WASHINGTON -- Retired Marine Col. John Nicholson walked into a tough job recently. Gov. Beverly Perdue appointed Nicholson as her military adviser on Dec. 1 and charged him with stimulating defense-related job growth and investment. On the same day, fellow North Carolinian Erskine Bowles, co-chair of the president's deficit commission, recommended dramatic federal spending cuts, including a trillion-plus reduction in national security funds through the end of the decade.
Military spending austerity is coming, and Nicholson's primary task should be to adjust expectations accordingly.
North Carolina's Advisory Commission on Military Affairs projected in 2008 that, by 2013, military growth would increase the state's income by $2.9 billion. There are three reasons why this almost certainly will not happen. Most simply, our new Congress has a resounding mandate to cut spending. National defense constitutes a fifth of the total federal budget and more than half of the subset that Congress spends on a discretionary basis. A share that large - about $700 billion - cannot escape scrutiny. Defense Secretary Gates resists this logic as "math, not strategy," but that is not going to stop it from happening.
Politics also plays a large part. Republicans surged in the November election by championing fiscal discipline and adamantly opposing tax increases. Our national finances are so bad that these two principles may be essentially incompatible, but they certainly are if the military's share of spending also is off the table.
Republican Rep. Walter Jones acknowledged this in a May letter to the deficit commission. Since then, influential Republicans such as Sen. Tom Coburn and Reagan-era budget director David Stockman have publicly reached the same conclusion. And this month a group of conservative budget and strategy experts led by Grover Norquist released a public letter condemning the "protected status that has isolated [Pentagon spending] from serious scrutiny" and demanding that there be "no sacred cows."
Most importantly, national defense spending cuts are coming because they are the right thing to do strategically. Another country has not plausibly threatened our territory since the Soviet Union collapsed 20 years ago. The challenge that al-Qaida poses is far more sensational than it is severe, in part because that is the nature of terrorism and also because our forces have splintered its network in Afghanistan. The likelihood that we would choose a fight with China, North Korea or Iran is very low. In the event we do, we can count on a competent force of professional volunteers and a hardware capability more than sufficient for any conceivable strategy.
Additional defense spending at this point would only aggravate competitors' perceptions that we are intent on conflict and make us less safe as a result. Lower defense spending is needed both for our security and our fiscal circumstances.
The General Assembly created Nicholson's position and the Advisory Commission on Military Affairs to resist just this type of situation - to "protect the installations of this State from the results of any future defense budget cuts." This viewpoint inappropriately puts the state's narrow economic interest over our larger national security interest. Nicholson spent decades in the Marine Corps serving the national interest, and now is no time to stop.
He can best support North Carolina by helping to diversify the defense economy into areas compatible with, but not dependent on, future military missions. iRobot, a multinational technology firm with an office in Research Triangle Park, provides an outstanding example. The business produces a popular home vacuum cleaner as well as one of the military's premier bomb disposal robots. Unmanned technology like this is one of the best bets in a tightened defense economy, and diversified firms such as iRobot can lessen North Carolina's reliance on federal spending.
By contrast, Nicholson need only point to Virginia's economic woes to show the consequences of being dependent on Pentagon funds. In August Gates decided to reduce the Pentagon's consulting contracts, an industry heavily concentrated in the Northern Virginia suburbs, and to close a lesser-known command in Norfolk. These two regions are the last in Virginia to escape the recession's effects, and Gates' decision almost surely will kneecap the state's recovery.
North Carolina must not follow in Virginia's footsteps. Campaigning for higher defense spending contradicts the national interest, and depending on it is economically unwise. In this light, the expectations placed on Nicholson by Perdue and legislators are fundamentally out of sync with today's circumstances. It would be a service to the state and the country for him to put North Carolina on a more sustainable path toward economic recovery by adjusting those expectations.
Matthew Leatherman is with the Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense Project of the Stimson Center in Washington.
