Mr. Gates’s Budget/Gates unveils sweeping defence cuts/Gates under fire for deep defence cuts

New York Times Editorial: Mr. Gates’s Budget
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/opinion/08wed1.html?th&emc=th


Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made a credible effort to bring new discipline and focus to military spending after the unrestrained, inchoate years of the Bush administration. He has made tougher choices than his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, and shifted billions of dollars from complex systems of little use in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to weapons needed right now by troops fighting today’s wars.

The only problem is that he did not go far enough.

Much is being made of his plans to cut the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet when, in fact, he wants to purchase four more of the planes, for a total of 187. Production should halt at 183. At his news conference on Monday, Mr. Gates vowed to end programs that significantly exceed their budgets or use limited tax dollars to buy “more capability than the nation needs.”

If ever there was a weapon that met these criteria, it is the F-22. It was designed for combat against the former Soviet Union and has not been used in the wars this country is actually fighting. The Air Force’s new high-performance F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which begins production in 2012 and which Mr. Gates is wisely supporting, uses stealth technology to elude enemy radar like the F-22. It should be sufficient.

We have long argued for canceling the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyer, a stealthy blue-water combat ship designed to fight the kind of mid-ocean battles no other nation is preparing to wage. Mr. Gates wants to buy three of them; we think that money should be invested in better, cheaper ships like the DDG-51 destroyer, which has been the mainstay of the fleet for years and which Mr. Gates proposes to resume producing.

He should have cut deeper than $1.4 billion into the unproven missile defense program and gone forward with planned reductions in the size of the active-duty Navy and Air Force. He should, however, be commended for scaling back the Army’s Future Combat System.

Scrapping wasteful weapons programs is essential, but how much better it would be if they were never built at all. The Pentagon’s procurement system has so run amok that 70 percent of the weapons were over budget last year by a total $296 billion. That’s real money for spending on other vital programs. Mr. Gates says procurement reform is a priority — and it must be.

The military needs rebuilding to recover from the strains of Iraq and Afghanistan, and it must restructure to meet today’s real-world challenges. Mr. Gates made a useful down payment toward that goal with more funds for intelligence and surveillance equipment (including more drones), special forces, experts to train foreign military units and for spending on combat ships that operate in shallow waters to support ground combat. Still, half the budget goes to traditional big battle warfare programs.

Even with much-needed plans to accelerate expansion of the Army and the Marines, Mr. Gates seems to have stayed within the budget figures announced last month: After adjusting for inflation, basic Pentagon spending will rise to $534 billion from $513 billion, with $130 billion more to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan.

After two years in which he focused on war-fighting and left the budget mostly to his then-deputy, Gordon England, Mr. Gates has taken charge of the process. We respect his stated determination to make decisions based on what’s good for the country rather than narrow political interests. Few documents are more political than budgets, however. Now it will be up to him and President Obama to stave off industry lobbyists and their Congressional allies seeking to protect cash cows and then push to do even more in the next budget.







Financial Times Editorial Comment: Gates takes on the defence industry
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: April 7 2009 19:50 | Last updated: April 7 2009 19:50
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/82a2008e-23a3-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html


Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has always enjoyed a somewhat mild manner in public. But he has just unveiled an overhaul of the Pentagon’s annual defence budget that is causing anguished squealing in Congress and the nation’s defence-industrial complex. Mr Gates’s overhaul does not entail any reduction in the Pentagon’s mammoth $534bn annual budget. But it brings cutbacks in a string of traditional military programmes that big name defence contractors have long cherished.

Mr Gates is reshaping the Pentagon budget with one goal in mind. He believes that the US, given the scale of the financial crisis, does not have unlimited resources with which to fight every kind of war; and that the Pentagon procurement system does not always buy the kind of weapons the country needs, anyway. In short, he believes the US needs more resources to fight insurgencies of the kind we see in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fewer to fight conventional wars against big nations such as China and Russia that will probably never take place.

From this thinking flow his decisions. On the one hand, Mr Gates is shifting away from conventional war planning – cutting missile defence programmes, ending production of the F-22 fighter and delaying the development of a new bomber. On the other hand, he wants to boost counter-terrorism operations, increasing the size of the army and marine corps, and putting billions more into surveillance equipment, such as drones.

These moves should be largely applauded. The Pentagon – and the defence contractors who supply it – cannot live on the assumption that the US must always have the best weapon system on offer, irrespective of need and price. Mr Gates will have a tough task getting this message across to Congress, where politicians have local defence factories to support. In making the case, however, he has the strong advantage of being a former member of the Bush administration.

Still, Mr Gates is open to criticism on one point. He is starting this restructuring before the administration has begin to conduct its next scheduled review of the country’s long-term security challenges.

Given the tasks facing the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is easy to assume that counter-insurgency operations will dominate the next generation of warfare. But the threat to the US from powerful, industrialised nations has not totally disappeared. Before Mr Gates reshapes the Pentagon budget any further, a more comprehensive assessment of the threat facing the US and its allies is surely needed.







