Vol. 73/No. 17      May 4, 2009

Current defense secretary Robert Gates presented major aspects of the proposed budget in speeches to the Army and Navy war colleges April 16-17.

“We have to be prepared for the wars we are most likely to fight, not just the wars we’ve traditionally been best suited to fight or threats we conjure up from potential adversaries who also have limited resources,” he said.

The proposal represents a modest, 4 percent increase in the base military budget to $534 billion. U.S. military spending has increased 72 percent since 2000.

The 2010 budget would place more emphasis on increasing the size of the military with higher pay and benefits. It would also increase funding for military intelligence, Special Forces, and cyber warfare specialists.

In a departure from his predecessor, Gates said the Pentagon also plans to hire 30,000 new civilian personnel over the next five years and reduce use of contractors.

The proposal includes a number of cuts to some longer-term future weapons programs, whose costs are high and practicality questionable, in favor of weapons that “can be produced on time, on budget, and in significant numbers,” Gates said. “As Stalin once said, ‘Quantity has a quality all of its own.’”

In addition, the administration is looking to reduce the proportion of its spending on weapons designed more specifically for conventional combat between regular armies such as China or Russia. U.S. dominance in this area is so well established, Gates argued, that some of this money is better spent—at this time—to “win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable.”

Along these lines the proposal calls for ending production of the F-22 “Raptor,” the most advanced fighter jet, after 187 of them are produced. The Pentagon would instead increase spending on the less expensive and more versatile F-35 fighter/bomber, to $11.2 billion from $6.8 billion, with plans to greatly expand production over the next five years.

The new budget would also cancel the $13 billion program to build 26 state-of-the-art presidential helicopters, while increasing overall funding for helicopters and helicopter pilots, which are in high demand in Afghanistan.

Funding for the next-generation bomber, which was scheduled to produce its first prototype in 2018, is also slated to be cut. At the same time, the proposal calls for stepping up the number of aerial drones in 2010, which are being used for reconnaissance and ground strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

The Pentagon seeks to slow down the production of aircraft carriers and some other blue-water warships where it has unchallenged superiority. The proposal projects stepping up production of smaller, faster, and more agile and versatile combat vessels better suited for operations closer to shore, such as along Somalia.

The new budget includes shifts in spending on antiballistic missile (ABM) programs, designed to enhance the threat of Washington’s nuclear arsenal. The plan would divert spending on the development of more complex future systems capable of taking out ballistic missiles in the first few minutes after launch, in favor of building up its more mature and tested systems designed to destroy missiles in the latter phases of trajectory. The proposal includes the addition of six—double the three announced in January—ABM-equipped Aegis warships to its current fleet of 18.

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial April 10 disagreeing with reduced spending on dominance in conventional weaponry, including naval forces and the F-22 Raptor, as well as investment in future ABM technology. It cited Moscow and Beijing’s upgrading of conventional weaponry, and in particular Beijing’s plans to begin developing a relatively small blue-water naval force, as reasons for maintaining the same degree of focus on Washington’s conventional arsenal.
 
 
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