The Defense Budget II

People ask why our armed forces are so large (275 ships, about 10,000 aircraft, about 9000 tanks, 1,400,000 people, etc).  They also ask why, with this much equipment and this many people, the military keeps saying they need more. This is because most people assume most of these forces are always readily available for use, when in fact only perhaps something like 25% are available at any time for immediate use.  Why? Here are some of the reasons.

Forward deployment

Equipment and personnel are of no use if they aren’t where they are needed when they are needed. For example, we have treaty obligations to defend Taiwan or Japan if China ever invaded either of them.  But in fact, if such an invasion started it would take warships in US ports several weeks to get there, by which time the invasion would probably be over.  When Iraq invaded Kuwait it took allied forces six months (August 1990 to January 1991) to get forces in place to begin to oppose the invasion.

The solution to this is to have ships and planes and troops forward deployed around the world so that they are closer if needed. But one can’t forward deploy everything all the time. For example, we have 10 carrier strike groups at the moment, but each is on a nominal rotation of 8 months deployed out of 35 months.  The rest of the time they are in maintenance, or in training, or steaming to or from their assigned station.  As a practical matter that means that while we have 10 carrier strike groups, at any given time only two or three are on station and available for combat operations. (that also means that if Russia or China have only one or two carriers, they really aren’t much of a threat yet, because they can’t keep a presence at sea much of the time).

As a rough rule of thumb, the navy figures it takes about 4.4 ships of a given class to maintain one on station somewhere in the world.

Maintenance

Modern military equipment is complex, and typically operates in harsh environments (like the Middle Eastern deserts, for example).  That means they take lots of maintenance. Combat aircraft take much more stress to the engine and airframe than commercial airlines, and need frequent inspections and maintenance and engine rebuilds. Navy ships live in a corrosive salt water environment and need constant maintenance. Nuclear propulsion systems need constant maintenance and major refueling from time to time. That means at any given time lots of equipment is out of service for maintenance or upgrading. Any force size planning has to account for perhaps 20-30% of the equipment in routine maintenance or upgrading at any given time.

Training

The reason why a few armed forces (US, UK, Israeli for example) are so much better, so much more effective than most others is training, training, training. US forces “train as they fight and fight as they train”, meaning they get lots of pretty realistic training exercises. “Top Gun” schools, Red vs Blue force training exercises, naval exercises, combined arms exercises (where different branches learn to work together), allied exercises (where the forces of different nations learn to work together) all take up perhaps 25-30% of the time, but they are absolutely essential to keeping the forces in peak fighting shape.

Logistics

Modern armies, whether at war or just on peacetime patrols, take an enormous amount of logistics support. For example, according to NPR, the US military burns about 340,00 barrels (not gallons, barrels) of fuel a day. All that fuel has to be stockpiled somewhere, and then moved to the users. The Department of Defense reported in 2004 that “supply specialists in Iraq distributed an average of 1.2 million gallons of fuel, 55,000 cases of bottled water, 13,000 cases of meals ready to eat, 60 short tons of ammunition, and 200 pallets of repair parts each day to U.S. forces.”

That means that an appreciable proportion of the personnel and equipment in a modern army are devoted to just managing the logistics – keeping the troops supplied with food, water, fuel, ammunition, and spare parts.

Industrial base

People don’t often think about this, but it matters. Ships require shipyards and drydocks not just to get built but also to get maintained and upgraded. Armies require manufacturing facilities to build munitions fast enough to keep them supplied in a war. Tanks and aircraft require companies to keep manufacturing the spare parts that wear out.  All of these facilities need thousands of experienced engineers and machinists and designers and electricians and other specialties. And if these facilities get closed, it might take years or even a generation to recruit and train adequate replacements.  Moreover, it is not enough just to keep them open, they also need to keep working to keep all their specialists in practice and up-to-date.

So there is a national security need to keep a healthy domestic industrial base in existence and up-to-date, and constantly plying their trade designing and building new (and hopefully better) equipment. This may seem wasteful in peacetime, but it is often the difference between winning and losing in wartime. Military people worry about this, even if Congress doesn’t.

