None other than Defense Secretary Robert Gates is trying to rein in the military-industrial complex. A recent profile in Newsweek told about Gates' attempts to reduce the "brass creep." He wants to eliminate some of the redundant generals.
Gates grumbles about perks and posh quarters—generally defended by senior officers as a reward for decades of stressful family moves every couple of years—but those are not his real targets. The defense secretary’s deeper complaint is about what he calls “brass creep.” Roughly translated, it means having generals do what colonels are perfectly capable of doing. Generals require huge staffs and command structures: three-star generals serving four-stars, two-stars serving three, each tended by squadrons of colonels and majors. This sort of elaborate hierarchy may have been called for in Napoleon’s day, but in an era of instant communication, Gates thinks the military could benefit from a much flatter, leaner management structure.
These entourages are symbolic of a military leadership that, in the view of its civilian leader, is suffering from an inflated sense of entitlement and a distorted sense of priorities. If Gates has his way, the top brass will have to shed old habits and adjust to leaner times. Some of them will become civilians. The number of generals and admirals has increased by more than a hundred since 9/11, to 969 (and counting Reserves, roughly 1,300). Gates plans a first cut of at least 50. He intends to disband an entire headquarters, the Joint Forces Command, created after the Cold War with the noble aim of making the different armed forces work better together, but which has grown into a $250 million-a-year, 6,000-strong operation of questionable usefulness.
The military-industrial complex has created jobs at all levels which are unnecessary but consume huge quantities of taxpayer cash. The interesting thing is that these jobs have been created in every state in the union and are both civilian and military. They form the backbone of local economies ubiquitously throughout the US. Under George W Bush the military-industrial complex grew indiscriminately. Money was thrown at it. While there was a net loss of jobs in the US from 2000 to 2010, it wasn't because the military-industrial complex shrunk in size. On the contrary, if it wasn't for the jobs created by the military-industrial complex, the US would be in another Great Depression instead of the mere Great Recession we're now experiencing.
After 9/11, U.S. military spending more than doubled. President Obama has vowed to cut back—to only 1 percent growth a year. Deeper cuts appear inevitable. Gates sees the need to turn off “the spigot of money”; he also sees it as an opportunity. In his speech at the Eisenhower library, he noted that Ike understood that real security lay in a strong economy. Having been Army chief of staff after Marshall, Eisenhower knew the Pentagon and how to tame its appetites, but few presidents since have been so wise or lucky. In conversation with NEWSWEEK, Gates was frank about the challenge he faces in forcing what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” to adjust to the new budget realities. Since 9/11, “what little discipline existed in the Defense Department when it came to spending has gone completely out the window,” he says. He is measured but scathing in his judgment: “I concluded that our headquarters and support bureaucracies, military and civilian alike, have swelled to cumbersome and top-heavy proportions, grown overreliant on contractors, and grown accustomed to operating with little consideration to cost.”
Republicans want to return to the good old days when there was a job for everyone in the military-industrial complex. From grunt to PhD, from high school drop-out to research fellow, from illegal immigrant earning his citizenship to West Point and Annapolis graduates, the military-industrial complex could accomodate anyone and everyone. Can't find a job in the civilian economy? Join the Navy! There you will find floating cities in the biggest Navy in the world - bigger than all the rest of the world's Navys combined.
Don't take it from me about the behemothness of the sprawling military-industrial complex - take it from its titular head himself - Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. There is abundant make-work at all levels. They used to say about the Soviet M-I complex, "They pretended to work and the Soviets pretended to pay them." The US military-complex is slightly different. People pretend to work and in return are paid very well indeed. If Republicans have their way, they will continue to be paid very well and the money will come from eliminating social programs like social security and Medicare. Now the bloated M-I complex has had an axe taken to it by Robert Gates, much to the chagrin of those Generals and defense contractors who will be losing their jobs and lucrative contracts. But not to worry. Gates will be gone next year, and Republicans are poised to take over Congress. The spigot will soon be reopened.
Asked by President Obama to stay on as defense secretary, he did not hesitate. In 10 hectic weeks in early 2009—with everyone involved sworn to secrecy to prevent leaks to Congress—Gates drew up a hit list of big-ticket weapons to be chopped in favor of programs that were less glamorous but more useful. He scrapped far-out missile-defense schemes and gave priority to near-term alternatives. He ended production of the F-22, the Air Force’s next-generation fighter, and also tried to cancel its C-17 transport aircraft—while pouring new money into drones. He stopped production of the Navy’s futuristic DDG-1000 destroyer and postponed its CG(X) cruiser while increasing the purchase of Littoral Combat Ships, useful for in-shore operations that are far more likely to engage the Navy than a full-scale sea battle (last fought in World War II). Demonstrating that no program was sacrosanct, he canceled the replacement for Marine One, the presidential helicopter. The new craft was so over-designed that, Gates says, “it was a billion-dollar helicopter in which the president could cook up a meal during a nuclear attack.”
