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.

IMPOSING POLITICAL DISCIPLINE

So how should U.S. policymakers balance their various concerns and arrive at strategic solvency? Truman's and Eisenhower's remainder method of budgeting had the merit of limiting costs but the defect of accepting higher risks than one would want to accept. But the approaches that replaced it after the 1950s have been uncertain improvements. Kennedy came to power after campaigning against the Republican failure to do enough for national security and established the principle that the United States would spend whatever was necessary. The problem then and since has been that there is simply no objective way to calculate how much is enough to guard against potential threats, even when aims and strategies are clear. Analysts with green eyeshades can highlight tradeoffs and efficiencies, but politics always determines whose vision of what is needed prevails.

A significant virtue of a fixed budget ceiling was that it forced the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make difficult choices about program priorities. Despite the Kennedy administration's claims about being willing to spend whatever was necessary, budget ceilings were actually still enforced. But because these ceilings were no longer determined arbitrarily, the size of the pie as a whole and not only the proportions of its slices became a subject of contention. Unable to say that more money was unavailable, civilian managers now had to reject programs requested by the military by saying that they were unnecessary. The process thus forced them to substitute their judgments for those of the military professionals and turned budget discussions into a test of civil-military relations.

Giving up arbitrary budget caps thus inadvertently crippled a prime means of civilian control, the ability to divide and conquer the services and force military professionals to make tradeoffs between programs themselves. Compare the brutal interservice competition in the late 1940s with the civility of recent years. At the start of the Cold War, the air force and the navy had a bitter political battle over which new weapons system, the B-36 bomber or the flush-deck supercarrier, should be the primary vehicle for dropping bombs on the Soviet Union. (Both were eventually procured when defense spending tripled after the Korean War broke out.) In the years after the Cold War, there was no significant argument over whether air force B-2 bombers might substitute for one or more navy carrier battle groups, even though the threats being confronted were obviously less dire and strategic redundancy obviously less necessary. The B-2 would have looked cheap by comparison with the costs of buying and maintaining a carrier force, yet the air force did not try to argue in public or in Congress that the B-2 was the more cost-effective option for strategic airpower in the twenty-first century. Whereas in the old days the air force might have tried to wrest a share of the aggregate military budget from the other services, in the new circumstances, it directed its lobbying not to the Joint Chiefs of Staff but to the executive branch, subordinating its interest in the B-2 to other procurement priorities within the air force's roster of programs.

The managerial reforms of the 1960s that tried to rationalize resource decisions not only created new difficulties for civilian control; they also contributed indirectly to higher defense spending in the long term by feeding the image of Democrats as antimilitary. The Democrats had regularly favored higher defense budgets than had the Republicans during the first phase of the Cold War and were often tagged as "the war party." With the McGovern campaign of 1972, however, the Democratic Party became identified with opposition to military spending and the use of force and developed a reputation for strategic fecklessness. When this image became a political liability, the party tried to shake it by dropping demands to economize in defense. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton was spending more on defense than the final plans of his predecessor, George H. W. Bush, had proposed. In the 2000 campaign, Democratic candidate Al Gore promised to increase defense spending by $80 billion over the following decade. And since then, mainstream Democrats have tripped over themselves trying to prove that they are as pro-military as anyone.

During the same period, the Republicans were giving up their traditional fixation on fiscal responsibility. Truman and Eisenhower had favored the remainder method because they had felt a need to balance the federal budget. Later Republicans, from Nixon onward, preserved the rhetoric but abandoned the substance behind it; they put more effort into cutting taxes than cutting spending and let budgets fall out of balance.

Over the years, because of these trends in both parties, the strong political base for restrained defense spending eroded. It was blown away completely on 9/11. As a result, the defense budget has risen in nine of the past ten years at an average annual rate of more than six percent -- a record unmatched in any other decade since World War II, even including during the wars in Korea and Vietnam. (In the 1960s, which included Kennedy's military buildup and the worst years of the Vietnam War, the average annual defense budget increase was 2.5 percent.)

STRATEGIC SOLVENCY