A Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2008

Executive Summary

If Congress funds the president’s $623 billion FY2008 military budget request, we will spend more on our forces next year than at any time since World War II. As they defend this budget before congressional committees, Defense Department officials are also arguing for a substantial increase above this amount in future years, even as they project that spending on the current wars will decline. A consistent theme of these presentations is that military spending currently represents a relatively low percentage of national Gross Domestic Product.

We should spend more, according to this argument, because we can.

This (arguable) idea that we can begs the question of whether we should. As our country seeks to extricate itself from a disastrous attempt to remake the Middle East by means of military force, this is the moment for a serious debate on the long-term direction of our foreign policy. The Bush administration’s national security doctrine, drawn up before the current wars were launched, prescribes an expansive, global role for the military, one that even current levels of spending don’t come close to covering. After five years of testing, it’s time to ask: does this doctrine, and its costs make sense? Are we safer as a result?

According to current polling, most Americans beyond the beltway believe that our current aggressive, unilateral foreign policy has eroded our standing around the world and made terrorist attacks more likely. They support a different course—a less militarized, less unilateral approach. The Iraq Study Group pointed in this direction by recommending a path out of the current war that shifts the emphasis of our strategy from military forces to diplomacy.

Meanwhile the service chiefs and civilian Pentagon leadership are laying the groundwork to fund an expansive, global military role with a permanently expanded budget. It is a debate, to put it mildly, worth having.

One useful, currently missing tool to ground this debate, we argue, would be a Unified Security Budget (USB). It would pull together in one place U.S. spending on all of its security tools: tools of offense (military forces), defense (homeland security) and prevention (non-military international engagement.) This tool would make it easier for Congress to consider overall security spending priorities and the best allocation of them.

It would, for example, enable consideration of security trade-offs like the following: the F-22 fighter jet, one of the most troubled and strategically questionable programs in the arsenal, is set to receive an increase in FY 2008 of $600 million.

• FINDING: Foregoing this increase for the F-22 could allow the U.S. to triple the amount it plans to spend on canceling the debt that is crippling development in the world’s poorest countries. Or it could increase by 50% U.S. contributions to international peacekeeping operations. Or it could more than triple the amount allocated in FY 2007 for domestic rail and transit security programs.
  

• FINDING: Canceling the administration’s initiative to build offensive space-weapons, which threatens to create a whole new arms race, could provide the $800 million needed to double the originally requested annual budget for the State Department’s Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization. This corps of civilian experts in post-conflict rebuilding, envisioned for Iraq and other locations such as Haiti and Sudan, has been an unfunded political football since it was proposed in 2003. The Pentagon supports it. “If you don’t fund this, put more money in the defense budget for ammunition—because I’m going to need it,” one Marine general recently said.

Since 2004 this task force has produced an annual report sketching the outlines of a Unified Security Budget. Its members’ expertise spans all three security domains—offense, defense and prevention. Our report lays out the spending levels and relative proportions the President’s FY 2008 budget request allocates to each of them.

• FINDING: While cutting most of the rest of the discretionary budget, the request would increase real spending in all three security categories. The defense and prevention categories actually get larger increases, as a proportion of their total budgets, than does offense. But in absolute terms, of course, military spending increases the most. And comparatively, defense and prevention remain vastly overshadowed by spending on offense. Foreign policy by military force is underwritten at 21 times the level allocated to all non-military forms of engagement with the world; it receives 14 times the amount devoted to protecting the homeland; it will outspend both defense and prevention put together, that is, all forms of non-military security spending, by a factor of 9-to-1. In other words, the President’s proposed budget would devote 90% of our foreign and security policy resources to engaging the world through military force.

One of the drivers of this gaping disparity between military and non-military security spending is the federal commitment to a set of dazzlingly complex weapons systems whose capabilities have more to do with pork barrel inertia than strategic sense, and whose future costs are set to grow even larger as many of them move from development to production phases. In making its case for a rebalanced security portfolio, the task force identifies cuts in these programs and explains why they can be made with no sacrifice to our security. And it identifies a nearly equivalent amount for investment in programs that engage the world by non-military means—including diplomacy, non-proliferation, and economic development—and that strengthen our homeland defenses.

• FINDING: The shift recommended in this report—$56 billion in cuts to spending on offense and $50 billion in additional spending on defense and prevention—would convert a highly militarized 9-to–1 security ratio into a better balance of 5-to-1.

The hard part is getting this done in the real world. A Congressional budget process working through “stovepiped” committees that rarely talk to each other makes this difficult. A new feature of this year’s report, therefore, is a set of suggestions for how these stovepipes might be transcended.

• FINDING: There is new political space this year to examine overall security spending priorities and recommend changes in the budget process that would enable them to be considered as a unified whole. Our proposals include giving this mandate to a Congressionally-appointed Select Committee on Budgeting for National Security and International Affairs.

Rebalancing security spending is not a task that can wait. The latest BBC World Service poll shows that U.S. standing in the world has deteriorated substantially in the last year alone. And valuable time is being wasted in failing to address key security priorities, such as the one President Bush has identified as his top priority: preventing nuclear terrorism.

• FINDING: Among other cuts in spending on nonproliferation, the President’s FY2008 budget would again reduce spending for Cooperative Threat Reduction, one of the key programs securing and dismantling international stockpiles of nuclear material and delivery systems to keep them away from terrorists. At the same time, the budget would triple spending on new designs for nuclear weapons, calling into question our commitment to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (giving other countries tacit permission to follow suit.) Meanwhile, the State Department has been reduced to accepting private donations to make up the shortfall on what it views as urgent nonproliferation priorities. Five million dollars of private money, for example, has paid for the removal of two bombs-worth of highly enriched uranium from Serbia. A former State Department official involved in this project said, “It was embarrassing [but] we needed the money.”

As Congress works to balance the budget and find a solution to the Iraq crisis it must also focus on a different kind of budget balancing. Our country needs a rebalanced its security budget, one that strengthens a different kind of overall U.S. presence in the world. This budget would emphasize working with international partners to resolve conflicts and tackle looming human security problems like climate change; preventing the spread of nuclear materials by means other than regime change; and addressing the root causes of terrorism, while protecting the homeland against it. The rhetoric of these intentions must be underwritten by the resources to make them real. The overall priorities set by a Unified Security Budget must both symbolically and substantially guide the United States toward a new, more balanced foreign policy.

For the full report, download the PDF here.