They are, according to five of my CNAS colleagues, these:

1. Redundant Overhead, Layering and Workforce

2. Inefficient Business Practices

3. Excessive Acquisition Costs and Overruns

4. Excess Infrastructure, Installations and Management Costs

5. Unaffordable Increases in Cash Compensation

6. Unsustainable Growth of Military Retirement System Costs

7. Escalating Military Health Care Costs

If these seven money gluttons aren't tamed, they warn, "DOD will have no choice but to find savings through deep cuts to force structure, modernization and readiness -- the very core capabilities required for the U.S. military to maintain global pre-eminence."

You can read the whole report here. You likely will hear more if you tune in to the CNAS annual conference tomorrow (Wednesday).

The other day FP carried a standard carriers-are-great piece by a trio of admirals. A friend of mine, appalled at what he regarded as the ostrich-like views of the high-ranking authors, sent a corrective note to me:

Key questions to be considered would be:

• To what degree will China be able to impede our ability to freely use carriers in the Pacific in the future?

• How willing would U.S. political leadership be to commit carriers in a high-threat environment where China would view a negative outcome for them as a threat to the survival of the Party (recognizing that in that culture every defeat, even small ones, are a threat to the survival of the Party)?

• Would POTUS commit a carrier if there was a 10 percent chance it would be hit?

• How about 20 percent, or 30 percent?

• How many of the vertical launch tubes on the destroyers and cruisers are committed to defending the carrier vs. carrying Tomahawks to carry out power-projection missions? 

• When does the Navy come in a la Bay of Pigs and say that it can only operate carriers forward to accomplish the mission if it is allowed to hit targets on the mainland, placing CONUS at risk to reprisal, and how does the president respond?

• When does the POTUS realize that for years we have built platforms that we cannot afford to lose, either in monetary cost or the cost of lives? That is the key question. Rule number three of war is never build a weapon that you cannot afford to lose or have defeated. We seem to proceed on an assumption that no one will ever attack our carriers. I think the Chinese will see themselves as being in a position that they cannot afford NOT to attack our carriers.

• How does this all affect our position vis a vis Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and India? All of those relationships will be at risk if we don't have an alternative.

Final thought: The Navy has already accepted that the fleet is going to shrink to 270 ships, and I am here to tell you that it will go smaller than that, probably 230 before this is all done. This is largely because all of those ships that were built by Reagan are all retiring at the same time and we are not building replacements at the same rate right now. That will be the price of maintaining 10-11 supercarriers at $12-13 billion with an annual shipbuilding budget of $15 billion. The price will decrease overall naval presence, and raise questions as to the U.S. commitment to local security concerns.

It was underwhelming. Got it, he admires Ike. So do I. As a friend of mine said, "This was a terrible speech.  Said nothing and awful delivery."

Not a good sign for a SecDef leading a Pentagon on the budget roller coaster.

[Here are Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII.] 

Crist: One of the things as a federal employee who works on current Middle East issues, and having studied pretty extensively for a project on the Joint Staff the lead-up to decisions on Iraq, the thing that has struck me is that the lessons learned among policymakers from Iraq is there was a lot of thought given -- which was not the case in 2002 and 2003 -- given to second- and third- order effects of American action and what are the ramifications for this that we don't anticipate. Whether that can be sustained over the next generation or just each generation learns its lesson, institutionalizes it and [inaudible].

Dubik: The lesson-learned process and what people learn from our 10-year experience is important. There is a reasoned way to think through using force, there is a useful process in increasing the probability that you'll get it more right than wrong -- not that you'll ever get it absolutely right.

I fear that we are throwing out counterinsurgency because we are never doing that again. But we already did that once: It was post-Vietnam. Counterinsurgency is not a strategy; it's a way to deal with an insurgency, and if you face it again, it gives you a relatively decent structure to think through these things. It certainly shouldn't be a national strategy. It was never designed to do that.

Ricks: Another person who could not attend today, Kyle Teamey, who some of you may know, a terrifically smart young man, sent in this question: "Is there anyone at this table who thinks we will not do counterinsurgency again?"

For the record, I want to note that everybody agrees we will do counterinsurgency again.

