The most significant problem in our future deficits and debts will not be defense, but the most inaptly termed “entitlements”. Defense is but 5 percent of our GDP. Entitlements are 10 percent and growing quickly. The most difficult of these entitlements to deal with will be Medicare. It is not only politically difficult, but is also tied in with the complexities of the costs and benefits of our obviously declining healthcare system (based on outcomes for each dollar spent). Social Security can be dealt with by either cutting back on benefits to some age or income groups or by increasing the age at which one can draw down benefits. Of course, these are difficult issues and most people still think that it is their right to draw on these benefits because they had a pile of money taken out of their paychecks over their working lives. That is so, but the number of workers per Social Security recipient and Medicare recipient is far less than it was just a few decades ago and this is expected to drop even more so. So the numbers just will not add up. We either get to the tough and emotional issues involved in making a more sustainable entitlements system or we raise taxes to the 60-80 percent brackets to pay for them within the next few decades. And that will slam the economy, which will increase deficits, which will increase debt. Even if we cut DOD by 25-50 percent it will just be a drop in the bucket compared to what we are looking at for the explosion of entitlement expenditures going to 2040. If we cut the measly State and USAID budgets by 25-50 percent then this would be “palm dust” compared to entitlements in the coming decades. We would also likely end up cutting the wrong things in DOD, State and USAID and jeopardize many important programs that actually do some net good for national and international security, health, education, diplomacy and all the sort of things the Tea Party folks either know nothing about or think are useless. Surely we have made mistakes, but we should not throw out the better programs that do some good whilst trying to pare the budget.

As a nation we need to have a serious discussion about what our priorities are. If we don’t then we might not have the chance to have certain priorities given how fiscally desperate things will become.

My recent writings on these issues for The World Policy Institute and Al-Arabiya, one of the top Arab News Channels can be found at these links:

http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2011/08/10/crushing-debt-and-us-foreign-policy

http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/06/20/153996.html

http://english.alarabiya.net/views/2011/07/27/159660.html

http://english.alarabiya.net/views/2011/08/02/160436.html?PHPSESSID=j85eicbtnbpt6gtmh7od54knk0

http://english.alarabiya.net/save_pdf.php?cont_id=160279

http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/07/31/160148.html

http://english.alarabiya.net/views/2011/07/29/159842.html

(Oh, yes, all ideas in everything I write do not reflect those of the National Defense University of the US Government or any other entity I may be related to.)

Where will the defense budget go? That is a tough trade off to make. Do we greatly raise taxes or do we cut back on entitlement or do we watch our debt grow and our credit rating go to even lower levels or…. do we make up and make the hard choices for the sake of the present and future generations of the country?

If dysfunction continues to be the rule of the day in leadership then get ready for your children, grandchildren and beyond to have a much lower standard of living and a more insecure world.

Dysfunctional leadership is so costly in so many ways.

I am so tired of those who define their interests by their party or ideology. We need to deal with realities as they are and for the sake of the country, not party, not ideology, and not self interest.

Until our leadership does that this country will weaken and weaken until its influence and importance in the world is a mere shadow of what it once was.

We could also see this country in its financial woes curling up into itself towards a position of insularity and isolationism that will be truly self defeating.

I cannot thank Professor Adams enough for explaining that there really is no problem in resources for the armed forces and the country and that business will be conducted as usual in the think tanks, lobbying groups and defense bureaucracy.

I don't expect a sequester to ever happen. I, like Claude Rains, am "shocked" to discover there is politics going on in this place. This debt deal bought another four months of wrangling, to be followed by the next debt ceiling increase and more wrangling, to be followed by the next Obama budget request and more wrangling, to be followed, oddly enough, by a national vote, in which the wrangling will feature.

If the commission fails to agree, there will be a sequester, but not until January 2013, at which point the electoral dust will have settled, and the parties left standing will either wrangle some more or craft a different deal.

Sequesters are a terrible way to run any department of government, including defense. But 1) defense is not sacrosanct from resource constraints, never has been, despite the piteous cries that our national security has no price; it always comes with a price. As Bernard Brodie put it in 1959, "strategy wears a dollar sign."

