It’s one thing to cut the fat of the defense budget. It’s another thing to gut national defense budget in favor of keeping massive welfare programs in tact.
Randy Forbes is a lonely man. President Obama’s stewardship of American armed forces has been a dismal failure, yet few on Capitol Hill have waved red flags over it.
Forbes, however, has been waving them furiously.
The Republican congressman from Virginia recently penned a pointed letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. It’s a warning shot, discharged in anticipation of the Quadrennial Defense Review, the report the Pentagon must deliver to Congress every four years to layout the long-term plans, concerns and requirements for the armed forces.“The QDR has become an exercise in lowest-common-denominator thinking that fails to light a way forward for our long-term military planning,” Forbes wrote Hagel. The lawmaker fears that the forthcoming QDR will amount to little more than a rubber stamp for slashing military capabilities and lowering readiness.
Forbes should prepare to be disappointed. By all accounts the QDR is in the can. The administration is simply debating whether to release it before—or after—it submits its FY2015 budget. Regardless of the sequence, both documents will likely hit the street early next month—just in time for March Madness.
And “mad” is the reaction the QDR is expected to generate among those who hope to maintain America’s status as a global superpower. Officials involved in putting the report together have indicated that its assumptions and its vision for the armed forces of the future won’t stray too much from the Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR) that Hagel ordered after he came into office.
The SCMR (which critics have taken to pronouncing as “scammer”) put the Pentagon on a path to austerity. The problem is that path was selected—not on the basis of any strategic analysis or analytical study—but because of purely budgetary desires. The president has designated the Pentagon as the primary “donor” for fiscal restraint—even though that means downsizing forces and reducing military capabilities.