The challenge isn't that the defense budget is in danger of shrinking. You're right, at the worst case, it will remain stable and only grow at the rate of inflation. Hopefully, the items within the past defense supplementals will be incorporated into the regular budget, as they should have been starting in 2006.

No, the real challenge will be that the four Services all need much more money for resetting their forces, recruiting more people, and continuing massive modernization programs. They all want the budget to continue growing to meet all their requirements, and that's not possible. And they know that, but in this town, you ask for the moon, and accept half the funds you initially asked for.

Hopefully, if William Lynn is confirmed as DepSecDef, we might - might, only - see some semblance of accountability come into play with regards to the proper balance of funds between the Services (Navy and Air Force continuously getting more than the Army) and a significant shrinkage of major defense acquisition programs. There will be plenty of controversial in-fighting with DOD just to retain the status quo - no one's worried about any real cuts. As you say, that would be "unpatriotic."

One thing to keep in mind is that as a percentage of budget, the military isn't actually that high in terms of the average; about 4-5% of the Federal budget goes to the military, compared to about 10% in Ike's time and compared to a world average of around 3-4%.

You mention that we have "worldwide interests", but I don't think you really appreciate the significance and cost of those interests, Stephen. In East Asia, the US's role in providing protection to areas like Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea arguably work to prevent a real arms race from occurring in that area so that said countries can deal with security threats from China. The US Navy ensures that we can not only deploy our own troops worldwide to various areas (including peacekeeping areas), but other countries as well; the US flew back much of the Georgian military stationed in Iraq to Georgia when the August War broke out. We keep the sea-lanes open, and more generally provide a bunch of services that other countries (particularly Europe, which has very low percentages of military funding on average, about 1 percent of the budget) would have to spend much more on if the US wasn't doing them.

You criticize the F-22, for example, but I don't think you really understand why it costs so much or why it is necessary. The F-22 is basically the fifth-generation air superiority fighter, and is considerably better than its predecessor, the F-16; trials frequently have two F-22s beating 8 or 9 F-16s, if not more.

Moreover, the F-16 has two major problems. The first is that the planes are from the 1980s, and they're started to show problems. Very little of the original planes are left from multiple retro-fits, which leaves open the risk that they'll just start falling out of the sky (same with the F-18s, one of which just did exactly that not long ago). The second is that strategic competitors, like Russia, are producing planes that can go toe-to-toe with the F-16, like the latest Sukhoi fighters. This wouldn't be a problem, except that Russia also tends to sell those planes to countries that can be problems for the US. If we're stuck with F-16s the next time a major air issue breaks out (and it will happen), it's a guarantee that more U.S. pilots will die.

The reason for the F-22's cost? A lot of it has to do with the fact that Congress would say, "Why do we need 700 F-22s when we could save money by only building 600?", and would cut the order. This would then require the manufacturers to re-tool the assembly lines for the smaller order, and that takes both time and money. Not to mention idiocies like the F-35, which is probably going to cost just as much per-unit as the F-22 when it is finally produced, and will be an inferior fighter. As it is, the number of F-22s being produced is so low that the parts manufacturers have said that it won't be cost-effective for them to keep the facilities needed to make replacement parts, which means the planes will be worthless after a few years in service when repair times come around if this keeps up.

As it is, Jason's right - the services are going to have to cut back, and they know it. Of course, if they simply received a block grant of money and were told "Here's your money - do as you will with it" instead of having to have everything go through the Pork Barrel Machine in Congress (where they can make stupid cuts like the one above, which waste time and money), then the above would be easier.

One last thing I ought to note - R & D and Procurement (meaning the making and development of these types of projects plus their production) aren't the highest expenses in the military, by far. The largest expenses are in Personnel (AKA having lots of troops) and Operations (deploying said troops). If you really wanted to save a lot of money, you'd shrink the active-duty Army in size, not take away its firepower.

As a service member, I see many places where we need to trim the fat off the budget. The primarily Stability and Support Operations (SASO) and Counterinsurgency (COIN) -oriented force that our nation requires is manpower and training intensive, rather than technology intensive. Items like Missile Defense and the F-22 represent some of the most extravagant excesses, but there are many others as well. Unfortunately, that force that the country requires doesn't generate jobs and income in every congressional district in the country, the Army to fight the Soviets and the Navy ready to take on the Imperial Japanese does.

From my knowledge, the DOD spend lots of money when employing private military contractors (some of these contractors receive passes to secret bases).

I'm still debating about the military budget. The US is in a horrible economic crisis but I believe that the US should really touch this budget. This because the US is fighting wars on different fronts and is facing quite a few threats worldwide. If the US wants to stay ahead of China (or even Russia) then they should think carefully about shrinking their military budget. It's going to be interesting to see how Obama runs the US when he's in control. We'll see if he makes serious changes or slightly modifies what's going on. Hopefully the US will figure it out.

professor walt:

i've often heard the rumor that there was a third hyphen in ike's statement.

is this true.

if so what else did he include.