2) A planned reduction of $1 trillion in DOD's projected resources over the next ten years is 15% of the Department's budget projection. It is eminently manageable. For comparison (but, caveat emptor, not apples to apples), actual defense spending went down 36% between FY 1985 and FY 1998, and the force left behind was still the only global force, took down Saddam Hussein in a short time. The same would be true if we went the full trillion this time.

3) $350 billion is easy; give DOD inflation growth for the next ten years; job done and no loss of buying power. A real build-down would take the funds down about 1% per year, and be manageable.

4) Maybe the first stage of the agreement is more of a build-down than we think. Depends on the baseline one is measuring from. Jack Lew wrote on the White House blog l;ast week that the agreement is about $500 billion below current DOD projections over ten years; and $350 b. compared to the CBO baseline, which is lower.

6) Republicans are not the bulwark of defense budgets; every build-down until now, starting with Korea, was engineered by a Republican president - Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush I. There has always been a strong fiscal wing of the party that sought discipline across all federal operations; they become stronger in times of deficit and fiscal crisis.

The GOP’s “strong on defense” brand is mainly a myth. Even before the Vietnam buildup, John Kennedy increased defense spending by 15 percent in real terms over the budget he inherited from Eisenhower. Jimmy Carter increased defense spending by 11 percent over the budget he inherited from the Nixon-Ford administration. Bill Clinton actually spent more on defense than Bush 41 had projected on leaving office. And since the end of the George W. Bush administration, the baseline defense budget has continued to increase in real terms under Obama. For example, in early 2008, the last budget of the Bush administration, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates projected that for FY 2012, the baseline defense budget would be $544 billion. In FY 2012, Gates, who remained in office under Obama, requested $553 billion.

In fact, the major reductions in defense since World War II have all been done by Republicans. Eisenhower reduced defense spending in real terms by 27 percent; Nixon by 29 percent, and Reagan II and Bush I by 25 percent. Clinton actually left office with a budget that was only five percent lower than the budget he inherited from George H. W. Bush.

Nonetheless, the myth has persisted, and Democrats continue to fear making significant reductions in defense or voting for large proposed reductions. The recent example is new Secretary of Defense Panetta’s apocalyptic warnings about what might happen to our security if sequestration kicks in and the department of defense has to find up to $900 billion in reductions over the next decade. His warning ignores the fact that this number is similar to the amount proposed by the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission, the bipartisan Gang of Six, and Republican Senator Tom Coburn. Moreover, such a reduction would leave defense with some $6.7 trillion to spend over the next decade, exclusive of war costs, and return defense not to the Clinton, Eisenhower, or Nixon eras but to 2007, the next to last year of the Bush 43 era.

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (about $4 trillion) and the doubling of the regular defense budget over the last decade have played a large part in turning a budget surplus into a massive deficit, which Admiral Mullen has called the greatest threat to our national security. If Republicans truly want to be “strong on defense,” they will support reducing the defense budget to more sustainable levels, a move that would be applauded by Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and the first president Bush.

I like the thing about the "6 MRAPS" on every VFW lawn." In front of the AMTRAK station in Alexandria, Virginia stands the WWI Memorial, a tall granite cross, an obvious violation of the principle of separation of church and state. Until a few years ago there stood beside it a cute little Renault tank from that war. Children crawled over it. Tourists (for some odd reason) posed beside it, etc. Then one tragic day it was gone. There was an outcry! In response the city mothers (mayoress and city manageress) announced that the constant spectacle of the glorification of this instrument of death was "bad for the children" and for that reason and the genaral ugliness of the object it had been returned to "the authorities" who had sent it to a VFW Post in West (by god) Virginia.

Does this anecdote betray a lack of seriousnes with regard to the question of the week? Yes, it does.

There is no money!! We cannot afford to pretend any longer to be the heartland of an unacknowledged ecumenical empire devoted to the welfare of "the children," or "the women," or whatever.

Eisenhower's M-I complex is shieking with fear at the prospect of a massive defense retrenchment and the reduced foreign policy goals that will accompany them.

Me too! Congress contains people who think it would be an acceptable thing for the government to renege on the pay and beneits used to lure people into long service.

