An Uncertain Trumpet

The election of Donald Trump initially seemed to be a lifeline to an American military suffering from unrelenting budget cuts—a loss of more than $250 billion in spending power from the 2009 budget alone—and an equally punishing pace of operations. The morning after the election, Forbes magazine confidently predicted the restoration of at least $500 billion in defense spending.

Not only did Trump promise to make America great again, but in September, he gave a rousing speech outlining a Reagan-like rearmament: a 540,000-soldier active-duty Army, from its current strength of 470,000; a 350-ship Navy, from a current level of 280; hundreds of new tactical aircraft for the Air Force; and a renewed national missile defense network. In a notable deviation from his otherwise expert-free campaign, candidate Trump quoted the blue-ribbon National Defense Panel, a bipartisan group of former senior officers and civilian national security officials, arguing for a return to the last defense budget crafted by Secretary Robert Gates. Trump's credibility was enhanced by the recommendation to eliminate the "sequestration" provision of the 2011 Budget Control Act, which, as he emphasized, disproportionately put the burden of deficit reduction on defense accounts.

Early Trump cabinet moves seemed to confirm the prospects for a military revival. Nominating Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general rather than secretary of defense removed one potential obstacle; a budget hawk, Sessions prides himself as a man who "regularly stands guard" to fight government "waste, fraud, and abuse," which he believes is rife in the Pentagon. Retired Marine Corps general James Mattis, whom Trump picked to run the Pentagon, can be expected to be frank in advancing the military's resource requirements.

But the choice of South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney to run the Office of Management and Budget sours the apparently rosy scenario. Mulvaney has been among the most dedicated budget-cutters of the 2010 "Freedom Caucus" class of Republicans, willing to make common cause with far-left Democrats such as Barney Frank in offering anti-defense-spending amendments. His particular bêtes noires are the supplemental appropriations, known as "overseas contingency operations" (OCO) funds, that pay for the annual costs of fighting multiple wars. Yet as defense needs have become desperate, even the Obama administration has embraced this backdoor way of financing national security. To Mulvaney, this OCO approach is nothing but a "slush fund," one that "it's past time to do away with."

Trump, too, seems to believe the Pentagon is polluted by waste, fraud, and abuse, at least if his tweets about the costs of the F-35 or the program to replace Air Force One mean anything. Also, the Trump transition team is said to be a-twitter over a recent Washington Post story alleging a "cover-up" of a report recommending management reforms for the Defense Department. The newspaper account was a vaporous blend of inaccuracies and innuendo but reinforced every budget hawk's darkest conspiracy theories. To cite just one example of many, the Post insisted the study had been "buried" and removed from the Pentagon website. In fact, it was available from July 2015 to April 2016 through the business board's website and remains available through the Defense Technical Information Center—a simple Google search away.