I try to avoid discussions about domestic politics here, except when they directly affect national security. This is one of those times. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a 28-year-old Democratic Socialist who won a surprise upset in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th District. Representative Joe Crowley has represented the district since 1999, is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, and was widely seen as a likely successor to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
The loss is a bit reminiscent of 1956, when Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts thought his re-election was so secure that he spent his time campaigning for President Dwight Eisenhower’s re-election, only to lose to a young congressman named John Kennedy.
Since her win in June, Ocasio-Cortez has become a media star. And when you’re 28 and give a lot of interviews, you’re bound to make some mistakes. But even by that standard, Ocasio-Cortez shows a stunning lack of understanding of what the nation gets in return for the $700 billion it is spending on national defense.
An economics lesson: There’s a difference between an increase and total appropriation
Last week, Ocasio-Cortez appeared on “The Daily Show” (of course she did), where host Trevor Noah asked her how she planned to pay for the expansive agenda of social spending she advocated. The third of her three points was to reprioritize federal spending. Here, rhetoric failed her and her lack of basic knowledge came to the fore.
“Just last year,” she said, “we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for. They’re, like, ‘we don’t want another fighter jet!’ They’re, like, ‘don’t give us another nuclear bomb,’ you know?”
Sorry, I don’t know… and neither does she.
Even if one grants Ocasio-Cortez the benefit of the doubt that she simply misspoke, she’s so wildly off the mark that it would be funny if it weren’t so serious. To state what ought to be the obvious, last year the military’s entire appropriation was $700 billion. It wasn’t a $700 billion increase. That being said, Ocasio-Cortez is technically correct that the Pentagon didn’t ask for the level of increase Congress gave it. But that’s not the same thing as saying the military leadership didn’t want it.
When Ocasio-Cortez gets to Congress (an all-but-certain conclusion, given the make-up of her district), if she’s assigned a seat on the Armed Services Committee, she will find that her degree in economics from Boston University did not prepare her for the role. The level of detail the committee goes through (thanks largely to it professional staff) to get to the final National Defense Authorization Act, or the amount of work the Pentagon goes through to get the budget submission to the Hill, is under appreciated.
The NDAA: A complex, often painful process
The Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution process, PPBE for short (one of the few acronyms that isn’t pronounced as a word, but as four individual letters) is byzantine. It’s not something normally taught to most enlisted personnel, or to most junior officers. It is the process of synthesizing the departments various priorities (gleaned from the National Security, Defense, and Military Strategies), its previous and ongoing spending, and the amount of money it expects to get in upcoming years.
This last part, the projection, is supposed to be based on the annual budget resolution, which congress is supposed to pass each year but hasn’t. The budget resolution sets spending levels for the next five years based on projections. Armed with that information, and the assessment of the Office of Management and Budget of how much will be available for defense, individual organizations prepare a Program Objective Memorandum, their request for the coming year and the next four after that.
Everyone’s POM is assembled into the service’s budget estimate. The Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) assembles these four budget estimates, plus that for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, into the DOD’s budget request. This document goes to OMB, where it becomes part of the President’s Budget Request.
Pentagon staffs are working on their POMs right now. The budget goes to the Hill in the first week of February. This, mind you, is for the fiscal year that doesn’t begin until October 1, 2019.
Alongside that budget request, the military keeps a list of “unfunded requirements,” those things it still believes it needs to do its job, but for which there simply wasn’t room in the budget. Congress relies partly on their UFR list when deciding how and where to increase defense spending. So really, the Pentagon did ask for that increase.
Corporate Welfare Queens?
Twitter is a great place for people to have in-depth discussions of this amazingly complex process, 280 characters at a time.
Over the weekend, one Ocasio-Cortez supporter told me I was supporting “corporate welfare queens” because in fiscal Year 2016, the DoD paid out $300 billion of its budget to contractors.
Well of course it did.
The money required for individual service members’ pay and benefits comprises only $147 billion of the $717 billion authorized in this year’s NDAA. The rest, for the most part, goes to procurement (buying stuff), research, development, testing, and evaluation (designing new stuff to buy), and operations and maintenance (using and fixing the stuff we buy). For most of that, we need defense contractors.
After all, buying military hardware isn’t like buying a car. Imagine instead of going to the Chevy dealership and picking out your new car from those on the lot, or ordering one custom-made that will arrive in a few weeks, you had to give General Motors your exact specifications for the car you wanted, which their engineers would use to design a car that then had to be tested, and which then required retooling the entire assembly line to build before you got it.
Needless to say, it would be years before you got your car, and you would have had to pay for all that work in the meantime.
There is plenty wrong with the military acquisition process. But the sad fact remains that except in rare circumstances, there isn’t a tank dealership we can go to and pick out our M1 Abrams replacement and drive it home. The closest we’ve come is the 1999 decision to buy the Stryker armored fighting vehicle, a modified version of an existing Canadian vehicle. And intent was for the Stryker to be a stop-gap measure, a quick fix to plug a “capability gap.” The death of the Future Combat Systems program, though, meant that we’ll keep the Stryker around longer than we originally intended.
America’s defense industry is a national treasure, not a burden. I suspect that many of these “Democratic Socialists,” to the extent they understand what the government gets for its money, would like to see those companies nationalized, with the government doing all the work instead of paying private companies to do it.
If you thought the rollout of the Obamacare website was bad, imagine an entirely government-run defense industry. Enough said?
