US budget: Focus on strategy, not numbers

It’s May 28, and the Biden administration is scheduled to release more details about its spending requests to Congress. Foremost among the list of items is the defense budget, which is set to compose roughly 50 percent of the U.S. government’s discretionary spending in fiscal 2022. President Joe Biden’s $753 billion defense spending request , including $715 billion for the Pentagon, represents a nearly 1.7 percent increase from the previous year. Senior Defense Department officials have made it clear that a large portion of the defense budget will be devoted to great power competition , principally on countering China’s growing military capabilities.

Like most defense budgets at the time of release, the White House is sure to receive a significant amount of pushback from lawmakers who believe a 1.7 percent hike is too small. Others, including dozens of progressives in the House, oppose the budget request due to its overzealous size and are advocating for a $50 billion decrease. But as important as these concerns are, the debate over the U.S. defense budget is not simply a battle over dollars and cents. Focusing exclusively on the numbers to the exclusion of strategy is akin to missing the forest for the trees.

Budget season is the perfect opportunity for the stakeholders in Washington to review U.S. grand strategy as a whole — what the United States seeks to achieve, which missions it should eliminate or pass onto allies and partners, and whether the U.S. force posture as it now exists is actually serving core U.S. security interests.

According to the Pentagon’s own statistics , over 226,000 U.S. service members are stationed in dozens of countries around the world performing a litany of tasks, from active combat to training programs, surveillance missions and other forms of host-nation support. U.S. military personnel are spread out over as many as 800 base sites around the world. The Overseas Base and Realignment Closure Coalition estimates that 80-90 percent of the world’s total foreign military bases are U.S.-owned and operated. None of this begins to account for the constant rotation of warships, vessels and aircraft carriers the U.S. Navy operates on a daily basis, some of which have been at sea for such a long period of time that maintenance and repair are desperately required .

Some of this overstretch can be explained by the usual wear and tear of overseas deployments. A good portion of the problem, however, is more systemic: the ingrained tendency in U.S. policy circles to do as much as possible for as long as possible, in as many locations as possible. Despite a budding movement toward realism and restraint in Washington, U.S. foreign policy is still very much dominated by a reflexive activism, where wading into overseas disputes regardless of their strategic significance is seen as an example of U.S. global leadership.

However, what is often dubbed leadership is in reality a shorthand justification to saddle the U.S. military with missions that are duplicative, expensive and entirely tertiary to core U.S. national security interests. Whether it’s a perpetual training and advising mission in Iraq, maintaining a questionable force presence in northeastern Syria, adding more U.S. troops to the already bloated U.S. military posture in Germany or wearing out the U.S. Navy with symbolic freedom of navigation operations , U.S. policymakers are forcing the U.S. military to expend precious resources that could otherwise be conserved for major contingencies in the future.

The U.S. military, to put it bluntly, is doing too much when it should be reassessing its current roster of obligations, preserving limited resources, and ensuring Washington doesn’t get embroiled in the local civil wars and disputes that trap U.S. soldiers into indefinite deployments and permanent security commitments.

As it relates to the U.S. defense budget, Washington has two fundamental choices: It can go down the usual road and replay the same game, where stakeholders in the White House, Congress and the Pentagon battle over how many F-35s should be purchased or how much taxpayer money should be invested in this or that service component. Or it can do what hasn’t been done since the Cold War ended — take a good, hard, honest look at whether U.S. grand strategy is being overwhelmed by tasks that either have a marginal return or have in fact ended.

That means recognizing when U.S. counterterrorism objectives have been accomplished ; cutting the cord on training missions in Iraq, Syria and Africa that are circuitous and don’t have an end date; downgrading the U.S. force posture in the Middle East; and incentivizing a wealthy Europe to take primary responsibility for its own defense . The U.S. should also elevate diplomacy as the core tool of foreign policy again and become more pragmatic in terms of when Washington engages its competitors and adversaries.

