| 摘要 | Announcing a new two-year budget deal, President Trump noted that “real compromise” was necessary to “give another big victory to our Great Military.” A day later, the president claimed the U.S. armed forces were “almost totally rebuilt from the depleted military I took over.” Unfortunately, that’s not true. While the deal avoids a worst-case scenario for the Pentagon—$71 billion in immediate, mandatory cuts under the 2011 Budget Control Act—it still does not adequately fund the Defense Department’s 2018 National Defense Strategy. History will remember the Trump administration’s defense policy for helping to repair military readiness, but not for rebuilding and modernizing the military as President Reagan did.
The White House’s 2017 National Security Strategy directs the U.S. military to regain its edge against China and Russia, even as it continues to deter Iran and North Korea and keep jihadist terrorists at bay. In total, the strategy demands a robust military posture in three major theaters: Europe, East Asia and the Middle East. But the proposed budget, even with the repeal of the Budget Control Act through 2021, falls short of the funding the military needs to carry out the strategy with confidence.
Consider the chasm between the current U.S. military and the stated requirements for force structure, readiness and modernization, all of which were validated by the independent, bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission.
The Navy must grow from 290 ships to 355, even as it introduces unmanned ships and pursues new long-range strike capabilities. The Air Force must grow from 312 squadrons to 386 while developing new networking initiatives and manned-unmanned teaming concepts. And the Army must grow from 478,000 soldiers to 540,000 and aggressively modernize its equipment after several high-profile failures.
Defense technocrats may argue about whether to increase the size of the force or modernize it more quickly. Either way, these force-structure targets are a klaxon for a military asked to do more with less.
Bipartisan defense legislation from three congressional committees identifies a perfect example of this gap. The Air Force must buy 72 fighters a year to meet its fighter-squadron target. Yet as one committee notes, “the resources to initiate and sustain such growth simply do not exist within the fiscal year 2020 budget request or [five-year spending] program, nor does the Air Force’s five-year plan for fighter procurement achieve 72 new aircraft within any year.” Multiply this contradiction across the services and their myriad personnel and weapons needs, and the overall defense budget shortfall jumps out.
Mr. Trump supports each of these goals, plus additional investment in missile defense and modernization of the country’s nuclear forces. Why doesn’t his defense budget reflect this? This incongruence between what the Pentagon officially asked for and its real needs stems from the White House itself. The budget request—$733 billion in 2020 and flat spending thereafter—was always an arbitrary set of numbers. No one at the Defense Department can explain how a $733 billion budget actually meets the requirements of the National Defense Strategy. In the absence of a confirmed defense secretary, the Pentagon did not push back against White House budget officials who have never supported the security strategy with sufficient resources.
How much would it cost to close this strategy–budget gap? Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, repeatedly testified that matching budget to strategy required 3% to 5% annual real growth. Over the next two years, that totals $40 billion to $100 billion above the levels in the budget agreement that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently reached. Over five years, that equates to around $550 billion in additional funding, exactly the amount of buying power the Pentagon lost under the Budget Control Act.
While the Pentagon cannot spend its way out of America’s national-security problems, it can also spend too little to give the all-volunteer force greater certainty it will be a position to win in the event of a conflict. There are multiple reasons the military services face problems in recruiting and retaining experienced personnel. Certainly, one reason is the sense they are being asked to put themselves in harm’s way without the tools to carry out their duties.
Political leaders cannot make up for the time lost under the Budget Control Act. But they can make up for the lost money to render current U.S. national-security challenges easier to solve and set the U.S. military on solid footing for the great-power competition the country now faces. The current budget agreement may avoid outright disaster—or it may simply postpone it.
Mr. Berger is a research fellow and Mr. Schmitt is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. |