Mudd: But we went in to do counterterrorism, and now all we talk about is counterinsurgency. So success on Sept. 12 would have been, "Is there going to be an attack against the United States?" and by 2003 that answer was no. And now we say success is: Should we have a third election? And my view would be, if the Taliban wins, I don't care as long as we have a residual capability to eliminate the target we went in to get.

I hate counterinsurgency, because it wasn't our threat. Just a quick asterisk: In parallel with these major wars we had intervention in places like Somalia and Yemen. There's been no tactical conversation here, and I think appropriately -- but especially with the new tactical capability-- we've been able to say, "Man, we are giving the president in some cases better options, but in some cases much tougher?" You want to go into Mali? You want to go against Boko Haram? I want to know why we are not talking about armed drones against cartels, which were a much bigger threat to this country than terrorism ever was or ever will be. But it is interesting that parallel subwars or campaigns is part of this war and what they mean about American intervention in the future that leads not only to things like increasing the capacity of the partner but also unilateral use of force against a target without ever having to put a boot on the ground fast.

Ricks: What do they tell you?

Mudd: That tells me that we are going to be into it because we are going to say there's a way to get out of this without putting big green on the ground.

Flournoy: I think that there probably will be some point in the future where we decide to help a government deal with its problem of insurgency, and that's the thing: It's not our insurgency. The question is: Can we come to some consensus on what's the right model? Is there a single right model for that, or is it really entirely case by case? To me, after the experience of the last decade or more, the El Salvador model looks a lot more attractive than the conventional occupation model of Iraq and Afghanistan, but is that just being falsely wedded to something? Can we generalize from these different experiences to say there is one approach that either is generally more effective or, from our own political culture, generally more acceptable and sustainable to the American people?

Ricks: I'm going to try and answer your question. I would say, yes, clearly: Light footprint, minimal American boots on the ground, leading from behind, helping host nation abilities, or even helping third parties like we've been helping the Colombians help the Mexicans on the drug war. These are the things that work; these are the things also that go to the issue of sustainability. I once was talking to Elliott Abrams, and I said I thought secretly more Americans had been killed in El Salvador than were killed in the 1991 Gulf War. He said, "Yeah, but I won my war."

Alford: You also have to design the force to support your strategy. You got to start thinking about the force.

Ricks: We have a force that's tactically magnificent, but is it relevant, Colonel Alford?

Alford: No, I don't think we are organized the way we should be right now for the future.

Ricks: How should we be better organized?

Alford: Well, I mean all the things you just talked about were what the U.S. Marines do from amphibious ships. We are balanced, we are flexible, we are adaptable, and we are forward deployed. We can go in and be out and not have to put a footprint on the ground for any significant period of time. And that's what we want.

I mean, I love the U.S. Army -- we have the best U.S. Army in the world, but in Kosovo when you take in 24 helicopters and it takes 6,000 troops to support those 24 helicopters, that's not the future.

Ricks: I need to go now to the Army generals who have been shaking their heads.

Dubik: We have a great Marine Corps for a reason, and I'm glad we have it. But we have a great Air Force, and Navy, and Army for a reason that we need also.

But I play golf with 13 clubs. And I like to solve problems with more than one conceptual framework. So I'm not at all satisfied with a conclusion of our last 10 years of war that "quote, unquote" this approach works. I think that that would be a dangerous way to come out of this war. For me, the lesson learned is come to a war with more than one conceptual framework. Because every war, while it may have some common elements, every war, as Clausewitz says, is a chameleon, admits to its own solution, and you have to think through that solution. So the light-footprint approach that you talked about works in many, many circumstances, but there are an equal number that it won't.

Ricks: So be adaptive is what you're saying?

Dubik: Intellectually adaptive.

Ricks: I've been reading another history of World War II recently which Churchill keeps on saying in ‘39, ‘40, ‘41 that this will not be a force-on-force war.

Dubik: [Laughs.] Yeah, well it ended up being that way.

And that gets to my comment about adaptability. It's not just intellectual adaptability but force adaptability. If you predict one future and you optimize your force for that future, you're either a hero or a goat. You're a hero if the future unfolds as you predict. You're a goat because you've got the country's reputation on something that now is not relevant. So in our force-structure decisions coming up necessarily as a result of the position we are in strategically and fiscally, maintaining as many options as we possibly can is an important way forward in an uncertain environment. It's organizationally important to have alternatives.

