Pentagon warns on big defense cuts

Reuters

Wed, Apr 13 2011

By Missy Ryan and Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States may have to scrap some military missions and trim troop levels if President Barack Obama sticks with his goal of saving $400 billion on security spending over a 10-year period, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.
Arms makers' shares sold off after Obama made a speech on the budget deficit in which he called, in effect, for holding growth in the Pentagon's core budget, excluding war costs, below inflation through 2023, starting in fiscal 2013.
The squeeze on the Pentagon's budget, which has roughly doubled since 2001, is part of a larger drive to cut the budget deficit by $4 trillion over the 10-year period.
Standard & Poor's aerospace and defense index declined 0.9 percent on Wednesday, underperforming the S & P 500 index, which closed up .02 percent. Lockheed Martin Corp, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales, dropped 2.6 percent to close at $80.37 on the New York Stock Exchange.
"It's not just a math exercise which is 'cut $400 billion'," said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. "It's 'let's review our roles and our missions and see what we can forgo, or pare down, in this age of fiscal constraint, where we are all collectively trying to work with the deficit problem.'"
Analysts said a selloff of arms makers' shares was an overreaction.
"We think that a flat defense budget" (excluding overseas contingency operations such as Iraq and Afghanistan) "is what investors and the defense industry already expect," said Rob Stallard of RBC Capital Markets.
"We think the knee-jerk selling in response to today's headlines has created an opportune entry point for our preferred defense names, notably Raytheon Co and General Dynamics Corp," he added in a note to clients.
The Pentagon has been tightening its belt in the hope of warding off deep cuts amid the concern over budget deficits.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates already had eliminated or scaled back more than 20 troubled or "excess" weapons programs since April 2009. Last June he ordered the military to come up with more than $100 billion in overhead savings over five years, which could be reinvested in higher priority programs.
The chairmen of Obama's deficit commission as well as a Bipartisan Policy Center Debt Reduction Task Force each had called for cuts in projected military spending of up to $1 trillion over 10 years, far more than Obama proposed.
OBAMA'S GOAL
The core Pentagon budget is now about $530 billion, roughly $10 billion less than Gates said was critical when the Obama administration sent Congress its spending plan for 2012.
The Defense Department could easily meet Obama's goal -- which amounts to saving an average of about $40 billion a year -- without jeopardizing the U.S. military's global dominance, said Gordon Adams, a senior White House official for national security budgets from 1993 to 1997.
"It's fundamentally trivial," he said. "This is stuff a comptroller can do while playing with his prayer beads." He suggested it would mean shrinking the force "a bit," trimming and deferring some hardware purchases and finding more efficient ways to handle operations and maintenance spending.
But Mackenzie Eaglen, a national security analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the world was not getting any safer and the U.S. bill would come due.
"The need to modernize the inventory of all the services is not going away and that bill will simply grow larger the longer policymakers defer modernization," she said.
The Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, Howard McKeon, said he had "grave concerns" about spending reductions while the U.S. military was involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
The Defense Department accounts for roughly 20 percent of federal spending and roughly half of discretionary, non-mandated spending.
Gates said in January the United States planned to cut $78 billion in defense spending over five years, including a reduction of up to 47,000 troops. That came on top of the $100 billion cost-savings drive that Gates kicked off last year.
"My greatest fear is that in economic tough times that people will see the defense budget as the place to solve the nation's deficit problems," Gates said last August.
(Reporting by Missy Ryan, Phil Stewart and Jim Wolf; editing by Christopher Wilson)

Gates Ratchets Up His Campaign of Candor

March 4, 2011
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — This is the season when defense secretaries typically sit for hours, hat in hand, before Congressional committees to plead for more money and then journey to the military academies to give perfunctory speeches about patriotism before young cadets.

But this year, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has not followed the script.

He sharply criticized members of the House of Representatives this week for spending money on Humvees that the Army did not want instead of buying surveillance systems needed to protect troops. In recent speeches, he has rebuked military leaders for clinging to ancient concepts of war — and by ancient he means before Sept. 11, 2001. And he has cited the painful experiences still unfolding in Afghanistan and Iraq to warn of grave risks if the military again intervenes in the Muslim world, this time in Libya, using tones far more grim than others in the Obama cabinet.

Even for a particularly outspoken defense secretary, Mr. Gates has reached a new level of candor. Perhaps he feels liberated by the fact that he is retiring soon and leaving Washington, a city, he has said, “where so many people are lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory.”

Mr. Gates’s independence is a reminder that if he leaves this year — as he has insisted he will — his departure will kick off a search that will help define the administration. Will the president choose someone as outspoken, with a bipartisan pedigree that allows him to criticize the conduct of combat and makes him acceptable to Republicans?

The next defense secretary will have to grapple with two wars and brisk budget-cutting battles that for the first time promise to involve the Pentagon. It is a military that has been at war for a remarkable 10 years, and with an all-volunteer force. For these and other reasons it is in the middle of a number of profound debates, including how technology is changing the very nature of war.

If his recent public comments are any measure, Mr. Gates appears to be worried about how it will all go when he steps down. Before Air Force Academy cadets in Colorado Springs on Friday, the defense secretary said that starting three years ago, he “challenged the Air Force, and indeed our entire military, to do more, much more” to send surveillance drones to collect more information on adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The process, he said, was like “pulling teeth” because the Air Force preferred white-scarf pilots at the stick of high-tech fighters to those sitting in trailers operating slow-flying drones. But the Air Force came around.

