This morning’s DOD Buzz over at Military.com hints the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) will recommend slashing the carrier force from 11 to 9, killing the Marines’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, reducing the Joint Strike Fighter pro­gram buy, and chopping two Air Force wings.

The EFV is the centerpiece of the Marines’ future conventional warfare capability. Will the Marines fight for this one? According to DOD Buzz, “Reports are that Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway will come out swing­ing to pre­serve the abil­ity to kick down the door and ensure forcible entry from the sea.”  Will Gates fire him? Nope.

After the demise of the F-22 program, the F-35 is the last active production fighter program in the US. The Air Force (after having its n*ts cut off and handed to it by Gates) gently rolled over on the F-22, handed over majority on control of tactical UAVs to the Army, rolled over on CSARX, and got bi*ch-slapped on the tanker. This service will mutter some weak-kneed platitude about “jointness,” meekly cut even more from it’s F-35 program (I’m sure the Navy and Marines will adequately defend their F-35 purchases) as well as a couple of combat wings. Afterwards, to make themselves feel better, the Air Force will issue a new policy about wearing reflective belts.

For our money, one of the better parts of President Obama's speech at West Point this week was his connection between a healthy economy and U.S. national security. To quote: "Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy." We only wish Mr. Obama understood the link between the larger welfare state he is trying to build at home and the economic weakness that will undermine our military power.

The proof is right before his eyes in the U.S. struggle to get Europe to contribute more forces to Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has called on NATO to buttress the U.S. surge of 30,000 in Afghanistan with 5,000 or more European troops. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Brussels today to round up promissory notes. But except for the usual stalwarts—Britain and Poland—the allies are having trouble meeting even this modest goal. Germany and France are reluctant to contribute anything more to defeat the Taliban.

This is by now a familiar story, and a big part of the problem is the relative lack of military spending. Among the Western Europeans, only France and the U.K. spend more than 2% of GDP on defense, supposedly the NATO-mandated minimum. Nearly everyone else is below that. Germany, the continent's largest economy, stands at 1.3%. U.S. defense spending has been above 4% of GDP since 2004, having fallen to 3% after the Cold War ended.

No amount of pleading and shaming has worked on the continentals. NATO launched the "Defense Capabilities Initiative" in 1999, only to abandon it a few years later. Various attempts to stand up European "rapid reaction" forces have floundered.

Most European countries also commit more than half of what little they do spend on defense to soldier salaries and benefits. Equipment and training are shortchanged. Belgium devotes 74% to personnel; the U.S. 30.6%. Europeans lack cargo planes and helicopters to enable troops to get to, and move within, far-off conflict zones. In 2007, the U.S. deployed 14% of its troops in overseas operations, Europe 4%.

Such relative strategic weakness has made the Europeans more dependent on the American security umbrella, even as they resent it. But it also makes Europeans more disposed to avoid confrontation with adversaries like Saddam Hussein or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As Henry Kissinger has put it, European leaders are no longer able to ask their people to make major sacrifices.

The overlooked culprit here is the rise of the modern welfare state. Since World War II and especially from the 1960s, Europe has built elaborate domestic income-maintenance programs, with government-run health care, pensions and jobless benefits. These are hugely expensive, requiring high taxes and government spending that is a huge proportion of GDP. The nearby table compares the so-called tax wedge across nations, which is one measure of the relative burdens to finance cradle-to-grave entitlements.

One consequence has been slower growth in Europe, relative to the U.S. and China, with less tax revenue to spend on everything. Another result is that welfare spending has crowded out defense spending. The political imperative of health care and pensions always trumps defense spending, save perhaps in a hot war. Europe may never again be able to muster public support for a defense buildup of the kind the U.S. undertook to end the Cold War in the 1980s, or even the smaller surge after 9/11.

The tragic irony of this year is that Democrats are rushing the U.S. down this same primrose entitlement path. With ObamaCare certain to eat up several more percentage points of GDP as it inevitably expands, we will take a giant step toward European social priorities.

