Sign Up for ASP Alerts This essay is part of the ongoing American Security Project series, Iraq: Lessons Learned. Read more essays in this series here.
By Gordon Adams
February 20, 2008
One of the hidden consequences of Iraq is the impact that funding the war has had on the defense budget and planning system. Although few have acknowledged this reality, the lack of fiscal and planning discipline has caused this system to spin completely out of control. As a result, although future budget projections that appear relatively flat are causing concern in the Pentagon, the reality is that defense spending has grown way beyond any sensible requirement driven by any sense of strategy.
Recently, the president asked Congress for $515 billion for defense in 2009—a figure that dramatically understates actual defense spending. When Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Department of Energy’s defense functions are added, the United States will spend approximately $710 billion on defense in 2009. In 2002, the U.S. defense budget was less than half that amount, $335 billion.
For the last seven years, emergency supplemental appropriations were the way out of the budget squeeze. In 2009, approximately 25 percent of defense spending will be classified as “emergency” funding. Now, the Department of Defense (DOD) wants to make this emergency spending part of the base budget, regardless of what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has asked that the Pentagon be guaranteed at least four percent of U.S. gross domestic product. He has done so without strategy statement, mission description, or statement of requirements. He simply asserts that defense deserves a set share of the economy.
Indeed, the defense planning process is now encouraging this trend. The 
administration has announced it intends to add 92,500 permanent troops to the ground force. Here, too, no strategic justification has been provided. But planners know that the size of the force drives the rest of the budget. So, as the enlarged ground force ripples through DOD’s planning and budgeting system it will increase the pressure for more infrastructure investment, more training, more education, more operating funds, and, inevitably, more equipment. This is the consequence of how we have funded the Iraq war.
For the last nine budgets, from fiscal years 2001 to 2009, the share of overall defense resources coming through emergency supplemental funding has grown. Emergency supplementals are not like the regular budget, though they buy many of the same things: people, operations, and equipment. They don’t get the same scrutiny and they don’t go through the Pentagon’s planning, programming, and budgeting process where they are scrubbed against the regular budget, with ceilings and tradeoffs and the need for strategic, mission and requirements justifications. Congress, too, devotes little time to examining emergency supplemental requests.
Over the years, DOD and the services have stuffed their supplementals with requests that don’t fit the regular budget and are not really about Iraq: modular brigades for the Army, increased end strength, certain aircraft systems. Indeed, to the Pentagon, supplemental funding and regular funding have become fungible.
Some will argue that this is wartime and the troops must be supported. But this is an argument without precedent. A Congressional Research Service review of how past administrations used supplemental budgets shows that using them to fund combat operations for seven years is unique. In Korea and Vietnam, war funding became an integral part of defense planning after a year or two, not a free good outside the regular budget.
It will be hard to restore discipline to the defense budget and planning system. The correction must begin with unexamined questions—what are we growing budgets for; what are the future strategy, requirements and missions for which we are planning; and what is the straight line (not the rhetorical one) that ties them to a given sum of money?
Once we have the answers to these questions, we may find that we are overspending on defense and under-spending on diplomacy and foreign assistance. Yes, our military is adaptable, capable, and flexible, but today it is overextended, not just in Iraq, but in its overall mission. It is deeply encroaching on territory that belongs to our diplomats and development programs—subsidizing foreign governments, building political institutions overseas, and providing foreign aid. And while many analysts and political commentators believe that U.S. leadership in the world can be measured by an enormous defense budget, projecting military power as the leading edge of our international engagement has brought about a rising hostility to U.S. foreign and security policy.
The lesson of Iraq, then, is that it is time to re-examine our strategy and our missions (and who performs them), and then look at the requirements, not the other way around. From operations and maintenance spending—where annually the U.S. spends $115,000 per soldier versus about $50,000 a decade ago—to procurement—where per-unit hardware costs are spiraling out of control—the Pentagon’s absence of budget discipline is costing Americans billions of dollars that may better be spent elsewhere.
It is well past time to take a good, hard look at our national security strategy, forces, and equipment needs. And it is time to recognize, as Iraq has amply demonstrated, that leading with our military chin is getting us in trouble. It is even getting our forces in trouble as they try to adapt to missions that belong elsewhere in the government. It is time to recognize that we need all the tools in the tool kit of statecraft, which means right-sizing the military, and reforming and building our civilian capability. Iraq has sent the system tasked with balancing these needs out of control and our security may be paying the price.
Gordon Adams is a Professor of International Relations at the School of International Service, American University, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center. From 1993-1997, he was Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget the senior White House official for national security budgets.
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