More logrolling at the DoD, where everyone gets their prize toy, it seems. Fred Kaplan reports:
The administration's budgetary sleight of hand (not invented by Bush's people) involves a basic conceptual confusion—the tacit notion that more money means more defense. Nobody expresses this equation explicitly, yet few officials or politicians are willing to challenge it, either. (When legislators vote to cut a weapon system, for whatever reason, they know that their opponent in the next election will call them "soft on defense," if not "unpatriotic.") ...
The SSN-774 Virginia-class submarine ($2.6 billion). This is the cost of one nuclear-powered attack submarine. The Navy currently has 60 capable of patrolling the oceans. Does it—do we—really need another one? Rumsfeld's Quadrennial Defense Review, issued last week, declares that the Navy will soon start building two new submarines a year, a rate of production not seen since the Cold War, an era when our main foe, the Soviet Union, also had a huge submarine fleet ...
I'm not proposing that Congress should kill all these weapons systems—just that it should (as a starter) ask if funding all of them is necessary, especially at these extravagant levels, given the threats that are out there in the world, and the need to set priorities, given that we're broke.
The slender relationship between money and value goes the other way, too. Among the most spectacular weapons programs of recent years are the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (the pilotless reconnaissance drones, such as Predator and Global Hawk) and the JDAM smart bombs. The UAVs cost as little as $5 million; JDAMs go for a little more than $20,000 apiece. Bush and Rumsfeld are proposing to accelerate production in all cases, building 132 additional UAVs and over 10,000 more JDAMs, for two-thirds the cost of a single attack submarine.
Someone who looked just at the dollars might think that the one sub was more vital to security than all those drones and smart bombs. No one who looked at the specific programs (except maybe a Navy submarine captain) would believe that for a minute. The point is, it's time to take a more tangible approach to the entire defense budget, line by line—to assess military security not according to how much we spend but what we buy.
Posted by Alan Allport at February 8, 2006 03:43 PM