Bob Gates, all-American...(and Larry Summers, academic all-American, too...)

Although the need to cut costs is imperative, there is unacceptable risk in cancelling current production lines of complex weapons systems like the F22. This is not in one big shed! It is a multiplex production and assembly process for the world's best fighter plane. It may not be needed to fight al quaeda , the Taliban, or Mindanao rebels, but it is certainly needed to meet and defeat the latest generation Russian or other advanced fighter in a big league war. What big league war? Do we really believe that is not a possibility, given the lessons of history? Mr Gates is a good, capable civilian leader, but he is not a military professional. The military professionals have the sworn obligation to be prepared for all possible adversaries. We need all five services at peak preparedness in all of their functions, The Secretary properly should address the shamefully inefficient and sometimes corrupt cost and procurement system of the Pentagon. Trust the professionals over than the civilians to prepare for war. We have the finest Army and Air Force in the world. Give them what they need today, not tomorrow.

some of the more bloated, even-less-successful than the norm missile defense programs (and that's saying something),

Try doing some actual research before spouting off this type of thing. Many of the ABM systems have tested well (yes, the source of the testing results is often the MDA, but there's others), and even Gates isn't cutting them across the board. He's hammering the theater-defense ABM while keeping funding for the sea-based ABM (the SM-3, for example).

The problem, in fact, with the Gates cuts is not that they are too sweeping, it is that they are far, far too small.

Where do you want the cuts to come from? Iraq operations (which are already winding down)? Afghanistan? Personnel costs (aka "shorting the troops")? R & D plus Procurement (commonly called "eating the seed corn" in other venues)?

This is the problem with this idiotic obsession with the budget number on the liberal spectrum. As I argued with Walt on his blog, the actual number is just an end-result of the various perceived strategic and tactical needs of the US government. If you want to make cuts, go after those needs.

In fact, if you really wanted to cut expenses in the long-term (and I'm not saying I support this approach), you should drastically cut the number of active Army and Marines troops, or shift them to Reserve. Build-up ABM and a Nuclear Striking Force, plus an air-force to provide protection against missiles and overflights over CONUS and North America. You may have to make some capital investments, but the biggest costs in the US military are Personnel and Operations, so cutting those would be far wiser if you wanted to reduce the amount.

Doing the above would put you a permanent defensive posture, with lower costs per year than the current situation (and that's assuming you keep a strong bluewater navy, which may decide not to do if your air force drifts towards strategic bombing). Of course, there's a downside to that - we couldn't do a bunch of interventions and operations like Iraq or Afghanistan.

What Gates is doing certainly won't lead to a lower budget in the long-run. He's hiring more troops, while escalating operations.

We will have to come to recognize...and this won't be easy...that we actually make ourselves weaker with overspending, that we undercut our strength by creating high tech military programs while we let rust rot away the guts of the U.S. economy.

Again, despite all the idiotic rhetoric from the "OMG US spends more than the rest of the World combined!" crowd, the greatest costs don't come from "high-tech military programs". Then you need to take into account the fact that we do a lot of the defense spending that other countries (particularly the NATO countries and Japan) don't need to do, because they're under our defense wing. Without that guarantee, their defense spending would be considerably higher.

Why don't you suggest a strategic model for the US to aim for? There are some out there, like the Eisenhower "New Look" strategy.

An additional comment about Secretary Gates's defense budget proposal. The lead paragraph for this new proposal states that he wants to cancel the F22 fighter production, while eliminating the new Presidential helicopter, Marine One. This is a very disproportionate tradeoff, to say the best if it! The Presidential helicopter is tiny potatoes compared to the F22, which is the nonpareil new generation fighter plane of the US Air Force. Obviously the President's personal helicopter should not be mentioned in the same breath with any weapons system as important as the F22. Why is this worth commenting on? Because it reveals clearly the assumption of the Secretary and his information staff that the American people are literally stupid enough not to detect such a blatant insult to their intelligence. Millions of Americans are smart enough to see through this kind of selling job. Forget the helicopter; it's small change. But if he wants to save money on the F22, don't cancel it; just slow the production down. He knows, and the taxpayers know, that the production line for anything as revolutionary and superior as the F22 must be maintained. To shut it down means that it will take years to start up again, and at the pace of modern warfare, that is sure to be way too late. He also is certain to know that several other nations are working on fighter planes competitive with the F22. Mr Gates notwithstanding, we cannot afford to lose our air superiority over any possible adversary. The same goes for the Army's cancelled new system, and he Navy's new littoral capability destroyer. The salient fact about Mr Gates's proposal is that he reveals a distressing shortsightedness about this nation's need to be prepared for major adversaries. Of course we need irregular forces and armaments, but we need state of the art, big league capabilities also.

