The Defense Budget

Yet another battle is shaping up between the Republican-dominated House and the Republican-controlled Senate, this one over the defense budget.  The budget proposals in both the House and the Senate seek to restrain government spending so as to slow the alarming growth in the federal deficit, and to do so without increasing taxes.  But the House budget proposes to increase defense spending, while the Senate proposal maintains the sequester spending caps in military spending. There has been a parade of military high brass testifying that without an increase in defense spending, they will not be able to maintain America’s military strength. Of course that is what they would say, but then, we have stretched the military thin for a decade now with our Afghanistan and Iraq adventures, wearing out equipment and people, so there is some justification to their arguments.

What size our military ought to be – how many submarines and surface ships and fighters and bombers and  missiles and armored divisions we ought to have are arcane and highly technical subjects that only experts can guess at – but only AFTER we as a nation have told them what we want to be able to do. That is the national debate that is missing.

And it is more than just the divisive and difficult question of if and when and how much we ought to intervene in places like the Middle East or the Ukraine. Remember that the primary purpose of military strength, at least for a nation not interested in conquest, is to DETER potential opponents. Maintaining an armed force is expensive, but not nearly as expensive as fighting a war. So one needs to spend enough to build an armed force that is perceived by potential opponents as strong enough not to be worth challenging.  Anything less than that, anything that isn’t large and powerful enough to be an effective deterrent, is simply a waste of money – one might as well disarm completely and live with the (probably unpleasant) consequences.

So what do we as a nation want to be able to do?  Certainly we want to be able to deter any potential opponent from attacking and invading the US homeland.  And certainly we want to be able to safeguard the ocean lanes that carry goods to and from our trading partners, because our whole economy depends on that. So that is perhaps the basic requirement.

Do we want to be able to defend Europe almost single-handedly from Russian aggression?  That is more or less where we are now.  European nations have been drastically cutting their defense budgets since the end of the cold war, and could hardly defend themselves these days without America assistance, especially in logistics support. Should we provide the armed forces they are unwilling to provide for themselves? And if not, are we willing to live with the consequences if they were attacked?

Do we want to defend the Middle Eastern oil supplies from extremist groups like ISIS, or from hostile nations like Iran? Are we willing to do it alone if our European and Middle Eastern allies are unwilling or unable to do it themselves? If not, are we willing to live with the consequences of losing access to that oil?

Do we want to defend the freedom of the seas in the areas that China is aggressively moving to control in the South China Seas? If not, are we willing to live with the consequences of losing access to that part of the world’s seas?

These are the sort of national policy questions that have to be answered before our experts can determine the size and mix of armed forces we really need. They are the sort of questions that have to be resolved before we can decide how much of an industrial base (shipyards, aircraft manufacturing plants, etc) we need to maintain, or how big a stock of shells and missiles and bombs and torpedoes we need to keep in stock.

And over all of this hangs Rumsfeld’s accurate observation that if and when we go to war, we have to go to war with what we have, not what we wished we had. History is replete with examples of nations that misjudged what they needed to effectively defend themselves, and paid the price for that misjudgment.

Unfortunately the defense budget is more likely to be decided on political grounds, on left- or right-wing ideology or on which Congressional districts get the jobs.  But it ought to be decided on the basis of a coherent national policy. We had that (more or less) during the Cold War.  We need it again.