For many Democrats, this is precisely the goal. Many Europeans, such as those at the Financial Times, will also welcome America's relative decline. But we doubt the American people fully understand what such a gilded entitlement cage means for our national vitality, or for our ability to defend U.S. interests at home and abroad.

The chart nearby shows the change in the share of U.S. federal spending on defense and domestic programs across recent decades. The upward blips in defense outlays occurred during Vietnam, the Reagan buildup and post-9/11. But the overall trend has been to spend less of the budget on defense. Add the stimulus, ObamaCare, a new entitlement for college and other Democratic plans, and the defense squeeze will only tighten. Higher taxes and borrowing may allow guns and butter to co-exist for a while. But over time, the welfare state will defeat the Pentagon here, as it has in Europe.

President Obama's domestic agenda may well mean that his successors lack the option to deploy 100,000 troops to Afghanistan, or to some other future trouble spot. This is the way superpowers lose their superiority.

The Foreign Office refused to discuss the funding but privately officials confirmed the money was cut amid vain hopes that the Americans would foot the bill instead...

“It was a highly successful mission and the Afghans were getting better every day,” a special forces source said last week. “The paltry sums involved were getting a pretty valuable return.”

Ed Butler, who commanded British troops when they first deployed to Helmand in 2006, said: “It strikes me as pretty counter-intuitive and verging on the ridiculous to cut this funding when the government is stressing the training of Afghan security forces as a way of withdrawing our troops.”

...The Conservatives said it “beggared belief" that the Foreign Office should withdraw funding from what was clearly an important project.

Even the smallest of counter-insurgency programs prove too much of a strain for the British military to sustain.

The next article, U.S. Seeks 10,000 Troops From Its Allies In Afghanistan, shows America’s other allies cannot sustain token troops in Afghanistan, let alone increase force levels.

The United States is scrambling to coax NATO allies to send 10,000 additional troops to Afghanistan as part of President Obama’s strategy for the region. Those countries appear willing to provide fewer than half that number, American and allied officials said Wednesday.

The British government is facing opinion polls showing that around 70 percent of the public favors an early withdrawal...

Germany and France have balked at committing any more forces to a war that has so little public support that they can barely maintain current troop levels...

The Netherlands and Canada have begun discussing plans to pull out. Canadian defense officials told reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in Halifax last week that they had no intention of sending troops in the future, and that they remained committed to withdrawing by the end of 2011...

Waning public opinion plays an important role in most NATO members’ reluctance to remain in Afghanistan, but I believe the heart of the matter lies in two important facts: Europe can no longer afford to send troops abroad; and they know the US will pick up the slack.

As sun sets in the west, it also rises in the east. China,Japan Boost Defence Ties illustratesas western power quickly retreats once staunch allies are running for cover and seeking other benefactors.

Japan and China yesterday agreed to conduct their first joint military training exercise as ties warm up between the Asian neighbors, which have long argued over a range of issues and have been suspicious of each other

Top defence officials and military officers from both sides will also meet regularly...(and) The joint exercise will be held next year, according to the Japanese Defence Ministry.

Japan knows the Pax America that kept peace across the Pacific for half a century is coming to an end and China’s rising power is fed from America’s and Europe’s decay. They are smartly moving out from under one shadow to another.  US Navy and Air Force power in the region is atrophying, and China is quickly rising, as seen the article Admiral Says PLA's Strength, Intentions Should Be Displayed.

Beijing should not be shy of displaying the full breadth of its growing military power and intentions to the world, a senior naval officer wrote in comments published yesterday.

In a commentary in the Global Times, a newspaper published by party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, Naval Rear Admiral Yang Yi said Beijing should expand its military power and need not hide this from the world.

“We should confidently and overtly tell the US and other countries that China needs to expand its overseas military power because of the continuation of national interests abroad,” wrote Yang, director of the Strategic Studies Institute under the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defence University

...Yang said Sino-US strategic relations were moving from the level of “common interest” to “ balance of power”.

