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.

To ask whether the United States can afford higher levels of military spending is stupid. It can, and if necessary, it would. The problem is that there are other important things that the United States wants and can afford too, and a dollar spent on one thing cannot be spent on another. Defense spending has to be balanced not simply against presumed military needs but against other needs as well. Those needs include not just bedrock domestic programs such as Social Security and Medicare entitlements, which are imperiled by looming deficits, but also other programs affecting national security. The State Department, for example, is comparatively starved. It is struggling to staff embassies and project the United States' message around the world with a Foreign Service of a few thousand officers and a requested operating budget of just over $7 billion. Its total budget request for 2008 -- including foreign aid, contributions to international organizations and peacekeeping missions, and supplementals for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is just over $42 billion, which is equal to 6.5 percent of the funding request for the Pentagon. For dealing with a world in which many threats stem from political and economic instability and anti-American sentiment, and in which the U.S. government has great trouble communicating at the grass-roots level, these numbers appear badly unbalanced.

Even if there were infinite resources available to support them, military capabilities would still be useful for only some purposes. The ability to use military power to regulate the world according to American values is more limited than post-Cold War optimism assumed. Imperial policing is feasible where the problem consists of individuals or gangs of thugs rather than organized and trained armed forces. In most cases, imposing political order against resistance requires waging war -- a much bloodier and more involved enterprise. The professional military understands this, which is why it usually tries to avoid such policing operations and usually argues for strategies that rely on overwhelming force. Civilians, in contrast, often prefer a lean and light application of military power, in the hopes that significant gains can be had on the cheap. Given the difficulties the United States has had with military interventions recently, there is reason to believe that it will resort to fewer such operations in the near future.

Regaining strategic solvency will take time, and there is good reason not to cut the defense budget drastically. Arguments for restraint, moreover, will go out the window if future catastrophic attacks validate the World War IV notion in public opinion. But should that not happen and should the case for a more modest national security strategy gain ground, it will become easier to limit defense spending and focus it on the threats that merit the most concern. Democrats will have to get over their long battle against the wimp image. Republicans will have to rediscover the virtues of fiscal responsibility.

Powerful armed forces are necessary for U.S. national security, but they should be tailored to counter the threats and vulnerabilities the country actually faces, not to satisfy hubristic ambitions of remaking the world. Ideally, the next administration would make these decisions through a process of calculation less arbitrary than Truman's and Eisenhower's and less constrained than Nixon's. But if the choice were between those approaches and Washington's recent profligacy, one could do worse than to follow the old models. Current advocates of pegging military spending to some higher percentage of GDP are offering a standard just as disconnected from a net assessment of enemy threats as was the remainder method.

Translating a change of direction into specific spending cuts would involve hard choices, rough bargaining, and much blood on the floor of the political arena. The sentiment in favor of defense increases since 9/11 has been so broad that few organizations associated with mainstream policy thinking are yet offering systematic options for reduction.

Even the Institute for Policy Studies, usually considered to be far to the left of the mainstream, offers a recommendation that would bring the baseline defense budget down by only about $56 billion, or 11 percent, and total military spending down by less than nine percent -- a far cry from the McGovern campaign's call for a one-third cut in the late stages of the United States' last unpopular war. The institute's suggested defense budget for 2008 includes trimming or canceling the procurement of F-22, F-35, C-130J, and V-22 aircraft; Virginia-class submarines; and Zumwalt-class destroyers and the funding for the army's Future Combat Systems program, national missile defense, space-based weapons, nuclear systems, research and development, and deployed air force and naval forces. Some of these suggestions may be ill advised (for example, cuts in research and development would not be compatible with shifting toward a mobilization strategy). But implementing even half of the suggestions would cut the baseline budget (not current war spending) by almost six percent.

Marshaling the political will for restraint will be an uphill battle. A starting point might be the slogan "Half a trillion dollars is more than enough." Modest reductions for a few years and a steady budget eroded by inflation for a few more could tighten the system's belt. The case for cuts should be made on the principle that expensive programs must fulfill unmet needs for countering real enemy capabilities, not merely maintain traditional service priorities, pursue the technological frontier for its own sake, or consume resources that happen to be politically available.