For the first time in a long time, it’s not just far-left politicians who are calling for cuts to the defense budget: It’s far-right politicians, too.
In order to win enough support to become House speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) cut a deal in January with hard-right members of his party to support a cap on all new discretionary spending at fiscal 2022 levels. That would freeze the Pentagon’s portion of defense spending at $740 billion, compared to the current budget of $816 billion, a cut of roughly $76 billion.
While a solid bipartisan majority in both houses supports increasing defense spending to at least keep up with inflation, McCarthy argues there’s plenty of fat to trim. “I’m sure they can find some places that they could be more efficient. We have some of the best Navy SEALs, some of the best Rangers. They come to me every single day as they serve in Congress and tell me where that waste is in the Pentagon and others and want to be more efficient,” McCarthy told Fox News in January.
“Eliminate all the money spent on wokeism. Eliminate all the money that they’re [using] trying to find different fuels, worrying about the environment,” McCarthy said. “I want our men and women trained to be able to defend themselves, to secure, to have the best weapon systems possible.”
In principle, everyone opposes the notorious trifecta of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but in practice, it’s proved hard to define and harder to eliminate. That’s where the kind of sophisticated analytics used in professional sports might help, argued Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who is praising the newfound willingness of conservatives “to tackle the thorny challenge of military spending reforms,” calling it “a refreshing change from the Washington status quo.”
In an essay published last month titled “Getting Serious About Responsible Defense Spending,” Roberts invoked the now-celebrated story told in the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, as a blueprint for finding smart ways to trim the Pentagon’s budget without hurting its warfighting ability.
“Congress needs to take a Moneyball approach to our national defense,” Roberts argued.
“To get into the right mindset, Congress should refamiliarize itself with Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who was handed a team in 2002 with the third-lowest payroll in the MLB, one-third as much as the Yankees. By defying the prevailing practices of MLB old-timers, who valued the looks of their players ahead of on-base percentage, Beane took a more efficient, data-driven approach and squeezed the most out of every dollar. He took his band of misfits to a 103-59 season and a postseason berth — the same number of wins as the well-funded Yankees.”
In a Freakonomics Radio interview last year, Lewis said he was well aware that people tend to use “moneyball” as a catchall adjective when they want a sports metaphor to describe shaking things up, but other times, he thought, “You are finding better data and you’re analyzing it in different ways, and you come to pretty radical, different conclusions about how this should be done.”
In baseball, Beane used so-called sabermetrics to identify cheap, underrated players to build a team that performed above expectations. At the Pentagon, better metrics could help identify expensive programs that aren’t delivering significant extra bang for the taxpayer’s buck.
For example, in January the Congressional Budget Office did a side-by-side data analysis looking at the cost-benefit ratio of older missile systems compared to newer, more expensive hypersonic weapons. It found the only real advantage of the hypersonic weapons is that they could evade enemy missile defenses that no adversary has. “If time was not a concern, much cheaper cruise missiles could be used. If targets were time-sensitive, less costly ballistic missiles with maneuverable warheads could be used,” the CBO concluded.
The idea of improving military readiness and combat lethality using Moneyball metrics isn’t a novel idea. Budget analyst Todd Harrison, managing director of Metrea Strategic Insights, wrote about it in a paper for Strategic Studies Quarterly in 2014. “In defense, as in baseball, the way money is spent often matters as much as the total amount of money available,” Harrison wrote. “History is replete with examples of wealthier nations being defeated by more modestly resourced adversaries.”
But in today’s world, where there’s a hot war in Ukraine and a cold war with China, Harrison said Moneyball metrics might be better reserved for things such as training, readiness, personnel management, and compensation. “It would not work well for things like military construction, basing, and force posture decisions or real-world operations where there are a variety of intangible factors that must be considered,” he told the Washington Examiner.
“Moneyball is a bad analogy to DOD for two reasons,” argued Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In baseball, statisticians have a large amount of data from real-world situations. That allows analytically sound results to be drawn from the data.” But, he said, “There is very little real-world data regarding wartime experience — for example, the performance of fifth-generation aircraft in aerial combat.”
“Second, even in those situations where data might exist, for example, with logistics operations, there is often no good benchmark,” Cancian said. “FedEx is not a good benchmark for TRANSCOM. The missions are too different.”
Moneyball metrics, Cancian admitted, might be useful in squeezing savings out of “boring things like dining facilities, real estate management, and maybe some maintenance.”
“While a Moneyball approach, leveraging statistics to gain an edge in sports, looks attractive, it is overly simplistic compared to what a 21st century war would look like,” said Harry Kazianis, president of the Rogue States Project.
“Waging a modern war against Russia or China, which is what the Pentagon is preparing for long term, will be a multidomain affair where billions of people could die,” he added. “A Moneyball approach assumes that sportslike rules will be followed in war and that we know where the action will occur. None of that can be assumed in a great power war.”
And in war, unlike baseball, it’s not good enough to win at the bottom of the ninth by a single run.
Roberts insisted his experts at the Heritage Foundation will go over the Pentagon’s budget “line by line” to help lawmakers find smart ways to target inefficiencies, including “wokeness and waste,” “inefficient and outdated weapons systems,” and a new round of base closures. Last month, Thomas Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told the Washington Examiner that he found “maybe $100-$150 million” in the current defense budget that he could be “relatively confident are associated with woke programs.”
In Pentagon budget terms, $100 million to $150 million is a rounding error.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