 “The Taiwan issue has been the most sensitive and explosive problem,” he wrote. “This is a friendly reminder to the US – please be careful, careful, careful, and don’t think Beijing won’t dare to declare war with Washington.”

Anthony Wong Dong, president of the International Military Association, an independent grouping of observers based in Macau, said the article was a candid assessment.

These articles show the West can no longer sustain low-intensity combat operations against an enemy clearly bent on their destruction. At the same time, China is drawing traditional allies from the US orbit and brazenly challenging America as the sole military superpower.

They have the money and leverage to do so. We, on the other hand, have vaults full of IOUs and a congress full of fools.

I don’t like the odds.

In my last blog entry I highlighted the imminent demise of the Royal Air Force. Over the next 5 years the RAF will slash its force by 25%, essential ending it as a global power projection force.

This morning’s Washington Times heralds the same forces are now at work eroding America’s military might:

...The era of American military dominance, or "Pax Americana," is dwindling as the nation loses its position far atop the global marketplace, a congressional military analyst said Wednesday...

...The new dynamic - in which the U.S. remains a world force, but does not hold the pre-eminent position it attained after World War II - is the result of global financial centers shifting to Asia, said Stephen Daggett, a defense policy and budget specialist for the Congressional Research Service...

..."It seems this administration finds massive amounts of money for bailout and [stimulus spending] but not enough to fund the basic money needed for defensive hardware and personnel," said Rep. Trent Franks, Arizona Republican.

Victor Davis Hansen had a good quote this morning, “...political influence and military power are ultimately predicated on economic strength.”

Our economic strength, like that of Great Britain, is dying as we quickly drowned in a sea of self-induced socialist debt. Only two pillars are keeping us afloat: the fact oil is traded in dollars and the might of the US military protecting the global trade system.

The dollar hangs upon a precipice; it dies overnight if the world turns to another medium for oil trading. Now, our military is about to be cannibalized to feed the socialist beast eating us all alive.

When the US military is gone, depleted in endless wars abroad and cashiered for progressive votes, it will not rise again. We will be naked before our enemies and creditors...one in the same.

This article comes from today's Newsweek, its the Periscope column by John Barry and Evan Thomas. I think its a new insight into defense spending politics and well written.

The Few, The Proud, The Savvy

By John Barry and Evan Thomas

In his farewell address in January 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex, the cozy relationship between the Pentagon, Congress and defense contractors. In April 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposes to do something significant about it. He wants Congress to cut big-ticket items from all the major services: the Air Force's F-22 fighter, the Army's family of Future Combat Systems and the Navy's DDG 1000 destroyer.

One service was notably spared the budget ax. The how and why suggests that Gates can be politically cagey as well as bold. The Marines are the smallest, cheapest and, arguably, the bravest of them all —"The Few, the Proud, the Marines" is not just a recruiting gimmick. The Marines were quicker than the Army to think about how to fight nasty, small wars—and do it without spending vast sums of money. But the Marines are a proud service, and they worry about becoming too much like the Army. They want to preserve their historic mission of landing on foreign shores in small boats.

The Marines last major amphibious operation was in 1950, a highly successful maneuver at Inchon in Korea. Since then, landing troops by sea (which, historically, has been an often-bloody gambit—think of Gallipoli and Tarawa) has become an increasingly dodgy proposition. Today, all but the poorest countries are likely to possess radar, mines and ship-killing missiles. Even the take-that-hill ethos of the Marines recoils at sailing into slaughter.

For almost 40 years, the Marines' landing craft has been the AAV, the Amphibious Assault Vehicle. Carrying 25 men and three crew, it's meant to be launched two miles off shore and it pokes along at 8mph—a sitting duck at sea. It can move on land, but the old, thinly armored vehicles were taken out of combat in Iraq when IEDs turned them into death traps.

