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This coming week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is expected to announce significant changes in armed forces weapons and acquisition programs. As we embark on a mission to defend against the growth of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in southwest Asia, it seems that Gates wants to reduce expenditures for some big-ticket systems and increase capability to fight unconventional war. It will be interesting to see how well he succeeds.
We have always grappled with the problem of deciding what wars we should be armed to fight, but most of the time we got it wrong. We were unprepared for nearly every conflict, even when we had plenty of warning, and in some cases actually went out of our way to fight wars whose objectives---to say nothing of the capability to achieve them---were only sketchily outlined.
There are two root problems at work. The first is that nobody can see into the future. Even when there is clarity about the strategic objective, there are too many actors and independent variables to make reliable predictions about what will happen, and this is true even in regions in which we are paying attention because we have a strong security interest. So our choice is to prepare for everything, or to make choices that entail risks that really can't be calculated.
Second, and no less important, is that we believe we can't prepare for every contingency because we can't afford to do so. Government costs money, and lots of it, but the government doesn't have control over fixed entitlement costs---Social Security, government pensions and debt service chief among them---leaving the remainder pretty much a zero-sum game. So, even if we wanted to prepare for everything, we can't print enough money to do so without propelling the cost of bread to hundreds of dollars a loaf. We must be selective about what we buy.
And we have committed to buying lots of expensive things, including airplanes and ships that are designed to be most effective to deter, or to prevail in, conventional conflict with other nation-states, not in an unconventional struggle with Muslim revolutionaries. Few observers expect the F-22, for example, to be the weapon that permits us to prevail decisively in Afghanistan, but we are buying it just the same because we may need it against Russia or China, about whom we can't afford to be sanguine.
Meanwhile, we have insufficient numbers of soldiers and Marines, of intelligence production operators, of mobile training teams, of a host of other things that we need in low-intensity combat, and Gates reportedly will try to redress the imbalance. He will need plenty of luck in this endeavor.
The Executive Branch doesn't have a great deal to say about the budget because, in the end, no money can be spent until the Congress appropriates it. In many cases, of course, the two branches negotiate and agree, but that is most often only at the margins. Especially in the difficult economic environment we have today, it will be tough to convince a legislator that valuable defense jobs in his state or district should be trimmed. And so in the end the government will field a sub-optimal force to cope with what the president says is a problem that we need to solve, and the outcome will be anybody's guess.
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Thanks. As much as an extremist as I am---and as we all tend to be on some subjects, especially as we get older---I find it useful to cut to basics, something we all learned as brand new soldiers.
