The United States stands to lose its leadership role in the world if it fails to resolve the nation’s fiscal troubles and develop a leaner and more agile military, according to national defense experts at a security conference Wednesday.
The Center for a New American Security’s annual conference featured lawmakers, Defense Department officials, and members of the defense industry discussing the international and domestic challenges facing the Pentagon and the military in an era of budgetary constraints.
Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the defense community tends to focus on managing the short-term cuts from sequestration.
However, nations like China are paying just as much attention to the United States’ long-term fiscal health, he said.
"Our biggest issue is our fiscal situation," Corker said. "Many Chinese leaders views us as a nation in decline."
Corker said he thinks the sequestration cuts to the defense budget, totaling more than $500 billion in the next decade, will remain in place until Congress tackles reforms to entitlement spending and the tax code.
The fact that the average American married couple with employer contributions pays $119,000 into Medicare but receives $357,000 in health benefits in their lifetimes, is unsustainable and will continue to siphon resources from defense, he said.
Eric Edelman, a former State and Defense Department official, said health care spending is expected to dramatically outpace defense spending going forward.
Entitlement spending is projected to average 17 to 20 percent of GDP through fiscal year 2020, while defense spending will only average 3.3 to 4.3 percent, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"It's the entitlement problems that are really the driver of the long-term budget issues, not defense," Edelman said.
A strong domestic economy is vital to the United States’ recent pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, Corker said, as the United States seeks to nurture its "complex" political and economic relationship with China.
Dealing with territorial encroachments by China and maintaining influence in other dangerous parts of the world requires more flexible forces that can be deployed quickly, said Ashton Carter, deputy defense secretary.
However, the sequestration cuts, on top of $487 billion in defense spending reductions over the next decade from the 2011 Budget Control Act, make that a difficult task, he said.
"Despite our best efforts to minimize this damage, [it] is at a minimum embarrassing to be doing this in the eyes of our friends and foes around the world, and at a maximum unsafe," Carter said.
The Air Force has grounded more than a quarter of the forces in one of its squadrons, the Navy has canceled ship deployments, and the Army has canceled most of their collective training events for this year, he said.
"To avoid disproportionate adjustments to force structure, we have to make significant managerial changes in efficiency and compensation," he said.
Modernization is also important for a military that continues to use equipment acquired from the defense buildup during the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations, Edelman said.
"We need to be making the investments now that we’re going to need in the next 10, 15 years down the road," he said.
Corker said the United States remains the only nation that can organize other countries to take action in conflicts like Syria despite the temptation to withdraw from the region as the Afghanistan War draws to a close.
President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have recently gained the upper hand in the civil war against the rebels, who consist of defectors from the Assad regime and more radical Islamic groups like Jabhat al-Nusra that are affiliated with al Qaeda.
The Islamic groups are better fighters and providers of humanitarian aid, he said, while the rebels favoring a more democratic outcome in Syria are disorganized and overwhelmed.
He said he thinks President Barack Obama’s administration is leaning toward arming the rebels in the next few days.
"[The rebels are saying], ‘These goggles you all are sending are nice and these vests are pretty cool,’" he said. "But at the end of the day it’s almost becoming symbolic, the lethal aid. ‘Are you going to be involved in helping us change the balance of power or not?’"