Pentagon: Wars Come and Go But War FUNDING Should Be Forever!

Here’s
a real test to see if House Republicans are serious about
making any cuts in government spending.

As you’ll recall, with a few notable exceptions such as Rep.
Justin Amash (R-Mich.), it’s tough to find GOP members who
really stick to their guns, especially when spending is in any
way related to the military spending rather than, say, food stamps,
funding for the arts, or foreign aid.

The Pentagon says that even though wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
are effectively over, well, they still need money as if we’re still
at war. The Defense budget is one of the most inscrutable documents
ever written (it puts Melville’s The Confidence Man to
shame in this regard). On top of a “base budget,” there is also
money for “overseas contingency operations” (OCO), which is where
most of the money to fund wars in Afghanistan and Iraq came from.
OCO funds also cover some other things such as disaster relief and
evacuation efforts. You would expect OCO to be cut massively as
troops come home. But you would be wrong.

The enacted base budget for fiscal 2014 was $496 billion, and
DOD received $85 billion for OCO.

But the military has also been using OCO to train troops,
refurbish and modernize its equipment, maintain bases and force
presence outside of Afghanistan, and do other activities not
directly related to the war effort. Pentagon leaders want that
extra money to continue flowing in an era when Congress has put
caps on the base budget. A final OCO request has not yet been made
for fiscal 2015, but in budget documents, DOD listed $79 billion as
a “placeholders” figure.

“Any transition from OCO to base at the current base topline or,
worse, under sequester laws, would drive all of our bases down, and
our limited budget will pressurize our already difficult decisions
as we work to balance our force structure, modernization and
readiness. Without additional supplemental funding, I’m concerned
that all three of these areas will suffer,” Vice Adm. Joseph
Mulloy, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of
capabilities and resources, told members of the House Armed
Services Subcommittee on Readiness on Thursday.

The OCO budget is not subject to budget caps imposed by past law
and thus exists as what one analyst calls “an uncapped funding
stream that exists for DOD.” You can understand why the military
wants to keep the spigot open. And here’s a preview of how
Republicans, apart from the odd duck such as Amash, are likely to
respond. Take it away, Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.):

“Some would characterize OCO as unnecessary after 2014.
However, the fact of the matter is that the rapidly broadening
scope of challenges now facing our military has led the Department
to become increasingly dependent on OCO to support enduring
activities — activities beyond Afghanistan’s borders that must
continue after combat operations have ended. OCO funds a multitude
of enduring high-priority activities like building partner
capacity, providing humanitarian assistance, conducting training
exercises, and performing intelligence functions,” he said. “Until
we are able to [move those funds to the base budget], we have a
responsibility to provide the necessary OCO resources to allow our
troops to do the job we have asked them to do.”

More
in Stars & Stripes.

Some would characterize it? No, just people who are
interested in having an actual conversation about how much money
the government spends, including how much it spends on defense,
which is likely to receive lesser scrutiny precisely because it is
universally accepted as a core government function. How else do you
explain massive, Titanic-sized boondoggles such as the F-35 jet
program,
a $1.5 trillion exercise in flushing tax money down the
toilet.

Hat tips: The excellent Twitter feed of
Outside the Beltway‘s
James Joyner and
Small Wars Journal.

Two things to consider:

1. From a Keynesian perspetive, defense spending is
often thought of as the ultimate government multiplier. How many of
us were taught in undergrad econ that it was spending on World War
II that finally got us out of the Great Depression? That’s simply
not true.
Recent research by Harvard’s Robert Barro and Mercatus
Center economist and Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy shows that
defense spending actually finds that “a dollar increase in federal
defense spending results in a less-than-a-dollar increase in GDP
when the spending increase is deficit-financed.” The idea that
maintaining defense spending is a way of propping up our current
economy is simply wrong and that fact should be front and center as
the Defense Department works a pliant House GOP for more and more
money.

2. Defense spending is one of the few items in the budget
that can and has been cut in the past. Massive drops in spending
took place after World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the end
of the Cold War.