Security

Gates: Cash Cows of War Running Dry

In his first appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee as a member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet, Defense Secretary Robert Gates today issued more words of warning to the defense industry and Pentagon bureaucracy. "One thing we have known for many months is that the spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing," […]

Gates_mullen_3

In his first appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee as a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, Defense Secretary Robert Gates today issued more words of warning to the defense industry and Pentagon bureaucracy.

"One thing we have known for many months is that the spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing," he said. "With two major campaigns ongoing, the economic crisis and resulting budget pressures will force hard choices on this department."

This reinforces a message Gates has been telegraphing to the weaponeers for some time now. But what he really seems to be suggesting here is that the practice of lavish wartime supplemental spending needs to end. From his testimony:

Efforts to put the bureaucracy on a war footing have, in my view, revealed underlying flaws in the institutional priorities, cultural preferences, and reward structures of America’s defense establishment – a set of institutions largely arranged to plan for future wars, to prepare for a short war, but not to wage a protracted war. The challenge we face is how well we can institutionalize the irregular capabilities gained and means to support troops in theater that have been, for the most part, developed ad hoc and funded outside the base budget.

Wartime spending needs, Gates added, "must have a home and enthusiastic constituencies in the regular budgeting and procurement process."

This gets to an important point. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been funded largely through emergency spending measures, and that firehose of money has warped the Pentagon budget process and seriously diminished oversight.
While supplemental war budgeting is supposed to cover the unpredictable costs for ongoing operations, in practice it's become a way for the services to plump up spending for new equipment and avoid the pain of making sensible long-term budget decisions.

As Steven Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments noted two years ago,
Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England "essentially opened the floodgates in terms of what the services could ask to have funded through GWOT [global war on terror] supplementals" when he issued guidance on wartime budgeting in 2006.

The administration is supposed to present a defense budget in the spring. It will be interesting to see if the cuts will be as painful as
Gates is warning.

[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]

ALSO: