MILITARY: Pentagon Just Doesn’t Get It

The Cold War is over; the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact are no more. While we continue to face dangers in this world, there is no country today that poses anywhere near the threat to us that we faced just 10 years ago. So why does the Pentagon keep acting like nothing has changed and continue spending at near Cold War levels?

Fighting the Cold War was very expensive. It cost us trillions of dollars to maintain a huge worldwide force ready to repel an enormous invading army with weapons nearly equal to our own. Military strategists were faced with a real fear that any land lost may be lost for good. To prevail, we needed to keep hundreds of thousands of troops stationed overseas, ready to fight at a moment’s notice--and always with a new generation of weapons.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Russians have cut their military spending from more than $250 billion a year to less than $65 billion a year, and none of our potential enemies have picked up the slack. Yet the U.S. has continued to keep hundreds of thousands of troops stationed around the world, often on bases that formerly bordered enemies but are now surrounded by allies. These troops remain ready to fight a major war on a moment’s notice.

The Pentagon’s weapons procurement policies also seem little affected by the changed world around us. The wars in both Iraq and Kosovo showed that our $40-million-a-copy F-15 fighters can chase any other aircraft out of the skies. Now the Pentagon wants to replace them with $188-million-a-copy F-22s, even though there are no new fighters rolling off any assembly lines in our adversaries’ or potential adversaries’ countries.

We see the same flawed pattern across all branches of the armed forces. Somehow Pentagon strategists have become convinced that complete military dominance plus static or diminished threats equal a need to throw out the current weapons and replace them with far more expensive ones.

This thinking permeates a myriad of decisions: The Russians have dry-docked most of their submarines, and nobody else has a credible fleet. Still, the Pentagon has decided to scrap before the end of their useful life much of our current fleet of attack subs and replace them with 30 new ones at a cost of $64 billion. Our fighter aircraft are the best in the world, so let’s replace them with three new systems costing more than $329 billion. Our carrier battle groups no longer face any blue-water threat, and still we feel the need to build two new carriers at a cost of more than $10 billion.

By bringing more of our troops home and waiting until our weapons wear out before replacing them with the current generation of weapons, we can save more than $25 billion a year. More modest investments in transport vehicles and R&D; will ensure that we can continue to project power anywhere around the globe and that our fighting men and women will never be faced with weapons more advanced than our own.

We do not need to waste billions of dollars arming ourselves to fight a war we’ve already won.