Why not, they reason, recruiting has not been a problem.

I still want the tank back

A good organization can identify all of its key interests and resolve discrepancies between all of its interests or goals. The Tea Party wing of American politics --- the Washington Post months ago said that 30 percent of Tea Party people self-identify as democrats --- has not identified all of its important interests and so runs the risk of deficit demagoguery and inadvertently proposing harm to national defense. This is not a huge problem because there are countervailing economic problems, like unemployment, which will balance the urge to savage the national budget. The leaders of the Republican Party will not defense go down the tube. If they were tempted to, democrats like SEN Jack Reed of Rhode Island will hold them in check. The President and his staff will help. They have generally done well on defense issues and on the war in Afghanistan.

At this moment in the life of our country, on the heels of a great market correction, we all need to exhale. We are nowhere near as dumb as S&P made us out to be, nor is our debt to GDP ratio outlandish or un-fixable. Let's all keep our heads and find the sweet spot to balance all of our critical interests and goals, including those that have to do with national defense.

Point 2, second sentence should read:

There is neither the talent, the will nor the sense of public interest within the nation's security establishment as currently populated (which includes the White House and OMB) to do this on an honest and rigorous basis. "

While I agree with much of what Sydney has said below, I do not credit Tea Party Republicans--most any post-Ronald Reagan Republicans--with "consistency."

A conservative Republican at the time (a family tradition), I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Aside from habit, I was profoundly motivated by the mounting debt rung up by the Carter Administration. Unfortunately, amidst the stress and overtime of being the lead State/INR intelligence analyst covering the new Iraq-Iran War, I hadn't taken seriously enough Republican rhetoric about so-called "supply side economics." Not only did the new Republican conservatives believe tax cuts would greatly stimulate the economy (which they did at a time of recession in 1981-1982), but they plunged the US into the largest deficits since WWII--in fact, the first time the US had run annual fiscal deficits of that magnitude without either a major war or a full-blown depression. If that wasn't enough, when the country emerged from its early 1980's recession (and despite the fact that the new economic approach did not bring forth from the economy a corresponding leap in Federal revenue to bring down these deficits), those fiscally damaging tax cuts were not reeled in--nor was spending on various expensive sacred cows across the political spectrum reduced meaningfully. This pattern of fiscal self-destruction would remain in place for the next 30 years. So within 2 years, I shifted from Republican to Independent, where I have been ever since, simply voting for candidates who seemed to make the most sense--many going down to defeat.

Consequently, by the late 1980's--I began anticipating a major fiscal crisis at some point down the line. And, for the most part, we are there now because conservative Republicans have been inconsistent, not the reverse. In other words, the only thing more dangerous to our economic health during much of 1981-2010 than the proverbial "tax and spend" Democrats were what might well be called "don't tax, but spend anyway" Republicans. So I ask Tea Party Republicans where they've been for the past 30-odd years. The answer in many cases is basking in the eventually unsustainable prosperty of both lower taxes and a variety of increasingly expensive Federal programs.

In response to the issue raised originally by James Kitfield, at this point in the progressive deterioration of the American fiscal situation--at the Federal level (but also among most state and local governments)--the question of defense hawks may well be moot. Quite frankly, the US has reached such a critical fiscal crossroads that one wonders whether it now will be able to sustain its capability to fund the level of modern power projection to which it has become accustomed (not to mention current levels of domestic infrustructure, education, law enforcement, and other vital areas of public interest).

Caution should be our watchword in speculating about significant cuts in the defense budget anytime soon. History counsels against anticipating that the latest wave of austerity will breach the seawall that protects the Pentagon from bouts of intemperate political weather. There are 3 reasons for this.

1. The DOD is not just any Executive Branch department. It is the keystone of an Iron Triangle whose other vectors are the vested defense contractors and legislators whose districts and campaign chests both are kept well filled by Pentagon largesse.

2. Assessing tangible defense depends on a frank strategic appraisal of threats and response capability. Always difficult to do, it has become impossible in today's climate. There is neither the talent, the will nor the calculated interest within the nation's security establishment (which includes the White House and OMB) to do this on an honest and rigorous basis. Too many careers, bank accounts and pet ideas would be put at risk. As a consequence, there are no yardsticks for measuring what is needed to perform what missions for what purpose and how.