The takeaway from all of this is that the absolute size of our military forces is not the right measure to look at – it is the combat-ready and combat-available size that matters, the amount of troops and equipment that can actually be delivered to the battlefield in time.  And that is a lot less than the total size.

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.

The Israel-Palestinian “Two State” solution

A number of successive US administrations have trumpeted the desirability of an Israel-Palestinian “Two State” solution, in which some portion of the lands around Israel become a Palestinian state. It’s a nice, neat, politically-correct solution, just as was the British 1917 Belfour Declaration that dispossessed Arabs of their lands in this area in the first place in favor of a new Jewish homeland.  The 19^th century British were great at drawing abstract boarders on maps with no regard whatsoever for the races, religions or cultures of the people who already lived there. 21^ST century American politicians seem to be equally adept at proposing neat-sounding solutions to other nation’s problems that take no account of the reality on the ground.

The reality on the ground in Israel is indeed difficult. Israel faces the choice of (a) fully enfranchising all the Arabs who live in the State of Israel (including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and no longer being a Jewish-majority nation, or (b) not fully enfranchising these Arabs and therefore not being a true democracy.  One solution would of course be to let the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza become a new Palestinian state.

But the question is, what sort of Arab state would this new state be? Almost certainly, based on past experience (such as when Israel voluntarily withdrew from the Gaza strip), it would be one ruled by hard-line Hamas leaders, intent on eradicating Israel.  Would any Israeli in their right mind voluntarily let this happen?  Look at a map of Israel, hemmed in by aggressive enemies in the West Bank and Gaza.  I don’t think so, despite the fairyland dreams of successive American administrations.

The administration is livid that Netanyahu said there would be no two state solution while he was in power. They really don’t like it when someone points out that the emperor has no clothes. Personally, I find it refreshing to see a politician who says what he thinks rather than what some spin doctor or focus group determined that he ought to say. If only we could find a few like that in American politics.

Netanyahu’s win

I see that all the predictable left-leaning journalists, as well as the White House spokespeople, are trying to downplay the significance of Benjamin Netanyahu’s unexpectedly strong showing in the Israeli elections. It is of course a stinging defeat for the White House, who even sent Obama campaign operatives (and probably money) to Israel to help defeat him.

What it shows once again is that US left wing journalists and politicians are completely out of touch with the Israeli public and what they worry about. (For that matter, they don’t seem to be particularly in touch with what Americans worry about either). American presidents and politicians and liberal academics love to chastise Israel for the way it handles its deadly neighbors – but of course they do it from the comfort of US shores, far away from the terrorist kidnappings and suicide bombers, or the incessant rocket fire from Hamas, or the perennial threat of surprise attack from Arab neighbors publically committed to wiping Israel off the face of the earth.

In fact, Netanyahu won largely because he promised to pay attention to Israel’s security, and that tells us a lot about what worries the Israeli ”street” these days. If we lived in Israel it would probably loom large in our worries too.

Mostly I think the White House failure to predict the election results is a failure of the administration to understand Israel, just as they seem not to understand ISIS or President Putin. Let’s hope the next US administration is not quite so naïve and ideology-driven.

More on the Palestinian Question

A friend, reading my previous post, pointed out to me something I didn’t know (or forgot), but that subsequent research has verified:

At the formation of the State of Israel, about 700,000 Arabs within the new state’s territory fled or sold out to Israeli immigrants, many encouraged by their leaders, who promised them that they would soon drive the Jews out and give them their land back.  The Arab nations around them wouldn’t accept these dispossessed co-religionists, so they became the now-dispossessed Palestinians, living permanently in camps.

At the same time about the same number of Jews were forced to flee their homes in the surrounding Arab lands due to the violent anti-Jewish sentiment being stoked by the Arab governments.  These were all welcomed with open arms by their co-religionists in Israel and helped to resettle in the new state, which is why we don’t hear much about their dispossession.

The difference between the way these two dispossessed groups were handled by governments nominally of their own religious persuasion says something profound about why there is a Palestinian problem in the first place. If the Arab governments around Israel had handled the dispossessed Palestinians the way the Israelis handled the dispossessed Jews, there wouldn’t be a Palestinian problem. But then if those Arab governments had been that humane they probably wouldn’t have launched repeated wars to try to exterminate Israel either.

