There is much less there than meets the eye. That is the knowledgeable assessment of a number
of independent defense analysts and (on a "not for attribution" basis) senior
defense officials about what has been widely publicized as "the largest increase in
defense spending" since the end of the Cold War.
President Clinton said so himself in his
first weekly radio address of 1999. The president said that his proposed fiscal year 2000
budget request, which will be sent to Congress in early February, will include "an
increase of over $12 billion for defense readiness and modernization." Department of
Defense officials later disclosed that the president had approved an overall increase of
approximately $110 billion for the six years in the current FYDP (future-years defense
program). That sum equates to an average increase of just over $18 billion per year and
seems to justify the president's claim that his FY 2000 and "outyear"
projections represent "the first long-term increase in defense spending in a
decade."
That description is not quite accurate,
though. The increases promised are, as Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) said, "a step in the
right direction." But they fall "way short" of what the Senate Armed
Services Committee (SASC) last year identified as validated naval/military requirements
for the FY 1999-2004 time frame. Moreover, said Warner, who now chairs the committee: (a)
the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress last year that the nation's armed services face a
collective funding shortfall of $17.5 billion per year for the foreseeable future; (b) the
JCS projections do not include the funding needed either to close the current
military-civilian pay gap (an estimated $37 billion) or to fix the now-broken
"Redux" retirement system (another $9 billion); and (c) the funding shortfalls
identified by the Joint Chiefs "have been worsened ... [by] hundreds of millions of
dollars" to pay for additional contingency operations--Operation Desert Fox, for
example--ordered by the president since last year's readiness hearings.
Several other pro-defense legislators
have criticized the president's defense budget plan as "too little and too
late." Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), ranking minority member of the House Armed Services
Committee, for example, was quoted in the 3 January Los Angeles Times as saying the
president's FY 2000 budget proposal would not be "sufficient to take care of the
needs of the troops plus modernize our forces." And Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.)
noted that $8 billion (two thirds of the FY 2000 increase) is expected to come from
anticipated (but far from guaranteed) "savings" that may or may not result
"from lower-than-expected inflation in military fuel oil costs and other related
items." The president used some "extremely creative interpretations of the
figures" to describe his supposedly much-increased defense budget, Inhofe said.
An independent analysis, in the 4 January
issue of the Wall Street Journal, of the president's budget plan confirms the
Warner/Skelton/Inhofe criticisms, accuses the president of "using accounting
maneuvers ... to overstate [his] pledges for increased spending," and points out that
the much-touted $12 billion increase projected for FY 2000 "is actually only about
$2 billion over what Congress approved last fall for fiscal 1999 [emphasis
added]."
The president's starting point, though,
Jacob Schlesinger and Thomas E. Ricks explain in their analysis, is not what Congress
actually appropriated in its final action on the FY 1999 budget, but what the president
himself said, in submitting that budget, that he intended to request for FY 2000.
What all of this political legerdemain
demonstrates, said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is that "the bean-counters are running
the Pentagon. ... 'Smoke and mirrors' budgeting ... may be integral to the
administration's [defense] budget proposal [but] will prove no more likely to solve the
real problems we face today than in the past."
The challenge now facing the Navy League
and like-minded organizations--and ALL supporters of a strong national defense
program--is clear: Insist that the defense leaders, uniformed and civilian alike,
testifying before Congress this year provide an accurate and honest assessment of our
naval/military budget requirements; demand that Congress carry out its
Constitutional mandate--and most important responsibility--to "provide for the Common
Defense"; and fully support whatever appropriations are needed to do so.
In the long run this is the most
important responsibility not only of Congress and the president, but of the American
people as well. All of us, no one excepted.
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