It was a New Yorker cartoon, I think, that showed two generals walking in front of the Pentagon, with one saying to the other, "Well, we've run out of money; guess we have to start thinking." Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel started that thinking process in his speech at National Defense University on Wednesday. He is the first to really do so since we started flooding the Pentagon with money when we invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq.
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Oh, the speech is full of some miserable speechwriter progeny. The boilerplate per square minute was almost indigestible: "a principled realism that is true to our values" (a Dagwood sandwich of prose, everything in the strategic fridge layered on top of itself), and "we are a wise, thoughtful, and steady nation, worthy of our power, generous of spirit, and humble in our purpose" (how could we, dare we, be anything else?).
But in and around this mindless rhetoric, Hagel got the problem right: It's about the money. And the money is going south probably for a number of years. Strategy and planning have to follow the money, not the other way around.
He was wrong to say that the Pentagon will be dealing with "significantly less resources than the Department has had in the past," as Mark Thompson pointed out on TIME's Battleland blog. Defense budgets, even down 10 percent over the past two years, are still higher than they have ever been since the end of World War II, in constant dollars.
And instead of drawing the line at the "cuts" Secretary Panetta made (that $487 billion in reductions to projected budget growth over 10 years), Hagel was clear that the Pentagon now needs to plan for further reductions, perhaps as low as the full sequester. (Realistically, I would suggest even lower than that.)
But instead of saying these lower budgets will turn the United States into a second-rate power, or undermine national strategy, or decimate the nation's military capability, his message was clear: It is time to adapt, change, reform, and move on. If the Pentagon wants funding for the point of the spear, he said, it will need to zero in on the real budget issues: military hardware that has cost too much for decades; a system of pay and benefits that has spun out of control; and, especially, a "back office" that is over-stuffed and hasn't faced budgetary discipline in decades.
As the secretary said, everything we buy costs too much, takes too long, and falls short on performance. The Government Accountability Office has reported that recent reforms to the way the Pentagon buys equipment have lowered cost growth in hardware programs. Maybe, maybe not. (A large part of the cost change has come simply because programs have been finished or cancelled.) It is certain that costs will not stay down unless the secretary follows weapons programs closely. Maybe Hagel will; most secretaries do not.
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