Obama announces Pentagon budget cuts

[bobalot]

Obama announces Pentagon budget cuts

President Obama announced a new military strategy on Thursday that will cut the Pentagon budget by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.

Speaking from the Pentagon, Obama said the plan is "smart, strategic" and sets priorities.

"I just want to say that this effort reflects the guidance I gave throughout this process," Obama said. "Yes, the tide of war is receding. But the question that this strategy answers is what kind of military will we need after the long wars of the last decade are over. And today, we're moving forward, from a position of strength."

The new military strategy includes $487 billion in cuts over the next decade. An additional $500 billion in cuts could be coming if Congress follows through on plans for deeper reductions. The announcement comes weeks after the U.S. officially ended the Iraq War and after a decade of increased defense spending in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Obama said that the military will indeed be leaner, but the U.S. will maintain a budget that is roughly larger than the next 10 countries' military budgets combined.

"Some will no doubt say the spending reductions are too big; others will say they're too small," Obama said. "It will be easy to take issue with a particular change. But I would encourage all of us to remember what President Eisenhower once said — that 'each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.' "

That new strategy turns away from labor intensive wars, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, analysts say.

"The attitude is no more Iraqs," said Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Iraq and Afghanistan were large nation-building efforts requiring thousands of troops. The emphasis on the future will be to partner or advise foreign militaries in order to counter threats, Krepinevich said.

"The Army and Marine Corps are going to take the biggest hits," Krepinevich said. Both services grew in size to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the sizes of those services would be reduced. But Special Forces troops, which can be used to train foreign militaries, will increase in size. The new strategy sees a need to counter China's growing influence in the Pacific.

"We'll be strengthening our presence in the Asia Pacific, and budget reductions will not come at the expense of this critical region," Obama said.

Contributing: Jim Michaels

So roughly $100 billion per year (If it all goes through). Not bad.

[Sea Skimmer]

Umm, no actually the 500 billion dollar cut is never going to happen because it was written purely as a political ploy in the dumbest possible terms that would ensure it could not be implemented. It requires that EVERY program be cut by a equal percentage amount; which would effectively destroy many programs. You cannot for example buy 80% of an aircraft carrier or a missile, and yet kill the whole carrier and the law would still require everything else be cut; so its plain stupid.. Deeper cuts are likely, but they aren't coming that way.

[mr friendly guy]

1. Link please.

2. Of the $487 billion do we have a breakdown? Is it mainly less troops because the US is withdrawing from Iraq and being less engaged in Afghanistan? Does come from duplicate programs (in which case the US really doesn't lose much if anything). Or does it come from things like producing less planes, less ships etc.

[Siege]

I'm going to need a moment to wrap my head around the idea that you could apparently cut close to one trillion dollars from the US military budget and end up afterward with not just a military, but one that's still presumably the most powerful in the history of the planet by miles and miles of comfortable margin. That's a quite frankly unimaginable arseload of money.

[Simon_Jester]

That trillion dollar cut is coming over a period of ten years, though- more like hundred billion a year.

Which is, yes, is staggering. It's partly just because he US has somewhere between 20 and 25% of the world's GDP all by itself; in percentage terms the US spends more of its GDP on its military than a lot of countries, but not that much.

Those cuts, if implemented, would reduce US military spending as a percent of GDP by 0.7%.

I think Skimmer's right, though, there are a lot of military programs the US has going that are all or nothing and cannot arbitrarily take a 20% budget cut. Doing that for rifle procurement just means you have fewer riflemen in the field; doing it while building an aircraft carrier just means stretching out construction of the carrier to no good purpose.


Am I wrongheaded for suspecting that in the long run, the Obama Drone Bombing campaign is going to end up as one casualty of the military budget cuts? Not necessarily in the near future, but eventually?

That's not so much because the drones are expensive as it is because the rate of return is so questionable. What are we blowing up that's worth spending millions of dollars to blow up, in other words?

[Sea Skimmer]

2. Of the $487 billion do we have a breakdown? Is it mainly less troops because the US is withdrawing from Iraq and being less engaged in Afghanistan? Does come from duplicate programs (in which case the US really doesn't lose much if anything). Or does it come from things like producing less planes, less ships etc.

A proper breakdown will not be published until next month but it will including something like 100-125,000 fewer army and marine personal. Afghanistan and Iraq costs mainly came out of war supplemental funding, this mostly concerns the base budget.

Am I wrongheaded for suspecting that in the long run, the Obama Drone Bombing campaign is going to end up as one casualty of the military budget cuts? Not necessarily in the near future, but eventually?

That's not so much because the drones are expensive as it is because the rate of return is so questionable. What are we blowing up that's worth spending millions of dollars to blow up, in other words?

The rate of return is astoundingly high, and the total cost low, compared to anything else we are doing to take out terrorists. If the terrorist supply is unlimited or not is another question, but dozens and dozens of top leaders have been killed in just the last year, no question it has a high suppressive effect. Furthermore, the US military fully intends to keep all those Predators and Reapers anyway and just keeps raising the goals for orbits, 65 now without considering classified CIA drones.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm thinking strategy here- again, is the terrorist supply limited enough, or the risk that they'll develop international rather than regional ambitions again high enough, to justify ongoing active drone operations. The alternatives are more expensive, I know...

What it really comes down to is "is the War on Terror ever going to end, or are we still going to be at this in 2030 and dealing with the ongoing blowback from it?"

[SirNitram]

Never will happen. The Defense Industry will lobby extensively against, and they already have the infrastructure to be in enough states to kill it.

[Lonestar]

Looks like the new bomber got saved, but possibly more cuts coming to the deterrent.

[Pelranius]

Looks like the new bomber got saved, but possibly more cuts coming to the deterrent.

