Daylife/AP Photo
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Robert Gates and Gen. James Cartwright |
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has announced a major reshaping of the Pentagon budget with deep cuts in many traditional weapons systems but new billions of dollars for others, along with more troops and new technology to fight the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The decisions are expected to set off a vigorous round of lobbying over the priorities embroidered into the Defense Department’s half-trillion dollars of annual spending. They represent the first broad rethinking of American military strategy under the Obama administration, which plans to shift more money to counterterrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan while spending less on preparations for conventional warfare against large nations like China and Russia.
Mr. Gates announced cuts in missile defense programs, the Army’s expensive Future Combat Systems and Navy shipbuilding operations. He would kill controversial programs to build a new presidential helicopter and a new communications satellite system, delay the development of a new bomber and order only four more of the advanced F-22 fighter jets.
But he also said plans to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, while halting reductions in Air Force and Navy personnel, would cost an additional $11 billion. He also announced an extra $2 billion for intelligence and surveillance equipment, including new Predator and Reaper drones, the remote-controlled vehicles currently used in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq for strikes against militants, and more spending on special forces and training foreign military units.
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More broadly, Mr. Gates signaled that he hoped to impose a new culture on the Pentagon — making the system more flexible and responsive to the needs of the troops in the way it chooses and buys weapons.
Even so, he acknowledged that it would be hard, with the economic crisis and concerns in Congress over jobs, to “make tough choices about specific systems and defense priorities based solely on the national interest and then stick to those decisions over time…”
“The perennial procurement and contracting cycle, going back many decades, of adding layer and layer of cost and complexity onto fewer and fewer platforms that take longer and longer to build, must come to an end,” he said. “There is broad agreement on the need for acquisition and contracting reform in the Department of Defense. There have been enough studies, enough hand-wringing, enough rhetoric. Now is the time for action.”
Overdue.
Gates’ complete prepared statement is over here.
More drones should save money in the long run.
Our government is so corrupted, I don’t think either party has any chance of cleaning it up. The problem is… the only people who can change things are the ones in office, they would have to write new laws that would put the screws to themselves. That’s not going to happen.
Ha! Let’s see if the Congress is actually willing to kill procurement programs that benefit their constituents.
Ugh, I’m getting pop-up banner ads on this site (from desk.opt.fimserve.com). They’re kinda weird. A new window pops open, but inside the window is nothing but a vertical banner ad (which doesn’t fill the window).
#3…all in the name of jobs, naturally.
Gates has turned out to be quite impressive now that he reports to a real leader with a vision.
He recognizes the need to invest in what future battles call for and a sense of responsibility for military spending.
He and Colin Powell were two jewels in the Cheney presidency whose talents were squandered.
Overdue? Hardly. Clinton choked the military down to a skeleton crew that he handed off to Bush Jr.
9/11 happened and we went to Afghanistan and Iraq.
People whined that our military was not very well equipped (while not realizing it takes a long time to produce said equipment) The lack of equipment was due to Clinton’s aggressive cuts. People also whined that our Guard and Reserve were being overworked. When Clinton reduced the active duty military down to a skeleton crew, he justified it because he said that the Guard and Reserves could be utilized to serve a more active role as needed.
Obama is going to choke the military again. Hopefully another 9/11 won’t happen, but if it does, then however comes in after Obama will inherit a weaker military like Bush Jr. did. And hopefully whoever fills Obama’s shoes won’t get blamed for Obama’s cuts.
Uh, Guyver, multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers aren’t much good against scruffy terrorists with boxcutters and plastic explosives.
And which president bled our military down to crisis levels on bogus wars? (Psst… his name begins with B… take your time)
The reaction to this brave announcement by Gates (who I formerly distrusted) will separate the shills from conservatives from the realists. Don’t be surprised at the number of Congressoids who assert how important to the safety of Americans these fantastically expensive systems, useful mainly against enemies found only in sci-fi movies, are. In reality they’re defending their contractor kickbacks.