The Marines are working on a new landing craft called the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. It would launch from 25 miles out ("over the horizon") and move at 25mph. Heavily armored (38 tons versus the AAV's 23 tons) it requires a turbojet engine, which makes it look like "a tank on water skis," according to its critics. And there are many critics. The EFV has been in development for 14 years and its cost has tripled to $23 million each. With ship-killing missiles getting ever deadlier, the EFV would seem to be a candidate for cancellation by a pennywise SecDef.

But Gates kept it in the budget he proposed last week. Politics had nothing to do with it, insists spokesman Geoff Morrell. Rather, as Gates explained, he wants to take up the whole issue of the amphibious mission in the coming year when the Pentagon engages in a long-term review of defense priorities.

There is another good reason to kick the issue down the road. The Marines are famous for their political savvy. The Army wheezily jokes that while an Army squad commonly has 12 men, a Marine squad has 13—the extra is a PR officer. Trying to kill a favorite Marine Corps weapons system can be an exercise in futility. During the Bush 41 administration, then–Defense secretary Dick Cheney tried no less than four times to eliminate funding for the V-22 Osprey, which flies today. The Marines have close ties on Capitol Hill—none better than Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha, the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense and a combat-decorated 37-year veteran of the U.S. Marines. Last week, Murtha praised Gates's budget. As they say in the Corps, Semper Fi.

Few alive can recall when our nation faced such unsettling times. Servicemen watch the financial turmoil battering our nation with grave interest. Obviously, their most immediate concerns are how the crisis affects their wallets. However, in recent days I’ve been approached by concerned young officers asking, “How will this impact the military?” They’ve been at war for years and now another level of uncertainty has been dropped upon them. They understand the military doesn’t exist in a vacuum and are hungry for straight answers.

The straight answer is the budget outlook is grim, won’t get any better, and it will effect defense.

The short term outlook is dark. According to February 2008 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates, the government took in about $2.6 trillion and spent about $2.9 trillion.  That resulted in an annual deficit of almost $300 billion dollars, or roughly the equivalent of half the defense budget. Add that to America’s growing 10 trillion dollar debt, a conservative estimate. (It’s important to note these OMB figures assumed a healthy economy and unemployment under 5%.)

Those February assumptions are now worthless. The feds just spent over $850 billion of money it doesn’t have to save the global economy. Unemployment raced to 6.1% and most agree we’re heading into, at minimum, a deep recession. Tax revenues will fall and the pool of money available for the federal government to borrow will shrink in the face of the deepening global credit crisis. This year’s deficit has doubled and may top one trillion dollars before all is said and done. This bodes ill for a nation at war.

The Pentagon budget would face substantial challenges even in the best of times. The Navy and Air Force are struggling to modernize Cold War era equipment while the Army and Marines must grow and replace equipment worn out by a decade of combat. Healthcare costs are rapidly eroding the defense budget from within. Seldom has the need for defense dollars been so great, nor has the budget outlook been so bleak.

The long term outlook is even darker.

Many in the military have never heard of Mr. David Walker. He was U.S. Comptroller General under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.  As America’s former senior bookkeeper his message to America is simple: we’re way over our head in debt, it’s getting worse, and time is running out. Here’s why.

If one took the 3 trillion federal budget and condensed it into one dollar, defense spending would be about 20 cents. Mandatory spending, mostly interest on the national debt and entitlements, take about 50 cents; by law these take precedence over everything else, including defense. Starting in 2010 mandatory spending will begin to devour the entire dollar until, somewhere between 2020 and 2030, there will be no revenue left over for defense or anything else. Even worse, these OMB estimates are based on rosy economic forecasts and don’t account for anything approaching the scale of our current crisis.

I believe global economics and the colossal pressures on the federal budget are the true defense issues of our generation. Our entire strategic outlook must revolve around this new reality. Leaders of every service should level with us about the impact these challenges will present in the coming years.