Wars, Weapons, and Warnings
And so it begins. Obama hit the ground running the day after the election with his first Pentagon briefing. Via Reuters:
President-elect Barack Obama will quickly face big decisions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the United States undergoes its first wartime change of administration since the Vietnam era.
The commander-in-chief of the world’s only military superpower will also have to grapple with other major national security issues, such as Iran’s nuclear program and militancy and instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan.Faced with such a major transition at such a sensitive time, the Pentagon says it has made unprecedented efforts to ensure a smooth handover to the next administration.
“This is the first wartime transition since 1968, the Johnson-Nixon turnover during the Vietnam War,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said on Tuesday.
Of course, it isn’t as if Obama hasn’t prepared himself for the enormous task ahead. Back in June, heassembled a stellar national security advisory team; the thirteen members include former Secretaries of State Madeline Albright and Warren Christopher, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig, who is leading the team.
Inside Defense fills in many of the blanks in a lengthy subscription-only article. We are looking at, yes, a lot of change:
The Obama transition team, according to a briefing paper prepared for the campaign’s national security advisory team, may consider a number of organizational changes to the Defense Department’s civilian leadership that signal a break with priorities of the last eight years and point to the ascendancy of new issues that will affect defense strategy.
The incoming administration, according to the paper, may retool the intelligence under secretary office established by Donald Rumsfeld; create a new high-level energy security post; and divide the substantial portfolio of the assistant secretary for special operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities.
It will also mull cuts to high-profile weapon systems, the paper states, naming three: national missile defense, the Airborne Laser and the Army’s Future Combat Systems program.
I like it. Creating an energy security post would make campaign rhetoric reality. In fact, Obama has literally been saying “energy security is national security” for over two years.
Now, about cutting funding to national missile defense: bravo. Let’s turn to Lt. Gen. Robert Gard (yes, the same guy who’s been posting here at dailyKos, as part of Vets for Obama). He’s been talking about missile defense for a while now, and his latest analysis came out about three weeks ago.
Despite the Bush administration’s investment of an estimated $60 billion since 2001, U.S. national missile defense continues to be an unnecessary and counterproductive enterprise. Testing objectives consistently are not met, cost overruns and scheduling delays are rampant, and relations between the United States and Russia are worse than at any time since the end of the Cold War, thanks in no small part to squabbling over the proposed third missile defense site in Europe.
He recommends three basic changes. Please click the link above for the details; basically, shift spending to systems countering existing threats, dissolve the Missile Defense Agency, and “spend political capital” on diplomacy.
This year was the 25th anniversary of Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, a bottomless pit of defense spending that further worsened our relations with Russia. We do not need to repeat that; funding a defense program that is plagued with problems and is only serving to escalate animosity between the US and Russia is simply not prudent. To be perfectly blunt, Obama should heed Gard’s advice and not go forwardwith the missile defense shield as it has been planned in Europe.
The airborne laser is a proposed part of the national missile defense shield. As of last year, the program had still – quite literally - not gotten off the ground. Testing in which a laser is fired from a plane at a missile has been put off until 2009, and Congress has already decreased its funding.
The Inside Defense article goes into some depth regarding funding of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars:
The paper also notes a goal long championed by many Democrats in Congress, including Obama, of consolidating all military spending into a single appropriations request.
“[When] will it be possible to transition off of supplemental funding for DOD?” asks the paper.“No ’smoke and mirror’ budgeting.”
“No supplementals,” the briefing paper states, referring to the Bush administration practice of relying on supplemental appropriations to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Adm. Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, agrees, although he and Obama have other major differences regarding management of the wars themselves.
The paper also mentions “preserving nuclear deterrence”. This is exactly in line with what Obama has beentalking about all along:
Here’s what I’ll say as President: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.
We will not pursue unilateral disarmament. As long as nuclear weapons exist, we’ll retain a strong nuclear deterrent. But we’ll keep our commitment under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty on the long road towards eliminating nuclear weapons. We’ll work with Russia to take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert, and to dramatically reduce the stockpiles of our nuclear weapons and material.
So far, Obama has said that “retaining a strong nuclear deterrent” will not include building new nuclear weapons – in other words, he is opposed to the Reliable Replacement Warhead program (pdf).
Obama has laid a very solid foundation to handle security issues on almost every front. He has a good transition team, and it looks like he’ll be putting a lot of the policy he laid out in various campaign white papers to use.
Given the rising tensions with Russia, I predict that on top of all of the other issues (Iran’s nuclear program, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, paying for it all, etc.), the proposed missile defense shield in Europe is going to eventually become a major problem for the Obama administration. I will address that in future posts.
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