The Palestinian Question

There are sound, practical, rational, liberal reasons for wanting to find a stable settlement to the Palestinian question, but “justice” is not among them. There certainly was no justice for the Arabs who lived in that area when the British arbitrarily designated their land as a new homeland for the Jewish People in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, but then there was no justice for the Jews in the European Holocaust or the Russian pogroms or the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 or in the many other atrocities that forced the Jews to look for a new homeland in the first place. Nor is there any justice in the way the Arab nations of the Middle East have for decades cynically milked the Palestinian plight for their own political purposes, but offered no real effective relief.

The Jews (with British connivance) took the land from the largely-Muslim Arabs in Palestine, but in fact the Muslim Arabs in turn, under Saladin, took that land themselves from the Christian Crusaders, who in turn had taken it from the Muslim Seljuk Empire, who had taken it from the Christian Roman Empire (or rather the Eastern half of what remained of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire).  The Romans, of course, originally took it from the Jews, who in turn had taken it from (the history this far back gets a little blurred and uncertain) …. and on and on and on. (see, for example this animated map of the territory through history)      

This is the same problem with the occasional liberal guilt-driven moves to give the land back to the Native Americans. Here in the Southwest we would have to give states like New Mexico and Arizona and California back to the Mexicans, from whom we took them by force of arms. But the Mexicans in turn by the same logic would have to pass them back to the indigenous people from whom the proto-Mexicans, the Spaniards, first took them, again by military conquest. Would this finally be justice? No, because almost every indigenous American tribe lived on lands they had themselves taken by force from other tribes, and so on back through history.

A realistic look at world history shows that peoples throughout the globe have always had expansionist cultures taking over other people’s lands. And despite the persistent Western liberal myth that we are more “civilized” these days, the history of the past century (Germany’s two attempts to expand by war, Stalin’s communist empire, Japan’s attempt to create a Southeast Asian empire) and even today’s current events in Russia (The Ukraine and Crimea, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) or China (the conquest of Tibet) or the Middle East (Saddam’s attempt to invade Iran and then Kuwait, the rise of ISIS) shows that this is an unrealistic dream.

There are good, humane, practical reasons for trying to end the endless suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank and living in the camps in places like Jordan, and for that matter the endless terrorist attacks on Jews in Israel and around the world, but the appeal for “Justice” is not one of them.  History has been unkind to both the Palestinians and the Jews (and practically everyone else's ancestors as well, if one goes back far enough), and there is nothing anyone in the present can do to remedy that. What is needed is a realistic plan, starting from where things are today, to find a reasonable settlement.

This is not easy. There is a powerful Israeli faction that hankers to “take back” all of the ancient Kingdom of Israel in the name of "justice", and continues to advance that cause by building settlement on Palestinian lands.There is an even more powerful Palestinian faction that hankers, again in the name of "justice", to exterminate the Jews entirely, or at least drive them entirely from the Holy Lands, and attempts to advance that cause with suicide bombers and random rocket fire. Both will have to come to terms with reality to find a practical accommodation.  And part of coming to terms with reality is giving up the “justice” argument and looking for more pragmatic approaches

Recommended: Terry Pratchett - Shaking Hands with Death

Sir Terry Pratchett died yesterday.  In 2010 he gave the annual Richard Dimbleby lecture on the subject of "Shaking Hands with Death", which the BBC taped and is available on YouTube here.  As his Alzheimer condition had already progressed to the point where he had trouble reading his speech, he had his good friend the actor Tony Robinson read his speech for him.

It is classic Terry Pratchet, full of humor and insight, but passionate in his appeal for the right of people suffering from an incurable disease, like himself, to choose the time and place of their exit from this world, surrounded by friends and family whom they still recognize, rather than existing as a living corpse sustained by tubes and machines.

I don't know (and perhaps the public will never know) if he availed himself of that choice yesterday, but it would have been in his character  - and in my opinion, his absolute right - to do so.

This lecture, running about 45 minutes, is well worth listening to.