Gates’s Defense Budget and the Past of Warfare

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s proposed new defense budget is the result of a rising awareness of the irrelevance of traditional warfare in the face of September 11 and, more recently, the threat of Somalian piracy. While this fundamental readjustment is long overdue, there seems to be a potentially misleading public sentiment that these cuts represent merely a reigning in of military spending on unnecessary, wasteful and impractical projects more suited to the Cold War or the pages of science fiction novels (for a humorous representation of this view, check out this Daily Show coverage).

I would argue that a more accurate assessment of Gates’s defense budget is that it represents an over-extended military shifting resources to the most pressing defense needs, at the cost of other important military programs. A prime example is the cancellation of the Air Force’s next generation F-22 fighter. The March 2009 Atlantic reported:

“American air superiority has been so complete for so long that we take it for granted. For more than half a century, we’ve made only rare use of the aerial-combat skills of a man like Cesar Rodriguez, who retired two years ago with more air-to-air kills than any other active-duty fighter pilot. But our technological edge is eroding—Russia, China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan all now fly fighter jets with capabilities equal or superior to those of the F-15, the backbone of American air power since the Carter era. Now we have a choice. We can stock the Air Force with the expensive, cutting-edge F22—maintaining our technological superiority at great expense to our Treasury. Or we can go back to a time when the cost of air supremacy was paid in the blood of men like Rodriguez.

In cutting F-22 production, Gates has made this choice of more resources for the future of warfare over resources for a more traditional arena of warfare. This choice is necessary, but does not come without costs. The F-22 may represent the past of warfare, but we have not left this past behind forever – a fact that may be manifested in American blood.