As any cursory student of economics knows, you can never completely escape the condition of scarcity. Choices and thus trade offs must be made. The world of defense is no different.
Although the military slice of the budgetary pie is ever growing, the military still has to make decisions. Some of these include: present needs versus investment in the future; new hardware versus training people; and certain types of weapons systems versus others. It's not that we should spend nothing or everything on one thing or another--it's how much we should spend on A versus B given what we know and think about the world.
For the most part, this work is not POGO's forte. However, in particular cases, the F/A-22 Raptor most notably, we have drawn upon the view that World War II and Cold War-style confrontations are not the most likely kind of conflicts the United States faces in the 21st century. (We have argued that the F-15 and F-16 are more than adequate to deal with the foreign aerial threat for the next several decades. This is a contentious point that many vehemently disagree.) Many subscribe to this interpretation, arguing that asymmetric warfare--such as terrorism in its many iterations or guerrilla warfare--is the most likely threat the US will have to battle. Yet it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of war with nations with large militaries. Although one hopes none of these possibilities materialize, war with Iran, North Korea, China and/or other countries is not simply in the realm of fantasy.
These are the kinds of issues the military is currently grappling with now as it conducts its Quaddrenial Defense Review. But, as Fred Kaplan pointed out last week, will the Defense Department make any radical new choices or will they dodge the hard questions with some artful wordsmithing? Does the US need to change its military priorities or is the current set of choices the right one given what we face in the world?
Increasingly it looks like the military needs some changes, sooner rather than later. A new Army study, conducted by the RAND Corporation's Arroyo Center, a federally-funded research center, says that the US Army is so strained by its deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq that the US will "need to decide what military capabilities the Army should have and what risks may be prudent to assume." We'd like to also point out that the Army should not be seen in isolation from the other armed services. For instance, is the Air Force being lavished with more than enough monetary attention while the Army is underfunded relative to their respective workloads?
It may be true that, to quote Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "You have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want." But it would be nice to have the military we want to face the threats we believe we will likely confront in the years ahead. Will we make the right choices to build that military?
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