Gates unveils sweeping defence cuts
By Sylvia Pfeifer in London and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: April 6 2009 21:44 | Last updated: April 6 2009 23:19
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/651b8cec-22e5-11de-9c99-00144feabdc0.html


Robert Gates, US defence secretary, unveiled a sweeping overhaul of defence priorities on Monday, taking an axe to several high-profile weapons programmes as part of his spending proposals.

Mr Gates said the Pentagon would place more emphasis on “irregular” warfare as he outlined a series of cuts and changes as part of President Barack Obama’s $534bn defence budget.

“We must rebalance this department’s programmes in order to institutionalise and finance our capabilities to fight the wars we are in today and the scenarios we are most likely to face,” he said.

While Congress will try to alter some of the plans, Mr Gates proposed dramatic changes, including cancelling a deal to build a presidential helicopter. Lockheed’s VH-71 helicopter programme, based on a design by AgustaWestland, the UK subsidiary of Italy’s Finmeccanica, has seen its costs soar since the companies won an initial contract in January 2005.

The initial contract, worth $3.8bn, was for nine helicopters, of which seven have already been delivered. Mr Obama signalled this year that the contract was in danger when he said it had “gone amok”.

Mr Gates also proposed ending production of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet at 187 aircraft. While that would affect Lockheed Martin, the company would benefit from a separate proposal to increase production next year of the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet, which will also be bought by US allies, including the UK.

The Pentagon chief also ordered major cuts in missile defence systems, while restructuring the overall programme to focus on missile threats posed by “rogue” states such as North Korea. Pyongyang this weekend fired a long-range rocket over Japan in a failed satellite launch.

Shares in the major defence contractors gained after the announcement. Analysts said investors saw the news as positive because it had put an end to months of uncertainty. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman both saw gains of about nine per cent.



Gates under fire for deep defence cuts
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: April 6 2009 23:36 | Last updated: April 7 2009 02:16
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/69fd08a8-22f9-11de-9c99-00144feabdc0.html


Robert Gates on Monday launched war against the defence industrial complex by scrapping major defence programmes, in a move that saw the defence secretary come under immediate fire from Congress.

In unveiling a major rebalancing of Pentagon spending plans, Mr Gates increased the emphasis on the kind of “irregular” war the US faces in Iraq and Afghanistan, while ending programmes, such as the F-22 fifth-generation fighter jet, that are considered more relevant for peer-to-peer war.

At an unusually packed Pentagon press conference, Mr Gates – who has barely received a word of criticism since replacing Donald Rumsfeld in 2006 – conceded that his decisions would be “controversial”.

Mr Gates urged Congress to “rise above parochial interests and consider what is in the best interest of the nation as a whole”, but his plea was unheard.

Within hours, politicians raised questions about his proposed cuts and reform plans for the much maligned Pentagon procurement process. In a YouTube video recorded in Afghanistan, James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican senator, lambasted President Barack Obama for “disarming America” and vowed to fight the cuts.

“I cannot believe what I heard today ... Never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war,” said Mr Inhofe.

While increasing spending on weapons such as the Predator that are firing missiles into the Pakistani tribal areas where al-Qaeda has established safe havens, Mr Gates cut more conventional programmes such as the VH-41 presidential helicopter designed by Agusta-Westland, the UK subsidiary of Italy’s Finmeccanica. He also killed the CSAR-X search and rescue helicopter programme, the TSAT satellite programme and elements of the army’s Future Combat Systems network.

In proposing major reforms – that critics argue are more than long overdue – Mr Gates is wading into the same politically treacherous waters that almost cost Mr Rumsfeld his job in 2001. Mr Rumsfeld was widely rumoured to be on the ropes over his internal battle to cut major weapons programmes when 9/11 saved his job, and the defence budget.

“Clearly Secretary Gates does not have the interests of the defence industry first and foremost in his mind,” said Loren Thompson, a defence expert at the Lexington Institution.

“Gates is trying to return to a rebalancing that first was attempted by Secretary Rumsfeld ... However, Secretary Gates is repeating the mistake of his predecessor in proposing these changes without a strategic framework or political plan for getting them implemented.”

Mr Thompson questioned how the Pentagon could make dramatic changes before completing the quadrennial defence review scheduled to start later this year. Mr Gates rejected the criticisms, saying his new priorities reflected the US national defence strategy released last year.

John Murtha, the top lawmaker on the House appropriations subcommittee on defence, said the recommendations were an “important first step” but stressed that his committee would “carefully review” the plan.

Mr Gates said halting production of the F-22 would reduce the workforce for the fighter jet from 24,000 this year to 13,000 in 2011, but the number of workers involved in the Joint Strike Fighter programme would rise from 38,000 to 82,000 over the same period.