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Meanwhile from the left coast, Robert Scheer thundered against the "orgy of defense spending" that the president had unleashed. "The red ink that Bush wants U.S. to bleed to line the pockets of the defense industry, along with tax cuts for the rich will do more damage to our country than any terrorist," Scheer wrote in the Los Angeles Times. The result will be an economically hobbled United States, unable to solve its major domestic problems or support meaningful foreign aid, it enormous wealth sacrificed at the altar of military hardware that is largely without purpose." The knee-jerk Left was joined in its criticism of the Bush defense budget by the heirs of the 1980s "military reformers." For instance, Admiral William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Stanley Weiss, chairman of Business Executives for National Security (BENS) wrote in the New York Times that "most, if not all, of the resources necessary to finance a 21st century military are already available. But they're wasted on mid-20th century practices....the real challenge is not spending more or less on defense. It's spending better." Of course, not everyone agreed that defense spending is too high. House Armed Services Chairman Bob Stump (R., Ariz.) lamented that only about $10 billion of the president's proposed $48 billion increase in defense spending would go toward procuring new weapons, far below what experts believe to be necessary to modernize the force. "What is left over is not nearly enough to repair the damage done by decades of enormous maintenance, operations, and training shortfalls. It is not enough to support a complete modernization effort — as demonstrated by one of the smallest shipbuilding budgets in history. Rep. Stump's views were seconded by Senate Armed Services Committee member Max Cleland (D., Ga.), who said that the $48 billion increase was "much needed" but that Congress may actually need to come in a do more" to address ageing weapon systems and other deficiencies. The magnitude of the modernization problem is indicated by the fact that only two years ago, the Joint Chiefs of Staff contended that procurement alone would require an additional $60 billion per year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said $90 billion, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. said $100 billion. And this is just to replace "legacy" systems, not to develop the innovative new weapons and systems. But the mother of all defense-budget increases was proposed by Mark Helprin in a provocative National Review article, "Phony War." Based on GDP and the precedent of World War II, Mr. Helprin claimed, the U.S. could "easily and painlessly sustain a defense budget not of $379 billion but of $655 billion." By not spending enough to "go it alone," much, he argued, the United States placed itself in the position of having a prospective campaign against Iraq "vetoed" by Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states in the region. Mr. Helprin is right about many things. The United States does spend too little on defense to sustain its global role. The rapid success of allied operations in Afghanistan has led to complacency on the part of many Americans. Indeed, after fretting that the United States was bogging down in a "quagmire," pundits now tout the "Afghan model" — air power plus special-operations forces (SOF) — as the paradigm for future war. The rapid success in Afghanistan has obscured some serious shortcomings in the U.S. military. These need to be fixed, and this will require more money. But he is wrong about others. He understates the impact of information technology on military effectiveness. Missions can be planned and executed today in a fraction of the time it took during the Kosovo campaign. The accuracy of weapons has improved by magnitudes. Information and intelligence networks provide something close to a real-time common operational picture to all units. As a result, Mr. Helprin seems to measure military power in terms simply of ships, tanks, and aircraft. But during Desert Storm, precision strikes launched by networked U.S. systems that were primitive by today's standard rendered Iraq's sizeable military impotent. To paraphrase a recent study of U.S. naval forces, numbers may count, but military capabilities are what matters. And today's smaller force is far more capable than its larger predecessor of only a decade ago. In addition, while
few can match my zeal as a proponent of naval power, I believe Mr. Helprin
vastly overestimates what even a much larger Navy could do without U.S.
