Mattis' Plan to Modernize Military Faces Uncertain Future

It’s the story line of the Trump agenda: Everything keeps getting pushed further and further back as priorities pile up and infighting escalates.

Congress has yet to pass a budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, leaving a short window of time to do so. There are just 12 legislative days for lawmakers to hammer out a compromise before government funding runs out. A packed agenda also includes raising the debt ceiling, approving emergency disaster aid for Texas, tax reform and the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act.

President Trump is unlikely to deliver on promises of a major defense buildup, and he cannot push all the blame on Congress for that, said former House Armed Services Committee counsel Roger Zakheim.

A fractured budget process and continued deferral of military modernization efforts should not be a surprise to anyone, Zakheim said last week in an interview on WJLA-TV’s “Government Matters.” The Trump administration “hasn’t been successful bringing the parties together or siding with one or the other,” he said. “They are trying to have their cake and eat it too.”

And with Congress under pressure to pass a Hurricane Harvey disaster aid package, he noted that “this pushes the bigger budget fight down the road.”

Mattis estimated the military needs 3 to 5 percent annual spending growth at a minimum to fill immediate readiness gaps and modernize the military quickly enough to stay ahead of adversaries.

The best the military can hope for now is to receive temporary funding and wait for Congress to figure out how to bridge wide differences, said Katherine Blakeley, research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The wide gulfs between the political parties, and between the defense hawks and the fiscal hawks, will not be closed soon,” she noted in a recent briefing. 

Procedural and political hurdles will slow down or possibly derail the substantial defense buildup proposed by the administration and by hawkish defense committees, said Blakeley.

The administration proposed a $603 billion base defense budget. The House Armed Services Committee and the Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee approved a $621.5 billion top line, compared to $640 billion proposed by the Senate Armed Services Committee. All exceed congressionally mandated spending caps by tens of billions of dollars.

Defense industry investors are still somewhat optimistic. But increasingly they recognize that military budgets in 2018 or even 2019 may not pay for all of Trump’s campaign promises, said Cowen research analyst Roman Schweizer. “The real issue is the final fiscal year 2018 defense number, and that will be negotiated in the Senate, most likely,” he wrote in an email to clients. “It's hard to see how a two-year spending deal to adjust the Budget Control Act can be cobbled together in a short time frame.”

Venture capitalist and former defense industry executive Ray Johnson said it has become apparent the Pentagon cannot afford all of its modernization plans and this is not all Trump’s fault. The Pentagon’s budget started to get squeezed during the Obama administration while the military’s workload kept increasing, Johnson said in an interview with RealClearDefense.

“Then came sequestration and all the other crazy actions that Congress took and, by the way, that the Obama administration really did not do anything to stop,” resulting in today’s readiness crisis, said Johnson, who is a former senior vice president and chief technology officer of Lockheed Martin.

“DoD will have a hard time investing in the future,” he said. “The budget is going to go up year after year” although not enough to both fill urgent gaps and invest in next-generation weapon systems. “Things have been underfunded for a few years,” he said. Future increases will be absorbed by current weapons programs that will continue to run over-budget and by soaring personnel costs, Johnson noted. And the Pentagon cannot cut people to pay for new technology.

“As long as we have a multi-front war — ISIS, Afghanistan, North Korea, Eastern Europe — all these demands on DoD not only require programs to address these threats but also come with huge personnel costs.”

Hugely expensive next-generation systems that the Pentagon said it intends to buy may not fit in the budget unless cuts are made elsewhere, or there are massive spending increases for defense, Johnson said. That includes modernizing the nation’s strategic nuclear triad and developing new systems to defend U.S. dominance in outer space.

Johnson believes the military will continue to do what it has done for decades: update existing systems because it cannot afford to buy new ones. “I believe the future will be in ‘block’ upgrades,” he said, which is military-speak for incremental improvements. “This has been the history of large programs in the past.” The poster child is the half-century-old B-52 bomber. “How many block upgrades have gone into the B-52? The F-16 fighter is another wonderful example.” The Pentagon will hold on to systems on average for 30 to 40 years. “The way forward is going to have to be block upgrades.”

With regard to nuclear weapons and delivery systems, the United States can expect to keep using Cold War-era technology for the foreseeable future, noted analyst Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute. “The U.S. is not currently producing and deploying any new strategic nuclear delivery systems,” Goure commented in a recent RealClearDefense editorial.

The Air Force’s new stealth nuclear bomber will not be available until the mid-to-late 2020s, Goure noted. The Navy’s new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is projected to enter service in 2031. “The reality is that for the next two decades, at least, the U.S. will have to rely on an aging, even obsolescing strategic nuclear force posture to deter a growing number of hostile nations with modern and growing nuclear arsenals of their own.”

In a memorandum signed last month by Mulvaney and by deputy assistant to the president for science and technology policy Michael Kratsios, the administration set broad guidelines for how government agencies should invest research-and-development funding. 

At the top of a list of five priority areas identified in the memo are “American military superiority” and “American security.” The military superiority category notes that agencies should invest in R&D that “can support the military of the future” including “hypersonic weapons and defenses, autonomous and space-based systems.”

However, getting there will be an uphill battle. “The U.S. military faces substantial challenges in maintaining its current technological and operational advantages,” Blakeley noted. “Russian and Chinese investment in long-range conventional strike and power projection, hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, air defense systems, 5th generation fighters, and undersea anti-access technologies increasingly constrains the ability of the United States to project power in war and reduces allied confidence in U.S. security guarantees in peace,” she continued. “Corresponding Russian and Chinese investments in space, cyber, and electronic warfare capabilities challenge U.S. dominance in the electromagnetic spectrum.”

Sandra Erwin is a national security and defense reporter for RealClearDefense. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow Sandra on Twitter @Sandra_I_Erwin.