Fighting the last war.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Images of American soldiers in the heat of battle dominate the news, allowing taxpayers a rare opportunity to see with their own eyes what their defense dollars are buying. The public's deep compassion for the wounded and a bipartisan desire to show support for the nation's military volunteers create an environment conducive to rubber-stamping the wish lists of defense contractors and Pentagon planners.

All of which makes the congressional delay over next year's $650 billion military budget a blessing in disguise. The Senate is divided over whether to encumber the pending defense appropriation with restrictions that could force the White House to change course in Iraq. While Majority Leader Harry Reid wrangles with recalcitrant Republicans over the scope of those restrictions, senators from both parties ought to use this unanticipated timeout to rethink the spending priorities outlined in the current budget.

It's always possible to find levels of waste in the Pentagon budget that would embarrass an Enron executive, but before drilling that deeply into the document, senators should take a step back for a wider perspective.

An analysis done in 2006 by Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now a senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information, points out that in fiscal year 2007, the United States will spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Compare the pending $650 billion U.S. defense appropriation with those of Russia and China, which will spend $100 million - combined. Add to that the combined budgets of U.S. adversaries North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Libya and Sudan, and the total annual defense outlay by strategic opponents of the United States - including Russia and China - is less than $150 billion.

Senators undoubtedly will remind everyone - including those who are still struggling to make sense of the numbers in the preceding paragraph - that the world has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, and U.S. security needs must change accordingly. But the $448 billion spent so far on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hasn't come from the Pentagon budget. Bush has kept the true cost of the `global war on terror' outside the normal budget process by segregating those expenditures in special appropriations bills.

The normal defense appropriation also fails to reflect the $43 billion annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, or the $300 billion annual defense budgets of U.S. allies.

What the bloated defense budget does reflect is the old saying that `generals are always fighting the last war.' The Pentagon plans to spend nearly $30 billion on nuclear deterrence and weapons programs, virtually unchanged from the average Cold War nuclear budgets.

The Bush administration continues to keep defense contractors beaming with $1.5 trillion worth of weapons systems in various stages of development, according to Korb's report. These include the clearly unnecessary F/A-22 Raptor jet fighter, conceived more than 20 years ago to achieve air superiority over Soviet fighters that were never built, and the equally quaint Virginia-class attack submarine, designed to counter Soviet subs that never left the drawing board.

All in all, Korb found unnecessary, wasteful and redundant expenditures in the defense budget totaling $60 billion. That gives Congress a lot of options. At the top of everyone's list is better protection for the ground forces that are doing the heavy lifting in the nation's defense. The Army and Marine Corps need a mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle - MRAP, for short - a lot more than the Air Force needs a Cold War-era fighter to counter a never-built opponent from the former Soviet Union.

The `big iron' of a bygone era - submarines, nuclear missiles, strategic bombers - should take a back seat to weapons systems and personnel enhancements more reflective of 21st century defense needs. If there's an overriding lesson for the Pentagon in a post-Sept. 11 world, it's that a better balance must be struck between technology, training and tactics.