Can the GOP Stop Gates' Pentagon Downsizing?

Secretary Gates' latest Pentagon budget will slash the size of the Army and Marine Corps. But does the GOP have the will to fight the cuts?

FrumForum readers, of course, should not be surprised by Secretary Gates’ latest round of defense budget cuts. This is a story that we’ve been tracking for well over a year.

The Obama administration, after all, came into office with an ideological commitment to cutting defense and Gates has been the administration’s willing executor of those cuts.

Indeed, when Obama took office, the Department of Defense was virtually the only government agency that Obama forced to make cuts, even as he pushed through a behemoth $787-billion economic “stimulus” program.

Yet, despite the fact that we are at war in two countries (Iraq and Afghanistan), face long-term strategic threats from two other countries (China and Iran), and must grapple with a host of failed and failing states which are now, and threaten to become, breeding grounds for terrorists, the Obama administration is still hell-bent on cutting defense.

Yet, in the eyes of the Big Media, the only ideologues are conservative ideologues. Please.

It’s telling, isn’t it, that we don’t see any other government agency -- say, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or the Department of Education (DOE) -- forced to make “difficult and hard choices.”

We don’t read front-page headlines like the one in today’s Washington Post -- “Pentagon faces new budget reality: Cuts $78 billion in planned spending. Troop strength of Army, Marines will be downsized” -- about planned cuts to HHS, DOE and other domestic social-welfare agencies. No, it’s only defense that must be cut.

And the Big Media don’t ask any of the politicians about whether they’re willing to cut the health and human services’ budget, the education budget, or any other social-welfare program; the Big Media care only about cutting defense.

And they frame the question always in ways that compel the politically correct answer. “Are you willing to cut defense?” And “Is the defense budget off limits?”

Well, of course nothing is “off limits.” And of course there may be ways to find efficiencies in the defense budget. Even a self-avowed defense hawk such as myself would answer those questions in the affirmative.

But as the American Enterprise Institute’s Thomas Donnelly points out, these defense cuts aren’t the logical end result of some wise and grand military strategy designed to streamline and strengthen our defense posture. To the contrary: these defense cuts have been forced by mathematical calculations done for strictly green eyeshade budgetary reasons.

The proposed cuts to our ground forces, the Army and Marine Corps, truly boggle the mind and are arguably the most dangerous. After all, if we’ve learned nothing else over the past decade, it should be this: that we have too few soldiers and Marines; and that no strategic weapon can substitute for the tactical presence of an American soldier or Marine.

Indeed, we absolutely need, as I’ve argued here at FrumForum, a vastly bigger Army and Marine Corps.

I know most conventional defense analysts disagree with me. They think that Iraq and Afghanistan are anomalies; and that we’ll not soon fight another land war. Thus, in their mind, cutting our ground forces is an “acceptable risk.”

But the conventional defense analysts are wrong. Worse yet, they miss the point.

The point is not fight another land war; the point is to prevent and deter another land war from ever happening. And you do that by forward-deploying our soldiers and Marines abroad in partnership with allied countries and indigenous forces to keep the bad guys at bay.

Moreover, we still must accept the fact that another land war, or military occupation, is a distinct possibility. Why, one need only look at North Korea, which, were it to collapse or implode, might well require more than 100,000 American troops to help stabilize and police that country.

In short, this new defense budget is shortsighted and myopic. It reflects the Washington Beltway conventional wisdom, which is notable for being wrong more often than it is right.

The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.), has it exactly right:

These cuts are being made without any commitment to restore modest future growth, which is the only way to prevent deep reductions in force structure that will leave our military less capable and less ready to fight.  This is a dramatic shift for a nation at war and a dangerous signal from the Commander in Chief…

I remain committed to applying more fiscal responsibility and accountability to the Department of Defense; but I will not stand idly by and watch the White House gut defense when Americans are deployed in harm's way.

Let us hope that McKeon’s words are more than mere rhetoric. If the GOP wants to seriously battle the Obama-Gates defense cuts, then it’s going to have to seriously analyze the defense budget and fight the administration -- as well as some libertarian Republicans and conservative neo-isolationists -- on the administration’s own terms.

Unfortunately, this is not something the GOP has seemed willing or able to do.

But if the U.S. military is to avoid the type of slow and steady undoing that has befallen the militaries of western or old Europe, then it will require smart, well-informed and tenacious congressional advocates.

McKeon looks like he’s up for the job, but are his GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill? That’s an open question. We just don’t know. Time will tell.

John Guardiano blogs at www.ResoluteCon.Com, and you can follow him on Twitter: @JohnRGuardiano.