Guns and butter
Even with a budget boost, the cost of supporting service members and their families may make money for new weapons scarce.
An Army transforming into hell on wheels on the other side of the world within 100 hours.
A Navy in latter-day corvette boats chasing down terrorists in Cigarette boats in the muddy shallows of the developing world.
An Air Force with pilots who can fly four aircraft at once.
A Marine Corps with its own aircraft carriers.
A Defense secretary sitting on a mountain of money but still unable to buy as many weapons as he wants.
These are the new faces of the American military staring out from behind the numbers and words in President Bush's defense budget unveiled last week. Because the budgets for fiscal 2004 and beyond are so big, both visionary boat-rockers and hidebound traditionalists did well.
For a while, though, it looked as if Gen. Eric Shinseki's vision for the Army would lose out to the doubts of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his budget hatchet man, Stephen Cambone. The Army chief of staff wanted to create six of the new highly mobile 3,500-man Stryker brigades-so named because of the Stryker rubber-tired armored vehicles the soldiers drive-while Rumsfeld and Cambone thought three would be enough for now. Shinseki believes that the new brigades, each equipped with 300 vehicles, are the answer to President Bush's emergency calls for a quick insertion of military power into a distant hot spot. "We can be there in four days, Mr. President," is what the chief could say if Stryker brigades live up to Army advertising.
In Bush's new budget, Rumsfeld did not fully commit to Shinseki's Strykers. He said he would not release funds for the desired fifth and sixth Stryker brigades until he reviews their worth yet again later this year. But the two senators Rumsfeld most needs to get the entire $380 billion he wants for the Defense Department in fiscal 2004-Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, and its ranking Democrat, Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii-have served notice that they will insist on buying all six of the hell-on-wheels Stryker brigades.
Like Shinseki, Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, saw different kinds of threats in the Navy's future. "I'm worried about one of our ships getting surrounded by six Cigarette boats," Clark fretted. He pushed for, and got in the new defense budget, money to develop and build abler successors to the light and fast corvettes of World War II fame. Clark's larger, more lethal but still speedy version is the LCS-littoral combat ship. The 3,000-ton LCS is supposed to cost no more than $500 million, compared with upwards of $1 billion for the 9,300-ton Arleigh Burke destroyer, and be able to fight close to shore. Bush's six-year budget plan contains money to start building one LCS in fiscal 2005, another in 2006, three in 2008, and four in 2009.
Air Force revolutionaries also made fresh gains against the diminishing number of white-scarved, you've-got-to-have-a-man-in-the-cockpit traditionalists. In Bush's spending plan, money for unmanned vehicles continues to shoot up: from $716 million in fiscal 2002 to $1.2 billion in fiscal 2003, to $1.4 billion in fiscal 2004, and to $2 billion in fiscal 2005. Visionaries see the day when one pilot sitting in an aircraft too high for enemy missiles to reach directs three or more unmanned bombers below him.
The Marines for years have fought to keep an independent air force so they can swoop in and provide air support for their troops on the ground. But for now, they have agreed to join the Navy's air force. One Marine squadron will be in every one of the Navy's 11 aircraft carrier air wings. But Bush's defense budget also puts the next-generation aircraft, the Joint Strike Fighter, in the Marines' future. The Navy plans to build ships for the Marines that are shorter versions of its own aircraft carriers. The Marine versions of the JSF will be able to take off from, and land on, a short deck. So an independent, seagoing Marine air force will make a comeback.
Doing all of the above, along with continuing purchases of weapons designed for the Cold War, such as the $205 million-a-copy F-22 fighter, will require mountains of money. Bush's defense plan calls for total military appropriations (including the cost of nuclear warheads provided by the Energy Department) of $400 billion in fiscal 2004; this amount will climb to more than $500 billion in fiscal 2009. Over 12 months, the $500 billion comes out to almost a million dollars a minute for national defense.
For all that money, one would think that the Defense secretary could buy as many new weapons as he wanted. But the Congressional Budget Office figures that in fiscal 2002, two-thirds of the Pentagon budget went to pay, feed, train, house, and doctor soldiers and their families, along with Defense Department civilians, and to operate and repair military equipment. Troop levels are to remain at 1.38 million, and these operation and support costs will not go away. Such a restraint means that neither the Defense secretary nor the Duncan Hunters in Congress will be able to buy as many weapons as they want, despite record peacetime defense budgets.