Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

2 • Introduction & Historic Overview: The Overburden of America’s Outdated Defensesstate governors in order to use. Today, we have one large all-volunteer federalArmy, which for all practical purposes responds only to the president andthe executive branch. It has engaged in numerous foreign wars, involved usin many entangling alliances, drained our treasury and eroded our libertiesjust as our Founding Fathers foresaw. It has enabled the president to take thenation to war on little more than his own authority. The recent repeal of thePosse Comitatus Act of 1878 allows him to unilaterally use the military not onlyagainst foreigners, but against the American people as well.• Our military is inwardly focused. This is to say that it focuses on itself and itsinternal concerns, rather than looking outward at the world and reacting towhat occurs there. This is partly a consequence of domestic politics, whichdetermine the military budget, and partly due to a climate of intellectual lazinessand complacency that prefers the glories of the past over the unpleasantrealities of the present and future. This has made it very difficult for us eitherto produce or implement a realistic grand strategy or to adjust to changingrealities, particularly the emergence of Fourth Generation War (4GW).• Our military is very expensive. The “official” budget will soon hit $600 billionper year. This approximates the military budgets of all other nations of theworld combined. Some have argued that this amounts to only a few percent ofour gross national product (GNP) and that it should be increased. One mightreply, however, that the military budget might instead be determined by themilitary needs of the nation (the determination of which requires lookingoutward at potential threats) more than an arbitrarily determined portion of itseconomy. Also, the real budget is much higher than the official one. The officialbudget does not include the Department of Homeland Security or VeteransAffairs, both of which are really military expenses. The current wars in Iraqand Afghanistan are paid for by offline “supplemental” budgets so they are notincluded either. If one adds these costs the budget climbs to about a trilliondollars. It absorbs much of the government’s discretionary spending and hascontributed significantly to the depreciation of the dollar.• As our military gets more expensive it gets smaller and less capable. Althoughthe current military budget, even adjusting for inflation, is the highest sinceWorld War II it buys us only modest forces. At the height of the Reagan militarybuildup in the 1980s the U.S. Army had 18 active divisions. Yet today,with a higher budget, it has only 10. At the height of the Vietnam War the U.S.military maintained over 500,000 men in Vietnam besides a substantial forcein Germany under NATO. It fought an enemy with more than half a million