In an article on slate Phillip Carter of intel-dump.com and Slate’s Fred Kaplan cover how to fix the mess the past eight years have made of the military. Since it fits with my Things We’ve Learned From Iraq posts, and they have way more military experience than me, here’s some of their recommendations:

“Overhaul the budget. If you’d awakened from a 20-year-long slumber and glanced at the current defense budget, you’d think the Cold War were still raging. President Bush’s budget request for the next fiscal year—totaling $541 billion, not including money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—is dominated by aircraft carriers, submarines, fighter jets, and ultratech combat fighting vehicles, i.e., the sorts of weapons you’d need to fight the sort of comparably armed superpower that no longer exists.”

The recommendations: Make sure the supplemental Iraq/Afghanistan war budget only includes money that’s abslutely necessary. Then hold a complete, systematic review of the defense budget and what we really need and look at EVERYTHING for the first time since the Cold War ended.

(I’m reminded of an article I read a while back that pointed out the invariable response is “Well, our military spending is a much smaller percentage of our gross national product than during the Cold War,” and that this is irrelevant. If we don’t need to spend the money, we shouldn’t, regardless of that percentage; if we need to spend more, we should).

•If the services want to keep splitting the military budget evenly, they need to be pushed to spend it on items that we really need. “Because the current Air Force is dominated by fighter pilots, the Air Force’s No. 1 priority today is to build as many F-22 fighter planes as it can, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars—even though they would play no role in any foreseeable war over the next two decades.” Kaplan and Carter recommend emphasizing base security, cargo transport and close air-support missions instead, and that we need the Secretary of Defense to make future budgets contingent on this.

• Fix the Army, by which they mean stop lowering standards to meet recruitment quotas and find ways to keep talented junior and midgrade officers. Annoyingly, they don’t have much advice on how to do that (the articles says getting out of Iraq will help some, but not all).

•Provide the military with better educational benefits, more opportunities to study and immersion in foreign languages and cultures.

•Promote better leaders. “Junior officers read each year’s promotion list as they would tea leaves; it tells them what types of officers are desired and what types are not. Many creative officers leave the Army after realizing that it holds no future for them.”

Kaplan and Carter suggest that Congress can set standards for the skills and experience required for higher ranks, and that junior officers should be consulted on promotions, as well as superiors.

•Improve the military’s counter-insurgency capabilities.

•Put more money into the State Department and other agencies to carry out some of the nation-building now falling to the military. “Some senior Army officers have told us that, for certain urgent tasks in Iraq and Afghanistan, they would rather have 500 more Foreign Service officers than 5,000 more soldiers. If wars—or foreign policies generally—are national campaigns, the burden should be carried by the national government more broadly.”

•Either raise taxes in some fashion to pay for all this, or start scaling back our military goals to what we’re willing to pay for.

There are, obviously, counterpoints—as I noted a while back, some military thinkers are worried that in focusing on counter-insurgency, we’ll ignore the possibility of conventional war—but these make a lot of sense to me. Thoughts?

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