Bombing at the Pentagon: Don Rumsfeld's agony.

For Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, it was his own personal equivalent of the U.S.'s apology to China earlier this year: a way to placate a hectoring adversary after doing nothing wrong. In Rumsfeld's case, the adversary was a "discouraged, frustrated, and angry" Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts (as he described himself). The Republican senator blamed Rumsfeld at a hearing for the work of, in the senator's golden words, a "doofus over at the Air Force." What the doofus had proposed was eliminating 33 B-1 bombers.

The B-1 has a two-decade history of failure that many in Congress hope to stretch into a three-decade history. The Air Force didn't dare fly it during the Gulf War, and flew it in the Kosovo war only after Serbian air defenses had been suppressed. But in places like Kansas and Georgia, permanent communities have grown up around B-1 bases, with children of Air National Guardsmen sometimes joining their fathers in B-1 units (it's a warplane that brings people together). Hence, Rumsfeld's apology. For Sen. Roberts, as for so many others in Congress, the comfort of his constituents trumps the idea of building a rational, modernized American military.

And so goes Rumsfeld's effort to reform the military, which so far has a record about as impressive as the B-1's flying history. Rumsfeld's critics blame his difficulties on his early ham-handed handling of relations with Congress and the Joint Chiefs. His defenders blame the shortsightedness of a porked-up Congress and a stubborn uniformed- military leadership, as well as the chronic underfunding in the Clinton years that has left the armed forces in a perilous-and not easily reversible-state of decline. Whomever is to blame, defense-watchers now expect Rumsfeld, who at first blush seemed the foremost stud of the Bush cabinet, to be among its earliest flameouts: "Bush will fire him," predicts one expert; "a glorious retirement," predicts another.

Rumsfeld's brewing failure may seem a surprise given his matchless resume, but it arguably was inevitable. In a prescient article in Foreign Affairs before Bush won the election last year, defense intellectual Eliot Cohen outlined a thoughtful approach to military reform, with one minor caveat: "Unfortunately, the current system will not produce such a new strategy." In the Pentagon, the bureaucracy rules, and it is bureaucracy on Quaaludes, making the New York City Board of Education look sprightly and trim by comparison. The Pentagon is the only flaccid governmental organization that conservatives love to love, looking the other way as the services relentlessly protect their turf, and their weapons, in a manner straight out of Joseph Heller.

Especially since the end of the Cold War, the military has desperately needed a new direction from its civilian leadership. In the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, the military marched on with an essentially unchanged fight-in-the-Fulda-Gap strategy. Enter Rumsfeld. He was supposed to be the different drummer, bringing a new post-Cold War strategy to the Pentagon. Instead, he has been flailing, and now is in the position of having to choose between two unpalatable options: He can either jettison Bush's military-reform agenda, or make deep cuts in the current force to try to fund it, thus prompting howls from the pork-barrelers, the hawks, and everyone in between.

The mantra from Rumsfeld's circle is that money won't fix the Pentagon's problems. It is more accurate to say that money alone won't fix its problems. The current force is in what experts call a "death spiral." During the 1990s, funding for procurement declined by nearly half, a rate of decline twice that of the military budget as a whole (which in 1998 had reached a 20-year low). As weapons systems age, paying to repair and replace them becomes more and more expensive. Imagine an old car that gets more expensive to repair even as it is less reliable on the road. And with every year the military doesn't keep up the pace, the costs of "catching up" grow to the point that it becomes simply impossible to maintain the current force-hence the spiral.

Rumsfeld has repeatedly walked Congress through the dynamic. Take shipbuilding. The current strategy calls for the Navy to maintain a steady state of 310 ships. The 2001 budget-Clinton's last budget- provided for six new ships a year. That puts the Navy on track for a 230-ship force by 2030, which Rumsfeld calls "clearly unacceptable." But instead of building nine ships a year to get back on track for 310 ships, the 2002 budget also provides for just six ships. Every year the Navy stays on that 230-ship course, the cost of "catching up" to the 310-ship rate ratchets up by another $3 billion. It's like falling a little bit behind on rent every month, until the debt becomes too big to pay.

So, every year the military doesn't get a truly massive increase- estimates of the shortfall go as high as $100 billion a year, although the Congressional Budget Office has pegged it at $50 billion-the idea of maintaining the current force structure fades further from the realm of possibility. Defense reformers argue that that isn't necessarily a bad thing-sometimes it makes sense to give up all the repairs and simply buy a new car. And it's not just the equipment, but the thinking behind it, that is outdated. For about the last decade, the military has piled stopgap upon stopgap, with the word "strategy" wishfully stamped on top of it all. The so-called "two-war" doctrine-likely to be jettisoned by Rumsfeld when he completes his strategy review in September-is more a description of the size of the existing force than a guide to its role in the new strategic environment.

