Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen are on Capitol Hill this week to plead the case for President Barack Obama's rather radical new defense budget. And they are facing tough questions over cuts to weapons programs, Pakistan strategy, and the recent sacking of the top U.S. general in Afghanistan.
The disagreements have been particularly sharp when it comes to chopping weapons systems that just happen to be made in the home states or constituencies of certain lawmakers. Spencer Ackerman highlights the face-off between Gates and Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, a staunch defender of the Air Force's F-22 Raptor stealth jet.
Chambliss, Ackerman writes, hinted that Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz -- who reluctantly endorsed ending Raptor production at 187 aircraft -- not-so-secretly favors a larger Raptor buy. Schwartz, Chambliss said, "has told me that his military requirement is 243."
"So much for Gates' warning to the services against budget 'guerrilla warfare,'" Ackerman notes.
At its core, the new Pentagon budget represents a fundamental shift in budget priorities, devoting more resources to equipping the military to fight today's irregular wars, and moving away from what Gates called "exquisite, service-centric" weaponry that costs a fortune to develop and is deployed in very limited quantities. "We must understand that we face a more complex future than that, a future where all conflict will range across a broad spectrum of operations and lethality," he said in his opening statement. "Where near-peers will use irregular or asymmetric tactics that target our traditional strengths. And where non-state actors may have weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated missiles."
Among other things, that means canceling the Army's plans to buy a next-generation family of networked, lightweight combat vehicles; ending production of the Air Force's prized Raptor; and delaying amphibious ship production.
Rep. John McHugh, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, slammed the Pentagon for "a vacuum of analysis" in presenting the budget, saying that major reductions to military equipment were being prepared without properly explaining the rationale to Congress.
"The programmatic and funding decisions in the budget, according to your prepared remarks at that press conference, were the product of a holistic assessment of capabilities, requirements, risks and needs for the purpose of shifting the department in a different direction," he said. "Now, it's undeniable you're taking the department in a different direction. The problem, Mr. Secretary, is, from my perspective, the Congress really hasn't had yet the benefit of reviewing the analysis and data to determine how those decisions will take the department in the best direction possible."
During the preparation of the budget, Gates made service officials sign non-disclosure statements to keep a lid on internal deliberations. But the secretary challenged the idea that Congress was somehow being excluded from the process. "The only reason the Congress was included in the internal deliberations of the executive branch process in the past was because the building [the Pentagon] leaks like a sieve. It wasn't through -- it wasn't through formal releases or formal briefings up here that the Congress found out what was going on; it was because they had a hotline to virtually every office in the building."
Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee also had serious questions about the wisdom of the Pentagon's request for $700 million in funds to help shore up Pakistan's faltering counterinsurgency campaign.
Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed skepticism about Islamabad's commitment to fighting extremism. "Unless Pakistan’s leaders commit in deeds and words their country's armed forces and security personnel to eliminating the threat from militant extremists for the sake of their own future– then no amount of assistance will be effective," he said. "I sincerely hope that Pakistan’s recent military operations in the North West Frontier Province reflect a long overdue realization that the extremists pose the single greatest threat to Pakistan’s survival. If Pakistan makes this fight their own fight, then the United States should be willing to help Pakistan achieve a more stable and secure future. But we can't buy their support for our cause, or appear to do so, since that would play into the hands of their and our enemy."
[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]
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