This book offers a systematic guide to the allocation of American taxpayer dollars used to provide for the common defense. With engaging and illustrative examples like the narrative of a helicopter purchase, it reveals an unexpectedly chaotic political process that produces a conversely stable aggregate defense budget. The book explores specific attempts to control or influence these turbulent funding outcomes as Congress reviews the Presidential budget request. Containing data and sources largely unavailable to researchers without access to the Department of Defense, the book should be of interest to anyone looking for a direct, current, and methodical analysis of defense budget outcomes that preserves the informal and nuanced mechanics of a political and complicated process.
The U.S. military is one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world. How it spends its money, chooses tactics, and allocates its resources have enormous implications for national defense and the economy. The Science of War is the only comprehensive textbook on how to analyze and understand these and other essential problems in modern defense policy. Michael O'Hanlon provides undergraduate and graduate students with an accessible yet rigorous introduction to the subject. Drawing on a broad range of sources and his own considerable expertise as a defense analyst and teacher, he describes the analytic techniques the military uses in every crucial area of military science. O'Hanlon explains how the military budget works, how the military assesses and deploys new technology, develops strategy and fights wars, handles the logistics of stationing and moving troops and equipment around the world, and models and evaluates battlefield outcomes. His modeling techniques have been tested in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the methods he used to predict higher-than-anticipated troop fatalities in Iraq--controversial predictions that have since been vindicated. The Science of War is the definitive resource on warfare in the twenty-first century. Gives the best introduction to defense analysis available Covers defense budgeting Shows how to model and predict outcomes in war Explains military logistics, including overseas basing Examines key issues in military technology, including missile defense, space warfare, and nuclear-weapons testing Based on the author's graduate-level courses at Princeton, Columbia, and Georgetown universities
In this book we introduce the basics of the federal budget process, provide an historical background on the foundation and development of the budget process, indicate how defense spending may be measured and how it impacts the economy, describe and analyze how Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution System (PPBES) operates and should function to produce the annual defense budget proposal to Congress, analyze the role of Congress in debating and deciding on defense appropriations and the politics of the budgetary process including the use of supplemental appropriations to fund national defense, analyze budget execution dynamics, identify the principal participants in the defense budget process in the Pentagon and military commands, assess federal and Department of Defense (DoD) financial management and business process challenges and issues, and describe the processes used to resource acquisition of defense war fighting assets, including reforms in acquisition and linkages between PPBES and the defense acquisition process.
A RAND study analyzed Chinese and U.S. military capabilities in two scenarios (Taiwan and the Spratly Islands) from 1996 to 2017, finding that trends in most, but not all, areas run strongly against the United States. While U.S. aggregate power remains greater than China’s, distance and geography affect outcomes. China is capable of challenging U.S. military dominance on its immediate periphery—and its reach is likely to grow in the years ahead.
A myth from the colonial period was that Americans could defend themselves by keeping a rifle in the closet and when needed, grab it, and march off to battle in times of crisis. Unfortunately, providing national defense is more complicated that that; indeed it was more complicated even during the Revolutionary war. General George Washington’s struggles to form a standing army supported by workable logistics and supply processes and to get funding for both from the Revolutionary Congress are well documented. Financing national defense requires planning and resourcing in advance. Reacting at the instant of crisis is too late. Building an educated, highly trained and capable Armed Forces and the acquisition of defense weapons and weapons systems has long lead times and involves making decisions the consequences of which are likely to last for decades. These decisions include how to recruit and retain military and civilian personnel as well as designing, buying and fielding a vast array of ground weapons, ships, aircraft and other weaponry. A decision to buy a major defense weapons system for example sets in motion a chain of other decisions that will affect the U.S., its allies and enemies around the world. Implementation of such decisions is financed through the U.S. federal government and Department of Defense budget processes in a planned yet highly and pluralistic and disaggregated system for determining how to advocate, acquire and allocate scarce resources in a manner that culminates in congressional and presidential approval. In this book we examine the concepts and practices of defense financing, provide a detailed description and analysis of resource policy decision making, financial management and budget execution processes, and analyze the most significant features of the national defense and U.S. federal government resource decision and management system. The book assesses the numerous factors, including those that characterize the complex budget review and appropriation decision making dynamics of Congress, that make U.S. defense finance and budgeting different from any other system in the world. In addition, in a concluding chapter the book compares U.S. defense policy and budgeting to other nations in different regions of the globe, drawing conclusions about the effects of U.S. defense policy and defense financing abroad in regions including Europe, Russia, the Middle-East and Asia.
