The recent budget deal in Congress, for what it is worth, has kicked the tough decisions of who will bear the pain of cuts down the road to a later point in time. Just what will get cut will be decided by a super-committee of Congressmen drawn from both parties. If the committee cannot agree, there will be automatic cuts, with the defense & security agencies bearing the largest brunt of up to $600 billion. Such a heavy handed approach to the national security sector is shocking given that providing for the common defense is the first function of government. Furthermore, it denies the basic truth that it is not defense spending that will cause the explosion in deficits over the coming years and decades. Defense did not cause the deficit crisis, and it will not be the solution to it.
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There is no question that the Pentagon will need to bear its share of the pain as the nation seeks to solve its fiscal woes. Even though defense as a percent of GDP is not high historically, real spending is high – and there is plenty of room for efficiency gains and canceling of non-central programs. But defense budgets cannot be set in isolation to the threats the nation is facing, and to the ability to share costs with our allies. Simply setting defense as an output of budget math is nonsensical. Rather, we should rationally seek to articulate what we want our role in the world to be, and what we honestly believe are the threats we face. Based upon this we can determine what is a realistic size of defense spending should be. If this is out of line with what we can afford, we need to debate our role in the world and what threats we believe are worth ignoring.
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Defense spending must be a function of what we need to protect ourselves and what we believe is the role of a superpower, not a function of how much we will or will not cut in entitlements at any point in time. The candidates for President therefore need to articulate their vision for America’s place in the world. We need to address this now, and not hit a sudden realization in 10 years, that we no longer have the global reach that we are now accustomed to. The debate about America’s role in the world needs to be made central to our national dialog in the upcoming election season. We deserve no less.