This will be interesting. We need a strong Navy, marines & special forces. I don’t think we will really be getting into massive land battles, Iraq was stupid & uncalled for & we did what we could when we ousted the Taliban & should have left after that.
The Army should go back to state level with a lean umbrella organization to coordinate in case of a real need.
Just goes to show you just how much longer they plan to be involved in Iraq and Afghanistan…forever.
Building our strategy around dropping insanely expensive air-launched weapons onto camels is short-sighted. We should be building our strategy around ensuring China doesn’t get enough confidence to roll the dice, since that is obviously the strategic threat of the coming decades.
Right now we are very vulnerable to anti-satellite and submarine warfare. Indications are that China is putting its money into those very areas.
I kinda like This Gates guy much better than that Rummy the Rumsfield. But lets see how the results are going to be. Cutting back or no cutting back, most of the US weapons will be sold to Israel to kill more innocent people and bomb more third world countries in the name of Terrorism and Democrazy.
Translation: We get budget savings from the military budget, and let the Republicans make up the difference when they’re in charge, and we get to attack their high deficits too!
This plan isn’t any different than what Rumsfeld proposed… and it will fail as well.
Ted Stevens would solve this pretty fast.
Sounds fine with me. We get 187 F-22’s and they wont have to cut the F-35 order.
The F-22 is the ultimate stealthy interceptor and also fills the deep strike role of the retired F-117 while the F-35 is a cheaper stealth strike aircraft.
Considering the current economic situation and the sort of fighting we expect to be doing over the next few decades its a sensible plan.
8,
To answer your question, it was Clinton and not Bush. You sounds like some partisan hack who’s never served in the military. Why am I not surprised. 🙂
Clinton had no military foresight. Bush got blamed by libs for Clinton’s lack of foresight. Bush has only undone what Clinton did to weaken the military. Obama is about to bring it right back down.
I served under Clinton and the military had all sorts of problems from pay, to recruitment, to equipment, to morale. And don’t get me started on this nonsense that some idiot politicians thought a woman can do anything as well as a man can do. Equal work for equal pay? Hardly. What ended up happening was forcing fewer men to do more work (since the women that were assigned to units could not do said work). How can a maintenance chief order a 100 pound female to go carry 100 pounds of chain to secure a jet on the flight deck? They can’t… they’re too worried about sexual harassment nowadays.
How bad did morale get under Clinton? People were trying to get out by failing their PT tests or being overweight. It got so bad that the CNO put a temporary ban on chaptering people out of the military during this time. Women essentially just got pregnant before a 6 month deployment (and thus weakening their unit’s combat strength).
Body Armor and armor-plated Humvees were somehow a fault of Bush? Please. You don’t defecate these things on demand. It takes time to mass produce them. Not to mention Humvees were never intended to be light armor vehicles to begin with. Rumsfeld had it right. You go to war with what you have, not what you’d like to have.
Clinton cut things down to ridiculous levels. He forced good people out of the military by RIFing them. And if his ilk couldn’t find a good reason to RIF, the offered many who remained an early pro-rated voluntary retirement. Those who didn’t take the offer but were later kicked out got a severance pay with nothing else.
The problem with liberals is they think about today…. not tomorrow when it comes to national defense. When a crisis does occur, you go to war with what the previous administration essentially handed off to you.
Obama is inheriting a much stronger military than what Clinton gave to Bush. That’s an undeniable… unless you’re a liberal hack who’s never served in the military.
The problem with you libs is you play a game of double standards. When it’s not a Democrat in office (when a crisis does occur), you libs accuse the current guy of not sending troops with proper equipment. You libs have more interest in your party than in your country when you play these double-standards games.
Interesting.. Mr. Gates announced cuts in missile defense programs..
George W. Bush yesterday said that as President he would vastly expand a planned missile defense shield. Bush surrounded himself yesterday with foreign and military policy heavyweights in plugging for a robust missile shield system reminiscent of the Star Wars proposal of former President Ronald Reagan.
