Tag: defense

National Defense

American military strength (an important aspect of our national security) depends on the size, training, and equipment (weapons) of our military, which is very much dependent on the size and efficiency of our economy, which pays for it.  Devoting more of our productive capacity to the military reduces our economic capacity. Getting the balance right between military and nonmilitary uses of our resources is very important.  Knowing what military capacity we need to insure our defense requires assessing the sources of threats to our national security and what motivates their deployment.

The cold war was a confrontation with international communism, most heavily concentrated in the Soviet Union. This was an ideological enemy of free market, capitalist countries, whose goal was to spread its ideology to the entire world. There is no such ideological enemy today. The Chinese government wants to be strong and prosperous and doesn’t care whether anyone else follows their model or not. They do want the rules for global trade and interactions to permit their own domestic model. We need to engage China fairly in establishing international rules that serve everone.

Historically wars were generally about territory and political control, usually about moving boarders a bit this way or that.  The Mogul, Roman, Persian, British, Ottoman and other empires existed largely to extract economic gain from the territories they ruled, something more peacefully enjoyed today via free (or freer) trade.  The mere threat of war and the creation and maintenance of potential enemies is also a useful device for rallying countries around their leaders and for keeping the money flowing to their “defense” industries–think of Mr. Putin, Xi Jinping and the U.S. military/industrial complex.

American defense today requires military strength sufficient to deter any country from successfully attacking the United States. It does not require the 800 military bases that we maintain around the world.  It did not require and was not enhanced by our many wars that followed the infamous and very damaging Viet Nam war (Lebanon 1982-4, Grenada 1983, Panama 1989-90, Gulf War 1990-91, Somali 1992-5, Bosnia 1992-5, Haiti 1994-5, Kosovo 1998-9, Afghanistan 2001-date, Iraq 2003-11, 2014-date, Somali 2007-21, Libya 2011, 2015-20, Syria 2014-date, War on Terror in various places). War with China would be quite a different matter. “The delusions of high tech warfare”

Fareed Zakaria unloaded on our war industry last month: “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin outlined his key concern. ‘China is our pacing threat,’ he said. He explained that for the past 20 years, the United States had been focused on the Middle East while China had been modernizing its military. ‘We still maintain the edge,’ he noted, ‘and we’re going to increase the edge going forward.’ Welcome to the new age of bloated Pentagon budgets, all to be justified by the great Chinese threat.

“What Austin calls America’s ‘edge’ over China is more like a chasm. The United States has about 20 times the number of nuclear warheads as China. It has twice the tonnage of warships at sea, including 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers compared with China’s two carriers (which are much less advanced). Washington has more than 2,000 modern fighter jets compared with Beijing’s roughly 600, according to national security analyst Sebastien Roblin. And the United States deploys this power using a vast network of some 800 overseas bases. China has three. China spends around $250 billion on its military, a third as much as the United States.”  “The Pentagon is using China as an excuse for huge new budgets”  As noted above, over-investing in the military results in a smaller economy overall.

The latest debate is whether we should make our commitment to go to war with China to defend the independence of Taiwan explicit or leave it implied and ambiguous. In 1979 the U.S. recognized the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China and acknowledged that Taiwan was part of China (slightly fuzzy diplomatic language). So would American national security be enhanced by an explicit credible commitment to go to war with China, if necessary, to preserve the independence of Taiwan? China is a nuclear power. Going to war with China (World War III if we could get anyone else to join us) would inflect enormous damage on the U.S. whether it became nuclear or not, even if we won. In my opinion it would be simply insane to take such risks.

Would the U.S. deter China by being tough enough?  As Doug Bandow put it: “America’s antagonists saw something very different than weakness…. Stupidity and arrogance. Poor judgment. Refusal to admit mistakes. An almost demented willingness to sacrifice America’s future in a desperate attempt to redeem the nation’s tragic past. A better way not to show weakness would be to stop doing ‘stupid shit,’ as Obama suggested.