Given the number of states expressing interests in ABM, and programs in the making, the current crop of silo based ICBMs may be the last of their kind in the American arsenal.

[Simon_Jester]

In which case the new bomber becomes all the more important; we may need it as a vehicle for the nuclear deterrent.

[Terralthra]

It doesn't seem like our SSBN fleet will be cut any time soon, and that's pretty much the ultimate second-strike guaranteed deterrent.

[Darth Wong]

Am I wrongheaded for suspecting that in the long run, the Obama Drone Bombing campaign is going to end up as one casualty of the military budget cuts? Not necessarily in the near future, but eventually?

That's not so much because the drones are expensive as it is because the rate of return is so questionable. What are we blowing up that's worth spending millions of dollars to blow up, in other words?

The rate of return is astoundingly high, and the total cost low, compared to anything else we are doing to take out terrorists. If the terrorist supply is unlimited or not is another question, but dozens and dozens of top leaders have been killed in just the last year, no question it has a high suppressive effect. Furthermore, the US military fully intends to keep all those Predators and Reapers anyway and just keeps raising the goals for orbits, 65 now without considering classified CIA drones.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. At first glance, the drone program seems like a great way to save money rather than spending it. It is highly analogous to many types of industrial automation: reduce total manpower, reduce the need for ancillary logistics, replace generalized personnel with a smaller number of specialist personnel, etc. I don't know where Simon Jester got the idea that it would be something you'd cut to save money; it seems more like something you'd lean on more if you want to save money.

Two years ago, would anyone have thought that Obama would become known as the drone-kill president?

[Panzersharkcat]

Two years ago, would anyone have thought that Obama would become known as the drone-kill president?

I got the general idea that he'd be basically Bush's third term, as far as foreign policy goes, but that may be more libertarian hyperventilating than anything else.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. At first glance, the drone program seems like a great way to save money rather than spending it. It is highly analogous to many types of industrial automation: reduce total manpower, reduce the need for ancillary logistics, replace generalized personnel with a smaller number of specialist personnel, etc. I don't know where Simon Jester got the idea that it would be something you'd cut to save money; it seems more like something you'd lean on more if you want to save money.

To be clear; despite it commonly being claimed, drones do not save personal vs. manned aircraft, they actually need more personal which is heavily related to the fact that they fly so many hours. But they certainly save manpower and money vs. ground armies and can do missions manned aircraft cannot because a pilot in a fighter cockpit cannot orbit a target for 36 hours. He’d literally die from blood clots if nothing else.

Two years ago, would anyone have thought that Obama would become known as the drone-kill president?

Well, I don’t know that I would have called him that, but I was looking at the projections for drone production years ago and you could simply tell that large hunter-killer UAVs were going to suddenly get a lot more prolific. In the later stages of the Bush administration, for all the attention Predator type drones got the USAF only had about 24 orbits (sustaining 1 drone in the air constantly) to spread around the world. But in the 08-09 period this number more then doubled until its at around 50 now and heading for 65 by 2012-13. How could Obama not use all these new drones? Nobody seems to have any clear idea how many the CIA has and if all the CIA drones are really CIA property or just the CIA controlling USAF ones.

Obama went pretty damn far though, in fact the only way the US fielded as many big drones as it has is because as part of his Afghanistan surge the USAF actually stripped all the instructor pilots out of its drone pilot training program and began using them for combat missions. Currently the USSF isn’t training anyone to fly Predators; the CIA might be, though USAF training will be restarting soon to support further expansion of drone spam. We are training Predator sensor operators by using small manned aircraft with the Predator camera turret strapped under the wing.

Also just this spring, the US Army is fielding a new type of large drone which is going to start changing things even further, the A160 helicopter with the ARGUS-IS camera pod (has 30 something cameras). Instead of a narrow high field of view, it provides a massive area picture at 2fps and the ability to update small windows within it at more like 15fps. A much less capable version called Gorgon Star can go on a Predator.

One image from ARGUS-IS was released earlier. Warning 5000x3000 pixel image; but its pretty amazing to realize that its really slow video. This will mean if you want a drone to say, track a moving truck, now the drone can track that truck and still look at other things. Predators have to focus in one just one thing, which is a major limitation and often leads to avoidable civilian and friendly military losses, the number one problems with drone warfare.
http://sitelife.aviationweek.com/ver1.0 ... 6.Full.jpg

[Sea Skimmer]

Given the number of states expressing interests in ABM, and programs in the making, the current crop of silo based ICBMs may be the last of their kind in the American arsenal.

Maybe maybe not, ICBM boosters could be used to deploy future hypersonic weapons that would negate ABM. At the same time the reductions in the size of Russian ICBM forces plus the US's own ABM systems make silo based weapons much less vulnerable then they used to be. Really it returns silos to more the way they were when we first built them, its unlikely an enemy could wipe out more then a portion of the force with a first strike. The silos and command systems cost more then the missiles themselves, and the US has already built and upgraded those systems so don't count out the ICBM yet.

It doesn't seem like our SSBN fleet will be cut any time soon, and that's pretty much the ultimate second-strike guaranteed deterrent.

It’s also so few missile tubes deployed at sea at any one time that its completely reasonable to expect someone like China or Russia to field an ABM system capable of knocking them all down in the future. The US could field a system like that now if we felt like doing so. But in fact the lead time to design, produce, test and train the first crew a new SSBN is so high that the US must and is commencing work now as SSBN(X). The first boat needs to be operational by 2029 to avoid a drop in numbers.

Problem is while SSBN(X) has R&D funding, no one has come up with a way to pay for production yet. The USN budget is much too small, and one proposal rather then giving the navy more money is just to create a new defense account purely for strategic nuclear weapon systems. For the money budget planning doesn't go out in detail far enough to need to firmly address this question.