(General Martin Dempsey, CJCS, talks to reporters about that boring budget crap. Photo ABC).

We are at the point where we really ought to get a cup of Starbucks and talk about where we are going. I am deliberately staying away from talking about the health care thing, except to note that it clearly is going to be more expensive than it was proposed to be, and it going to squeeze other things pretty hard in a zero-sum budget universe.

The conversation ought to be about what it is we are willing to pay for, and of course who is going to pay for it, and then move to make rational decisions about re-structuring the government to enable it to continue to function.

I don’t know if we need the sort of military structure and intelligence community we have, but we are not even going to have a rational chat about what it is we ought to be able to do, if necessary.

I talked to an old friend over the weekend who is still in the harness of Government. He had just finished reading the Mark-Up Bill of the Intelligence Authorization. Without delving into specifics, it is reportedly not pretty for my former employers and customers.

In fact, it is starting to look like a cascade of woe. The contractors will be the first to feel it as money dries up. The industry is already quivering in anticipation, and not in a good way. Then the waves of pain will spread through the government, as programs and capabilities are put on the block, one by one.

I think the argument is completely valid that the Intelligence Community over-expanded during the last decade, and probably ought to be scaled back. Several of my friends are of the opinion that the field is too crowded with Offices and Agencies and some could be eliminated, which would render substantial savings and the harvest of resources would keep the rest of the Community could be kept above water.

I went to this movie as a middling-grade officer as we harvested the “savings” of the Cold War to offer back to the Congress for them to apply to other things they deemed more important.

There were many capabilities, many redundancies that were built into the system. They were completely intentional. I was always a believer in the notion that redundancy in combat systems is no vice. After all, we were supposed to be able to continue to function in the post-attack world where millions of us would be dead.

We salami sliced our way through the thirty percent reduction the Congress imperiously demanded. That is a process where every line item is subject to the same percentage reduction, which along the way, means whatever is left of some of the projects is not enough to do whatever it was they were intended to do.

Smart reduction requires sharp, vertical cuts that protect what is really important, and discards those that are not.

That is much harder to do than say, and usually the system will blunder its way through arbitrary reductions to everything. That is about as dumb a way to do business as it is possible to imagine. It is sort of like a DoD budget that magically apportions resources in rough thirds to Army, Navy and Air Force.

Dumb as Sequestration, you know? That was supposed to be so intentionally stupid that no one would allow it to happen. It is, of course.

One of the agency Chief Financial Officers, a great lady I worked with when she was at the Office of Management and Budget, summed things up in the context of sequestration and punitive cuts: FY-15 is going to be “a bleak year.” The mark-up will doubtless exacerbate the situation.

As of this morning, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, was quoted as praising the unbelievable sacrifices made by our kids in uniform over the last dozen years, and then moved on to decry the percentage of the total budget allocated to personnel issues.

It is projected to increase from half to 60%. We are supposed to be shocked by this, since it would naturally impact the precious pet rocks of the Service acquisition officials. The ships, aircraft, vehicles and sensors all have distinct and vocal constituencies, while the kids who carry the rifles do not.

I remember a time after the Soviets collapsed where one load of ammunition made two ships magically fully combat ready. It was dishonest and absurd, but that is the road we are headed down. The the overall DoD is a bigger mess than the Intelligence Community. It is unable to control costs and unable to downsize smartly.

My pal thinks capabilities will decay until the inevitable next military shock, after which we’ll throw money at the problem. It’s the American way.

Remember 9/11?

Anyway, things will get petty and nasty in the budget wars. My pal said that at one point the word “punitive” was used to describe the cuts the Congress was demanding.

I have been in the middle of one of those before. It was the mid-1990s. I was working for the office of legislative affairs in the Pentagon. There was a battle of wills being waged between one particularly strong-willed Admiral and a particularly hard-headed staffer in the senate. The Admiral wanted to continue to do some things he thought were vital to the nation’s security, while the Staffer believed they were not, and the money could be better spent elsewhere.

The result was a Mark-Up that slashed the budget line for groundskeepers at the intelligence complex over in Maryland, and a rich crop of uncut grass growing up around the headquarters.

Defying enraged budgeteers is never a good idea. In the end, the reductions that are coming will render the DoD and the intelligence folks less capable, and they will do it in a way that prevents the institutions from making reductions in a way that lessens- not minimizes- risk.

Some of my more acerbic correspondents have said it before: it is long past time that Washington experienced some of the pain that the rest of the country has endured since 2008. I take their point, and support smart reductions where they make sense.

I think we are on the way to a nuclear Iran and an impatient China, eager to expand its suzerainty. Throw in an intransigent Russia and a restive south Asia and we could very well have our hands full.

It has been fifty years since Lyndon Johnson told us we could afford guns and butter during the Vietnam War.

We may now be on a road to the place where we can afford neither.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303