Strategic Forum. Number 287, May 2014. Strategy and Force Planning in a Time of Austerity

On February 13, 1989, General Colin Powell, who was in a transition between National Security Advisor and Commander of U.S. Army Forces Command, addressed the reality of strategy: "All of the sophisticated talk about grand strategy is helpful, but show me your budgets and I will tell you what your strategy is." (1) What General Powell meant is that the definition of the U.S. role in the world and its strategic goals flow from budgets, not the other way around. This paper fleshes out General Powell's observation by focusing on the means part of the ends, ways, and means of strategy in order to explain how austerity affects force planning and strategy. By first examining budget reductions as a general matter, the paper describes today's austere U.S. budgetary environment. It concludes with the current strategic options that will likely characterize the contemporary discussion of strategy and force planning. Decremental Spending The defense budget system works most smoothly, of course, when budgets are growing, not shrinking. (2) In the 63 years of Department of Defense (DOD) budgets, the budget grew in 49 of those years. (3) With one year's budget providing the base from which the next year's increase takes off, increasing budgets do not demand strategic reassessments. Budget debates concentrate on where best to allocate any incremental increases. Decreasing budgets obviously are more challenging than increasing budgets. They require the articulation of a strategy, but that rarely happens, and even more rarely does strategy shape budgets. Rather, bureaucratic infighting tends to result in across-the-board, rather than tailored, budget cuts. With decremental spending, there is rarely an obvious reduction of strategic ends to guide the reduction in means. As budget expert Allen Schick explains, "Decrementalism diverges from incrementalism in at least three significant ways. Decremental budgeting is redistributive rather than distributive; it is less stable than incremental decisions; and it generates more conflict." (4) As a practical matter, budgeting in austere times is different because of the budgetary context in which decision are made. With an increasing budget, advocates of particular programs argue for increases to those programs from the overall increase to the budget. If successful, in the following year they can ask for still more funding; alternatively, programs that were not favored previously may receive additional funding in the following year's increment to compensate for smaller, earlier increases. In contrast, with a decreasing budget, a reduction that is taken in one year may not insulate a particular Service or program from continued or increased reductions in the future. Quite the contrary, if a program survived with a 10 percent cut last year, the reduced level is the new starting point for next year's budget negotiation. This places a premium on defense leaders understanding the long-term budgetary conditions as defining a reality in which, they hope, strategy can be made realistic. Strategy involves far more than budgets. But budgets consume attention. Even if the budget system could be used to make relevant cuts, political, institutional, bureaucratic, and other factors can lead to continuing obsolete weapons, forces, bases, and concepts, even though they are likely not the most effective way to accomplish the ends of grand strategy with the means available. As Carl Lieberman states, "Decrementalism tends to apply cuts broadly, but often fails to establish clear-cut priorities for reducing expenditures. Moreover, in a period of decremental spending, powerful political forces are likely to seek exemptions from proposed reductions for their preferred agencies or programs." (5) In the extreme, austerity may cause political leaders to scramble to preserve constituent interests, military officers to fight to protect pet projects, and decisionmakers to placate the demands of competing groups, leaving no one to focus on the security needs of the Nation. …