Forward Observer: A 'Buy Everything' Budget

Comparing President Bush's sky-high fiscal 2007 Defense budget with his promises to restructure the military to combat new threats brings to mind the Texas expression for a blowhard rancher: "All hat and no cattle."

The toplines of today's and tomorrow's defense budgets have zoomed into the stratosphere as Bush keeps buying the old-threat stuff, like Cold War killer submarines costing $3 billion each. Few lawmakers seem to care.

The guns versus butter debate has been stifled by congressional fears of looking weak on defense in an election year. Yet the military spending figures in the fine print of the budget documents are startling.

Bush's Office of Management and Budget projects the government will spend more on national defense this year and next than it did, in constant dollars, at the height of the Vietnam War. The White House puts national defense spending at $535.9 billion for fiscal 2006 and $527.4 billion for fiscal 2007.

In making those estimates, White House budgeteers added $125 billion in supplemental funds for fiscal 2006 and $50 billion for fiscal 2007. Bush's actual requests for extra money are expected to be higher.

The fairest comparison between today's and yesterday's defense spending is tucked away in historical tables accompanying Bush's requests.

In constant 2000 dollars, which removes the impact of inflation, the government spent $421.3 billion on national defense when the United States had about 500,000 troops on the ground in Vietnam. The White House estimates that in the same 2000 dollars, the government will spend $440 billion on national defense in fiscal 2006 and $424.9 in fiscal 2007.

Wow! How can spending for national defense while we are fighting two little wars, with 138,000 troops in Iraq and 18,000 in Afghanistan, rise higher than it did during the comparatively big war in Vietnam?

The short answer is Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have found it easier, thanks largely to a compliant Congress, to keep spending billions on the old stuff while also buying the new. They have shrunk back from making the tough choices, despite tough rhetoric dating back to Bush's election campaign in 1999.

"I will give the Secretary [of Defense] a broad mandate to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come," candidate Bush promised at the Citadel on Sept. 23, 1999.

"We will modernize some existing weapons and equipment, necessary for current tasks. But our relative peace allows us to do this selectively. The real goal is to move beyond marginal improvements to replace existing programs with new technologies and strategies; to use this window of opportunity to skip a generation of technology. This will require spending more, and spending more wisely."

Three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack Bush returned to the Citadel. He said the attacks gave his earlier call for restructuring the military to cope with new kinds of irregular warfare a greater sense of urgency. He added that "our war on terror cannot be used to justify obsolete bases, obsolete programs or obsolete weapons systems. Every dollar of defense spending must meet a single test. It must help us build the decisive power we will need to win the wars of the future."

Winslow Wheeler, a veteran budget analyst who now directs the Straus Military Reform Project and combed through defense budgets as the senior defense analyst for the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee from 1996 to 2002, is among those who believes Bush and Rumsfeld are talking the talk but not walking the walk.

He told me this after studying the fiscal 2007 budget: "Only 4 percent of the total would go for combating terrorism and other forms of irregular warfare. Virtually all the rest of the money would go for preparing to fight the kind of conventional wars we fought in the past.

China is the new justification for buying ultra-high-cost but underperforming weapons, like the Air Force F-22 fighter. This mountain of spending is planned in the face of the CIA's estimate that China's total defense budget in 2005 was only $67.5 billion," or one-eighth of ours.

The Air Force F-22 fighter that is giving heartburn to Wheeler and others in the thin line of defense budget critics was designed to fight Warsaw Pact aircraft over Europe.

The Pentagon's latest Selected Acquisition Reports, the ones as of Sept. 30, 2005, disclosed that Bush and Rumsfeld planned to buy 181 F-22s for $61.3 billion, or $339 million for just one plane, counting research and development dollars. Another Cold War weapon developed to sink Russian submarines, which are no longer a primary threat, is the Virginia-class attack submarine.

The acquisition reports show that the Pentagon intends to buy 30 of those subs for $94 billion, more than $3 billion each, counting what the taxpayers spent to bring it into production. Bush wants to keep building the F-22 and Virginia-class sub, asking Congress in his new budget for $2.8 billion more for the F-22 and $2.6 billion additional for the sub.

With Bush and Rumsfeld, as it was with President Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger before them, the idea is to keep buying more guns and less butter in the form of domestic programs. Despite their rhetoric about radical reform, the new military budget documents that Bush and Rumsfeld are only working on the edges of the defense establishment.