The Navy was the big winner when teams of national security experts were tasked with finding and reallocating $50 billion in the defense budget in an American Enterprise Institute funding exercise last week.
The Navy’s submarine program, modernizing the nuclear triad and increasing operational readiness for all the services received the biggest across-the-board plus-ups, Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Friday.
U.S. Army force structure suffered the biggest cuts, Harrison said. The security team only recommended higher budgets for air and missile defense and missile and munitions for the Army.
Overall, the teams recommended very little change in the Marine Corps’ spending priorities.
Using AEI’s Defense Futures Simulator, the teams were tasked to re-prioritize defense spending, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s guidance on how much to cut and the 17 broad areas declared off-limits from the budget ax.
“Force structure is one of the biggest cost factors” in the department’s spending and a target for savings, Jennifer Kavanaugh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, said. Other panelists pointed out that the Army structure includes equipment, such as helicopters, trucks, radios, etc., in addition to soldiers.
They recommended keeping Army special forces expeditionary expertise, needed in the Indo-Pacific, Kavanaugh said.
An area her team would invest in heavily is “Hellscape,” swarming attack drones that could be used to defend Taiwan. The Pentagon “needs hundreds of thousands” of these low-cost, attritable drones to deter China’s ambitions in the Pacific.
Spending more on unmanned systems was also a priority.
Elaine McCusker, an AEI senior fellow and former Pentagon comptroller, pointed to the Marine Corps as the nation’s most “adaptable force” in describing her team’s decision to support the service. It also “spends our money well.” It has been the only service to successfully complete audits of its costs, an administration priority
At a Pentagon town hall meeting in February, Hegseth said the Pentagon as a whole will successfully pass a complete audit by 2028.
“The American taxpayers deserve that,” he said. “They deserve to know where their $850 billion dollars go, how it’s spent, and make sure it’s spent wisely. … Every dollar of waste we find, or redundancy, is a dollar we can invest somewhere else.”
Audits were in the 17 categories protected from cuts.
“Force structure is hard to grow back” once eliminated, Melissa Dalton, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, even though her team recommended cuts in 4th generation legacy fighters and Navy and Air Force legacy intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.
Several panelists noted that retiring systems – like Littoral Combat Ships or aging bombers – often also means cutting the service members that crew and maintain those systems rather than re-training them in newer needed skills.
Several panelists explained they would not cut service members’ pay and benefits during a time when recruiting remains difficult.
In surveying the cuts to the Army overall, “these assume risks” especially in Eastern Europe and the Korean Peninsula. Dalton added, “it will take years to get to levels of security and defense” where Europe can provide for itself.
These cuts also mean “sacrificing forward presence,” said McCusker, the co-author of a recent report on overhauling the department’s acquisition system.
“We need to balance capacity and capability” in making cuts, although China is considered the nation’s No. 1 strategic threat and competitor. McCasker’s team’s recommendations for cuts included surface combatant, as did others.
Michael O’Hanlon, director of the Strobe Talbott Center at the Brookings Institution, said in this era where “China has become much more capable” while “Russia has become much more dangerous” as demonstrated by its invasion of Ukraine, some budget growth and reallocation are needed.
He noted today’s active-duty force at 1.3 million service members is already smaller by about 100,000 than the force in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed. He also used a blockade of Taiwan rather than an invasion of the island as making a case to think seriously before reducing ships and aircraft that would be needed to break any attempt to isolate it.
“We have to be hawks, but cheap hawks, borrowing from Newt Gingrich,” O’Hanlon said.
Gingrich was the Republican speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999.
Several panelists mentioned that any cuts in the Army force structure and Air Force legacy aircraft would also have an impact on southern border security.
As USNI News recently reported, the Trump administration ordered 3,000 more active-duty soldiers to the border with Mexico. They joined the 1,200 already there and the 5,000 National Guardsmen under the control of local governors.
As an example of that new naval emphasis on the hemisphere and also as a demonstration of hard power, guided-missile destroyer USS Gravely (DDG-107) deployed from Yorktown, Va.
Destroyer USS Spruance (DDG-111) will deploy to support the border mission on the West Coast when it soon leaves Naval Station San Diego.
Both warships will be carrying a Coast Guard law enforcement detachment to provide southern border protection with the dual mission of halting illegal migration by sea and stopping the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