Ideally, strategy guides budgets. No amount of defense dollars can compensate for a faulty U.S. strategy.

Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist at Newsweek.

今天是5月28日，拜登政府计划向国会公布更多支出申请的细节。其中最引人注目的是国防预算，预计该预算将占美国政府2022财年可自由支配支出的约50%。拜登总统提出的7530亿美元国防预算申请，其中包括五角大楼的7150亿美元，比上一年增长近1.7%。国防部高级官员已明确表示，国防预算的很大一部分将用于应对大国竞争，主要目的是遏制中国日益增长的军事能力。

与以往大多数国防预算案一样，白宫此次公布的预算案势必会遭到议员们的强烈反对，他们认为1.7%的增幅太小。另一些人，包括众议院数十位进步派议员，则反对这项预算案，认为其规模过大，并主张削减500亿美元。然而，尽管这些担忧至关重要，但围绕美国国防预算的争论并非仅仅是金钱之争。如果只关注数字而忽略战略，就好比只见树木不见森林。

预算季是华盛顿各利益相关方全面审视美国大战略的绝佳机会——美国寻求实现的目标，应该取消哪些任务或将其移交给盟友和伙伴，以及美国目前的兵力部署是否真正服务于美国的核心安全利益。

根据五角大楼自身的统计数据，超过22.6万名美军人员驻扎在全球数十个国家，执行着从作战行动到训练项目、监视任务以及其他形式的驻在国支持等一系列任务。美军人员分布在全球多达800个军事基地。海外基地调整与关闭联盟估计，全球80%至90%的海外军事基地由美国拥有和运营。以上数据还未涵盖美国海军每日频繁轮换的军舰、舰艇和航空母舰，其中一些舰艇已在海上航行多年，亟需维护和修理。

部分过度扩张可归因于海外部署带来的正常损耗。然而，问题的根源在于体制层面：美国政策圈根深蒂固的倾向是尽可能在尽可能多的地点、尽可能长时间地开展尽可能多的行动。尽管华盛顿出现了一股务实和克制的风潮，但美国外交政策仍然深受一种本能式行动主义的影响，在这种模式下，不顾战略意义地介入海外争端被视为美国全球领导力的体现。

然而，所谓“领导力”实际上只是美国政府为让美军承担重复、昂贵且与美国核心国家安全利益完全无关的任务而找的借口。无论是持续在伊拉克开展训练和咨询任务，在叙利亚东北部维持令人质疑的兵力存在，在德国向本已臃肿的美军增派兵力，还是通过象征性的航行自由行动耗尽美国海军的资源，美国决策者都在迫使美军消耗原本可以用于未来重大突发事件的宝贵资源。

坦率地说，美国军方做得太多了，它应该重新评估其当前的义务清单，节约有限的资源，并确保华盛顿不会卷入当地的内战和争端，这些内战和争端会使美国士兵陷入无限期的部署和永久的安全承诺中。

就美国国防预算而言，华盛顿面临两个根本选择：要么重蹈覆辙，再次上演同样的戏码，让白宫、国会和五角大楼的利益相关者就F-35战机的采购数量或纳税人的钱应该投入到哪个军种部门争论不休；要么就做冷战结束后从未有人做过的事——认真、冷静、诚实地审视一下，美国的宏观战略是否被那些收益甚微或实际上已经结束的任务所占据。

这意味着要承认美国反恐目标何时达成；终止在伊拉克、叙利亚和非洲那些迂回曲折且没有结束日期的训练任务；降低美国在中东的军事部署；并激励富裕的欧洲承担起自身防务的主要责任。美国还应重新将外交提升为外交政策的核心工具，并在与竞争对手和敌对势力接触时采取更加务实的态度。

理想情况下，战略应指导预算。再多的国防开支也无法弥补美国战略的错误。

丹尼尔·德佩特里斯是国防优先事项研究员，也是《新闻周刊》的外交事务专栏作家。