A Military Budget Based on Hope - Washington Post Editorial
BLUF: In sum, the new defense budget is a patch constructed on the hope that funding needed to sustain even this administration’s constrained strategic objectives can be found in future years. And what if Mr. Obama is wrong, and the United States is forced into a large land operation — in Syria, Iran, Korea or maybe Eastern Europe? The chances might be small; but if the worst occurs, the United States will not be ready.
Comments
It seems contrary to me that the WP, of all sources, should seriously miss the connection between what this administrations 'Stated' strategic military preferences are, or have been, namely the use of special forces and non-traditional 'hard power' attack vectors, in conjunction with the use of predictable and questionable 'Soft power' institutions and tactics, to achieve it's foreign policy objectives, are not areas that neatly fall into traditional budgetary categories. From the DoD's end, SOCOM and associated 'Tier One' special operations funding isn't open to public examination for obvious reasons (not that 'Tier One' black ops are very 'black' to begin with), and thus can't be expected to be defended or debated by the SecDef in any sort of open forum. More importantly, and the recent fubar in Libya demonstrated, the jurisdictional friction between what are nominally 'Soft Power' entities, namely, the CIA and the DoS's Intelligence operations (whatever it's being called now a days), and particularly the DoS's determination to operate in opposition to BOTH the DoD AND the CIA in dealing with irregular threats that they have every reason to believe could end up growing, elevating into necessitating a 'Hard Power' reply, have budgets that are NOT under Congressional oversight vis a vis the DoD's budget, NOR, as far as I can tell, disclosed ANYWHERE to ANYONE outside the DoS?
How can the professionals trained and responsible for our Countries 'Hard Power' (but small stick) forces possibly be expected to plan for, or train, or predict what will or will not be necessary in terms of asset alignment in particular command regions (like Af-Com), if they are not privy to the financial and operational assets in play under "Soft Power" management in a particular Country or region? Especially when they are not given enough MilINT to adequately estimate the chances of an irregular threat elevating itself to the level where a "Hard Power" response is required. The recent failure of the raid to capture/kill the head of AQ in Somalia believed to be responsible for the attack on the mall in Kenya is the example that springs to mind. If the Administration is going to send elite, small units into hornets nests' without providing the MI officers with enough data to plan and arrange for a 'worst case' engagement, where a higher grade of firepower and support is at least able to be standing by, then it seems clear the Administration has not been sufficiently briefed or educated in the use of this type of 'Hard Power'.
Lastly, as it's my belief that the readers of this journal are mostly from the "Hard Power" side of the tracks, I'd like to leave you all with a very serious thought. If you were, tomorrow, asked to risk your life and the lives of your command on the assurances of field conditions and intelligence from a nebulous and unaccountable State Department counterpart, would you sleep easy, or is it more likely that you wouldn't be able to sleep at all?
A. Scott Crawford
This is getting the point of ridiculousness, as if the Hawks who want a larger budget 1) assume that the US must police the entire globe alone; 2) that clearly none of the other Instruments of National Power matter, because they must be sucked dry of funding to pay for the DoD; 3) that as we speak there is an international crisis going on that the Military Instrument of National Power offers little hope of solving; 4) the reason it offers little hope of solving it is because the Army we have built is only good for large scale fights against near peer competitors - it is slow, lumbering, and unable to respond any real fight against a near peer competitor without months of buildup; and finally 5) any attempt to pay for our huge, inflexible, military force by raising taxes will be attacked by the same hawks who are claiming we need to build it.