3. Intellectual disarray opens the way for purveyors of fear to use catch phrases to sow anxiety and to put on the defensive anyone who- might even contemplate asking the questions of 'why?' and 'how much is enough?' We still live in the brooding atmosphere of the post-9/11 era. The magic words terrorism, al-Qaeda, WMD and now Iran need only to be broadcast in somber tones for the Pavolovian fear response to register from sea to shining sea. Add to this host of ghouls China - the now omnipresent, lurking menace to America's fulfilling its Providential destiny to lead the world's tribes into the land of milk, honey and abundant consulting contracts. Leon Panetta put on his grimest face to trot out that time dishonored ploy a few days back. Barack Obama, too, always has it at the ready to rivet the attention of potential campaign contributors - most effective when deployed in combination with ringing declarations of support for Israel, the indispensable American leadership in the global fight for freedom, the obligation to leave the world a better place for our (soon to be impoverished) children, and to earn the Lord's blessing.

So don't count the savings until this logic shows signs of eroding.

I can’t stand the Tea Party, but I give them points for consistency. There’s always been a bizarre bifurcation in the Reagan Republican mind that all government programs are a waste of money and should be cut, except for the military, which in this worldview miraculously avoids the problems of waste, fraud, abuse, and bureaucracy that afflict, say, Food Stamps or Head Start. (There used to be an equal-and-opposite irrationality on the Democratic left, namely that all government programs are great and should be preserved from cuts, except for the military, but for good or ill there isn’t much of a Left left).

The Republicans’ newfound willingness to address the defense budget is frankly sensible in the context of our ongoing economic mess. Defense spending deserves at least as hard a look as domestic programs do. And after a decade of increasingly unpopular wars which most people only want to end, I think that even conservative voters are more willing than ever to take that hard look.

That said, the real drivers of the deficit are entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security), the sacred cows of the left, and tax cuts (which mostly benefit the very rich), the sacred cows of the right. Each side has so thoroughly demagogued the other on these issues– “Republicans want to kill your Medicare!” “Democrats want to raise taxes on people like you!” – that neither feels safe to compromise. Unless they do, though, even devastating cuts in defense spending won’t do more than dent the deficit.

I forecast aircraft markets for a living. If there's one accepted guideline I've followed for the past 25 years, it's that Republicans are strong on defense, and that's good for military aircraft procurement. But that's changed radically. The Obama defense budgets have been as high, and often higher, than the George W. Bush budgets. Meanwhile, much of the Tea Party crowd argues that spending cuts are necessary. Some of them think defense spending should be protected from this (although they won't say how much), but many don't.

You've got a real schism between defense hawks and budget hawks. Traditional Republicans like John McCain are quite critical of the latter group's attitudes towards defense, but the recent debt ceiling compromise makes it clear that the budget hawks have a lot of leverage. The overall impression is that the Tea Party tail is starting to wag the Republican party dog.

It's going to take a while for the new reality to sink in. I meet people in the defense industry who loathe Obama for being weak on defense, and then proceed to praise the latest Tea Party flavor of the moment. That represents either ideological inertia or mere cognitive dissonance.

Another complication that nobody, least of all the budget hawks, wants to recognize: we skipped an up-cycle. The run-up in defense spending over the past decade funded lots of equipment that's good for hunting lightly armed insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, but largely useless for a global military presence. Fixed-wing combat and transport aircraft, ships, and other traditional tools of superpower dominance didn't do so well, and existing fleets were worn out at a faster than expected pace. Body armor, light vehicles, anti-IED equipment, and the basic needs of warfighting and "nation building" got the lion's share of the budget. If the US does have a confrontation with a near-peer adversary in ten years time, that potential enemy will be highly unimpressed with the US's COIN-oriented arsenal.

So, if the Budget Hawks prevail, the US military will either be a shrunken force, a hollow force, or both. But thanks to the last ten years, every VFW hall in the country will have half a dozen MRAPs on its lawn.