Ricks: Is it possible to maintain options in an era when I'm guessing defense budgets are going to go down 30 percent in the next few years?

Dubik: My own answer is yes. The number of options may be reduced, but you can still retain a good number of options if you are willing to break some rice bowls in terms of current organizational structures, active, guard, reserve in each of the components.

Mudd: A sand wedge is what you're saying.

Dubik: Yeah, I use a sand wedge.

Alford: One of the four words I used there was adaptable. You've got to have a number of tools in the box to cross the threat that we are going to face, which I believe is going to be a more hybrid, irregular, not a toe-to-toe threat. That's going to be the most prevalent, I believe.

Ricks: And the other head-shaking general?

Fastabend: I'd like to make two comments. Jim [Dubik] talked adequately about the need to have 13 clubs in the bag. I can't restrain myself from saying this now that I'm retired: You can't help but love the Marine Corps. They are simultaneously one of the greatest and most insecure institutions that I've ever encountered in my life.

(More to come, as the Army-Marine smackdown continues)

By Thomas Donnelly

Best Defense office of historical force structure analysis, French and Indian War to World War II division

Beyond the official story, that Army chart tells you a couple of things:

1. Army was never as big as planned.

2. It got heavier -- more tanks and more artillery.

3. It got heavier in different ways than planned -- fewer tanks, a lot more artillery.

4. Didn't buy as many aircraft as planned.

5. Needed many more higher-echelon support troops than planned.

Questions why:

1. Were the differences a result of policy, manpower constraints, industrial constraints, tactical learning?

2. For a war that's supposed to be about the rise of tactical aviation and close air support, the increase in artillery and failure to meet aircraft goals is interesting.

3. Higher-echelon support troops: Like other wars, this was fought in coalition and at great strategic distances from the United States and at great operational distances within the theaters. Is "tail" actually "tooth?"

Words for our time?

I have felt that the military departments of the Government did not devote sufficient time, investigation and effort to the evolution or development of a system which would provide the necessary security with the minimum of financial output. We were forced into stringent economies by drastic cuts in appropriations, but there is a decided difference between effecting economies by cuts, particularly under pressure, and deliberately concentrating on the search for a system that permits a more economical set up and operation of an adequate military force.

I think we have erred at times on the side of a too dogmatic statement of requirements without regard to whether or not there was a reasonably practical possibility of obtaining the necessary funds through the years.

--George Marshall to the graduates of the National War College, June 20, 1947

(P. 157, The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, Vol. 6: ‘The Whole World Hangs in the Balance.' Edited by Larry Bland, Mark Stoler, Sharon Stevens, and Daniel Holt. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.)

By Max Boot

Best Defense guest columnist

In my new book, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, I argue that low-intensity warfare always has been and always will be the dominant form of combat. Assuming my analysis is correct -- and I believe it is confirmed by thousands of years of experience -- what does this mean for the future of the U.S. armed forces? What kind of military do we need to fight terrorists and guerrillas?

It is hard to top the description offered by Colonel Pierre-Noel Raspèguy, one of the central characters in Jean Larteguy's classic novel The Centurions (1962) about the French paratroopers who fought in Indochina and Algeria. Raspèguy, modeled on the real-life legend Marcel "Bruno" Bigeard, says:

I'd like France to have two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers who would be deeply concerned over their general's bowel movements for their colonel's piles: an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country.

The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put on display but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That's the army in which I would like to fight.

As it happens, the United States today already has the second kind of army -- and a Marine Corps too: Both have been shaped by a decade of war into counterinsurgency (COIN) forces with few peers in history. They may not look good on parade, and they may not be as proficient at fighting with tanks and artillery as the peacetime forces of prior decades, but at the messy, trying business of fighting terrorists and guerrillas they have few if any equals.

Achieving this level of proficiency has not been easy. It has required overcoming the built-in bias in favor of conventional conflict among all conventional military forces. Indeed the COIN revolution in the U.S. military would never have come about were it not for the fact that the more conventional method of fighting nearly led the United States to disaster in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. The danger now is that the armed forces will revert to their default setting -- preparing to fight some version of the (nonexistent) Red Army -- and turn their back on the hard-won lessons of the past decade.

