Bush has unveiled his final and last budget. Although many Republicans might lament a lost opportunity to present a realistic budget, including the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a realistic fix to the alternative minimum tax (AMT), fixing the problems with social security, and others - as well as pushing his own agenda including permanent tax cuts. Had Bush done this he might have gotten his way - since everyone realizes many of these fixes are tough pills to swallow, but critical to the financial well being of our country. Both Democrats and Republicans could either blame or credit Bush (depending on the audience) for making the tough decisions to fix our financial mess. This would have initially created a lot of pushback and required the sacrificing of many a sacred cow - but without him or his Vice President running for President, and with most Republicans distancing themselves from Bush - he could get away with this without causing undue harm to his party. Should he accomplish it, he would be a hero, and if he didn't then history would at least credit him for making an honest and realistic appeal to fiscal sanity. After years of runaway spending, bridges to nowhere, and practically doubling the national debt - this would be one way to partially recoup his true Conservative credentials as being fiscally responsible.

Instead, however, we got a bloated budget that includes the highest budget deficit of all time. Although there are minor cuts in several programs, the two most glaring issues are funding of entitlement programs (to be fair, Bush did try address these with Social Security reform), and the military. I'm not sure if we can afford any more "fiscal conservatism". Bush inherited a $1.9 trillion US government, which he's managed to turn into a $3.1 trillion US government. The deficit has risen from $5.6 trillion to $9.7 trillion. The most recent budget has a record $401 billion deficit, and that including all the fantasy land gimmickry including estimating GDP growth a full percentage point above the estimates of the GAO and the private sector (using a more realistic estimate causes another $340 billion in red ink to the total) and assuming only $70 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan next year, with no out year costs (he must be assuming a democratic Presidential victory and a withdrawal from Iraq). Our $260 billion in interest payments is greater than the departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, HUD, and Justice combined. We now spend more than the combined military budgets of the next 20 largest nations' military budgets.

Leaving fixes for entitlement programs for another day, if we zero in on the military spending, we see a runaway budget with a poor choice of spending priorities. The proposed military budget is once again filled with high-tech gadgets and weaponry - some of which even the US Military doesn't want. Perhaps we should reevaluate the F-22 stealth fighter, the V-22 tilt rotor helicopter, the Joint Strike Fighter jet that all of which are having as much trouble finding an credible enemy; a Star Wars missile defense system that will never work; the gold-plated DD(X) destroyer and the Army's overly-designed Future Combat Systems. Let's take the F-22 Raptor fighter plane. The current plan is to buy 184 F-22 Raptors for $65.3 billion, or $354.9 million per aircraft. How relevant is it to create a new plane whose primary responsibility is shooting down enemy fighters? No other nation can go up against our current crop of fighters, so which threat requires a new generation fighter? Yet we push ahead with these costly programs. The Predator drone aircraft, fitted with Hellfire missiles and cameras cost $4.5 million apiece. If we forgo just one Raptor, we could buy almost 78 Predators which can fly virtually 24x7 - allowing us to methodically blanket northern Pakistan and find Bin Laden. After all how tough can it be to find a 6 foot 5 inch tall Arab dragging a dialysis machine?

The question is: How does this happen? Part of it comes from the military itself, which is enamored with making their lethal weapons that much more so. Part of it comes from the contractors, who pressure the military and congress to buy their wares. Bullets and flak jackets are commodity items, bid out to the lowest bidder, but there are only a few contractors that can build a F-22 Raptor, and therefore they can charge a premium. These contractors then pressure key Congressmen and Congresswomen by providing jobs and production facilities in key members home districts and by providing the campaign contributions that are the key to reelection. Ex-Secretary of the State Rumsfeld was a champion of these high-tech weapons under a program he called "transformation", using terms like force multiplier, suggesting that one solider could act as many provided they were given the right technology tools. In the conventional war portion of the Iraq War, the US was able to excel - using fewer, better trained, and better equipped troops to beat a superior number of enemy soldiers - however, when the conventional war turned into an insurgency - Rumsfeld was largely criticized for having too few boots on the ground. What we learned is that we needed fewer high tech weapons and more of the unsexy and mundane - instead of nuclear submarines we needed more soldiers, armored humvees, and flak jackets - all of which were in short supply in the early days of the insurgency.

