Parsing Words

By John Liang / April 9, 2009 at 5:00 AM

Usually when the Pentagon submits its annual budget, defense analysts have a field day (or several) taking apart the hundreds of pages of supplementary justification material to find any new trends in defense spending.

This time around, though, it hasn't been that easy. The only thing for analysts to go on so far in any kind of detail has been Defense Secretary Robert Gates' press conference on Monday.

Which is exactly what the Center for Strategic and International Studies did today. CSIS released a paper titled "U.S. Strategy, Force Plans, and the FY2010 Defense Budget: The Questions Still to Be Answered," authored by in-house analyst Anthony Cordesman:

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates provided the first indications of how he will seek to shift the U.S. defense budget and program in his press briefing of April 6, 2009. This briefing, however, raised at least as many questions as it answered. It also is unusual in that it was not accompanied by any charts or detailed background data, and no material that supplements his comments has been issued by OSD (Public Affairs).

"Part of the reason for this lack of detail may lie in the need to rush some decisions out in time to meet budget deadlines, and before the secretary had time to develop all of the necessary supporting plans and analysis," Cordesman continues.

It is also clear that there will still have to be an FY2010 supplemental for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, the Department of Defense is also committed to yet another QDR this year, although it is far from clear as yet that it will be any better tied to a clear force plan, procurement plan, and future year defense program and budget (FYDP) than its largely meaningless predecessors.

Furthermore, if the new administration is serious about creating an integrated national security strategy, at some point it will have to put forward an integrated approach to civil-military strategy, programs, and budget covering the Department of Defense, State Department, and other federal departments and agencies—a massive but necessary reform in the way that the U.S. approaches national security and one that could make the rationale for the FY2010 defense budget largely moot. If nothing else, it may be impossible to modernize the U.S. security posture until the chaos, lack of focus, and waste in the foreign aid efforts in wars like Iraq and Afghanistan are addressed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already warned about these problems, which are exemplified by the lack of any integrated plans, budget, and measures of effectiveness for the State Department, DoD, and USAID efforts.

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