The danger is especially great because the heavy deployment tempo of the last decade is winding down and both the Army and Marine Corps are downsizing -- the former is set to lose at least 80,000 troops, the latter at least 20,000. Actually, the personnel cuts may be even deeper if $500 billion in sequestration cuts are implemented or if they are turned off by a budget deal that inflicts smaller but still substantial cutbacks on the armed forces. A smaller force that will experience less combat may see the exit of some of its most experienced COIN veterans -- the hardcore warriors who have no desire to serve in a spit-and-polish parade-ground army.

A smaller force will also be less capable of COIN operations in the future because such campaigns are manpower intensive. The Iraq War showed that, while you don't need that many troops anymore to take down a conventional force like Saddam Hussein's army, you need a lot more personnel to pacify a country of 25 million people. We did not have enough troops, in no small part because of the "peace dividend" cuts of the 1990s which eliminated one-third of the Army's active-duty ranks. There was a modest plus-up in active-duty strength over the past decade, but if the Army and Marine Corps are now cut again they will lack the riflemen they need to conduct COIN operations in the future.

Of course COIN requires not only large numbers of general-purpose troops but also as many as possible who know the culture and language of the land where they are deployed. This has long been a weakness of the U.S. military, which has never stressed foreign-language training or foreign-area knowledge save for a handful of foreign affairs officers who are typically consigned to career purgatory. This is supposed to be a specialty of the Army Special Forces, but over the past decade their A-teams from all over the world have been sucked into Iraq and Afghanistan and focused on direct-action missions, sacrificing whatever local language proficiency they might have previously cultivated.

It will be hard to enhance the foreign-area expertise of the armed forces without taking some steps that are anathema to the bureaucracy. Some ideas:

• Recruiting more non-citizens into the armed forces -- the premise of a small program, Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI), which was wildly successful when implemented in 2009 (one of its recruits, a Nepalese immigrant, was named the Army's Soldier of the Year) but that was suspended in 2010 after the shooting by Major Nidal Malik Hassan, an native-born citizen, at Fort Hood. The program has now been relaunched but it remains to be seen how many slots it will have and how long it will last.

• Creating an entire advisory organization within the Army focused on security assistance -- an idea first suggested by COIN expert John Nagl that has never come close to being implemented. Instead advisors are currently taken out of conventional Brigade Combat Teams, which means that top performers are seldom selected for this assignment.

• Dedicating officers to spent years focused on one region, whether they are down-range or at home station. This was the premise of the AfPak Hands Program, an initiative launched in 2009 by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Adm. Mike Mullen, designed to dedicate a group of officers to years of focus on Afghanistan-Pakistan. But the individual services refused to support it by assigning top-performing officers and it has not lived up to its promise. The program should not only be revived but expanded to other parts of the world -- and it should be attractive enough to recruit high-fliers.

• Making a year of study abroad mandatory for students in the military academies, command and staff colleges, and war colleges.

Whenever such proposals are put forward, the bureaucracy raises myriad reasons why they are supposedly impractical. What's really impractical, however, is forcing the armed forces to fight on human terrain they don't understand.

None of these is meant to suggest that we should get rid of all heavy conventional forces. The Army and Marine Corps should keep their tanks, albeit in smaller numbers than today -- not because there is great likelihood that anyone will once again fight an armored war against us, as Saddam Hussein tried to do twice, but because tanks can come in handy in COIN. (See the two battles for Fallujah or the Israeli Operation Defensive Shield during the Second Intifada.) The Air Force and Navy shouldn't focus much on COIN at all -- they need more ships and aircraft to counter the rise of China and deal with other conventional threats. But low-intensity conflict will remain the most common form of warfare in the future, and the Army and Marine Corps will need to dedicate the bulk of their resources to preparing for this kind of war in the future.

And that will require not only identifying and shooting insurgents but also dispelling the conditions that give rise to insurgency. Perhaps the most important step we can take to increase our COIN capacity in the future would be to create a civil-military nation-building office, possibly by transforming USAID into an agency focused not on promoting "development" for its own sake but on building up state structures in strategically important countries that are endangered by actual or potential insurgencies. In other words, places like Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Mali, and post-Assad Syria.

I know that "nation-building" is anathema to political expediency in Washington. But there is really no other choice. If we can't do a better job of assisting other countries to govern themselves, especially in the arc of instability stretching from West Africa to Central Asia, we will find our military forces sucked into more difficult and costly conflicts in the future.

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (Liveright).