Well, either your first point just left a heffer’s rump, or it is sufficiently vapid as to be a platitude. Can significant amounts of money be cut from the defense budget? Of course. All defense spending is discretionary, so you could theoretically zero it tomorrow the help of 218 Representatives and 50 Senators plus Joe Biden. But the same could apply to all spending, and I suspect that’s not your point. In what context, then, can significant sums be cut form the defense budget? As I’ve been arguing with Repair Man Jack lower in the thread, most of the costs of the current force structure are baked into the cake and significant savings can’t be achieved without a fundamental reformation of the military, which would invariably include a not-insubstantial amount of downsizing. You’re certainly entitled to, in light of your views of the Constitution, think there should be large reductions in defense appropriations. But to say “we can cut a significant amount of monies from the current defense budget”, with an implicit assumption that such could be done with no consequences, is patently false.

Your second point is non-falsifiable. Hell, how do you even go about trying to argue, let alone model, that? As it boils down to: “We’re spending more today on defense than FY2001. I feel less safe today than FY2001. Ergo, all expenditures above FY2001 suffer from diminishing returns.” Such confuses correlation and causation massively, which is made all the worse by the fact that you’ll never untie the Gordian knot of causality in the first place. And then there’s the fact that Defense is, by itself, sufficiently large that it’s almost impossible to untangle what funding imperatives produced what changes. Procurement and operations budgets are way, way percentage-wise compared to FY2001: Under your argument, every one of these dollars suffers from diminished utility. Which is a rather novel argument indeed for defense appropriations, as it basically says that all money spent enhancing the Pentagon’s capabilities or — Heaven forbid! — actually deploying the military produces less in the way of security than if the money used to fund such had been left in the Treasury.

Defense is no different that social security or medicare in that current costs are baked into the cake and that we need a fundamental ?reformation? of these programs to downsize them, but that doesn?t mean that we shouldn?t downsize just because we have to reform things (in any of the three spending areas, defense, medicare, or social security). You are essentially arguing that change would be difficult so we shouldn?t do it.

“Downsize” was in the context of the alluded to discussions with RMJ, which refers to absolute reductions in force size. Which, to restate here if you haven’t trawled down that way, are that there are few savings to be had in the defense budget for structural reasons stemming from personnel and procurement. If you want to effect serious reductions in defense outlays, it means one of two things: Either large cuts in the force size — as in lopping off three or four CVBGs, disbanding multiple USAF wings, reorganizing Army divisions, and other large-scale efforts of that sort — or dulling the technical edge by adopting cheaper, less bleeding-edge equipment. “Serious”, for point of reference, is on order of 25% or greater: Cuts of the sort that the Left will demand in the opening negotiations on any kind of long-term fiscal package with meaningful entitlement reform. I happen to think that both American technical sophistication and power projection are where they need to be, so I’m averse to the kinds of force reductions required to achieve those kinds of fiscal results. But the argument has nothing to do with the difficulty of the task.

Diminishing returns is a true state where incremental increases bring less utility than the initial ones (ie the 1000th aircraft carrier provides less incremental defense than the first). The use of 2001 was simply because I new what the level of spending for that year was off the top of my head, but we could easily use another number (either bigger or smaller and the point would be the same). As for the idea that ?actually deploying the military produces less in the way of security than if the money used to fund such had been left in the Treasury? that isn?t the issue at all, the issue is whether the diminished incremental increase in security we get from that dollar is worth more to the country than the economic benefits we get from the lower debt/deficit/taxes/etc by not spending that dollar at all.

I’m well aware of the concept of diminishing returns. The onus is on you to demonstrate that such defense funding above Point X achieves such. Given the immense difficulty in determining what the margin rate-of-return even is on security spending, let alone untangling the causal issues associated with increases to particular areas of defense, your burden is nearly insurmountable. Especially when you say that you pulled FY2001 out of thin air. You’re essentially positing a conceptually tool like the Laffer Curve: Something that is axiomatically true, but for which there is no real way to test one way or the other.

On the latter point, re: deployment of the military, you’re the one who made the silly proposition in the first place. FY2001 was the final year of the Clinton procurement holiday: Procurement budgets, and subsequently operations budgets, have swelled since then due to Clinton’s kicking of the procurement can and the evolution of the War on Terror. To argue, as you did, that defense spending post-FY2001 suffered from diminishing returns was to argue that expenditure of funds to make good on all the procurement which the Clinton administration put off, as well as those expended for actually deploying troops into combat, produced less incremental security gain than if the money hadn’t been spent. Trying to make that argument vis-a-vis the Clinton procurement holiday is laughable on its face, by simple virtue of the fact that it lionizes what amounted to accounting gimmickry at the expense of force maintenance. Trying to make the latter about the deployment of military force is the kind of sophistry typically associated with the loopier species of libertine economics uber alles social thought.

Or, in a more pithy way, diminishing returns is the wrong analytic lens for defense spending. To call it “exotic”, as streiff did, is being exceedingly generous and more fair-minded than I would have.