In all, Gates cut or eliminated 20 high-profile weapons, averting by DOD reckoning some $330 billion in future spending. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, he seemed surprised that Congress agreed to the cuts. “The amazing thing is how almost nobody thought I would win those fights,” he said. “Damn right. I’d have bet against myself.”
But what Gates is doing is only a drop in the bucket. The next Congress and the next Defense Secretary will surely restore all the cuts Gates is making especially under a Republican Congress and a Republican White House. Gates' cuts are a temporary blip in an otherwise orderly march to complete dominion over the economy by the military-industrial complex with its role of forming the backbone of every local economy throughout the US and indeed contributing mightily to local economies throughout its 1000 base world. Layers and layers of bureacracy make a giant sucking sound on taxpayer money while proponents of the military-industrial complex advocate freeing up even more money by reducing or eliminating 'social programs.' But don't take my word for it. Take Newsweek's.
Now that Obama has lost his political clout, his defense secretary needs to think hard about how to handle Congress. Many lawmakers, as the saying goes, confuse warfare with welfare. Weapons factories and military bases mean jobs back home. Already, the senators from Virginia are squawking that doing away with the Joint Forces Command, based in Norfolk, will harm national security (it won’t, but it will cost several thousand jobs).
Gates is also looking to cut the Pentagon’s civilian bureaucracy, which has added a thousand new staff since 9/11. Around the time of the attacks, Rumsfeld reckoned that 17 layers of officialdom lay between him and a line officer. A recent internal study, Gates says, found that “in some cases the gap between me and an action officer may be as high as 30 layers.” (In 1948, when the Cold War began, the secretary of defense had a deputy and a staff of three supervising 50 employees; today, he has 26 political appointees running a staff of 3,000.) The outcome, says Gates, is “a bureaucracy which has the fine motor skills of a dinosaur.”
Am I the only one who finds it strange that the military has as many musicians in military bands as the State Department has diplomats? I don't think so. I think the public is vastly underinformed about what goes on with the Republican jobs program. They have taken the lesson from World War II that the only way for the US economy to reach full employment is to have an enormous military or, in lieu of that, a gigantic military-industrial complex as its backbone. While FDR's New Deal provided some jobs directly, the US didn't really pull out of the Great Depression until the wartime economy of WW II pulled it out. So the unfortunate lesson was that the government creation of peace time jobs building infrastructure cannot do the job of providing employment the way growth in the military-industrial complex can. While Obama is trying to devote a relatively paltry sum to peace time infrastructure building, the huge military-industrial complex cranks on and will be unleashed even further once the Republicans regain power. That will finally pull us out of the Great Recession, but at the expense of reducing or eliminating 'social programs' so that the military-industrial complex's voracious appetite for Federal government money can be assuaged without going further into debt.
In his quest for savings, Gates faces reflexive pushback from the political right, which condemns any cut in a weapons system as a gain for a prospective adversary like China. Gates inquires, sardonically, “Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?” He takes issue with the left, too. Although he finds it “bizarre” that the Pentagon has as many musicians in military bands as the State Department has diplomats, he parts company with those who want to cut military spending and pull back from U.S. commitments abroad.
But in Gates' defense he doesn't really want to slash the military budget - only rearrange it. He wants to reduce overhead - the layers and layers of bureaucracy - and redirect the money to more fruitful miltary projects. The taxpayers will get no break here nor will more money be available for 'social programs.' No, any savings will stay within the military. And those Generals who will have their jobs cut will probably retire with generous pensions and abundant health care.
He thinks he can persuade Congress to go along. But he concedes that he faces some very tricky political issues. Four-stars are not the only members of the military to enjoy costly perks. Leaving aside the costs of treating wounded warriors—Gates calls that “a sacred obligation”—health-care spending on the military and their families has doubled (in constant dollars) over the last decade. Yet the premiums that military families pay for coverage remain ridiculously low because Congress balks at raising them. (The fraction of the overall bills covered by premiums has dropped from 37 percent to 9 percent since 1999). Health-care costs, Gates says, are “eating the Defense Department alive.” But the issue is a political third rail.
