DefensePentagon should use reduced budget to prepare for "great power conflict": study

As sequestration takes toll on the Pentagon’s budget, Defense officials must decide how to maintain superior military capabilities. A new study, Building the 2021 Affordable Military from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), suggests that the Pentagon should focus more on a “great power conflict,” reflective of a newly aggressive Russia and rapidly modernizing China. Such an approach would force the department to modernize its current infrastructure and invest significantly in technological advantages at the expense of unlikely-to-be used ships, aircrafts, and soldiers. The United States would maintain its full triad of bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles meant to deter or carry out nuclear warfare, the study suggests.

Crisis in the Middle East continues to dominate Defense operations today, but it is future threats posed by Russia and China that researchers recommend the Pentagon should focus its budget allocation on. “The trend lines in the relationships between the United States and its near-peer competitors, China and Russia, are worsening — cooperation and competition have been largely replaced with competition, which itself is migrating toward conflict,” the authors of the study wrote. “We believe that a 2021 affordable military that is focused on the growing conflict with China and Russia is the ‘least bad’ option for this punishing fiscal context of fewer and weaker defense dollars.”

Researchers estimate that the Pentagon’s base budget, which peaked in fiscal 2012, will fall by 21 percent between 2012 and 2021. By balancing the Pentagon’s stated goals in the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance and the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review against sequestration spending limits currently in place through 2021, analysts presented four options for the Pentagon to maintain military superiority during sequestration.

Defense One reports that the first, considered the “do nothing different” option, calls for a $492 billion spending cut across the Pentagon’s budget. The second option focuses on Asia and the Pacific region by allocating resources to Navy and Marines assets, including adding one carrier, guided missile destroyers, and Joint Strike Fighter jets, and spending less on Army capabilities. The fourth option takes a “soft power” approach which shifts $10 billion from weapons modernization over to financial assistance programs. It was the third option that analysts considered to be the most effective for a diminishing budget.

The option, for which the study provide a cost estimate, includes:

• Full-spectrum intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR
• Ability to project power in a so-called “anti-access area-denial,” or A2/AD, environment (largely referring to China)
• Global counterterrorism capabilities, like special operations or the Marine’s crisis response troops
• Theater and national missile defense systems
• Keeping the nuclear triad of bombers, missiles, and submarines at the same levels as Russia and ahead of China
• Maintaining America’s military-technological edge

By taking on the recommended approach, the study says that the United States “is not preparing for a ‘war fight’ with China and Russia but pursuing its traditional ‘peace-through-strength’ strategy for deterring, containing, and influencing its Cold War adversary. And by giving higher priority to capabilities that directly engage its powerful adversaries versus those aimed primarily at assuring U.S. friends and allies, the United States is sending the clear message, as the maxim goes, that ‘it will help those who help themselves.’ When establishing defense priorities during an age of austerity, (the Defense Department) must look to its own interests first.”

The “risks are beginning to accrue,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told PBSin March. Yet, “even at the budget level that has been submitted by the department, which is about $115 billion over the Budget Control Act…at that level we can still be the most powerful military in the world in 2020, which is about where we project out to.”