Independent defense analysts ridiculed the missile defense proposal. “The technology doesn’t exist and cannot be shown to exist in the near future,” said retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, deputy director of the Center for Defense Information.
http://bit.ly/kV8o5
CONCLUSION: BUSH was an idiot ahead of his time.
Without Shrub’s War, we’re arguing about morale instead of dead soldiers and insufficient equipment.
the pictures look like they are waiting together to get prostate exams.
19, If you know anyone who’s been in the military under Bush then you’d know that the overall morale has been fairly high.
Insufficient equipment was a fault of the Clinton administration that the Bush administration fixed without pointing fingers.
Death toll of soldiers since the beginning of the Iraq War has been less than the number of people murdered in this country in one year. Iraq War has been the lowest casualty war we’ve ever had but if you listen to the liberal news, they would have you believe this has been worse than Vietnam.
Obama is going to weaken our military so we’re going back on the path that Clinton set fourth. It will all be for noble and well-intentioned reasons, but it will be without any military foresight IMHO.
China’s playing catch up and Putin is wanting things to get back to the good old days. Obama’s bark is probably going to be worse than his bite. Or so I think.
Wow, Guyver, major denial there, sport… you’ve obviously been ignoring all the reports from the military — the spike in suicides, the worn-out troops stop-lossed, the body armor and uparmored Humvees not getting where they need to be. And all for a bogus war. Major, major denial… I’m backing slowly away from this one.
Whatever you say, Guyver, whatever you say.
Interesting how they want to focus just on insurgencies.
While I like Predator and Reaper drones they are only effective against an inferior opponent. Russia dispatched these type of drones easily in their war with Georgia. What Russia didn’t do well was in using their GPS satellite systems; most of their bombs didn’t find their targets as there were too few satellites to effectively compute location. Our own GPS satellite systems are getting older and do need to be replaced eventually. Are new GPS satellite systems the types of satellites that Gates is cutting back on? Why? This will only increase collateral damage.
Bottom line is that we need a well rounded military. You never know what threat you may have to deal with.
Right now we are very vulnerable to anti-satellite and submarine warfare. Indications are that China is putting its money into those very areas.
Um, actually, Billy Bob, the Chinese already have us by the short hairs. They didn’t even have to fire a gun, just ship us cheap stuff and buy our T-Bills. Now we don’t dare piss them off, lest they dump their Dollars or stop loaning us money. And we did it to ourselves, that’s the ironic part.
Sooner or later, this nation will have to decide whether it wants to bankrupt itself playing world police. We spend more on military than any other nation (more than most of them combined) but what good is it if our economy is crumbling? Do we really need eleven aircraft carrier groups? Can we afford them?
Ah, but we’re used to being the top dog in the world, the number one superpower. Lots of Americans will feel humiliated if we have to give up that superpower dream. But what’s the alternative? We’re spending money we don’t have.
# 25 Phydeau said, “Sooner or later, this nation will have to decide whether it wants to bankrupt itself playing world police.”
True. We’re much better off being commercial empire than a military one. Just need enough to defend our interests, not others.
Somebody is going to shot a nuke at us. I’d say within the next 20 years with the number of nut nations that now have or soon will have the bome at which point in time we have something in place that works or a _lot_ of dead citizens.
#12, Billy,
It isn’t the camels, it’s when they drop bombs on Wedding Parties that needs to be controlled.
Feet on the ground is always better than very expensive toys.
#17, Guyver,
As pointed out, you are in serious denial.
Rumsfeld was named Defense Secretary soon after President George W. Bush took office in 2001. He immediately announced a series of sweeping reviews intended to transform the U.S. military into a lighter force. These studies were led by Pentagon analyst Andrew Marshall.
Cuts under Bush I were almost 17% in four years. Under eight years of Clinton, the budget fell by a total of 15% even though the Bush I long range estimates were 19%.
There is lots more, however due to the spam filter, I’ll only post these two references.
# 27 deowll said, “Somebody is going to shot a nuke at us.”
Which is why refusing to develop missile defense qualifies a President as being criminally insane.