More on our military

Continuing my thoughts from the last post, it occurs to me that if one steps way, way back and looks at the big picture, a few things become clear:

1. Whether or not it offends liberal sensitivities to say so, America is an empire, a commercial empire in our case, as opposed to a colonial empire, but an empire nonetheless. As with any empire, it has its good points and its bad points. But on balance, the America empire has done better by the world than the empires that would have liked to replace it in recent decades. A world dominated by Hitler’s Reich or a Soviet empire would not have been as pleasant or safe a place to live, nor would it have been as prosperous.

But no empire in history has survived without occasional military challenges, and we will be no exception. The world is not unlike the streets of a gang-ridden city. The way to be safe and not have to fight is to be, AND TO BE SEEN TO BE, “the biggest, baddest dude around”, so that potential aggressors see no possible gain to their cause from attacking us. So adequate (not excessive, but adequate) military power is essential, unless we want to quietly drift down to second- or third-tier status in the world and let other empires determine our fate. Indeed, the best (and most economical) use of military power is as a deterrent. Those who think military deterrence is expensive should look at how much more expensive the failure of deterrence (war) is to the nation.

2. Military power depends, fundamentally, on national wealth. Modern armies are exorbitantly expensive to field, train, equip and maintain. We have as large a military as we do because we are wealthy enough to afford it. North Korea or Iran or China or Russia would have just as large and sophisticated a military if they could afford it, but they can’t. Their national wealth isn’t sufficient.

So from that perspective, the single most important thing to do to support our military preparedness is to do whatever needs to be done to keep the US wealthy and prosperous, so the nation can afford a military appropriate to the potential threats. As Dennis Blair, Obama's director of national intelligence, recently observed, our faltering economy is indeed a serious national security issue.

3. Projecting effective military power depends upon adequate logistic support. This has been clear all through history. Tacticians study tactics, strategists study logistics. The ability to rapidly produce replacements, food and munitions and move them quickly to the battlefront is essential to military success. High-tech front line weapons systems get all the press, but the unglamorous logistics systems – cargo ships and planes, warehouses, pre-positioned stocks, etc., are probably at least as important, if not more so, and ought to be attended to, upgraded, improved and funded just as aggressively as the front line weapons systems.

4. Good intelligence is probably even more important than good soldiers and good weapons. This has been evident as far back as the time of Sun Tzu (c. 300 B.C.), and the lesson has been repeated innumerable times throughout history (for those few who will read and learn from history) since then. In fact, good intelligence can often avoid war, and can certainly shorten it, reduce its cost, and markedly improve the odds of winning. We have invested heavily in technology for “external” intelligence (what is where), but not nearly enough in human capital for “internal” intelligence (how does the opponent think). In fact, our political class over the past few decades (both parties) have been remarkably uneducated, uniformed and naïve about our foreign advisories and their naïveté has cost us dearly in American lives and money.

5. Military power is subject to the “predator-prey” evolutionary race. Each advance in weapons or technique immediately begins to breed a response that nullifies much or all of the advance. History is full of examples of military powers that didn’t keep up and paid for their negligence – the Maginot line effect. (for readers too young to remember World War II, the Maginot line was the "impregnable" line of fortifications that the French built and that the Germans bypassed in a matter of days). That means that supporting innovation – educating our young in science and engineering and in fields that support good intelligence (languages, history, cultural studies), subsidizing basic research – is critical to our long-term military preparedness.

6. Shorn of sentiment, the drive to reduce human casualties is critically important as our military becomes increasingly high-tech. There is the obvious political problem in today’s American democracy that the public has little stomach for high casualty rates, and therefore public support quickly erodes for any extended military action. But there is also the issue of training costs. In today’s high-tech military, training many of the specialists is very expensive and takes many years, so their loss is expensive and they are hard to replace quickly. It can cost several million dollars and take many years to train and maintain the proficiency of a fighter pilot. Even a lowly foot soldier in today’s army can cost as much as $50,000 to train, and as much as $1 million/year to equip and maintain in the field of battle.

So moves to reduce casualties by using precision stand-off weapons, unmanned aircraft and the like are important not only for economic and political reasons, but also for logistical reasons because such casualties cannot be easily or quickly replaced, unlike soldiers in lower-tech armies.