Conservatives AWOL on Fighting Defense Cuts

The Right is too lazy, myopic, and mired in its Cold War ways to think imaginatively and creatively about the defense budget.

The American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI’s) Center for Defense Studies is lamenting what it calls the “isolationist urges” of some conservatives and many Tea Partiers. This is a legitimate point insofar as it goes; however, it really doesn’t go very far or explain much. And it diverts attention from the real problem now afflicting the conservative movement.

The Right’s real problem isn’t grassroots conservatives tempted by the neo-isolationist impulse. Instead, the Right’s real problem is its own journalistic and policy elite – at the American Enterprise Institute, Weekly Standard, National Review, et al.

These elites are a big problem because they’re either afflicted with a Cold War mindset; or they simply refuse to show leadership on issues of national defense and the defense budget.

For example, as I have argued repeatedly here at FrumForum, one of the most urgent military requirements of our time is to modernize our ground forces for 21st Century irregular warfare. This means significantly increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps while ensuring that our troops retain a decisive technological edge. Yet when it comes to ground-force modernization, the conservative journalist and policy elite have been mostly AWOL and indifferent.

Sen. McCain, for instance, has been one of the biggest champions of cutting the defense budget. And Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard has contributed mightily to the Right’s defense myopia by failing to articulate a strategic vision which has as its lynchpin ground-force modernization.

This is significant because the Tea Party activists whom the AEI editors decry take their cues on military and defense issues from supposedly better informed elite conservatives.

The Tea Partiers know only that they want to cut the size and scope of government, which is laudable. Bully for them. However, they do not know where and what to cut. Thus they mistakenly assume that legislators can surgically isolate and cut from the defense budget “waste, fraud and abuse.” But ask the Tea Party activists to specify where and what to cut, and they turn mute.

Tea Party organizer Ryan Heckler, for instance, admitted to Politico that he is “‘not an expert’ in defense spending and [thus] would rely on [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates or other Pentagon officials for advice on where to cut.”

But Secretary Gates is part of the problem! He loyally and diligently works for an administration that is committed to fundamentally reordering the federal budget and to effecting a radical reduction in defense spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The administration’s clear aim is to take money away from the military and to reallocate defense dollars to entitlements and social-welfare programs.

What is urgently needed, then, is substantive leadership on defense and military issues from the conservative journalistic and policy elite. But sadly, such leadership has been seriously lacking. The Right is too lazy, too myopic, and too mired in its Cold War ways to think imaginatively and creatively about the defense budget.

That’s why it’s difficult to find fault with misguided conservative grassroots activists. The Tea Partiers, after all, don’t know any better. But that’s not true of the conservative elite. And so it is time that they be held to account. Their failure to lead has hurt and undermined the conservative movement, and it has hurt and undermined America.