Resourcing for Defeat

The United States is now losing the war in Afghanistan, and is failing to consolidate its victory in Iraq. Reversing this situation requires changes in strategy, but it also requires significant additional resources. It may be tempting for the Obama Administration and the Congress to deny this reality, but any failure to provide the additional funds and forces needed to win, and to correct seven years of under-resourcing the Afghan conflict, may well lead to eventual defeat.

The challenges involved are described in detail in a new analysis by Erin K. Fitzgerald and Anthony H. Cordesman for the Burke Chair at CSIS. This paper is entitled Resourcing for Defeat: The Critical Failures In Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Resourcing the Afghan and Iraq Wars, which is available from the Burke Chair section of the CSIS web site at http://csis.org/files/publication/090806_afghan_iraqwar_fund.pdf.

It documents a major grand strategic failure on the part of the United States. Effective war fighting requires effective planning, and this is especially true of resources.  The United States, however, failed to develop meaningful long-term strategies and plans for the Iraq and Afghan Wars, and failed to translate them into budgets and well-defined requests for resources.  It dealt with both wars by budgeting for each year in an annual increment and without tying its resource requests to a coherent campaign plan for warfighting or armed national building. It never developed a consistent or credible long-term funding profile for war fighting, nor did it properly manage either conflict.

The Bush Administration failed to develop a meaningful long-term strategy or plan for the Iraq and Afghan Wars, while also failing to properly resource its wars and produce sound budgets. For the past eight budgets, the Department of Defense requested emergency supplemental or “bridge” funding outside of the regular defense budget. This dual-track budget process created numerous problems in terms of ensuring the effective planning and resourcing of the wars, and ensuring suitable Congressional and media review. Moreover, DOD consistently sought funding for programs that do not meet the reasonable test for a war-related emergency. In essence, the Department treated the supplemental and baseline budgets as fungible, compromising the integrity of the normal budgeting process.

The Burke Chair has prepared an overview of the current estimates of the cost of the war to date, and of possible future costs. While it surveys budget requests made by the Department of Defense (DOD), it relies heavily on work by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congressional Research Service (CRS), and General Accountability Office (GAO). Although there are problems in the available data and many different ways to estimate costs, the analysis shows that war costs of $915 billion have been covered by supplemental emergency appropriations, with $687 billion going to the Iraq War and $228 billion going to Afghanistan.

Figure I: Annual DOD Spending on the Iraq and Afghan Wars (in billions)

Source: Adapted by the author from data provided by Amy Belasco, The Cost of Afghanistan, Iraq and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11. Congressional Research Services (RL33110). Updated, 15 May 2009.

The difference between these two figures reveals a fundamental difference in the way in which the Bush Administration reacted to the challenges it faced after the initial moment of conventional victory. As Figure I shows, in the Iraq War, the United States threw enough money at the conflict to largely defeat the insurgency, although the ultimate outcome is still unclear. It did so, however, without developing coherent budgets and long term funding profiles, and without any clear effort to develop the kind of consistent and well-managed programs that could have reduced the cost of the war and improved the effectiveness of US forces – hence the continued reliance on supplementals displayed in Figure II.

In the case of the Afghan War, the United States underfunded the conflict to the point where it risked defeat. In spite of significant allied contributions, the Afghan War has received less outside funding than the Iraq War. Costs for Operation Enduring Freedom have risen dramatically since FY2006 as troop levels and the intensity of conflict have grown, but expenditures have been three times higher on Iraq to date.

The Bush Administration simply did not fund the war it had to fight. As Figure III illustrates, it was only in FY2009, some seven years after the war in Afghanistan became a major US strategic commitment, when the US began to fund the war seriously. At a minimum, American underresourcing allowed the Taliban to recover and seize the initiative, and al-Qaida to create a new sanctuary in Pakistan. The end result is that the cost of salvaging victory – if this is still possible – will be an order of magnitude higher than it should have been – both in dollars and body bags.

Figure II: Baseline Budget vs. Supplementals for Iraq, FY03-FY09 (in $US billions)

Source: Adapted by the author from data provided by Amy Belasco, The Cost of Afghanistan, Iraq and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11. Congressional Research Services (RL33110). Updated, 15 May 2009.

Figure III: Baseline Budget vs. Supplementals for Afghanistan, FY03-FY09 (in $US billions)

Source: Adapted by the author from data provided by Amy Belasco, The Cost of Afghanistan, Iraq and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11. Congressional Research Services (RL33110). Updated, 15 May 2009.

These years of underfunding have created a dilemma for the Obama Administration where it must now pay far more to compensate for a past Administration’s grand strategic failures or risk losing the war in Afghanistan. Moreover, neither DOD nor the State Department budgets now fund an adequate or well-defined plan for the civil side of either war, and it is unclear that the Department of Defense plans to sustain the US military advisory effort in Iraq at anything like the level required. The US finds it easy to announce “strategies” and concepts; it has yet to show that it can back them with efficient and effective plans, programs, and budgets.

The end result is that President Obama must now deal with two badly managed and budgeted wars. In the case of Iraq, he must deal with the withdrawal of US combat forces from a war with no clear plan or funding for making the transition to a civilian-dominated nation building effort or supporting the development of Iraqi security forces. It the case of Afghanistan, he must either make unpopular and costly decisions to compensate for seven crippling years of underresourcing the war, or risk losing it.