“The versatility on display by the Air Force in combat theaters these past few years befits the greatest traditions of the force,” he added. Yet Mr. Gates said he was concerned that once he departed, and once American forces were drawn down in Afghanistan and Iraq, then too many would try and “get back to what some consider to be real Air Force normal.”

That provocative assessment was mild compared to what Mr. Gates told the next generation of Army officers a week ago at West Point. “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined, as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates said.

Mr. Gates said his intention was to prod the Army to reshape its budget to slim down the number of armored units and prepare for the most likely challenges presented by terrorists, small rogue governments and upheavals in countries that cannot defend themselves.

His comments were hijacked by the left and the right. Liberals cheered that Mr. Gates actually opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And conservatives warned that his comments might comfort the insurgency.

Mr. Gates fired back on Friday, saying his remarks had been “distorted by some and misunderstood by others.”

“During my tenure as secretary of defense, I have approved the largest increases in the size of the Army and Marine Corps in decades,” Mr. Gates said. “And I supported and have presided over the surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”

This week, in warning about a no-flight zone over Libya, Mr. Gates seemed to take a position that was out of step with the rest of the administration. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said they wanted to leave all options on the table — including making it tough for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya to use jets to kill his own people. Mr. Gates made it clear, however, that any use of the military invited battle.

“Let’s just call a spade a spade,” Mr. Gates told Congress. “A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that’s the way it starts.”

Robert M. Gates Key speeches in 2011

United States Military Academy (West Point, NY)
http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1539

United States Air Force Academy
http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1543

Remarks by Secretary Gates at the United States Air Force Academy
http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4779

Opening Summary -- House Appropriations Committee - Defense (Budget Request)
http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1541

How Petraeus has changed the Afghanistan war

Gen. David Petraeus replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal as head of US forces in the Afghanistan war this year. One change he's made represents something of a gamble to some in the Pentagon.

Anna Mulrine, Staff writer 

December 31, 2010 

When Gen. David Petraeus took over as head of US forces in Afghanistan earlier this year, there was some speculation about the extent to which he would run the war differently from his predecessor.
The general consensus was that there wouldn’t be much difference between Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was forced to resign in June after he made impolitic comments about members of the Obama administration. Both were known as staunch adherents of counterinsurgency warfare, which tends to emphasize protecting the population over, say, body counts as a measure of success.
In many ways, this conventional wisdom has been borne out. But as the year draws to a close, there are, say senior US military officials, some clear differences emerging in the way Petraeus is now handling the Afghanistan war. Chief among the changes is one that represents something of a gamble to some in the Pentagon.

IN PICTURES: Winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan

Specifically, Petraeus has chosen to emphasize the violence that the Taliban and other insurgent groups have inflicted on the general Afghan population. This may seem like an obvious approach. Why not highlight the harm that your enemy is doing to the civilians you’re trying to win over?
But it’s not so simple, says a senior military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he has not been authorized to speak to the press on this issue. “If you draw attention to the enemies’ impact on Afghan civilians, does that make them feel less secure” – and consequently, less willing to support NATO forces?
“That is the debate: Do they perceive a greater insecurity or do they perceive the enemy in a more negative way?” adds the official. “There are arguments on both sides.”
In most respects, Petraeus and McChrystal have run the war similarly. “You’re talking about vanilla versus French vanilla," says Andrew Krepinevich, Pentagon adviser and president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, a Washington think tank. "At the end of the day it takes a very sophisticated palate to discern the differences between the two.”
But McChyrstal chose not to emphasize Taliban violence against the population for fear of making Afghans wary of a war that was not going well, and of a NATO force that was failing to protect them, says the official. “With M-4” – the military’s nickname for four-star general McChrystal – “there was a lot of discussion among his staff on the impact on the population.”
The focus of the generals is a product of their experiences. “Both officers come from very different operational backgrounds,” says Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger and fellow with the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “General Petraeus – his experience in the Army has been such that he spent a lot of time at a young age doing strategic assignments and thinking about the big implications of operations.”
While “General McChrystal brought operational art to a new level, General Petraeus is more experienced dealing with larger strategic issues,” he adds.
The decision to emphasize or de-emphasize Taliban violence has also hinged on the audience that the generals have wanted to reach. For Petraeus, that audience is international – he recognizes the importance of keeping the NATO coalition together in the face of home populations that are increasingly skeptical of the war, says the official.
“The thinking is that if he can draw more attention to Taliban atrocities, it will garner more support for among European partners who are sympathetic to human rights appeals," the official says.
But this comes with risks as well. “What Petraeus is emphasizing a bit more than McChrystal is winning hearts: Can you convince the population that you’re the side that should remain victorious?” says Mr. Krepinevich. “Part of doing this is also to show people that the Taliban don’t respect human rights and human dignity.”
But winning minds is a key part of counterinsurgency warfare too, Krepinevich adds. “That has to do with convincing the population that not only should they want you to win, but they have confidence that you will.”
The problem is that, “No matter how much he may want you to win, if he thinks your adversary is going to win he’s going to remain aloof, and he’s going to withhold his support.” And that, military officials add, is the challenge that Petraeus will continue to face in the months to come.