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This paper has been prepared by the Congressional Budget Office at the request of Senator Lawton Chiles, ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee. It presents a summary review of improvements since 1980 in factors contributing to U.S. military capability. In keeping with CBO's mandate to provide objective and nonpartisan analysis, the paper makes no recommendations.
This paper was prepared by R. William Thomas under the general supervision
of Robert F. Hale and John D. Mayer, Jr. Eugene Bryton and Jonathan Tyson
of CBO's Budget Analysis Division prepared some of the data. Robert Kornfeld
was a valued collaborator in compiling and verifying the data presented
here. Other members of the National Security Division and Budget Analysis
Division also made important contributions to the analysis.
During the first four years of this Administration (fiscal years 1982-1985), the Congress provided about $1.1 trillion in budget authority for national defense, some 36 percent more in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than was spent in the previous four years. This rate of expansion in defense budget authority was higher than in any other comparable peacetime period since World War II.
What improvements in U.S. military capability have been realized during this period? Claims by the Administration that significant improvements have resulted from the expansion of defense budget authority are challenged by some critics, who focus instead on instances of excessive pricing, inflated contractor overhead, or other wasteful practices. In an effort to provide a reasonable and objective basis for discussion of this issue, CBO has compiled selected measures of factors that contribute to military capability. These factors include the size of U.S. forces (force structure), the quality of equipment (modernization), the extent to which forces are ready for immediate combat (readiness), and the material resources necessary to continue to fight effectively to a successful resolution of a conflict (sustainability).
These measures are subject to important limitations. None provide a direct, comprehensive measure of U.S. military capability or that of its potential adversaries. Most ignore any quality increase in the new generation of weapons. And some--especially the size of U.S. forces--cannot be compared directly with changes in budgets because the measure represents a stock of equipment that changes only gradually over time as budgets increase. Despite these limitations, these measures are a reasonable set of indicators commonly used by the Department of Defense (DoD).
These measures suggest there have been improvements in all aspects of U.S. military capability since 1980, with the degree of improvement often reflecting the priority accorded by the Administration.
Despite widespread improvements, most of these aggregate indicators have not increased markedly, with a few exceptions like personnel quality. Yet there has been a sizable increase in the defense budget. The lack of marked improvements may reflect the aggregated nature of the measures used here, which may mask some changes, and the gradual change one would expect in stocks of defense equipment. Nor do the measures used here necessarily reflect improvements in weapons quality that have been a high priority in this Administration. Because of these limitations and others stated earlier, it is beyond the scope of this analysis to ascertain whether the defense buildup has been worth its cost.
The analysis does point up the difficulty in quantifying what has been accomplished by the higher level of defense budget authority. This is particularly true for factors such as the quality of weapons, training and equipment readiness, and requirements for sustainability in wartime. Clearly no single measure, or even a group of measures, will fully capture the effects of increased funding. Particularly in the difficult areas like weapons quality, readiness, and sustainability, it would be useful for the DoD to identify new, output-oriented measures of capability, perhaps including some that systematically capture the judgments of experts about factors that resist quantification. These steps might facilitate attempts to assess future improvements in U.S. military capability.
This document is available in its entirety in PDF.