The FY2010 DOD budget is a litany of wrong priorities and bad decisions on military programs. It is a lavish subsidy for DOD bureaucracies and a nice bounty for the military brass, including generals-sinecurists. It pays for wrongly-decided wars of nation-building, but impairs the modernization of the military and its preparation for the wars of the future and the current Korean war.

Procurement spending is at a record low. The USMC’s procurement budget is a meagre $2.765 billion. The Army’s procurement budget is an investment of merely $32.720 billion. The total DOD procurement spending for FY2010 requested by the Pentagon is just $122.313 billion. This is because Gates has decided to close crucial procurement programs such as the F-22, Super Hercules, C-17, Next Generation Bomber, Multiple Kill Vehicle, European missile defense, KEI and next generation gunship (AC-X) programs, and cutting many other weapon programs (including the airborne laser and F-35 projects), thus forcing the US military to operate with dangerously obsolete equipment.

The bulk of the fighterplane fleet (numbering 2065 planes) is composed of obsolete F-15s and F-16s designed in the 1960s and produced during the 1970s. America possesses only 90 F-22s. The USAF’s principal attack jets – A-10s – were developed and produced in the 1970s. Its anti-air-defense (SEAD) jets, the F-15Es, and its nonstealthy B-1 bombers were developed and deployed in the 1980s. B-52 bombers were designed in the 1940s, first flew in 1952, and were deployed in 1955. The youngest B-52 was produced in 1962. The bulk of the Navy’s attack subs were produced in the 1970s and the 1980s. The orders for Virginia-class submarines are insufficient. Unless procurement programs are maintained and weapon orders are expanded, hundreds of platforms will retire unreplaced, as 54 F-117 jets did in 2008. The ending of C-17 production will aggravate the cargo logjam from which the entire military, including the contingent in Afghanistan, is currently suffering.

The current Administration, however, is not the first one to reduce procurement spending – the Bush Administration also did that. Rumsfeld ended the crucial Crusader and Comanche programs and restrained aircraft fleet modernization (making few new aircraft purchases). Bob Gates, appointed by Bush and kept at the Pentagon by Obama, shrank procurement funding before Obama was even elected.

It should be noted, however, that with Obama as President, Gates is pursuing even worse policies than he did before 2009; some of these have been imposed on him by his boss. Instead of investing in state-of-the-art weaponry, the DOD spends huge amounts of money on military and civilian personnel.

The personnel budget for FY2010 is to be $149.601 billion; the Army alone is responsible for almost half of this cost – $68.436 billion. Much of the personnel budget is spent on exquisite personnel, e.g. generals-sinecurists and exquisite tankists. The US military currently has 876 generals and admirals; many of them are employed as commanders of duplicatory agencies such as “the CNO’s Environmental Division”, COs of duplicatory commands, Joint Staff employees, or delegates to the discredited NATO alliance. Reducing the number of military personnel by 23% would result in an annual saving of $34.370 billion. Reducing the number of soldiers by 10,000 would save $1 billion per year.* The belief that the number of soldiers is an indicator of how strong (militarily) a country is is obsolete, and has been obsolete since 1939.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense is one of the largest bureaucracies in the DOD. If its budget – $4.8 billion – and the JCS’s $482 million budget are added to personnel spending, then the total personnel budget of the DOD for FY2010 is planned to be $154.883 billion, which is $35 billion more than the DOD spends on procurement. The OSD alone (not to mention the Administrations of the three service departments) has a bigger budget than many procurement programs.

The three service departments also have huge administration budgets. The Army Dept. will spend $13.786 billion on this in FY2010, the Air Force $7.780 billion and the Navy Dept. $4.653 billion (plus 649 million for USMC Administration in the Navy Department). The total cost is $26.868 billion. The Pentagon will hire tens of thousands of new bureaucrats during FY2010, even though it already employs hundreds of thousands of civilian bureaucrats. It also has 2 separate police agencies (which could be merged): the Pentagon Police (which protects the Pentagon building) and the DOD Police (which guards all other DOD buildings). Like other federal departments, and like state and city governments, the DOD has dozens of duplicatory or unneeded agencies, such as the DBB, the DTRA and the Naval Historical Center.

Another burden on the DOD, which is paid for with money denied to procurement programs, is the continued deployment of about 100,000 American troopers in Europe. Most of them are stationed in Britain, Germany or Italy. They are supposed to defend Europe against its enemies, but the EU has approximately the same GDP as the US (7 times bigger than Russia’s GDP) and includes 2 nuclear-armed states, France and Britain. It has a population of 500 million and an advanced tech base. It would’ve been able to defend itself it its rulers wanted to, but they prefer not to spend anything on defense (with the notable exception of France and, until the 2000s, Britain). That’s a good deal for European taxpayers, but not for the Pentagon. If American soldiers stationed in Europe returned to the US, the Pentagon would save much money. It’s time to force Europe to defend itself and bring American troopers back to America.

Also limiting the amount of money for procurement programs are the ongoing wars of nation-building waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are the two most unpromising candidates for such wars, yet, despite 5000 fallen troopers and the expenditure of over $1.5 trillion (directly and indirectly) on the Iraqi war, American leaders have decided to continue these two wars, albeit American combat troops will come back from Iraq by 2011. The combined cost of these two wars for FY2010 will be $130 billion. Every dollar spent on these two countries is a dollar which cannot be spent on procurement, weapon R&D, and weapon maintenance.

In short, the FY2010 DOD budget is bad news. It significantly cuts procurement spending and closes dozens of crucial weapon programs while lavishly funding various bureaucracies in the DOD and paying for exquisite generals. It will significantly weaken the US military. You can’t fight a 21st century war with equipment produced during the 1970s. America needs a significant reform of the DOD which will protect procurement and R&D programs and guarantee a well-equipped military while cutting personnel costs and spending on bureaucracies. Only that will guarantee a military prepared to defeat China, North Korea, Iran, and other enemies of the US.

All numbers in this article are from the FY2010 Budget Poster (and its FY2008 counterpart, http://mibi.deviantart.com/art/Death-and-Taxes-2008-54322524) created by Jess Bachmann; his numbers come from official sources. 2007 figures were adjusted for inflation using this calculator: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

*A former Army Chief of Staff remarked that growing the military by 10,000 soldiers adds a cost of $1 billion to the DOD budget.