Bureaucratic imperatives for too long have been allowed to drive strategic planning. "The Army, Navy, and Air Force plan for the wars they would like to fight," writes John Hillen, one of the architects of Bush's military-reform agenda last year. The Army, for instance, still yearns to build a 55-ton-count them, 55 tons-howitzer that would be lucky to make it into the same hemisphere as one of today's regional conflicts, let alone ever actually be deployed on the battlefield in time for fighting. The Navy is still captivated by the glamorous aircraft carrier, which performed splendidly in the Battle of Midway, but looms as a slow, fat target in today's missile-rich environment. The Air Force can't resist developing ever-fancier, gee-whiz fighter jets, when its emphasis should be on the long-range bombers that can take off from Missouri and bomb Belgrade.

As Hillen points out, this is the best military that anyone could imagine back when Austin Powers was first making his reputation as an international man of mystery. But the 1960s and '70s are long past, and the U.S. no longer faces the prospect of a massive land war in Europe. Instead, as Eliot Cohen among others has argued, it makes more sense to focus on homeland defense to counter coming ballistic-missile threats, on the international policing missions that mushroomed in the 1990s even as military funding declined, and on maintaining conventional superiority over our next likely adversary (probably China). In a war in the Pacific-where the distances are long and the fight is likely to take place in the water-tanks and short-range fighter jets are likely to be less useful than cruise missiles and long-range bombers.

Rumsfeld is trying to turn U.S. strategy in this direction, as well as promote the leap ahead that military technology should be taking in the digital age. But with limited success. The panels Rumsfeld initially convened-to get around the Pentagon's traditional bureaucracy and help him think through these issues-were immediately panned by the services and Congress, while apparently producing no definitive new ideas. Rumsfeld keeps saying that the planning, and then the funding, of new weapons systems has to await the arrival of the grand new strategy. But this is little comfort to his congressional and bureaucratic critics, who can reasonably argue that, in the absence of this changed strategy, something (the current batch of tanks, B-1s, etc.) is better than nothing, and the something isn't being properly funded.

Indeed, Rumsfeld has missed a chance to buy off his political critics with toasty visions of new weapons ("Sen. Roberts, if you thought the B-1 was great for Kansas, just wait until you try a whole new fleet of B-2s!"). But buying off critics requires the kind of money that he hasn't been able to secure from the White House. Rumsfeld's circle fitfully acknowledges the need for more cash in between avowals that money is not the problem. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz says, "It is going to cost money, and it is probably going to take additional increases on top of the ones we asked for already." The White House gave Rumsfeld just a 7 percent increase in 2002, a relatively modest boost given the defense shortfall and the fact that Rumsfeld wanted about twice as much.

There probably won't be any more where that came from. Bush never promised much new defense spending in the campaign, arguing that the funding could be found by cutting dated weapons systems. Bush's critics, meanwhile, argue that the tax cut is starving defense spending. But the primary culprits are the fictional lock-boxes that define most of the surplus out of existence. As defense analysts Steven Kosiak and Andrew Krepinevich write, "It will be extremely difficult to sustain (let alone increase) the proposed FY 2002 defense funding levels for the following four years, unless the administration and Congress are willing to dip into that portion of the budget surplus generated by the Medicare trust fund and possibly the Social Security trust fund."

This is not even a competition between guns and butter, but between guns and fake butter. The administration should either find some clever way to finesse it (perhaps by cutting politically unpopular discretionary spending, e.g., corporate welfare), or forthrightly confront the absurdity of the let's-pretend game of lock-boxes. As it is, President Bush has left Rumsfeld in an impossible situation. He can adequately fund neither the current force nor the notional future force. Rumsfeld's failing, then, is really Bush's. The president also bears ultimate responsibility for the strategic meanderings that have gotten Rumsfeld battered almost every day in articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere. Big changes can't simply be left to sort themselves out in the bowels of cabinet agencies.

Take, for instance, another, related issue: building a missile defense. Bush has energetically led on the issue, making clear his determination and pushing the public argument for a system. He didn't leave it to Colin Powell to hash out with the bureaucrats at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In contrast, Bush has not clearly described, let alone tried to sell, a new national-security strategy-what we hope to accomplish in the world, against what obstacles, in concert with what friends, and with the military playing what role. This, one would think, should be a central aspect of presidential leadership, at least as important as, say, promoting Habitat for Humanity.

In light of Rumsfeld's travails, Bush also needs to reconsider the approach to the military outlined in his campaign. The promising new weapons technologies he talked about last year-swifter, lighter, smarter-are extremely important and desirable. But his means of funding them-primarily, cleaning up the Pentagon's spending practices and phasing out antiquated weapons-is politically impractical to the point of being counterproductive. In short, Bush should sell a new strategy and push for funding of new technology, but give up on trying to make all the Pentagon's spending programs make sense. Instead, he should do basically what Reagan did: throw lots of money at the problem.

It wasn't an elegant solution at the time, but it still bought many of the weapons the military relies on today. And by calming the various wolves of the status quo, extra dollars might actually make possible some incremental progress toward changing the military. The only other option is for Bush to continue to watch Don Rumsfeld slowly twist in the wind, which doesn't seem very conservative nor-one dares say-very compassionate.