The second problem is that we are chasing a phantom. The US outspends the combined military budgets of our two largest rivals, China and Russia, by a factor of three. 71% of all military spending is done by NATO countries. Are we really afraid of conventional war? President Bush introduced the concept of 'preemptive war', we attack them before they attack us, and used it as an excuse to invade Iraq. However, Saddam's Navy consisted of the Presidential yacht. At the beginning of the Gulf War Saddam had any planes that weren't destroyed flown to Iran, who never returned them. Besides, under the terms of the cease fire after the Gulf War, Saddam was unable to fly planes, even if he had them. With no way to move his army to position them to be able to attack the US, clearly we aren't afraid of Saddam waging conventional war against us. Rather it was unconventional war that we were afraid of. Which brings us back to fixing our military priorities. We need to recognize that the real threat to the US is more likely to involve low-intensity, insurgency type operations combined with a on-going battle to keep weapons of mass destruction away from those who might use it against the US. The tools we need to do this isn't a next generation fighter or a new nuclear submarine.

At Party of Common Sense we subscribe to Thomas Barnett theories in 2004 book, The Pentagon's New Map, where he argues that our military would inevitably split into a Leviathan-like combat force and a "system administrator" force optimized for the everything else: postwar stabilization and reconstruction, nation-building, crisis response and counter-insurgency. Although we prefer the terminology of a Hammer and Anvil, where the Hammer Force is the kinetic conventional war force (blowing stuff up) and the Anvil Force is the counter-insurgency policing type force. To understand the difference between the two think of the difference between the US Navy and the US Coast Guard. We recognize this is an imperfect analogy, so if you set aside the domestic vs. international responsibilities, you see that the US Coast guard is called on much more frequently and provides humanitarian search-and-rescue assistance as well as policing activities. When fired upon, the Coast Guard has lethal force and is prepared to use it. The Navy is rarely called upon, but when they are they don't fire warning shots. It’s strictly shoot to kill. Likewise, the Anvil force would be used to help bend the will of the enemy in low-intensity conflicts, while the threat and use of the Hammer force can be used in those situations where the enemy proves unwilling to bend.

One big problem is that gung-ho military types all want to blow-stuff up, and leave the policing to someone else. Remember Bush's famous statement that "we don't do nation building"? However, the Anvil Force is just, if not more important, than the Hammer Force. General Patreaus has taught us with the success of the surge that we not only need enough boots in the ground, but we also needed to switch tactics. The goal of conventional war is to capture territory, depriving the enemy the resources to continue to wage war, whereas with an insurgency the goal is to win the hearts and minds of the general population, thereby denying the enemy the sanctuary and ability hide among the general population. Winning an insurgency requires very different strategy and tactics than those required for winning a conventional war. In fact, some of the tactics used in a conventional war such as rounding up all military age men, kicking in doors, and shooting first are counterproductive in winning the hearts and minds of the general population when battling an insurgency. The War on Terror is much more like an insurgency, with pockets of the extremist enemy intermingled within more moderate general populations, and requires us not to invade nations and defeat conventional armies, rather to drain the swamps, win the hearts and minds of the moderates, and to flush out the enemy by denying them the sanctuaries that they currently enjoy.

The bifurcation of the military into a Hammer force and Anvil force would provide three main benefits:

1. Clarity of mission within the armed forces. Depending on the force sent, the goals of the mission are clear. Within the each group, the appropriate strategies and tactics will be taught and there would be clearly understood rules of engagement.
2. Clarity of intent within the international community. Depending on the force sent will show the world our intentions.
3. Create a balance of priorities. Since the majority of conflicts have been of the low intensity keepers of the peace, requiring an anvil-type response, this split of these armed forces means there would a group that would be advocating low-tech weaponry like armored humvees, anti-IEDs, and flak jackets - never again would be caught without the proper tools to handle the job.

Reworking the military into Hammer and Anvil Forces should provide the US with a more effective military, better suited to tackle the challenges we find in the 21st century. It would also make apparent (and hopefully reign in) the wasteful spending on military high technology gadgets and would streamline and make more effective what is currently being spent.

Although a lack of military budget priorities is the largest contributor to bloat in the current budget, it isn't the sole problem. There are addition priorities across the government are still skewed. In spite of overwhelming evidence of Global Warming, Bush once again attacked and reduced the EPA budget. Bush has cut funding for the poor and children while increasing funding for NASA and abstinence only programs. I wish I could say that it was just Bush, but Reagan also ran up the deficit by $1 trillion dollars. Put into prospective as percentage Gross Domestic Product (GDP) terms, Regan raised the federal deficit from 2.6% of GNP to 5.3%. Yet somehow, a democrat, Clinton, managed to control the growth of the deficit and reverse the trend with budget surpluses. Perhaps this says something about Republican 'voodoo economics' and the 'trickle down theory' that just isn't working? It has been suggested that the standard fare of the Republican party: cut taxes, increase military spending, and free market economies had a place but have run their course. Our taxes are low, our military is strong, and we are started to see cracks in our economic system with lead paint, tainted beef, a subprime mortgage meltdown, and more. Perhaps the time has come for a new Common Sense approach to restore fiscal sanity?