Fiscal realities imperil Obama's vow to change military

WASHINGTON

Is the candidate who promised "change we can believe in " about to deliver continuity at the Pentagon,

Even as he insists he'll honor pledges to end the war in Iraq, President-elect Barack Obama's decisions to retain Defense Secretary Robert Gates and install retired Gen. James Jones as his national security adviser suggest that military change will come slowly in the new administration.

That means the defense budget - now about $540 billion annually, not including war costs - will remain steady or grow slightly for a while, analysts have said. Obama will find ways to save money by winding down the Iraq war while continuing to implement expensive decisions by his predecessor and the Congress to enlarge the Army and Marine Corps, they predicted.

It's "almost certain" that defense spending will grow - though slowly - during the next four years, said Bernard Finel, a fellow at the American Security Project, in a discussion with defense reporters recently.

Seven years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have so taxed American troops and equipment that the new president has little choice but to find the billions of dollars needed to maintain what's left and replace what's been lost, Finel said.

Obama might look to defense spending for part of the economic stimulus that he has promised for the nation's ailing economy, said former Sen. Jim Talent, a Missouri Republican. It's hard to see how the new administration can fix what's been worn out in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus modernize the military for challenges elsewhere, without a $50 billion boost in spending on weapons and other equipment, Talent argued.

"One needs to be humble in trying to project the future of defense spending," cautioned Steven Kosiak, senior budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based think tank.

Before 9/11, no one predicted a dramatic growth in defense spending, Kosiak noted.

Kosiak suggested that long-term pressures on the rest of the federal budget, principally from mushrooming costs for health care, will eventually force a flattening of or modest cuts in other programs, including defense.

That could mean slow progress, or cancellation, for some high-profile new weapons systems, including the Navy's already-imperiled DDG-1000 destroyer and Ford-class aircraft carrier, the Army's "future combat system," and the F-35 fighter being developed for the Air Force, Navy and Marines.

The services "have already gotten lots of money" to replace equipment used up in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kosiak said, and the Pentagon has used part of the annual "supplemental" appropriations Congress provides for the war effort to cover costs not tied to the war, he said.

While the prospects for quick change at the Pentagon appear limited, some of the new president's advisers, and people who want to be his advisers, are pushing ambitious proposals for military change.

Once troops in the field are taken care of, "you have to put everything on the table," Rudy deLeon, a deputy defense secretary in the Clinton administration, argued in a paper published last month by the Center for American Progress, a think tank run by Obama transition chief John Podesta.

In another essay written as part of the center's "progressive blueprint" for the new president, Lawrence Korb, a defense official in the Reagan administration, urged that all American troops be pulled from Iraq by the end of 2009, far sooner than Obama has proposed.

As some U.S. forces come home and others are re deployed to deal with growing threats in Afghanistan, Iraqi leaders will be "on notice that they cannot count on us forever and must instead begin to make the hard political choices necessary to bring about political reconciliation," Korb argued. "If they do not make these compromises as we redeploy then it will be clear they are unable to make them at all."

Another group, the Project on National Security Reform, argued in a study published this summer that a completely new structure is needed to replace the current "national security system's antiquated, inadequate organization."

"The gap between the system's capacity and the demands being placed upon it is widening," the congressionally-mandated study argued.

The group proposed doubling spending on the State Department and foreign aid over the next five years and closer links between the military and the "soft power" nation-building efforts led by the diplomatic corps.

T hose endorsing the report include retired Adm. Dennis Blair, reportedly Obama's choice to be director of the nation's intelligence apparatus, and Michele Flournoy, a co-director of the president-elect's transition team.

Also on board are a smattering of prominent Republicans, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser during the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

A far more radical approach to Pentagon change is being pushed by a group of analysts assembled by the Straus Military Reform Project, a branch of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information.

Introducing "America's Defense Meltdown," a new Straus project book, retired Marine Lt. Col. John Sayen argues that today's U.S. military forces are "high-cost dinosaurs that are insufficiently lethal against most of the enemies we are likely to face."

Those forces, retired Air Force Col. Chet Richards added in another chapter, have been used to "solve problems that are inherently social, economic or political and therefore do not admit of military solutions." The new president must "explicitly restrict the use of our military forces to those problems that only military forces can solve and that the nation can rally to," Richards wrote.

The book's authors are a group of retired military officers and civilian defense officials who were prominent in the 1980s defense reform movement that exposed wasteful Pentagon spending on things such as toasters and toilet seats. They have been warning for years that the Pentagon is overinvesting in high-tech weapons that are ill-suited for unconventional wars such as the current struggles against Islamic terrorists.

Winslow Wheeler, who directs the Straus project, said Obama's decisions to hire Jones at the White House and keep Gates at the Pentagon, along with reports that ex-Navy Secretary Richard Danzig will be tapped as Gates' top deputy, are not encouraging signs.

"If we judge people by their track records, we can expect more of the current, long-term negative trends" - a military that continues to grow in cost as its equipment ages, inventories shrink and readiness erodes, Wheeler said.

Dale Eisman, (703) 913-9872, dale.eisman@pilotonline.com