This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 7, 2011 - WASHINGTON - Arguing that military spending should be bolstered rather than slashed, former U.S. Sen. Jim Talent sparred Thursday with House Democrats who contended that budget cutting should not spare the Pentagon.
"America's military strength is declining, both absolutely and relative to the dangers which confront us," Talent told the House Budget Committee. "The rate of decline is growing and will soon reach a point . . . where our military leaders will not be able to honestly guarantee America's security within an acceptable margin of risk."
Talent, a St. Louis Republican who served on a military-strength assessment panel and is a "distinguished fellow" at the Heritage Foundation, endorsed the conservative think tank's call for maintaining military spending at about 4 percent of the nation's gross domestic product and resisting pressures to significantly reduce Pentagon funding as part of a deficit-reduction deal.
That drew the ire of the budget panel's top Democrat, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who argued that deficit-related reductions must include Pentagon and other "national security" spending, which accounts for about 55 percent of the discretionary budget.
"Over the last decade, the 'base' Pentagon budget has nearly doubled, and spending at the Pentagon is now at its highest level since World War II," said Van Hollen, adding that spending on national security -- excluding costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- has increased by an average of 1.5 percent more per year than non-security spending.
Van Hollen, echoing a quote from Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Adm. Michael Mullen, asserted that "our national debt is our biggest national security threat" and argued that the Pentagon, in dealing with a surge in its budget, had not been forced to prioritize spending. He said Talent's testimony failed to "mention the very important connection between the strength of the U.S. economy and the strength of our military."
Talent did not dispute the connection but said "it goes the other way too" -- in the sense that a strong military helps protect the economy. He said the national debt is indeed important, but Congress also must take into account the national security challenge and "the vital importance of getting back to sustained economic and job growth."
The budget panel debate occurred as the Republican-controlled House considered a $649.2 billion defense spending bill for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. That level is about $8 billion below the White House request -- a proposed trimming that has upset some tradition GOP backers of defense spending.
At Thursday's hearing, Budget Committee Chair Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. -- who developed the controversial "Ryan budget" that the House approved this spring -- said that "indiscriminate cuts in defense spending that are budget-driven and not strategy-driven are dangerous." He said waste and inefficiencies at the Pentagon should be cut but claimed that entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security were more responsible than military spending for "driving our unsustainable fiscal path."
David E. Mosher of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office told the panel that the Defense Department's "base budget" -- not including the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- would likely grow at an inflation-adjusted annual rate of 1.8 percent from 2012 to 2016, and that the primary causes of long-term growth in the Pentagon budget would be the rising costs of operation and support. That will include "significant increases" in payroll and military health-care costs, he said.
Another witness, Gordon Adams, a military budgeting expert affiliated with the Stimson Center, argued that the Pentagon "has not faced strategic or budgetary discipline" for more than a decade, and that deep reductions are possible. He agreed with Van Hollen that the nation's "central national security crisis" today is the looming federal debt and annual deficits.
"The key to a successful [Pentagon] build down will be linking strategic and mission discipline to this need for fiscal discipline," said Adams. "This means setting mission priorities for the military."