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An expert on modern warfare and strategic assessment, the Middle East and the politics of energy, Anthony H. Cordesman has held numerous senior positions in the Defense and State departments over the past 30 years. He is currently at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) and is a military analyst for ABC News.There are a multitude of things the American public ought to hear the presidential candidates discuss in detail but don't. However, it should be more than a little unnerving that among those unspoken topics are the decay of the military and utter absence of national security strategy, planning and budgeting. There is, astonishingly enough, no actual budget for fighting the wars that the United States is involved in. There is no real plan in place for replacing equipment and supplies depleted in those wars. There is little connection between long-range national security goals and weapons programs. Procurement programs are an undisciplined and over-budget embarrassment.
"There is no clear or coherent plan, program or budget that reflects the fact the nation is at war and no credible mix of force plans, modernization plans and procurement plans for the future," warns Anthony Cordesman, a respected national security analyst with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. "...No hard choices have been made." And it will all fall on the next president to fix -- and likely take him or her a full term to turn things around.
Cordesman finds the situation -- and the lack of attention being paid to it in an election year -- so alarming that he has written a 130-plus page briefing that he intends to keep updating throughout the year as information and new ideas emerge. He doesn't blame any one administration for the mess -- but he does blame current officials, and a Congress content to go along with them, for a budgeting, planning and procurement process so poorly conceived and executed that words and phrases such as "absurd", "no credible plan" and "liars' contest" crop up throughout the report.
Cordesman does find an occasional ray of sunshine in the situation. While an honest defense budget would likely be 20%-30% higher than current spending requests, fully funding programs would not "place an unacceptable national security burden on the nation's economy and federal/public spending," he says, arguing that the cost would be lower than it was during the Cold War. But then Cordesman's forecast grows gloomy again: "There will, however, be sharply growing pressure on the federal budget from rising mandatory spending and entitlements costs, and national security spending -- like all discretionary spending -- will come under growing pressure."
POSTED BY: cashpoor (May 16, 2008 06:42 PM)
See they may not "seem" to have a plan to refresh America after the "global war on terror". But they do, its called the Amero dollar, and sending our liberty bell off to China for recycling. Welcome to the NWO people, wake up! This has been in the books for a long time, stop pretending its not true.
POSTED BY: MS (May 17, 2008 06:53 PM)
Thank you for pointing out a serious economic threat to this country that almost no one wants to hear about.
POSTED BY: CMSGT (August 11, 2008 11:01 AM)
A re-evaluation of the balance of forces is essential.
Currently fighting a war with Guard and Reserves is backwards.
The U.S. must understand that a strong standing military (Regulars) is essential.
The regular military must be manned to the sufficient levels to fight the 1 and 1/2 war scenario and to fight the war they planned and have trained for. Only when force levels fall below sustainable levels augmentation by the reserves who begin increasing their level of training to bring them to peak capabilities and deploy replacing regulars with reserves trained in the same specialty (one for one). Bring back the draft if a stop loss level is reached.
Leave the Guard to protect the interior of the country from infiltration at all times and do not deploy to an actual war zone.
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