“China’s Xi Jinping and his colleagues in Zhongnanhai likely have a far more objective and practical take on U.S. policy: Endless wars by Washington are good for Beijing. The Chinese would love to see the US pour trillions more dollars and thousands more lives into new conflicts. Invade Iran? Please! Maybe occupy Syria too? Lebanon also needs fixing. Don’t forget the need to redeem Afghanistan. Then there is the problem of Russia in Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere: go for it!”  https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bandow/2021/03/23/the-failure-of-huff-and-puff-foreign-policy/

But China (and Russia in Ukraine) has been behaving badly–claiming this little island in the China Sea and that one as its own, not to mention the ever-present risk of invading Taiwan. Even if the forced takeover of Taiwan by the PRC would not threaten our national defense, shouldn’t we care? Shouldn’t we care about the abhorrent genocide by the Chinese government against its Uighur Muslim minority in its western province of Xinjiang? Of course, we should, but we should reject the presumption of our neocon friends and the military/industrial complex we keep fat and rich that these and other interests can only be addressed militarily. See my experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan: “My Travels to Baghdad”

The creation of the United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions and other international cooperative agreements and institutions after World War II were meant to provide dispute resolution mechanisms other than wars. President Biden is committed to rebuilding these neglected institutions and strengthening and reenergizing our diplomatic institutions and initiatives. We can confront China more effectively and more realistically together with most of the rest of the world using the tools of diplomacy rather than of war. If the people of Taiwan chose to integrate their governance more fully with that of the PRC, that is their choice and their business. But if China invades Taiwan or otherwise forces such an integration, China should know the economic and political price they would pay. In my opinion, such a declaration would be far more effective in deterring such behavior by China than a fuzzy uncertain threat of war. It is encouraging that Congress seems on the verge of reclaiming its War Powers provided by the Constitution.

It is worth remembering the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. against our war in Vietnam delivered April 4, 1967. https://kingandbreakingsilence.org/

Our Unsupportable Empire

Most of you are grudgingly aware that the U.S. government has promised us more than we want to or can easily pay for.  China is no longer willing to fill the gap knowing that we will not be capable of repaying it.  This is on top of the existing national debt from past borrowing to cover the government’s current and past spending in excess of its revenue of $16 trillion, about the same as the United States’ total annual output.  These numbers pale in comparison with the government’s unfunded commitments (those not covered by the revenue expected from existing tax laws and user charges) to future retirees and recipients of medical care (social security, medicare and Medicaid). The present value of the revenue short fall to pay for these future commitments (the government’s unfunded liabilities) is currently around $50 trillion for an astonishing total debt of around $66 trillion, which is larger than the total annual output of the world per year.

Naturally, these promises must be pared back because they can’t be paid for. To some extent a healthy, growing economy will also increase our capacity (lighten the burden) to pay for them but by itself growth will not be enough. This is one, but only one, of the reasons that we also need to reconsider our military promises around the world, while reducing and reorienting our military budget and modestly increasing our diplomatic (State Department) expenditures.

Our promise to provide security to most of the world suffers from the same moral hazard as does an overly generous welfare state.  Incentives matter. When access to welfare is easy and the level of support is generous, more people will choose it over taking a job that doesn’t interest them much.  When President Bill Clinton signed “The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996” (PRWORA) on August 22, 1996 (with strong Republican support), he fulfilled his campaign pledge to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” The law ended welfare as an entitlement by introducing tighter conditions for receiving it. Welfare costs dropped following adoption of the law. “A broad consensus now holds that welfare reform was certainly not a disaster–and that it may, in fact, have worked much as its designers had hoped.”[1] While some people remain skeptical, Sweden’s welfare reforms of the last two decades have demonstrated very similar results.[2]

The United States spends more on its military than the next 14 largest military spenders combined (China, Russia, UK, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Brazil, Italy, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Turkey). We are policing/protecting most of the world. This has two negative effects. The first, similar to chronic welfare recipients, is that other nations spend less on their own defense, taking a free ride on the United States’ ability to keep the world safe for everyone else. The second is that by diverting so much of our productive resources into the military, we reduce the resources available for developing and strengthening our economy. It is our powerful economy that underlies our influence in the world as much, if not more, than our military power. Moreover, our military might is made possible by our economic power. So we need to get the balance right. I urge you to read David Ignatius’ recent discussion of this issue in The Washington Post, (“The foreign policy debate we should be having”, Oct 21, 2012, page A15)

But there are more reasons that our military adventurism and spending should be reduced and more resources given to diplomacy. Our national security and the freedoms America was founded to establish and protect will be strengthened as a result.

