PolitiFact: Military cuts not so uniform

Leon Panetta

The statement:

“After every major conflict ... what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts.”

— Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in congressional testimony reported in a New York Times article on Oct. 23, 2011

In congressional testimony reported in a New York Times article on Oct. 23, 2011, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned against cutting defense spending too severely as the U.S. winds down its involvement in Iraq and reconsiders how to proceed in Afghanistan.

“After every major conflict — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union — what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts that impacted on equipment, impacted on training, impacted on capability,” Panetta said. “Whatever we do in confronting the challenges we face now on the fiscal side, we must not make that mistake.”

After a reader pointed out this quote to us, we decided it was worth checking.

Before starting our analysis, we’ll note a few factors.

First, on the statistical side, we’ll look at overall defense spending and troop levels. For spending, experts told us that the best figures to use are inflation-adjusted, annual totals.

Second, the definition of the key phrase Panetta used — “hollowing out” — is open to interpretation.

“’Hollowing out’ is a rather imprecise term that is floating around the Pentagon a lot these days,” said Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent think tank on defense and related spending. “It can mean not providing troops with adequate pay and benefits so that the best ones leave. It can mean not providing troops with adequate training, leaving them unprepared for combat. Or it can mean providing troops with substandard equipment, poorly maintained equipment or an insufficient quantity of equipment. When Panetta and others in the Pentagon say this, I’m not sure if they mean all of these things happened in the past or just some of them.”

The Pentagon did not respond to a query seeking data and background to support Panetta’s point, so we turned to a range of military experts and historians to assess whether the U.S. military experienced a “hollowing out” as Panetta said.

Now, let’s look at some numbers. For spending, we measured the decline from the peak spending year of the war to the lowest level within five years after hostilities ended.

The bottom line is that defense spending fell after World War II by 92 percent, after the Korean War by 53 percent, after the Vietnam War by 26 percent and after the Cold War by 28 percent.

As for worldwide troop levels, they fell by 27 percent after the Korean War, by 40 percent after the Vietnam War and by 32 percent after the Cold War. (The data we found did not include numbers for the aftermath of World War I, or for troop levels after World War II.)

What both of these measurements show is that for the periods following Korea, Vietnam and the end of the Cold War, both defense spending and worldwide troop levels declined by about one-quarter to one-half within a few years, so Panetta has a point.

Still, determining whether these declines led to a “hollowing out” requires looking at more than just the raw numbers. After all, it’s no surprise that both military spending and troop levels would decline after a war concludes.

A more relevant question is whether the decreases were severe enough in their scope and composition to hurt the United States’ ability to act militarily, given the threats the nation faced at the time. This is more of a judgment call, and the experts we contacted expressed some ambivalence.

“The accuracy of Panetta’s statement largely hinges on how you define ‘hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the board cuts,’” said Lance Janda, a historian at Cameron University. “His point is that during periods of budget cutting, we have to make smart choices, rather than cutting everything back the same amount, and that our choices have to reflect the threats we’ll face in the future. That’s a point I suspect most people would agree with. My caveat is that his use of historical examples is a bit suspect, and doesn’t reflect the political realities that governed defense spending during the 20th century.”

Panetta said that “after every major conflict — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union — what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts.”

He’s correct that spending and troop levels fell — enormously after the World Wars, more modestly after the other conflicts. But there’s less consensus that the cuts — particularly the ones that followed after the conclusion of the Korean War and the Cold War — led to a “hollowed out” force. We think it’s a stretch to suggest, as Panetta does, that cuts were made across the board. In most cases, the cuts weren’t knee-jerk but were in fact made with a larger strategy in mind.

On balance, we rate Panetta’s comment Half True.