Protecting the Pentagon Budget

Protecting the Pentagon's Budget

Jules Witcover

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the sensible Republican in the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, has taken the rising demand for federal spending by the horns with his sweeping plan for adjusting the nation's whopping military budget.

Gates insists that his planned moves are not so much applying a meat ax as rearranging Pentagon priorities, eliminating or reducing functions that are no longer required. "This is not about cutting the defense budget," he said in announcing his plans. "This is about a reallocation internally."

But part of this reshuffling is an attack on the vast military bureaucracy, such as the plan to liquidate the Joint Forces Command, whose task of better integrating functions of the various services and private contractors Gates says has largely been achieved. The positions but not the bodies of 50 general officers and 150 top civilian executives are to disappear in the plan.

To critics of the Pentagon budget -- which a Council on Foreign Relations report projects to exceed $700 billion next year -- Gates's moves may sound like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But they represent an earnest effort to counter congressional and public concerns about the mushrooming federal deficit.

"My greatest fear," Gates said, "is that in economic tough times ... people will see the defense budget as the place to solve the nation's deficit problems, to find money for the other parts of the government ... to find some kind of dividend to put the money someplace else."

It's a reasonable concern, one that surfaced after the end of the American involvement in Vietnam. A clamor arose then for a "peace dividend" that would evolve from lifting the burden of a gigantic and ultimately failed military effort to "save" that embattled country from communism.

In the current circumstances, one of America's two wars, the one in Iraq, finally appears to be winding down. But the other, in Afghanistan, continues to sap American forces and treasure. And with severe economic woes at home, pressures for deficit reduction have grown, with the Pentagon an obvious target.

Particularly in Obama's own party, more questions about huge military spending are being heard because of public reservations about the mission in Afghanistan itself. Seemingly stalled on the ground and hindered by chaotic and corrupt political leadership in the hands of President Hamid Karzai, efforts to bring stability and security to the country seem increasingly in doubt.

President Obama's timetable for starting the withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan a year from now is clearly seen as dangerous and unreasonable at the Pentagon, and Gates has repeatedly said he believes any pullout will be minimal and slow.

But Obama still insists that the 30,000-troop surge into Afghanistan that he reluctantly ordered at the end of last year, to the dismay of many antiwar Democrats, will not be open-ended. Rather, he approved it as a test of whether the counterinsurgency task proposed by departed Gen. Stanley McChrystal and continued by Gen. David Petraeus would work.

Unless the war in Afghanistan takes a more optimistic turn, public clamor inevitably will rise for America to "come home" to address pressing domestic challenges, as was the case regarding Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.

Thirty-eight years ago, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern pinned his slim chances for victory over Richard Nixon on calling on America to cope with the deep divisions it had left behind. He was ignored and soundly defeated, and the war dragged on another two and half years, still ending in disaster.

As the American death toll in Afghanistan rises with each passing month, opinion polls are showing diminished public confidence that the U.S. effort there can succeed either in rooting out Osama bin Laden, wherever he is, or in stabilizing and securing the country that is no longer the prime al-Qaida sanctuary.

Meanwhile, Gates in merely "reallocating" the huge Pentagon budget seems committed to keeping American military strength equal to the task of nation-building, which Obama professes to have rejected in his timetable opposing an open-ended mission in Afghanistan.

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