CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS – DEFENSE
Oct. 21, 2012 – 7:19 p.m.
Experts Project Future of Defense Spending Under Obama, Romney
By John M. Donnelly, CQ Staff
When President Obama and Mitt Romney debate for the final time Monday night with a focus on foreign policy and defense it may provide the last, best opportunity to clarify their views on military spending.
If Obama is re-elected he’s widely expected to accept more cutbacks at the Pentagon, while Republican presidential nominee Romney has said he would increase military spending above Obama’s projections by what experts estimate would be about $2 trillion over the next decade.
But neither candidate has delved deeply into what he has in mind for the defense budget. Romney, in particular, has not fully explained how he will avoid raising taxes, cut the deficit and still keep military spending at or above its current, near-record level.
In fact, many experts believe defense spending is likely to come down in the years ahead by more than either candidate acknowledges. The next president, analysts say, will have to effectively oversee an inevitable and deep downsizing at the Pentagon that will occur even if the automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, are avoided — and those cuts may amount to more than the half a trillion dollars in new reductions to planned spending that sequestration would require.
Gordon Adams, who oversaw defense programs at the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration, says if the Pentagon follows historical norms, it will lose about $1 trillion over the next decade, not gain it.
“The challenge to either candidate is: How do you manage a drawdown?” Adams said.
Rude Awakening
The defense budget, which nearly doubled in the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, is only now starting to come down. The caps in last summer’s debt ceiling law (PL 112-25) would result in nearly half a trillion dollars less for the Pentagon over the next decade, compared to previous projections, and the same amount in non-defense reductions. The law also requires another roughly $500 billion in defense cuts over 10 years under sequestration, which will start in January unless Congress passes legislation before then to avert it.
The president has said that sequestration would endanger the military’s capacity to project power, but many observers believe that in a second term, he would still support reducing the Pentagon budget by additional scores of billions of dollars beyond the debt ceiling law’s caps — even if sequestration does not come to pass.
“I think we all know Obama is going to cut defense further,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the conservative Lexington Institute think tank. “Deficit reduction and rising entitlements will force him to cut defense.”
There would be the same pressure on Romney to cut defense that much, but whether he would do it or not remains to be seen.
Romney has said he would increase defense spending. His campaign literature says he would oppose the reductions triggered by the debt ceiling law’s caps and by sequestration. Moreover, he would like Pentagon spending to stay at least as high as 4 percent of GDP. It’s at about 4.3 percent now, including war spending, so he’s essentially talking about institutionalizing the current levels of spending even after the Afghan war ends.
Romney’s pledge would require spending $2 trillion more than Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget projects over the next decade, according to Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Experts Project Future of Defense Spending Under Obama, Romney
But many top experts believe almost exactly the opposite will occur in the Pentagon budget. In the last three post-war drawdowns — in the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s — the reductions averaged about 30 percent, they said. And absent another Sept. 11, they say, it is reasonable to expect history to repeat over the next decade.
Harrison, for example, said the coming defense reductions will probably equal the $1 trillion called for in the debt ceiling law, but will be “more gradual and back-loaded.”
The first factor working against defense spending is external to the Pentagon. The political pressure to do something about the national debt is likely to remain strong. Obama would face politically difficult decisions, particularly on entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid. As wars recede, political support for military spending tends to wane.
Romney’s task in trying to keep defense spending high is especially difficult, because he has promised to reduce the deficit without raising taxes on Americans. He would seek to cut entitlements, but that will only go so far. And, significantly, Congress, which neither party is likely to dominate, may not go along with many of Romney’s prescriptions on taxes and spending.
Romney’s plans for the Pentagon include more money for additional submarines, destroyers and fighter jets. But he has not said how he would pay for them or, more broadly, for his no-cut approach to defense.
“Romney’s arithmetic is impenetrable to outsiders,” said Thompson of the Lexington Institute think tank, who believes that, notwithstanding the fiscal pressures, Romney would increase the deficit before he would cut defense.
The other pressure that complicates the challenge of funding the Pentagon is internal to the Defense Department. The growth in costs for military personnel, for general overhead and for major weapons will probably force the Pentagon to cut the number of people in uniform further than the roughly 100,000 reductions now planned, experts say. It will also drive a drawdown in weapon procurements, as was the case in other post-war periods, they add.
“This zero-sum trade-off will produce far more severe and disruptive consequences than is generally recognized by the department, requiring, at the very least, a wholesale recalibration of U.S. defense strategy and force posture,” concluded a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies released last week.
That is a message that neither campaign is delivering.