Jets or GIs? How Best to Address the Military's Manpower Shortage

Kagan's approach to budgeting absolves him of having to tackle a number of difficult issues, including how to curb the military's personnel costs, which have risen precipitously over the past six years. The average annual cost of maintaining a single service member currently exceeds $100,000. These costs will continue to skyrocket if, as Kagan proposes, 100,000 to 200,000 additional ground forces are added. Kagan implies that the Bush administration has not reined in personnel spending because it has no interest in adding more troops and therefore increases in per unit cost do not concern it. But this is not quite true, as demonstrated by the fight in 2003 over what is known as "concurrent receipt."

Before that year, the Pentagon had for decades maintained a policy of "nonconcurrent receipt," by which it reduced the retirement pay of disabled veterans who were already receiving benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. In the 2003 defense authorization bill, however, Congress stipulated that the Pentagon would have to change its policy and continue to provide full retirement payments to service members who also received such benefits. It was estimated that this shift would increase personnel costs by between $1.8 billion and $5 billion annually, and the Bush administration actively opposed the change. The president even threatened to veto the bill. The administration clearly had the political will to fight the increase -- but it lost the battle nonetheless.

Kagan anticipates that his call for greater defense spending will "inspire howls of protest in certain quarters," and he is right: there will be howls from members of the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and Congress, all of whom realize that the 41 percent increase in baseline defense spending of the past four years cannot and will not be duplicated in the next four. This is why the Department of Defense and others are busily prioritizing for leaner times. The five-year plan submitted to Congress last year called for a $30 billion reduction in defense spending between fiscal years 2006 and 2011, and the Pentagon has been instructed to reduce its 2007-12 plan by another $30 billion. Ryan Henry, the Pentagon's principal deputy undersecretary for policy, has acknowledged that the defense spending levels of the past few years are unsustainable, and he is planning accordingly. And as the chief executive of Boeing's military division lamented, "[It] has been a great ride for the last five years, but it's over. There will be a flattening of the defense budget."

As such statements suggest, Kagan's preferred approach -- adding new troops without cutting current defense spending -- is simply not an option. To govern is to choose, and by not choosing between troops and hardware, Kagan provides no real alternative to the status quo.

In order to ensure that the U.S. military builds the capabilities it needs in today's fiscal climate, the Pentagon should reorder its budgetary priorities. The Defense Department must add two divisions to the active force while maintaining the current strength of the reserves; double the size of the Special Forces to approximately 100,000 troops; add 10,000 military police, civil-affairs experts, engineers, and medical personnel to the active force; and maintain funding for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, unmanned aerial vehicles, the B-2 heavy bomber, the Future Combat Systems program, the Stryker Interim Armored Vehicle, and naval vessels such as the CVN-21 aircraft carrier and the Littoral Combat Ship.

Accomplishing these tasks will mean making some hard choices. Certain low-priority weapons systems -- especially those that do not address current threats or are extremely inefficient -- must be canceled or scaled back. These systems include the F-22, the SSN-774 Virginia-class submarine, the DD(X) destroyer, the V-22 Osprey, the C-130J transport aircraft, offensive space-based weapons, and the deployment of a national missile defense.

It is certainly possible to dream up future scenarios in which each of these lower-priority items would be useful, but one only has to read this morning's newspaper, or Kagan's article, to realize how much more useful additional ground forces would be. While it is tempting not to choose, the reality is that Americans must.

LAWRENCE J. KORB is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and was Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1981 to 1985.

PETER OGDEN is a National Security Analyst at the Center for American Progress.

Kagan Replies

I am grateful for the thoughtful support Lawrence Korb and Peter Ogden offer to my core argument: that manpower remains the principal determinant of a state's military power and is essential to success in almost any imaginable future conflict. The strains on the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps that we together have described are real, serious, and extremely dangerous. Fixing these problems should be Washington's number one national security priority. The only question is how.

Korb and Ogden argue that the key to success lies in establishing the right priorities within a predetermined defense budget, rather than increasing that budget. They dismiss as unrealistic calls for a substantial increase in military spending. They may be right that the political reality in Congress would block such an increase. But that is precisely the problem.