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.

Once a state crosses the nuclear threshold, preventive war against it becomes too dangerous to risk. It makes sense to handle the problem through containment and deterrence -- strategies that despite their flaws held the line against Moscow and Beijing for decades. The people who panic over Iran and North Korea today should bear in mind that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il are pikers compared with Stalin and Mao. There is no sure thing in strategy, but given the alternatives it is reasonable to bet that what worked with the earlier despots will work with the later ones as well.

As for possible future threats, China obviously looms large. If its economic growth continues and its internal politics remain stable, it is bound to act like other great powers in history, flexing its muscles for what it believes are its rights and contesting foreign domination of its neighborhood. Worse yet would be an anti-American alliance between a rising China and a recovered, resentful Russia. Even this prospect, nevertheless, does not warrant Cold War levels of military spending right now. Although military rivalry with China is more likely than not, it is not inevitable, and it is not in U.S. interests to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy -- something that premature or immoderate military initiatives targeted at China could achieve. There will be time to prepare before such conflict begins in earnest. The United States remains far ahead in airpower and sea power, the capabilities that a war in the Taiwan Strait would test. Fighting the large Chinese army on the Asian mainland would always be difficult, but the solution to that problem is not larger U.S. forces but a strategy that avoids such combat (except on the Korean Peninsula, where geography makes a defensible front feasible).

The correct way to hedge against the long-term China threat is by adopting a mobilization strategy: developing plans and organizing resources now so that military capabilities can be expanded quickly later if necessary. This means carefully designing a system of readiness to get ready -- emphasizing research and development, professional training, and organizational planning. Mobilization in high gear should be held off until genuine evidence indicates that U.S. military supremacy is starting to slip toward mere superiority. Deferring a surge in military production and expansion until then would avoid sinking trillions of dollars into weaponry that may be technologically obsolete before a threat actually materializes. (The United States waited too long -- until 1940 -- to mobilize against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. But starting to mobilize in 1930 would have been no wiser; a crash program in aircraft production back then would have yielded thousands of ultimately useless biplanes.)

MYTHS OF EMPIRE

If the current U.S. defense budget is larger than necessary to counter existing and plausible future threats, it is much smaller than necessary to support a truly effective American effort at imperial policing. The notion that the United States has the right and the responsibility to regulate regional peace, discipline violators of civilized norms, and promote democracy and world order is one of the hallmarks of the Wilsonian tradition in U.S. foreign policy. During the Cold War, such ambitions were kept partially in check by Soviet power, but the emergence of a unipolar world has allowed them to flourish.

The global-policing mission aims to protect others, not Americans alone, from immediate threats. Some advocates, emphasizing a new domino theory, would claim that it involves enlightened self-interest, as the immediate threats to others can eventually become immediate threats to the United States if allowed to fester and metastasize. Contract out Middle Eastern stability to local tyrants, let Afghanistan become a safe haven for terrorists, the argument runs, and the result is 9/11. Such logic makes preventive war a legitimate instrument of national security policy.

One major problem with this ambition is that attempts to run the world generate resistance. Local actors rarely see the dominant power's actions as benign or disinterested; external interventions often provoke resentment and nationalist reactions; praise for good results is accorded stingily; and blame for problems, freely. As a result, muscular military activism tends to multiply enemies, whereas sound strategy should reduce and divide them.

A second problem is that domestic support for humanitarian intervention tends to depend on its being quick and cheap, while success on the ground depends on its being sustained and expensive. Political leaders rarely suggest spending a great deal of national blood and treasure on remote problems. The experience in Iraq is likely to reinforce their skepticism about doing so.

These two problems reinforce each other. To have any chance at playing the role of benign hegemon successfully, the United States would need to be more consistent in enforcing international law, overthrowing murderous regimes, preventing governments from acquiring dangerous weapons, and so forth. But the burden of doing so would be huge, requiring national mobilization and exertion far beyond what even the most ardent interventionists ask for today. But if Washington chooses to keep the costs low by backing up its universal rhetoric with limited actions in a few easy cases, its policies will inevitably be regarded as arbitrary, capricious, or driven largely by its own material interests. An imperial role is, therefore, both unaffordable and unwise. The fact that Washington does not presently have the capabilities to sustain it should not be considered a problem.