Diane Sawyer, ABC anchor, described as "massive" the Pentagon budget cuts announced by President Barack Obama on January 5, 2012. The Pentagon is trying to frame the overall cut of $487 billion over ten years as the maximum sacrifice it will be able to endure. Yet Obama gave much of the game away when he said that even with the cuts, the United States would be spending more on the military than the ten next highest military spending nations in the world; also, he stated that the Pentagon would continue to get its "normal" increases.
None of the 11 aircraft carrier flotillas will be cut, except that their sailing schedules might be reduced. None of the current missions of the Pentagon would be eliminated, only "narrowed." There would still be a formidable nuclear weapons force, with the triad deployment probably preserved. Even though there might be fewer nuclear warheads, the modernization program, a new fleet of nuclear weapons-armed submarines and a new bomber equipped to nuclear warheads will apparently not be affected.
The planned 2,400 plane air wing of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will not be affected, except for a delay in deployment. The cost of a single F-35 almost doubled in just eight years; also, the Pentagon announced last year that projected maintenance costs alone of the F-35 could reach $1 trillion in 30 years. Fighter planes designed to serve two of the military services, as the F-35 is built to do, haven't worked out well in the past.
Although it is contended that the armed forces will have a reduced capacity to fight land warfare, this limitation is "reversible," as reserve forces and the National Guard will allow the U.S. to fight two land wars simultaneously. It is hard to imagine that given the drain on resources of the two wars during the last decade, that we are even contemplating fighting an additional war(s) in the next decade.
The Pentagon is following several major pathways: 1) the last Quadrennial assessment elevated fighting an insurgency of violent extremists to the highest planning level; 2) the Pentagon is also engaged in surmounting the major technological challenges in creating the electronic, robotic battlefield of the future, once the apple of Donald Rumsfeld's eye; and 3) the Pentagon is continuing to build the sophisticated weapons systems appropriate to fighting a major peer enemy, such as the Soviet Union once was.
There is a sense of deja vu in elevating fighting an insurgency to the top of the planning list, as about the time that Barack Obama came into the presidency, a Defense Department directive put "IW" (irregular warfare) to a level "as strategically important as traditional warfare," arguing that for the "foreseeable future, winning the Long War against violent extremists will be the central objective of U.S. policy."
The fact that we are militarily following several major pathways in military planning is linked to the concept of "full spectrum dominance," whereby a joint military structure achieves control over all elements of the battlefield, using surface, sub-surface and air space-based assets. Full spectrum dominance includes the electromagnetic spectrum and information space. Control implies that the freedom of an opposition force to exploit the battlefield will be wholly contained.
How will the $487 billion in cuts be achieved? The U.S. Army will be cut from 570,000 to 490,000 by 2017 and the U.S. Marines will go from 202,000 troops to 182,000. It was as recently as 2005 that the armed forces was increased by 92,000 troops, so this 100,000 cut basically restores the troop numbers to what they were seven or eight years ago. If Barack Obama wins a second term, the troop reduction will not be completed during his presidency.
Besides the troop reduction, some old planes will be retired -- two dozen C-5A cargo aircraft and 65 of the oldest C-130 cargo planes -- the U.S. Navy will retire seven cruisers earlier than planned and delay some purchases; the new generation of submarines will be deployed in 2032, not 2030 as now blueprinted; and there will be a delay in full deployment of the F-35. Notable in this list of cost savings is that not a single weapons system will be eliminated.
Given that the ten-year projection of Pentagon base budget spending and ongoing war-fighting spending submitted with the FY 2012 budget is nearly $6.4 trillion, a cut of $487 billion is not that impressive.
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