American hegemony rests largely on our economic and military power, but also on widespread respect for the American way of life (our respect for human freedom and dignity and our prosperity). Our efforts to promote democracy via military interventions have generally not gone well.  The talents and spirit of enterprise that have served us so well at home have not generally contributed to success in building new democratic nations where we have militarily intervened. Books like Joseph Heller’s, Catch 22 (about WWII) and movies like Robert Altman’s Mash (about Viet Nam) entertainingly introduced us to the bureaucratic problems of fighting and/or governing in foreign lands. We have the best trained and most well equipped military history has ever known, but it has failed for the last ten years to win in Afghanistan, which is now the longest war in American history. Our powerful military is not good at nation building, nor should we expect it to be. The military is not the right tool for promoting the values we believe in around the world. That is a job for diplomacy (with our powerful military well in the background).

We have been more successful at promoting our values and our economic interests through our promotion of and participation in international organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization and a wide range of international agreements and cooperation that facilitate free trade, and capital movements, and that extend the protection of property and human rights internationally. These organizations and agreements have developed the international legal frameworks for telecommunications, patents, financial and product standards, etc. that underlie the explosion of globalization that has dramatically raised the standard of living for much of the world’s population.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, has written an excellent exposition of our military efforts in Afghanistan, which I urge you to read “Afghan security forces rapid expansion comes at a cost as readiness lags” (The Washington Post, Oct 21, 2012, page 1). Every few years America’s military strategy has changed: from counter terrorism, to counter insurgency, to building and training (and equipping) an Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. As each approach fails, the Joint Chief’s extract the lessons learned and try a new one until it fails. In recent years, our military commanders have correctly emphasized the fact that “success” cannot be achieved by the military alone (it amazes me that anyone could have thought so – no wonder they are so eager to start wars).

But those are far from the only reasons for reducing our military footprint and budget. I believe in keeping government relatively small and encumbered with the organizational and political checks and balances meant to replace the role of competition in the private sector in bending self-interest to the public good. People are influenced by their self-interest whether they are in government or the private sector. However, in the private sector success comes from serving the needs of others in the market. This exerts a strong incentive on individual behavior. (Dishonesty can exist in either sector and can only be addressed by embracing appropriate moral standards and consistent punishment of breaches of those standards) In place of market discipline (acceptance or rejection), government must rely more on checks and balances to ensure that government officials behave as intended and they can only go so far to keep government honest and impartial in serving the public. The power of the government to coerce, and the expenditure of large sums of money by the government create enormous temptations for personal gain by those in positions of power in the government. The bigger government gets the more difficult it is to prevent some in government from yielding to the temptations to direct its power and money to their own good rather than the general good.

The firms in our large and important military support industry (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Halliburton, United Technologies, Computer Sciences, BAE Systems, General Electric, Bechtel, and Honeywell International, to name a few), do not have a disinterested view about the most appropriate and cost-effective military technology the defense budget should provide for. The millions of dollars they spend attempting to influence the choices of the services and congress are, in a sense, “honest” efforts to promote their self-interested view of what best serves our national security. The growing behemoth of the industrial military complex of which Eisenhower warned us over fifty years ago now both defends and threatens our liberties. See my earlier comments on Ike’s famous farewell address: http://dailycaller.com/2011/01/17/ikes-farewell-address-fifty-years-on/

The risks of the misallocation of our resources and waste are directly related to the size of our military (and government more generally). The boundary between honest differences of opinion over the best military equipment and systems and simple cronyism is fuzzy.  Consider, for example, the recent award of a large contract to build 100,000 homes in war-torn Iraq to HillStone International, a newcomer in the business of home building. When its president David Richter was asked how the newcomer swung such a big deal, he replied that it really helps to have “the brother of the vice president as a partner” (James Biden).[3] It would not be fair to disqualify bidders because they are friends or relatives of high government officials (As Afghan President Karzai’s brother Mahmoud said to us with regard to the shares of Kabul Bank given to him by its founders. The Bank is now in receivership as the result of the bank lending 95% of its deposits to its shareholders), but how can you tell what is merit and what is cronyism?

My point is that the defense budget needs to be on the table when our elected officials finally confront the cuts that must be made to the government’s expenditures to save the country. Defense spending needs to be cut not just because we can’t afford it, but also because our oversized military is weakening our economic base on which both our military and our political power in the world rest. And perhaps most important of all, over reliance on military power to the exclusion of diplomacy has actually weakened our security and standing in the world.

[1] The New Republic, editorial September 4, 2006, page 7.

[2] The Economist, “Sweden: The New Model” October 13, 2012.