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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Does a Smaller Budget Mean a Weaker Military? [Watch (HLS stream): Does a Smaller Budget Mean a Weaker Military?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/krges60Q.m3u8) (4:59)  _Published 2011-10-12. Can the military maintain its standards amit budget cuts?_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:18 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [House's Budget Increases Military Spending, Slashes Medicare and Medicaid](/video/Y3Pp2Bj4/) ### House's Budget Increases Military Spending, Slashes Medicare and Medicaid [Major Military Cuts: What You Need To Know](/video/86QC4BUp/) ### Major Military Cuts: What You Need To Know [Should the Pentagon be Afraid of Budget Cuts?](/video/pgIo19R2/) ### Should the Pentagon be Afraid of Budget Cuts? --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] This is Command Post, A series of discussions about military matters, from TIME and the Center For A New American Security. Noel we went through a similar budget drill in the draw down after Vietnam and ended up with as Army Chief of Staff [ UNKNOWN ] said. With a hollow army. How do we make sure that we don't end up with a hollow military this time around? Well first of all the situation today is very different today than the situation immediately after the Vietnam War. Particularly because there's an all volunteer force today, a professional force that is actually quite strong and healthy in terms of recruitment, enlistment, Retention and so forth. So it, it's not an exact parallel. There are a lot of, of structural differences. But certainly any time you're talking about cutting resources, cutting personnel, those are difficult decisions that raise the question of whether you're ready for things in the future. I think there, the balance that has to be struck, which is a very difficult one, To reach, is what are the right level of resources for the size of the force that you have. If you're going to be cutting people down because of the necessity of the, the mathematics in the budget. If that's the only way that you can achieve savings, you have to somehow scale down The number of people in the force and the things that you ask them to do. It's a lot better to have a small force that is well trained, well prepared with modernized equipment than it is to have a bigger military that doesn't have those capabilities. When I, I pick up on the last point there, you know, in terms of modernized equipment, we had a big increase over the past decade in that position finally. The problem is we didn't get a lot out of it. About a dozen major acquisition programs that were cancelled in development over the last decade. We spent about $ 50 billion, and that's just on some of the major programs. We certainly cannot afford to do that over the next decade, and with a declining acquisition budget, we probably can't even modernize all the systems that we planned to modernize today. In, in what kind of shape is the, the capital base in now? The planes, the ships, the tanks? In general it's smaller, and it's older than it was a decade ago. In the Air Force the number of aircraft is about the same as it was about a decade ago, but the average age of the aircraft is older. It's the oldest it's ever been in the history of the Air Force A lot of pilots are flying airplanes that are older than they are. Yes. [ LAUGH ]. Or that their father or grandfather flew. In the Navy the size of the fleet has gone down. The Army and Marine Corps may be a bit of an exception because in the wars over the past decade They've actually gotten a fair amount of acquisition funding through war funding, and so may have a lot of new equipment in the army and marine corps. It might not be relevant to future threats. And this is a very big difference between what's going on now and past drawn downs. During past drawn downs you would come out of the period where you would usually invested a fair amount in capabilities, and so you came out of it with a. Younger force in terms of the life- span of the procurement. This time that's not the case. The, the department has really been living on all of the equipment that Ronald Reagan bought during his build- up that we really haven't replaced since then. We've gone on a, almost a 20- year procurement holiday. That's right, and that's one of the things that, that makes this particular budget cycle so difficult, is because some of those are going to have to be replaced and upgraded. You can't just get a lot of the savings out of the procurement accounts. Without fundamentally reducing your military capabilities in a way that has not been true after previous periods of large defense spending. Now the pressure is going to be to replace the older things that you have in the inventory at the same time that you're decreasing your overall defense budget expenditure. Exactly, and, and the other point to is in previous buildups We actually increased manpower significantly. Over the past decade, the army and marine corp increased a little, the air force and Navy actually cut in strength. So where do we get, the, the big savings [ CROSSTALK ]. There's not, there's not a lot more we can cut out of the air force and the Navy. That's right. Just to wrap up here though, every time we've built down in this country, we've shrunk our military. You talk to any general officer, we blew it, we did it wrong, we didn't do it smartly. Do we have any sense that this time is going to be different in that regard, or by dent of history, or we're probably going to flub it? We're probably going to flub it again this time. Just the way that this is happening, DOD is yet to get ahead of this cycle here on the budget cuts, so in FY11 they put forth the budget that basically was dead on arrival, and 20 billion got cut out of it by Congress. Well now that flights wealthy again put together a budget that there was no way, they were gonna get the full amount appropriated by congress so congress now has the budget control act, and they're cutting about 26 billion. So at some point the DOD has gotta. Get ahead of the curve here and say, hey, you know what, this is what we would cut or else you're going to end up with Congress doing it at the last minute. We have flubbed it before and managed to recover. I mean, this is not a strategy you want to pursue. Obviously it's a whole lot better to not flub it in the first place. What it does, if you get it wrong, it doesn't mean that you cannot respond to future. Contingencies as they arise. It means the costs are higher. We have gotten this wrong before and we have lived to fight another day. But it has really serious consequences for not getting it right. [ MUSIC ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Does a Smaller Budget Mean a Weaker Military?","description":"Can the military maintain its standards amit budget cuts?","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/krges60Q/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2011-10-12T16:29:22.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/krges60Q.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/krges60Q/","duration":"PT4M59S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/krges60Q/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```