A Disciplined Defense

How to Regain Strategic Solvency

Richard K. Betts

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007

Summary:  The United States now spends almost as much on defense in real dollars as it ever has before -- even though it has no plausible rationale for using most of its impressive military forces. Why? Because without political incentives for restraint, policymakers have lost the ability to think clearly about defense policy. Washington's new mantra should be "Half a trillion dollars is more than enough."

RICHARD K. BETTS is Director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His most recent book is Enemies of Intelligence.

Today's supporters of increased military spending justify their advocacy by pointing out that current levels of spending, measured by the share of GDP devoted to defense, are well below those of the Cold War. This is both true and irrelevant. The argument focuses on only one component of the equation -- spending -- and conveniently ignores that the scope of commitments, the choice of strategy, and the degree of risk accepted can be adjusted as well. And it draws the wrong lesson from history, which when properly interpreted suggests that today's lesser threats could be handled with greater aplomb.

During the Cold War, the U.S. armed forces were constantly preparing for World War III. U.S. military strength was geared to be ready to battle an opposing superpower that had 175 army divisions, 40,000 nuclear weapons, and numerous allies. Yet even in the early phases of the Cold War, when tensions were highest and fears greatest, the value of economizing was not forgotten. Defense spending was kept in check by the limits on revenues, the extent of other government spending, and a serious commitment to balancing the budget. As the political scientists Glenn Snyder and Samuel Huntington noted in their classic studies of defense policymaking under President Harry Truman and President Eisenhower, those presidents calculated military spending using the "remainder method": they started with tax revenues, subtracted domestic spending, and gave whatever was left over to defense. Truman did this before the shock of the Korean War caused him to unleash a military buildup; Eisenhower did it to preserve a healthy domestic economic base for strategic competition over the long haul. The remainder method was a strategically arbitrary means of limiting expenditures and was not used for very long. It would not make sense to resurrect it now. But nor does it make sense to benchmark current defense spending against spending during any other phase of the Cold War, given that the Cold War is over.

The last time the United States faced a multipolar international system, in the decades prior to World War II, its peacetime defense spending was usually no more than two percent of GDP. In 1939, the last year before U.S. mobilization for World War II began in earnest, it was only 1.4 percent. Such a level was certainly too low, and the United States learned that lesson for good after Pearl Harbor. But on what grounds can one conclude that the current level should be three times as high? Certainly, it cannot be justified based on any actual threats that the U.S. armed forces might plausibly be expected to encounter. The military capabilities of the United States need to be kept comfortably superior to those of present and potential enemies. But they should be measured relatively, against those enemies' capabilities, and not against the limits of what is technologically possible or based on some vague urge to have more.

PRESENT AND FUTURE THREATS

The Pentagon will have a hard time confronting the underlying problems in defense spending until the United States climbs out of the hole it plunged itself into with the war in Iraq. The war has pushed parts of the U.S. armed forces close to the breaking point. Frequent and extended combat tours of soldiers and repeated deployments of civilian reservists have disgracefully made a small number of volunteers pay a high price for the politicians' miscalculations.

The main response that has been offered to this crisis -- planning for significant growth in the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps -- is dubious. Had the additional forces been available earlier, to be fielded as needed, the increases might have made sense. But it will take several years to recruit, train, organize, and deploy additional ground combat brigades, by which time the United States will probably have withdrawn the bulk of its forces from Iraq. So unless Washington plans on invading Iran or North Korea or making a habit of launching huge counterinsurgency campaigns in big failed states -- neither of which is either probable or desirable -- it is not clear what purpose permanent increases in the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps are supposed to achieve.

Despite the Bush administration's attempts to conflate the war against Saddam Hussein with the "war on terror," moreover, the two conflicts are not the same. The groups and individuals inspired by al Qaeda will remain a challenge around the world even after the United States manages to extricate itself from Iraq. But the notion popularized by some neoconservatives that the United States is now in World War IV (the Cold War having been the third in the series) is an absurd inflation of the contemporary threat. It also implicitly links all anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world to the radicals who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11. For observers whose strategic consciousness began on 9/11, Osama bin Laden's forces are as dangerous as Stalin's. But such thinking reflects amnesia about the actual scope of past challenges.

Washington opened the sluice gates of military spending after the 9/11 attacks primarily not because it was the appropriate thing to do strategically but because it was something the country could do when something had to be done. With rare exceptions, the war against terrorists cannot be fought with army tank battalions, air force wings, or naval fleets -- the large conventional forces that drive the defense budget. The main challenge is not killing the terrorists but finding them, and the capabilities most applicable to this task are intelligence and special operations forces. Improving U.S. capacity in these areas is difficult. It requires recruiting, training, and effectively deploying a limited number of talented and bold people with the relevant skills. It does not require half a trillion dollars' worth of conventional and nuclear forces.

In addition to terrorism, the other major security threat to the United States today is the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD) -- another problem that cannot be solved through the deployment of large and expensive conventional forces. Air strikes alone are unreliable as a counterproliferation tool, especially when the target has been given ample warning to disperse and hide the infrastructure needed to produce such weapons. At best, bombing can set back a program temporarily; at worst, it can energize it. The only sure military way to eliminate another state's WMD programs in their early stages is to invade that state and occupy it -- a path that the debacle in Iraq makes highly unlikely to be followed anytime soon. In the end, the least unsatisfactory instruments to use are diplomatic and economic ones: rewards for cooperation and sanctions for noncompliance.