After six years of slashing funds for military modernization, the Obama Administration has suddenly discovered that countries like China are closing the gap with America in warfighting technology.\u00a0 If Mr. Obama was the first president to skimp on military technology, the situation might be manageable.\u00a0 But he isn’t.\u00a0 Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 all undercut military modernization, which is why the joint force today relies heavily on weapons bought during the Reagan years.\u00a0 The warfighters who will suffer most for a generation of under-investment in new weapons are America’s soldiers, because when war comes they always do most of the real fighting and take most of the casualties.<\/p>\n
If you’re one of those armchair strategists who thinks the military spends too much on unneeded weapons, you ought to take a look at what kind of money the Army is actually getting.\u00a0 Just type “Army 2015 budget” into your search engine and look at the first set of charts that comes up.\u00a0 The Army’s base budget for fiscal 2015, which includes pretty much all of its technology funding,\u00a0will be about $121 billion — marking the fifth straight year it has declined.\u00a0 That sounds like big money, but only 17% — $20 billion — is set aside for developing and producing weapons.\u00a0 The rest goes to items like military pay and readiness.<\/p>\n
How much is $20 billion?\u00a0\u00a0It’s about one-tenth of one-percent of the national economy.\u00a0\u00a0According to the RAND Corporation, it’s\u00a0only\u00a0a fifth of\u00a0what Americans spend each year on illegal drugs.\u00a0 It’s 15 days worth of sales at WalMart.\u00a0 That’s how much money our dysfunctional political system provides to\u00a0equip America’s soldiers.\u00a0 And when you start splitting the money up among various types of weapons — helicopters, missiles, vehicles — the amounts become miniscule.\u00a0 For instance, the Army’s entire budget for purchasing wheeled and tracked vehicles in the fiscal year begun October 1 will be around $1.5 billion.\u00a0 That’s four hours worth of federal spending at current rates.<\/p>\n
With defense spending capped by the Budget Control Act through 2021, Army leaders have been forced to choose between force structure, readiness and modernization.\u00a0\u00a0Because new threats are popping up everywhere from Russia to West Africa to Syria to Afghanistan to North Korea, they have little choice but to focus on maintaining an adequately sized force in a reasonable state of readiness.\u00a0 They’re still losing an average of 20,000 active-duty soldiers each year, but when it comes to modernization, the Army has pretty much given up.\u00a0 It has canceled its next-generation air defense system, its next-generation combat vehicle, and its next-generation scout helicopter.\u00a0 In fact, it isn’t really developing anything new except for a\u00a0next-gen jeep.<\/p>\n
Word inside the Army is that it won’t be able to make significant strides in replacing Cold War weapons until the sequestration process imposed by the Budget Control Act goes away.\u00a0 If that means waiting until the law finally expires early in the next decade, then the Army is destined to lose its edge in warfighting technology completely against high-end adversaries, and thousands of soldiers may pay for that loss with their lives.\u00a0 President Obama has been against sequestration since Day One, but it wasn’t Republicans who came up with the bright idea of taking half of sequestration savings out of the 19% of the federal budget represented by defense.\u00a0 So if President Obama doesn’t want future military defeats to be part of his legacy, he ought to tell his Pentagon team to do something more than talk up innovation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After six years of slashing funds for military modernization, the Obama Administration has suddenly discovered that countries like China are closing the gap with America in warfighting technology.\u00a0 If Mr. Obama was the first president to skimp on military technology, the situation might be manageable.\u00a0 But he isn’t.\u00a0 Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n