Pentagon Budget Cuts Will Have ‘Dire Consequences’

Defense Department chiefs say proposed cuts to the Pentagon budget will have dire consequences but author Stephen Glain tells host Lisa Mullins slashing the State Department’s funding will be more disastrous.

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Lisa Mullins: Global economic gyrations are having plenty of effects in Washington. The Pentagon and the State Department are among many US agencies bracing for big cutbacks. Some analysts argue that the $700 billion defense budget can afford to be squeezed. They include author Stephen Glain. He says that even with major cuts the Pentagon would still have enough money to do its job.

Stephen Glain: Its budget has doubled just in the last 10 years, so my guess is they’ll be able to manage. Now, if you look at the State Department’s budget they’re looking at cuts of $8 billion for a $50 billion total budget, so that’s gonna make it very difficult for them to do what diplomats do.

Mullins: And what about in terms of our involvement in US foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and in fact, around the world? Are the civilian voices more dominant than the military voices and we should say you’re talking for the most part within the military itself right now?

Glain: I hear a lot about soft power and about we’re going to return, we’re going to revive our diplomatic tradition after seared by Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 10 years. But just look at what the Pentagon is doing. It is not withdrawing troops in the Middle East at least, it’s simply redeploying them. Once you’ve militarized a foreign policy it’s very difficult to demilitarize it, it’s just difficult as it is trying, bringing the troops home.

Mullins: But why is it binary? Why is it one or the other?

Glain: You have you know, the political imperative. President Obama campaigned on a promise to prosecute the war in Afghanistan because he said it was the good war. He may have believed that, but he certainly must’ve known there was no way he could’ve been elected if he did not talk tough on Afghanistan. And there is this very compelling burden of using the troops that you have every 10 years or so just to show that they’re necessary. So there are all these things that conspire to drive the process forward.

Mullins: Let me ask you this, if the US military represents the foreign policy face of the United States, if the military is also doing much of the diplomacy, which it seems to be doing like it or not in some cases, do we have to look at state versus Pentagon as this kind of competition? I mean maybe we need to rethink exactly how we conduct our foreign policy because the average America soldier knows that he or she is basically the face of a diplomat as well.

Glain: That’s true and I have to say the Pentagon has taken this mission, what it costs to build the operations, whether it’s diplomatic or aid driven, very seriously and they’re training their people to do jobs that most people do not enlist in the military to do. Having said that, I think a majority of them or plurality would much rather go back to their core mission. I keep getting back to the magnitude of the mission itself, so long as they are asked to assume this global burden of patrolling what they call the global commons, which is the seaways, the air corridors, the land bridges, every one in the world, then they’re going to be the go-to agency. You talked about how we militarized our policy elsewhere in the world, there’s a reason why we still maintain alliances that are legacies of the Cold War, with Korea, with Japan, with Europe, even though these countries are now rich and more than capable of assuming their nationals security responsibilities on their own. It’s because the Pentagon does not want to lose control. They want to maintain this global presence. So long as we have that global presence, it will be the Pentagon at the fore and the State Department running a lamentable second, third or fourth place.

Mullins: And that has not changed you think under President Obama, despite his campaigning on needing something different?

Glain: Just look at the budget, the budget debate. The Pentagon will suffer a haircut, there’s no doubt about it, but the State Department is looking at cuts that would really eviscerate America’s diplomatic capabilities.

Mullins: Okay, Stephen Glain, his new book is called State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire. Nice to have you on the program.

Glain: Thank you, Lisa, thanks for having me.

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