Level Iraq and leave it lying fallow and you save about $800Bn in operational costs. The reason I say that has its limits in my reply above because Iran crosses the border and sets up permanent shop in Basra the week after we leave. At that point, do we level Iran, or leave the Shiites in Iraq to their fate?

Well, you could always break out the salting nukes: That’d solve the problem of the Iranians crossing the Shatt al-Arab, at least. Not particularly desirable for any of the parties, but it’d solve the problem.

Also, Optempo costs for deployement are a lot more than peacetime Optempo. An occupying army runs it equipment ?on the edge? far more often than one that just levels the joint and then vanishes. Ghengis Khan saved a fortune by not caring too much what he left behind. It?s not the weapons systems you choose to procure, it?s how you use them that generates the savings.

Oh, I concur re: peacetime vs. combat costs for OPTEMPO. But you’re wrong re: procurement. Modern Western warfare leverages the wealth of the West into capital-intensive force multipliers. Sometimes these are tangible, such as body armor and artillery; sometimes it’s intangible, such as the benefits reaped from the Navstar network or the information gathered by airborne sensor platforms. The point is that once your warfighting starts revolving around high-cost tools, how they’re used becomes increasingly less important from a budgetary perspective: An hour of flight-time logged by a F-15E is, from a cost perspective, identical regardless of whether it’s being used for training, launching a surgical strike, or being used to bomb anything that moves. Your major costs for that flight-time are the sunk cost of buying the jet and the costs of maintaining it, and said maintenance costs are basically the same whether it’s flying out of CONUS or Sicily.

Where I think we’re having a bit a miscommunication is that I am hung upon this phrase of yours, Repair Man Jack: “We could have a much cheaper defense budget by reconfiguring our forces to be capable of leveling every stacked piece of masonry visible on the horizon and nothing much else.” My initial post was aimed at refuting such, in that even if we reconfigured the defense budget simply to level the enemy and then salt the ground, we would still have substantial defense costs because of the necessity of maintaining advantageous systems and force structures. To put it another way: We could already adopt such a policy, without changing a single organizational flow-chart at the Pentagon. The points you raise have nary a thing to do with force structure: Rather, what you are making (valid!) points about is operations policy. Or, more broadly still, points about strategic choices.

Without wading into that briar patch — as I think that might border on threadjacking — I’d just note that, from a budgetary perspective, you cannot really plan for wars. Because, at the end of the day, war and peace are political questions: What you do with defense spending is provide the political decision-makers with a toolkit with which to prosecute foreign policy and pursuit of the national interest. You cannot know, in a given fiscal year, whether or not one of the particular tools will be used and so you only budget for your regular peace-time affairs, with operational funding coming in via supplementary allocations. This is why, when talking about “defense spending”, the operational costs of the War on Terror should be set-aside: To use the $800bn figure cited above to be saved by just leveling Iraq, a much smaller figure was absorbed by the Pentagon’s budget, and it is only that bit that was absorbed into the Pentagon’s baseline that ought to be talked about in terms of what fiscal cost-savings can be achieved in the Pentagon’s budget by adopting different operational methodologies.

I am sorry that I let my inner wonk out of his box: He just get his panties in a knot whenever anyone, no matter their disposition, starts talking about how significant reductions in defense spending can be made via jiggering with the force structure. So you’ll have to pardon him — and me! — when the ranting on that subject comes up.

I do agree wholeheartedly that the first step to reining in the operations budget is to establish a rational strategic framework within which to make geopolitical decisions. Whether one liked it or not, the Bush Doctrine of 2001-2004 was one such framework: If you aided the Islamists, the United States would use the tools at its disposal to punish you for such. It led to some rather odious happenings — the rehabilitation of the Qaddafi regime being one of them — but no one could question that it was an internally consistent framework through which decisions could be made. (Things went pear-shaped once the cult of force protection took over in Iraq and it just got worse after the Democrats were given some power.)

On a somewhat different topic, I’d note that the reason I’m something of a defense procurement junkie is because we don’t talk about strategic choices much in this country. The last time we really had one was in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the memory of that shall be forever tainted because of the immense intellectual dishonesty of those on the Left and more craven politicos who wanted to dissociate themselves from whatever support they might have once lent the idea of deposing Saddam. Defense procurement functions as one of the proxies by which strategic policy dialogue occurs, as today’s procurement decisions determine tomorrow’s operational capabilities. It’s a lesson that many Congresscritters don’t seem to get, including most worryingly Paul Ryan, whose Path to Prosperity signed onto Gates’ procurement recommendations. Which includes axing the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, which is integral to the future of the Marines Corps’ amphibious assault capabilities. Though given that every big ticket procurement project in the last two years has been labeled as integral to the future of the services when funding cuts are mentioned, I wouldn’t be surprised if Congresscritters had stopped listening to proverbial cries of “Wolf!” by now.