Proposed Pentagon Budget Lags Promises to Transform Military

The Pentagon is expected to ask Congress Monday for a $15.3-billion increase in next year’s budget as part of a mammoth $379.9-billion spending plan that intends to enhance military power while making only incremental progress in advancing the Bush administration’s goal of modernizing and trimming the military.

The plan, which could change somewhat before President Bush’s formal budget submission Monday, calls for a 4.2% boost over the Pentagon’s current $364.6-billion budget. Among the biggest increases sought for the 2004 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 would be a previously reported 50% increase in funding for special forces, the elite troops who have played a critical role in Afghanistan.

“If you judge the administration by its campaign promises to transform the military, or by [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld’s speeches calling for bold new steps, this budget is incremental at best,” said Michael Vickers, director of strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

A senior Pentagon official Friday defended the progress the proposed budget would make toward reaching the administration’s goal of transforming the military by making its forces faster, more agile, more lethal, more networked and more technologically adroit.

“If it is incremental, that is because incremental is the only way anything here ever gets done,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If you look at any one year, how much you can do is limited ... but if you look at it over time and you stick with the plan, that’s a much better metric of progress and outcome.”

While the administration is barring the release of specifics on the budget proposal until it is formally released on Monday, the Los Angeles Times independently obtained an outline of the plan.

In percentage terms, the proposed budget increase is modest compared with increases approved in recent years, and it is in line with recent budgets in accounting for 16.6% of the proposed federal budget and 3.4% of the nation’s gross domestic product. However, the proposed 2004 budget does not include the cost of operations in Afghanistan or of any occupation of Iraq after a possible war.

In the Reagan era, defense accounted for as much as 28% of federal spending and 6.2% of GDP.

In 1982, President Reagan won a Pentagon spending hike of 19.8%.

With the war on terrorism stretching military resources, the proposed budget calls for maintaining the military at its current size of 3.9 million service members, not cutting it as the Bush administration once vowed.

It calls for spending $117 billion -- almost a third of the total budget -- to operate and maintain the force.

Pentagon officials assert that the cost of supporting a force that size -- with food, housing, pay, arms and other equipment -- has limited their efforts to make radical changes in the way the military does business.

“There’s a war on, and changing the end strength doesn’t seem to be the prudent thing to do,” one senior Pentagon official said. In fact, he said Rumsfeld has fought off moves to increase the military’s troop strength as a means of dealing with the terrorist threat.

In many respects, the budget stays true to the Bush administration’s agenda.

It provides money for some important programs that would help revolutionize the military, such as the conversion of the Trident nuclear submarine fleet to carry cruise missiles.

The plan would allocate $7.7 billion for the administration’s controversial missile defense programs, an increase of $1.5 billion over this year’s budget. It provides significant new money to build new ships and modernize the Navy’s current aircraft carriers, which proved their usefulness as mobile air bases in the Afghanistan campaign.

It adds $1.5 billion to this year’s special-operations forces budget of $3 billion, which is still tiny in the context of defense spending.

The budget provides $1.2 billion to buy more unmanned aerial and undersea vehicles. Two of those, both aerial vehicles called the Predator and the Global Hawk, also played important roles in the Afghanistan campaign.

But while Rumsfeld had vowed to battle defense-industry lobbyists and do away with unwieldy, aging weapons systems, the budget preserves every major weapons program, even those whose viability and usability have come under fire in recent years, while cutting about $90 billion in smaller programs.

The proposal seeks money for the Air Force’s controversial F/A-22 jet fighter and for the development of its Joint Strike Fighter, even though Air Force jet fighters saw little use in Afghanistan. It also seeks $1.8 billion for the development of the Marine Corps V-22 Osprey, a craft that has been plagued with technical problems. And it seeks to spend $1.1 billion on the Army’s Comanche helicopter.

Despite its size, the new budget is just a down payment on defense costs for 2004, because it does not include spending on ongoing operations in Afghanistan or money that may be needed to manage the aftermath of a potential war in Iraq. Pentagon officials said they plan to ask for those funds in supplemental requests, as they plan to do for a war in Iraq that would fall under the current budget. They said it is impossible to estimate what those costs might be.

The Pentagon had requested $19.4 billion to pay for operations in Afghanistan and other costs associated with the war on terrorism in the 2003 budget, but Congress only appropriated about $7 billion of the request. The cost of a war in Iraq has been estimated at anywhere from $30 billion to $130 billion.

The proposed budget seeks a bigger increase for the Air Force than any other military service. Its budget would increase 5.3%, while the spending plans for the Navy and Marine Corps together would grow about 3.2% and the Army’s budget would rise 3.3%. The administration’s plan projects that funding for national defense -- which includes Pentagon spending as well as $19.3 billion in Department of Energy and other defense-related programs -- would reach half a trillion dollars a year by 2009. But a report released by the Congressional Budget Office earlier this month found that U.S. defense spending would have to grow by substantially more than that -- as much as $75 billion annually over the next 15 years -- to support the planned weapons programs.

Pentagon officials said that spending cuts in an array of smaller weapons programs would alleviate that problem. Under the plan, the Pentagon estimates it can save $82 billion next year by canceling upgrades to the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the M1A1 tank, by retiring aging aircraft including the KC-135 refueling tanker planes, and by accelerating the retirement of some Navy destroyers.

But over the long term, military analysts said, and Pentagon officials acknowledged, that is only a start toward transforming the military.

“The secretary of Defense has been so focused prosecuting a war against terrorism and a potential war in Iraq that the long-term battle that would get those changes implemented has dropped into the background,” said Carl Conetta, director of the Project on Defense Alternatives, a military think tank in Cambridge, Mass. “They have made some progress, that’s true, but we haven’t turned the corner. And if we haven’t done it now, I don’t know when we’re going to do it.”