"We can no longer afford to spend as much as every other country in the world added up. Given current deficits, current and future debt levels, and the looming aspiration crushing deficits associated with retirement health care, we will soon look back on the Gates proposals to swap spending here for spending there as the idle chatter of luxurious by-gone days."

As a percentage of GDP, defense spending levels are actually quite low and very sustainable. Anyone with 5 minutes of research could check this out. It is foolish and irresponsible on the author's part to claim that we are currently engaged in a "permanent war economy" when we couldn't be farther away from something of the sort. It is hard to take serious the arguments of someone who gets something this easy so wrong.

I don't have a lot to say at the moment to those who insist that American national security can be protected in no other way than by fighter planes that take longer to move from the drawing board to active duty than it took the United States to fight World War II and Korea combined, each of which cost more than the yearly budget of entire federal agencies. I suppose if you fly the planes, build the planes, or work for the people who build the planes this is a defensible, nay an attractive proposition, but this isn't the point I wanted to make here.

Instead, I'd ask Mr. Rothkopf if he really sees no connection at all between a former Treasury Secretary cashing in on his public office in the way Larry Summers did and the ethic of the financial services industry that did so much to send the American economy into the power dive it's in now. I'm sure Summers is very ethical, in the sense that he only tried to get away with what everyone else tries to get away with.

But that's a bankrupt standard, if I may be forgiven for using that expression. And no, people who take advantage of the revolving door between big government and big money don't seem in line for any kind of special praise -- not when experience with the kind of company that helped cause the current crisis is being called an asset in the effort to fix it.

Of course, if Summers were to give away most of the money he earned from speeches and things of that nature I would have nothing to say. Why wouldn't he? It's only money, after all.

I don't have a lot to say at the moment to those who insist that American national security can be protected in no other way than by fighter planes that take longer to move from the drawing board to active duty than it took the United States to fight World War II and Korea combined, each of which cost more than the yearly budget of entire federal agencies. I suppose if you fly the planes, build the planes, or work for the people who build the planes this is a defensible, nay an attractive proposition, but this isn't the point I wanted to make here.

Military hardware (and the production of said hardware) has just gotten vastly more expensive and complex since World War 2. If you want to actually have air superiority (and usually you do in combat), then you have to pay the price for that.

What's also made the production process so long and drawn out is the infamous cycle of cutting the production order, then using the increased unit-cost and time necessary to re-tool the production line as an excuse to cut the production order further.

Provided one takes for granted that the only people qualified to judge the kind of fighter plane (or other weapons system) and how much it should cost we need are those who build them, and the military officers preparing for post-service careers working for the people who build them, the logic above makes perfect sense.

It does require one to exclude the possibility that the qualified authorities here may have motivations apart from the national interest -- the enormous amount of money called for in defense contracts, the minimal oversight such contracts usually receive, the attraction of each additional increment of technology (whether it is related to a likely threat or not), the career security provided by a weapons program designed to last many years before the system in question even enters service.

It requires, in a word, faith. Given faith that the qualified authorities are the only people who can understand the business they are in, and that they are immune to the kind of motivations that appeal to everyone else, all things are possible. Sucker's logic that a fighter plane must cost $175 million each after spending a decade or more in development because this is not World War II anymore and this is the only way for the Air Force to go can sound like strategic thinking. Sucker's logic that only some fool Congressman (or Defense Secretary) would shrink from spending tens of billions of dollars more so this same fighter plane can be bought for only $150 million apiece can sound like the very pith of fiscal discipline. All it takes is faith.

To add-

I'm not saying that all the cost overruns are from Congressional interference. One of the reasons why I despise the FCS and wanted the "vehicle component" canceled is because the Army had no real fucking clue as to what they actually wanted from the system other than to usher in the Next Age of Warfare, so they kept changing everything fifty thousand times a minute, producing major cost overruns.

The F-22, at least, is a plane with a purpose (or several of them); it's a better air-superiority fighter.