"Russia's recent aggression against Ukraine has disrupted nearly a generation of relative peace and stability between Moscow and its Western neighbors and raised concerns about its larger intentions. From the perspective of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the threat to the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- former Soviet republics, now member states that border Russian territory -- may be the most problematic of these. In a series of war games conducted between summer 2014 and spring 2015, RAND Arroyo Center examined the shape and probable outcome of a near-term Russian invasion of the Baltic states. The games' findings are unambiguous: As presently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members. Fortunately, it will not require Herculean effort to avoid such a failure. Further gaming indicates that a force of about seven brigades, including three heavy armored brigades -- adequately supported by airpower, land-based fires, and other enablers on the ground and ready to fight at the onset of hostilities -- could suffice to prevent the rapid overrun of the Baltic states"--Publisher's web site.
U.S. defense spending isn’t excessive and, in fact, should continue to grow because it’s both affordable and necessary in today's challenging world. The United States spends a lot of money on defense—$607 billion in the current fiscal year. But Brookings national security scholar Michael O'Hanlon argues that is roughly the right amount given the overall size of the national economy and continuing U.S. responsibilities around the world. If anything, he says spending should increase modestly under the next president, remaining near 3 percent of gross domestic product. Recommendations in this book differ from the president's budget plan in two key ways. First, the author sees a mismatch in the Pentagon’s current plans between ends and means. The country needs to spend enough money to carry out its military missions and commitments. Second, O'Hanlon recommends dropping a plan to cut the size of the Army from the current 475,000 active-duty soldiers to 450,000. The U.S. national defense budget is entirely affordable—relative to the size of the economy, relative to past levels of effort by this country in the national security domain, and relative, especially, to the costs of failing to uphold a stable international order. Even at a modestly higher price, it will be the best $650 billion bargain going, and a worthy investment in this country’s security and its long-term national power.
" U.S. defense spending isn't excessive and, in fact, should continue to grow because it's both affordable and necessary in today's challenging world. The United States spends a lot of money on defense--$607 billion in the current fiscal year. But Brookings national security scholar Michael O'Hanlon argues that is roughly the right amount given the overall size of the national economy and continuing U.S. responsibilities around the world. If anything, he says spending should increase modestly under the next president, remaining near 3 percent of gross domestic product. Recommendations in this book differ from the president's budget plan in two key ways. First, the author sees a mismatch in the Pentagon's current plans between ends and means. The country needs to spend enough money to carry out its military missions and commitments. Second, O'Hanlon recommends dropping a plan to cut the size of the Army from the current 475,000 active-duty soldiers to 450,000. The U.S. national defense budget is entirely affordable--relative to the size of the economy, relative to past levels of effort by this country in the national security domain, and relative, especially, to the costs of failing to uphold a stable international order. Even at a modestly higher price, it will be the best $650 billion bargain going, and a worthy investment in this country's security and its long-term national power."
The federal government wastes your tax dollars worse than a drunken sailor on shore leave. The 1984 Grace Commission uncovered that the Department of Defense spent $640 for a toilet seat and $436 for a hammer. Twenty years later things weren't much better. In 2004, Congress spent a record-breaking $22.9 billion dollars of your money on 10,656 of their pork-barrel projects. The war on terror has a lot to do with the record $413 billion in deficit spending, but it's also the result of pork over the last 18 years the likes of: - $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa - $102 million to study screwworms which were long ago eradicated from American soil - $273,000 to combat goth culture in Missouri - $2.2 million to renovate the North Pole (Lucky for Santa!) - $50,000 for a tattoo removal program in California - $1 million for ornamental fish research Funny in some instances and jaw-droppingly stupid and wasteful in others, The Pig Book proves one thing about Capitol Hill: pork is king!
