Regular readers are aware that I write often about the need to rebuild the armed forces. That’s because, while military power is not the primary or preferred instrument of national influence, it is the foundation of America’s foreign policy. By deterring or, where necessary, defeating aggression, it reinforces the various soft power tools and creates time and space for them to work.
As George Kennan said, “You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.”
To take only one example, the reason diplomacy has to this point had zero impact on China’s expansionism in its near seas is that the balance of power in the region is steadily shifting in favor of the Chinese. They have no incentive to stop their unilateral assertions of sovereignty, or negotiate seriously over territorial disputes, as long as they believe they can get their way, over time, by coercion.
Aggressors aggress. It’s what they do. ISIS will continue attacking America and its allies, Russia will keep pushing in Eastern Europe, Iran will pursue its hegemonic designs in the Middle East, China will continue to assert and expand its sovereignty claims against its neighbors, North Korea will continue its nuclear provocations, unless and until they are met with resolve backed up by power.
Again, military strength by itself is not enough for America to be successful in its foreign policy. Good leadership and sound policy will also be necessary. But a weak America isn’t credible as a leader, and policy without power won’t work.
Over the last year or so, I’ve briefed many of the Republican presidential candidates on defense issues. I always begin by telling them that if they don’t make it a personal priority as president to engineer a Reagan era type buildup of the military, their foreign policy will fail, no matter what else they do.
That at least gets their attention. Most of the candidates envision themselves as smart, tough leaders. Some of them really are. But that doesn’t mean they could succeed as president if the deck was stacked against them. America’s adversaries and potential adversaries understand what the Soviets used to call “the correlation of forces.” Even Donald Trump-like negotiating skills will not be enough if the next president is playing a weak hand against the likes of Vladimir Putin or Xi-Jinping.
And the next president will be playing a weak hand, because of the policies of his predecessors.
The armed forces were cut by about 30-40% after the Cold War and have declined further in size since then. They never recovered from the “procurement holiday” in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton Administration cut modernization budgets and stopped buying inventory, and they have been deploying at or close to a wartime operational tempo for close to 20 years; even before 9-11, “optempo” was much higher than anyone had anticipated.
When a force that is too small, with an aging inventory, operates for a long time at a high operational tempo, it begins to wear out.
So even before President Obama took office, the armed forces were highly stressed. One of the Administration’s first initiatives was its 780 billion dollar “stimulus” package, but – in the first and one of the biggest mistakes of his administration — the president chose not to spend any of that money (except for a small amount devoted to military housing) on the armed forces.
The Budget Control Act and sequester followed two years later. Those measures together cut a trillion dollars over ten years from defense funding, turning a slow bleed into a gaping wound. All of the services have shed force structure and lost readiness. Every one of the services is relying heavily on inventories that were developed during the Reagan years, and every service has basic modernization needs that cannot be funded under the current budget baseline.
The money to address those needs is simply not there, and without presidential leadership it will not be there in the future. And all of this is occurring when the threats to America’s homeland, and its vital national interests abroad, are becoming more diverse and intense: Islamic terrorism, great power aggression, nuclear proliferation, escalating armed conflict in the Middle East, and provocations by rogue states like North Korea.
Whatever else happens, the threats will continue to grow until America becomes strong again. Yes, policy is important; the next president will have to adapt the principles which guided the United States during the Cold War world to the vastly different world of today, and — to the extent foreseeable — the world as it will develop in the decades ahead.
But no matter how you define “success” in foreign policy, you should agree that America must have robust tools of power to succeed.
If you’re an archetypal neo-con who wants to spread democracy everywhere, you’ll need power; democracies do not build themselves. If you’re a Wilsonian who believes that national interest should be subordinate to international norms promulgated by international institutions, you’ll also need power; norm based systems do not sustain themselves. If you are a realist who believes the next President should confer with dictators and carve up the world, you should remember the famous question Stalin asked about the Pope: “how many divisions does he have?” And if you’re a neo-isolationist who wants the United States to withdraw behind a fortress America and ignore the dirty and difficult parts of the world – you’d better build a damn strong fortress, against the possibility that the world will come after us.
It will take two things to rebuild America’s armed forces: reform of the Pentagon, particularly by streamlining its acquisition process and thinning out its layers of bureaucracy, and a lot more funding invested in end strength and new inventory. Neither will be easy, but the money will harder.
Many people believe that the defense budget is a favored child in Washington. The opposite is true. There are no powerful special interests which fight to increase the topline of defense spending. To be sure, there are groups that protect particular programs within the topline – that lobby for their piece of the pie – but those interests usually do not pressure for a larger defense budget in general, because they don’t want to risk offending Congressional and Executive leaders when that isn’t necessary to get what they want.
Without strong presidential leadership, you would expect to see the topline of the defense budget pulled down over time, while Congress protects the politically favored programs within the Department. That is exactly what has happened, particularly over the last seven years.
For the last two decades, our leaders have neglected the armed forces, and forced them to live off the capital accumulated during the Reagan years. That capital is now gone. It would have been better, and far cheaper, to have sustained the force adequately over the last 20 years. But since that was not done, it will be necessary now to do a lot of things quickly: surge funding, reform the Pentagon so that the money is well spent, and create at least a degree of consensus across Party lines on behalf of a strong America.
President Obama will limp through his last year without changing anything. That means the next president will have to change everything. It won’t be easy, but it must be done. He, or she, must begin by rebuilding the foundation of power on which all else depends.