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The war in Afghanistan offers a blueprint for fighting future wars--through a mix of agility and lethality, with small groups of special forces on the ground wielding high-tech targeting devices linked to precision-guided munitions in the sky--but the military seems slow to embrace these lessons. And Congress is unlikely to challenge the Pentagon's $379 billion request for 2003. With Bush riding high and wartime patriotism still ruling Capitol Hill, few legislators want to be seen second-guessing the Pentagon, even as it proposes a $48 billion boost for next year that is larger than any other nation's total defense budget. Wartime budgets inevitably require painful sacrifice elsewhere (Bush wants to limit the increase in domestic spending to 2%), but this military-spending plan--the biggest buildup since the Reagan Administration--may be paying for the wrong war. Military budgets are always full of riddles and mysteries, but never has the Pentagon appeared so at war with itself. It is fighting a new kind of war in remarkably new ways, yet at the same time it is asking the nation to invest heavily in weapons that were created to fight old wars in old ways.
The irony is that Bush styled himself as a reformer, threatening to kill some of the Pentagon's costly "legacy" programs. In a September 1999 speech, he said the military should take advantage of the cold war's end "to skip a generation of technology" and move on to futuristic weapons without necessarily buying all those in development. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came in pledging to remake the military. "The U.S. defense establishment must be transformed to address our new circumstance," he said as he took the job for a second time. Pentagon corridors were buzzing last summer about how Rumsfeld planned to transform the military--cutting entire Army divisions, scuttling aircraft carriers, killing the F-22 Raptor and Crusader howitzer programs.
Yet with a surging budget, no hard choices are being made. The defense plan allows for some modest transformation: the Navy will spend $1 billion to convert four Trident submarines that now fire nuclear missiles into Tomahawk cruise-missile launchers. The Army will fork out $707 million to develop lighter tanks, and the Air Force will pay $629 million to accelerate development of the Global Hawk unmanned spy plane, which flies farther and higher than the Predator, surveying more terrain. The Pentagon wants $3.3 billion to speed the gathering and distribution of intelligence, and $1.3 billion to improve communications. Special forces--the heroes of Afghanistan--are scheduled to get antimissile sensors and jammers, along with four AC-130 gunships. And nearly $38 billion is earmarked for the military's growing role in homeland security. This week, for example, there are more U.S. troops patrolling the Olympics in Utah than there are in Afghanistan.