Gasp, choke, cough. Ha ha, he he! Wait, control yourself; take deep, regular breaths. Breathe in, breathe out. Ahh, that’s better.

Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there. Pardon me but I was busy recovering from the laughing fit I’ve been on since April 6 when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates released the FY 2010 Department of Defense budget request.

With all the doom and gloom prophecies coming from the right wing – cue the grim faced, tight jawed warnings from major military contractors and their think tank and media proxies – (American Enterprise Institute, “Obama and Gates Gut the Military); (Heritage Foundation, An Adequate Defense Budget for a Full-Spectrum Force; (Lexington Institute) one might think that the Obama Administration had done something radical, like actually cutting the military budget.

But of course it did no such thing. What it did do was propose a base budget of $533.7 billion, a four percent increase over FY 2009. That budget was actually $513.3 billion (excluding funding from the American recovery and reinvestment Act of 2009).

In other words, a budget that is higher than last year’s is being falsely depicted as a cut. As they say, only in America.

It is also only $2.3 billion less than the base budget request for FY 2008, which was by the highest in the past five year 2006-2010 time period.

The 2010 budget request does not, of course, include the $83.4-billion war supplemental appropriations request the  White House sent to the Congress on April 9.

What do we get for our money, assuming the budget request is passed as proposed. It won’t, but for the sake of discussion let’s pretend it is.

It will support “additional permanent forces in the Army and Marine Corps, which will increase to 547,400 and 202,000, respectively, by the end of 2009. This growth is two to three years ahead of schedule and will reduce stress on servicemembers and their families, while ensuring heightened readiness for a full spectrum of military operations.”

In other words, it will help provide more forces for the war in Afghanistan.  If you think the war there will be won simply by supplying more conventional forces then it is a good idea.

The budget also states that “DOD’s new weapons programs are among the largest, most expensive and technically difficult that the Department has ever tried to develop. As a consequence, they carry a high risk of performance failure, cost increases, and schedule delays. The Administration will set realistic requirements and stick to them and incorporate “best practices” by not allowing programs to proceed from one stage of the acquisition cycle to the next until they have achieved the maturity to clearly lower the risk of cost growth and schedule slippage.”

This is what all the whining and wailing and gnashing of teeth is about.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted, “The Pentagon’s pitch to scale back major defense programs may not only put hundreds of jobs at risk at Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems unit in St. Louis, but also could affect many of Boeing’s suppliers in Missouri and elsewhere.”

Of course, it is impossible to ignore the morass of runaway growth that is Pentagon weapons procurement.  Shortly before the Pentagon budget request was released the Government Accountability office released a report “Defense Acquisitions: Assessments of Selected Weapons Programs.” It found that:

the cumulative cost overruns [my emphasis] are still staggering—almost $296 billion in fiscal year 2009 dollars—and the problems are pervasive. Of DOD’s 96 active major defense acquisition programs, 64 programs have reported increases in their projected cost since their initial cost estimate. While there are different ways to measure the extent and nature of cost growth, there is agreement between DOD and us on the sources of the problem: (1) programs are started with poor foundations and inadequate knowledge for developing realistic cost estimates; (2) programs move forward with artificially low cost estimates, optimistic schedules and assumptions, immature technologies and designs, and fluid requirements; (3) changing or excessive requirements cause cost growth; and (4) an imbalance between wants and needs contributes to budget and program instability.

But wait, there’s more. Consider just a few of the points made by veteran military spending analyst Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information. His points appear in bold below excerpts from the GAO report

Since 2003, major DOD programs have grown from a total number of 77, costing $1.2 trillion, to 96 costing $1.6 trillion

(Most of the new programs can readily be identified in DOD’s Selected Acquisition Reports [SARs] which are the basis for the GAO analysis.  It is astonishing how few of these “new” weapons have anything to do with what used to be called the “Global War on Terror.”

GAO surveyed 96 programs with questionnaires. Only 33 of those 96 programs reported to GAO that they “were going to test a fully configured, integrated, production-representative prototype.” (p. 18) Of those 33, only 17 reported to GAO they plan to complete such testing before full production.

(It seems that 63 of 96 programs were unable or unwilling to assert to GAO that they planned “to test a fully configured, integrated, production-representative prototype” at any point.)

Most growth is in the ten most expensive programs.  (FCS, SSN-774, CVN-21, D-5, P-8A, F-18E/F, F-22, F-35,  C-17, V-22)  There, total acquisition costs grew by 13 percent.

(13 percent cost growth sounds modest but as GAO pointed out, these programs also experienced a reduction in the quantities delivered of 32 percent. That means that we pay more to get fewer weapons, and as the annual increments of additional cost for fewer programs build up, both the shrinkage and the cost expansion become stunning.  These trends also show up in dramatically increasing unit costs, that GAO measured as increased between 38 percent and 127 percent.)

Wheeler’s full commentary is here.

A pithier way of looking at it is the commentary Wheeler wrote the day the budget request was released.

While Washington, D.C. hisses and spits over the secretary’s hardware recommendations, it is probably more important to ask, what has changed, and if anything has, where are we now going?

It does not appear that the basic DOD budget has changed; this set of decisions may be budget neutral, or it may even hold in its future expanded net spending requirements.

We have not changed an anticipation to prepare for occupations in foreign lands (the advocates call it “counterinsurgency”), or to continue to spend most of our defense budget on forms of conventional warfare most reminiscent of the mid-20th century.  To fight the indistinct, unspecified conflicts we may have to face in the foreseeable future, what has changed?  The strategy?  The shrinkage of the hardware inventory and its age?  While many decisions were made, the Pentagon-ship of state appears to be very much on the same basic course.

For the Defense Department’s broken acquisition system, the secretary’s endorsement of the Levin – McCain “procurement reform” bill (now watered down at the Defense Department’s urging) means that business as usual is very alive and well.  There will be some new bottles for some very old wine, but the bitterness of the taste will still be around as we rush to build untested aircraft (e.g. F-35), endorse problematic, unaffordable ship designs (e.g. LCS), and spend generously to defend against less, not more likely, threats (e.g. missile defense).

In fact, the United States has long been ill served by an increasingly dysfunctional and out of control, fiscally speaking, military establishment. A book that Wheeler helped edit, “America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress,” released earlier this year, gives definitive chapter and verse on the ways American soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors have been consistently screwed over.

Related posts:

1. On Honoring the First Amendment
2. Pork is making us less safe
3. Giving us that old time military-industrial congressional pork barrel
4. Does Strategy Drive Defense Budgets?
5. Can’t anyone here manage a contract?