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Strategika Podcast: Kiron Skinner on the Dangers of Cutting Military Spending
In this episode of the Strategika podcast, I sat down with Carnegie Mellon’s Kiron Skinner —a former foreign policy aide to George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney — to discuss the implications of President Obama’s defense cuts. Professor Skinner takes us around the globe, analyzing the implications for Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Does she think the US can maintain an adequate presence throughout the world in light of these reductions? Listen to find out:
Published in General
Please can we get these HI podcasts up on iTunes?
Both The Libertarian and Strategika can be subscribed to in iTunesU.
Thank you Mr. Senik
Lets just say that not all military spending is made equal. I think we could probably cut some without affecting overall readiness.
The guns vs. butter debate that the administration wants to argue is flatly ridiculous on its face. If you’re talking about butter, what does a defense contractor buy at the store every week? What percentage of the budget is redistribution vs. defense spending? Defense is typically 20% of the budget, plus or minus 5%. The entitlement side is over 60% of the budget. Not mentioning unfunded liabilities. This type of discussion is just avoidance of the issue that the Barry Administration wants to neuter the military in order to appear to be something we are not to the world.
It’s easy to walk away from one fight (the middle east), to walk towards one that isn’t happening and doesn’t have any appearance of happening (China). The way to describe this most accurately is cowardice. If one group is actively waging war against you, and you walk away, does this embolden or frighten an enemy?
The other piece not gone over in any detail is defense contracting. Defense contractors have laid off and reduced workforces because of spending reductions that have already occurred. There is a definitive trickle down effect here, regarding tooling, manufacturing experience, and the labor that builds the parts, in that you lose all of that when you idle these shops. There are tens of thousands of small businesses that do business with the DoD as subcontractors. When the contracts dry up, so do those shops, and the knowledge that lives in them to manufacture milspec parts (we’re not talking about churning out kewpie dolls here). When the need arises for new materiel to be built, you pay an inordinate amount of start-up costs to get those shops back up to speed again. Lead times are vastly increased. Qualification of parts is ridiculously expensive.
In other words, we shoot ourselves in the foot for this predicted Asian pivot by building down our military. The long-term investment we make is worth those continuing budget costs.
This questioned seems to me to be a red herring. The proper question is, should the US taxpayers continue to foot the bill for most of the national defense of the other democracies in the world? If Britton, France , etc. started paying their own way and increased their military spending to an appropriate level, we could certainly safely reduce ours. If you think we should not go on footing the bill for these other countries, the question then becomes how do we go about getting them to start paying their own way. The problem is big government types have a vested interest playing uncle sugar.