allies in a war against Iraq. For instance, carrier-based aircraft striking
targets in Iraq still require land-based tankers to refuel them. And unless
Mr. Helprin believes that air power alone can topple Saddam Hussein, any
campaign against Iraq will require ground troops. Even with a larger military,
the United States will, for the foreseeable future, need allies in the
region — at a minimum, Kuwait and Turkey. As Churchill once remarked,
the keys to military security are the "two As" — arms and
allies. To execute a chosen strategy, certain strategic requirements must be fulfilled. Current U.S. strategic requirements include: defending the U.S. homeland; projecting U.S. power far from the shores of the United States in order to deter war or decisively defeat an adversary if deterrence fails; reassuring allies; conducting constabulary operations in support of "imperial policing;" and "transforming" today's military to one able to deal with a future security environment that may differ substantially from the security environment of today. To fulfill the strategic requirements, military planners identify the operational challenges that must be overcome to implement the strategy. These include the "tyranny of distance," the physical limitations placed on U.S. strategy by geography; the proliferation of militarily useful technology around the globe, which may expand the potential "deadly zone" in which U.S. forces will have to operate; the development by adversaries of "asymmetric" strategies designed to deny U.S. forces access to the littorals of the world; and the challenge of "real time" targeting, which permits the rapid attack of fleeting targets. Next, planners develop the operational concepts and military capabilities to overcome the operational challenges and fulfill the requirements established by the strategy. These include concepts as "rapid decisive operations" and "effects-based operations" designed to avoid a drawn out war of attrition by paralyzing an adversary; "network-centric warfare," the employment of distributed forces (sensors and shooters) integrated by means of information technology; and rapid power projection from "over-the-horizon." Required capabilities include stealth, long-range precision strike, and improved strategic mobility for expeditionary operations. These operational concepts and required military capabilities should then drive the acquisition of forces and equipment. Finally, planners must answer the question: How much is enough? Whether it is the two-major theater war standard recently abandoned as a metric by the Pentagon or something else, even a capabilities-based force must be subjected to discrimination analysis to determine the size of the force. Of course, throughout the process the planner must constantly evaluate any risk that may be created by a potential ends-means mismatch. If the risks resulting from an ends-means mismatch cannot be managed, planners have to reevaluate and scale back the ends, increase the means, or otherwise adjust our strategy. Today, most of the defense budget goes to fund the force structure required to project power and deter war. At the same time, operations and maintenance cost continue to rise not only because of actual contingencies such as Kosovo or Afghanistan but also because of the continuing requirement to conduct constabulary operations. As observed at the outset, the major loser in the defense allocation process has been modernization and transformation. This is the main reason the United States needs to spend more on defense. Even the $48 billion increase in defense spending still requires the United States to choose between the present and the future. Complaining about a defense budget of $379 billion, which will rise to about $450 billion by 2006, strikes some as absurd. As critics love to stress, the United States already spends more on defense, in real terms, as the next eight major military powers combined. But this is misleading. Only the United States underwrites the security upon which global stability, interdependence, and ultimately prosperity depend by providing the international "collective good" of security. If the U.S. chooses not to bear this burden, the result may be a decline in stability and prosperity. World War I illustrates how rapidly an interdependent world order can collapse if the rise of aggressive powers go unchecked. Given the contribution of U.S. military power to a global prosperity which benefits the U.S. disproportionately, it seems reasonable to suggest that we should spend at least 4.5 percent of GDP on defense. But won't this hurt the U.S. economy? Several years ago, much was made of Paul Kennedy's thesis of "imperial overstretch" and the suggestion that, in keeping with this thesis, the burden of U.S. defense spending was dragging the U.S. down relative to the other industrial powers. The stagnation of the economies of other industrial powers during the 1990s, especially Europe and Japan, took much of the wind out of this argument. But there is another flaw in the thesis that we should take not of when considering the U.S. burden of defense. Kennedy contends that Great Britain was the victim of imperial overstretch in the first part of the 20th century. But one can make the argument that it was not imperial overstretch that led to the decline of Britain, but the onset of a war Britain could not prevent: — it was World War I that doomed the British empire, not the expenditures to maintain the empire. In light of this observation, the burden on the U.S. of its defense posture may be substantial, but the benefits of the resulting world order far outweigh the costs.
— Mackubin
Thomas Owens is a professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval
War College & NRO contributing editor.
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hen
President Bush first submitted his defense budget back in February, some
of the responses made me feel like I was in a 1980s time warp, when budgets
were greeted by congressional Democrats with a derisive "dead on
arrival." For instance, Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) told the Boston
Globe that the president's defense budget was "much higher than
it needs to be. There is so much excess in maintaining Cold War weapons
you can adequately fund the war on terrorism for far less. The result
will be less money for public health and other domestic priorities."