In a little over one month, a new administration will have the opportunity to manage a significant realignment of U.S. defense and national security priorities. To be sure, this process will not occur in a vacuum. Today’s security imperatives and budgetary realities will require the next administration to make hard decisions and difficult trade-offs on competing visions of the military and its role in implementing national security strategy. These trade-offs will have wide-ranging consequences for the size and structure of the force, and what procurement and modernization options are feasible in order to advance overall U.S. national security interests.

This Center for American Progress report lays out some of these trade-offs and gives recommendations for where to make cuts:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/12/military_priorities.html

Good post, but it's worth pointing out that these domestic forces are not unique to the defense industry. It is a classic example of concentrated benefits, diffused costs (Yes, we all benefit from defense, but we don't all benefit from a particular piece of defense spending). That we can't even get rid of unpopular farm subsidies leaves little hope we can make a serious dent in an area such a defense, which is much more open to political demagoguery, as you point out.

Expending political capital to wrest funds from DoD just to turn around and waste it on foreign aid, however, does not strike me as a step in the right direction.

There are a few things that are worth mentioning here:
1) One of the big problems with many military programs is that, due to cozy relations between the government and the suppliers, costs of contracts are often understated to make the pill easier to swallow. No doubt that most decision makers know it before it happens.
2) Another problem is that the contracts are based on bids, and it's quite frequent that, to win the bid, one of the supplier will give a lower than internally and often externally estimated cost, leading to large overruns. But once the hugh sunk costs of setting up the whole thing are already covered, nobody will back out, rightfully so.
3) The F22 will be outdated very soon, as many have mentioned, planes with pilots are a relic of the 20th century, and have limitations due to human beings inside (think air supply, cabin space, ejecting seat) and on top of that could fly faster, maneuver better and so forth without a pilot in them. The F35 is meant to be a cheaper to build plane, but it will still cost a lot. As for our competition, what makes the US military strong are not necessary the best planes, but rather the amazing support behind them in terms of supply lines, air superiority due to carriers and early detection based on AWACS. We could fly F18s and still get those things.

Regardless, there is no way to cutting the spending on military, too many people have too many interests and it is a hugh employer like mentioned above.

Stephen,
Another thought. The public outcry of cutting funding while troops are in harms way is another tool the industrial-military complex has at its disposal. Even if the program is merely theoretical, any reduction or cancellation easily spins into "not providing what the troops need in a time of war". I'd argue that the defense lobby groups can easily feed those talking points to any member of congress to come across as pro-military and anti-DOD cut.

On another note, while I agree there are numerous DoD programs worth of a cut or cancellation, there are a large amount of reset/recovery costs getting ready to rear their ugly head. The wear and tear of 7 years of continuous use of tanks, bradleys, helicopters and HMMWVs will require massive overhaul programs to refit this equipment...again feeding the industrial military complex. However, failure to do so leaves a large amount of our conventional equipment (tanks/bradleys) and multi-purpose equipment (utility helicopters and HMMWVS) unavailable to accomplish mission abroad or at home (ie disaster relief).

Great food for thought!

Thanks Stephen, nice thoughts, also good point by" sullygoarmy". I'm just researching introductions to congress and Senate regarding the claim to withdraw/ redeploy troops from Iraq since 2006, and so many introductions calling for a withdrawal are actually answered by introductions calling for no cuts in spending that could put troops in harms way.

The budget allocations from DoD to State, will probably be for purposes of restructuring capabilities from DoD to State, USIP and USAID. In the recent years the DoD worked on the turf of State, especially by taking responsibility of the CPA or taking charge of the PRT's in Afghanistan and Iraq. Gates is just getting rid of those burdens, putting more emphasis on this work on civilian agencies. But this will not necessarily lead to a lesser defense budget, as the new kind of operations, the military emphasized on in FM 3-07 relies on a unity of effort between the civilian agencies and the armed service, which will further attribute to budget needs for reorganization of certain branches of the armed forces. Judging from Susann Rice's appointment to the UN and other strategic placements (Kilcullen and others, I'd say that the Obama administration will probably use this opening in the military to humanitarian intervention and R2P, to better the perception of the US in the world.

This along with the overhaul of the equipment in use, will be a further reason for why the defense budget will most likely not be cut. It simply can't be.

Another thought on that ridiculous discussion of the use of F-22's. I believe kicking off this discussion wasn't intended by Stephen, yet so many began commenting on it. Some thoughts on that:
First even though the US has the 7th Fleet in Okinawa and thousands of soldiers in the region it was unable to deter North Kora from detonating a nuclear weapon. Good job... second, China sent two destroyers plus a frigate to the Guf of Aden, so much for deterring China of a high seas capability...
Coming back to the F-22, even if F22 are superior to any other aircraft, the adversaries of the U.S. with whom the U.S. and NATO will have to deal with, are not going to even have aircraft. "A reliance on fixed wing aircraft is a claim of bankruptcy in a assymetric war". What use will F-16's, F-22's for that matter or a DDG1000 destroyer have in an assymetric war, in which your opponent will use IED's and RPG's?