WASHINGTON – As the Defense Department grapples with budget cutbacks, one of the premiere military war colleges has sustained a 29 percent budget cut, which could mean training future military leaders without the latest technology. But some critics say more than enough is being spent on professional military education.
National Defense University, based at Ft. McNair in Washington, has trained scores of future generals over the years, including former Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark and former Army Chief of Staff and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki. Its budget is $73.6 million for fiscal 2015, down by $29.4 million in 2010.
“We’ve had a tough last few years. We have, as an institution, been slimmed down quite a bit to deal with reduction in funds,” said Dr. Joseph J. Collins, director of the Center for Complex Operations at National Defense University.
The National War College and the Eisenhower School, two of the colleges within NDU, train select military and civilian students in big-picture national security strategy, studying the use of all instruments of national power, military, economic, diplomatic and financial to achieve national goals, Collins said. Dr. David Tretler, a professor and former dean at the National War College, said the school offers an intensive 10-month higher education training program. The courses include strategy, ethics and leadership as well as war and statecraft and non-military instruments of power, which Collins said require up to 80 hours of classwork each.
NDU spokesman Mark Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.
Due to mandatory budget cuts to all government agencies set by Congress, the Defense Department’s budget for fiscal 2014, including funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, was $580 billion. The president has requested $575 billion for the fiscal 2015, which includes war funding, as well as another $26 billion for an opportunity and growth fund. Because of the cuts, war colleges have had to curtail their operations. At the National War College, that has meant scaling back programming for students, research support, war-gaming capabilities and the number of students enrolled – from 224 to 208, Collins said.
“The powers that be essentially said, ‘Big cut is coming and we want you to take the cut here in research and other activities and we want you to the greatest extent possible to insulate the schoolhouse from the cuts.’ And so, internally there was real adjustment,” Collins said.
Because of the cuts, travel funds that allowed students to visit senor officials and policymakers in foreign countries and experience problems first-hand have been reduced, Tretler said.
He said the college could use a “much more robust gaming and simulation center that could model real world national security strategic challenges” He explained that national security issues are so complex that the amount of computer power it would take to simulate real events to challenge students would cost, “big money.”
Future sequestration could mean furloughing employees, which would limit the type of services offered to students. Reduction in student numbers and length of the program could be possibilities, Tretler said.
But some critics say there may be too many officers going to military war colleges.
Benjamin H. Friedman, a defense and homeland security research fellow at the libertarian CATO Institute, said too much is spent on defense.
“We want our officers to be well educated and to participate in intellectual lives as they advance in the ranks… ,” Friedman said. “Not everybody who gets promoted to lieutenant colonel needs to go to a war college. Sometimes, we are wasting labor.”
But Collins noted that “there’s always the people who want to do more with less, but when you have less you do less.”