The Budget Scrum
By Thoughts on the defense budget:
Rather, the real fight over the future of the defense budget will happen in the corridors of the Pentagon and in congressional committees. The nuclear weapons industrial complex will fight bitterly to maintain a role for itself, undoubtedly assisted by the senators and representatives from Tennessee and New Mexico. The Army and the Marine Corps will use every trick they have to deflect cuts and reaffirm their current size and status. In part because of mergers, the major defense conglomerates have spread geographically, reducing sectional conflict over major military projects. At the same time, however, maintaining an open spigot of defense money remains a bipartisan priority for many in Congress.
Unfortunately, this battle is likely to gain little national public attention. Defense politics would benefit from greater public scrutiny, but the lack of an imminent military threat like the Soviet Union, or an exciting partisan battle as developed in the 1980s, make it unlikely that the public will pay much attention to how the bureaucratic fight plays out. Defense budget politics has increasingly become a field of narrow contestation between experts, elites and interested actors, rather than a field in which different visions of the political good engage with one another. This has resulted in a prioritization of bureaucratic interest and parochial concern, both of which are enemies of real grand strategy.