Part 3 of 3 To Fight Future Wars, the U.S. Needs More Capacity—and Seriousness
Capacity Versus Capability
Much of the skepticism about the Pentagon getting around painful strategic problems with Yankee ingenuity is because it has been prioritizing R&D instead of procurement for decades, too often with little to show for it. Mackenzie Eaglen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that the last time the U.S. embarked on a comprehensive military buildup was during the Reagan administration, when the amount of the defense budget devoted to procuring new weapons systems exceeded the amount allotted for R&D programs at a ratio of 2.47 to 1. These days it has dropped closer to 1 to 1. In her opinion, a healthy ratio of procurement to R&D should be about 2.25 to 1.
“[Ronald] Reagan, the president who used the military the least, had budgets approaching 30% for procurement,” Eaglen said, “whereas today, the figure is less than 20% for procurement.”
According to Eaglen, since the start of the 21st century, presidents and their defense departments have prioritized to varying degrees what they would call investing in the future. And the future is in R&D, science and technology. This trend is supported by members of Congress who have universities in their districts that receive some amount of Defense Department funding, which a lot of them get. Typically, programs with political backers are among the last to get cut.
Meanwhile, procurement programs are the easiest to scale back. Eaglen describes military procurement as the “bill payer” of the defense budget. When money must be found for other purposes, it is easiest to just buy less of something or slow acquisition down for the next budget, so procurement becomes a frequently kicked can. The tension between acquisitions of existing weapon types and development of new technologies is what Eaglen calls capacity (existing) versus capability (hypothetical), and the trend toward future development is leaving the U.S. with fewer ships, fewer planes and empty magazines just when China, Russia and other hostile powers need to be deterred or, worse, fought.
“We’re always cutting the present to buy the future, but the future never arrives on time,” she said.
To make matters worse, the impulse to invest in the future too often yields little of tangible value. Eaglen cites her 2021 report, the 2020s Tri-Service Modernization Crunch, to illustrate just how many high-profile, supposedly transformational programs have been canceled in recent years, taking billions of dollars and wasted time with them. Some of the key disappointments include the Army’s Future Combat System ($22 billion) and Comanche helicopter ($10.8 billion), the Air Force’s Airborne Laser ($5.4 billion) and the Navy’s Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle ($4 billion). Left unmentioned are expensive programs leading to acquisitions of dubious military usefulness, chief among these being the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship.
The paradox is that about two-thirds of the defense budget is “walled off” each year for fixed costs such as personnel, operations and maintenance. In any given year, the Pentagon moves around only about 10 to 15% of the budget, and Congress may tinker with another 5%. Even when defense budgets are “eye-wateringly large,” Eaglen says that structural problems with Congress’ penchant for continuing resolutions, the Pentagon’s bureaucratic inertia and persistent inflation all conspire to prevent the U.S. military from achieving the capacity to deter and, if necessary, defeat today’s threats.
Desperate but Not Serious
There are distressing indications that the United States is no longer a serious world power, while its potential rivals seem serious as heart attacks. If Congress were serious, it would not abdicate its legislative responsibility to pass national budgets rather than relying on continuing resolutions, which impose limits on defense spending options. If the Pentagon were serious, it would face existent threats with procurement of actual military equipment that has already been developed and ensure it had enough people in uniform. If President Biden were serious, he would make America’s warfighting capacity his top priority.
The horrors and costs of war have been well documented by some of its most notable practitioners. Yet it is because of the enduring specters of death and destruction that war has forever been the ultimate arbiter in conflicts between countries and even civilizations. Perhaps in a future age humanity will evolve beyond armed conflict in foreign policy, but that age is not this one.
In the modern world, even when rival countries are managing their disputes with diplomacy, wealth transfers and wishful thinking, war is lurking in the background as a motivational threat. The fact is, the nations that are serious about organizing for war will be the ones that get to define how their regions and perhaps even the world order are organized.
The proverb tells us, “For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.” A modern corollary might run, “For want of an oiler, the world order was lost.” The United States military is running on such a fine line that the temporary loss of a fuel supply ship with no replacement sidelines an entire aircraft carrier battle group, as recently happened in the Middle East. Serious war planners must realize that far more significant losses will come with any war they fail to deter by neglecting capacity today for hypothetical capability in a tomorrow that may be too late.