Persistent Conflict
Spencer Ackerman has a smart post up about General George Casey’s conceit that the American strategic environment is characterized by “an era of persistent conflict”. As Spencer says, the key thing here is that “one man’s Era Of Persistent Conflict is another man’s Era Of Persistent Peace.” In other words, far from “persistent” conflict what we’re actually looking at is a persistent absence of large-scale security threat to the United States and, thus, a US Army more oriented to selectively playing a constructive role in other people’s conflicts around the world. Spencer
It’s possible that the second definition prevails, and our Army becomes more like, say, Australia’s — primarily used for assistance in a regional conflict, rarely for centrality in major war-fighting. (Apologies to the Aussies if I’ve misunderstood your national posture, but this is how it appears from Washington D.C.) That, I suppose, wouldn’t be terrible, provided it wouldn’t invite attack from a superior adversary.
I think we can be pretty sure it wouldn’t invite an attack from a superior adversary. Among other things, it’s the Navy rather than the Army standing between us and the Chinese — I don’t think we need to worry about offensive military operations from Mexico. The real issue, to my mind, is if we’re going to have a military oriented around this sort of thing, how big does it really need to be?
The correct answer, I think, is “pretty big.” We’ve got the world’s largest GDP. We’ve got the world’s third-largest population. And we’re very close to the top in per capita GDP — way higher than the other large population countries. So it makes a ton of sense for us to have the biggest and most expensive military establishment in the world. But it doesn’t need to be the most expensive by such an absurdly large margin. A lot of the rhetoric around the military suggests the idea (”fighting for our freedom”) suggests they’re really poised on the border to fend off a Canadian onslaught or, at a minimum, holding the Soviets at bay in the Fulda Gap. In reality, they’re doing no such thing. Acting as a the main guarantor of the freedom of the seas, peacekeeping in Bosnia, training friendly security forces in the Philipines, and the like are useful things to do (occupying Iraq less so) but none of them are essential to the continued existence of the United States.
Which is fine. Tons of stuff the federal government does, from wage-indexing Social Security to fighting AIDS in Africa to the National Parks System is hardly essential to the continued existence of the country. By the same token, most of our individual expenditures are for things that aren’t required for subsistence. We’re a rich and powerful land, so we needed be guided in either our individual or a collective decisions by a strict necessity test. Being a 21st century American is cool like that.
But this perspective does mean that a US military facing a strategic environment of persistent peace needs to be able to justify its budgetary claims in perspective — is the marginal dollar of defense spending more useful than a marginal dollar of civilian development assistance, of a beef-ed up foreign service, of enhanced domestic infrastructure spending? There’s some quantity of defense spending such that the answer is “yes.” But one can’t help but suspect that the point of describing persistent peace as “persistent conflict” is to obscure these trade-offs. To try to put the military’s operations in the Horn of Africa on a whole different plane than USAID’s relief work in Pakistan when on the merits it all deserves to be considered comprehensively.
48 Responses to “Persistent Conflict”
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November 11th, 2008 at 9:10 am
So it makes a ton of sense for us to have the biggest and most expensive military establishment in the world. But it doesn’t need to be the most expensive by such an absurdly large margin.
You have to remember that our absurdly large military is a big part of the reason that Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and other major economies are such loyal allies. Our military protects them and deters large-scale buildups in potentially more hostile countries, such as China and Russia.
I’m not saying this means we can’t cut military spending, but it’s an important part of the equation.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:10 am
What do we really need to spend for “national defense”? $100-billion? $200-billion? I can’t believe it would be more than that. What do we actually spend? $600-billion? How many thousands of overseas military bases do we have now? 7,000? 8,000? It’s insane.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Aren’t we way over $600B? I don’t think the budget includes the special funding requests for Iraq and Afghanistan (although they sure go to the debt). And the military accounting systems are so screwed up that we don’t have a good handle on what we’re really getting for all that money.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:33 am
“A lot of the rhetoric around the military suggests the idea (”fighting for our freedom”) suggests they’re really poised on the border to fend off a Canadian onslaught or, at a minimum, holding the Soviets at bay in the Fulda Gap. In reality, they’re doing no such thing.”
Thanks. Can you append this to every post?
November 11th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Imagining that peacekeeping in Bosnia or training security forces in the Philippines are useful things to be doing is a high flight from reality.
We simply don’t have infrastructure that would allow us to do distant jobs well. We don’t speak the language and our resources usually are tied up in meaningless (or worse) jobs elsewhere. The CIA, broadly speaking, is divided into the part that works with foreign gangsters and mafias, and the information part. Our policy-makers ignore the information part. There are a lot of concrete reasons that most of South America has turned against us and are rejecting the Monroe Doctrine.
There’s nothing new under the sun and this is all part of the downward trajectory of failing empires. If you don’t like to get hot and bothered about current events, just study history and you can see the same things happening to somebody else. Caesar brought the benefits of Roman society to Gaul, and returned to Rome to destroy the Republic.
A moment of rational skepticism would make it obvious that we can’t perform well, ten thousand miles away, a task we can’t do at all here in the US.
This is a good day to consider such matters, because the First World War (sic) convinced most non-Europeans that European civilization couldn’t actually be that great after all, if the end result was total devastation and the end of all civilized values. And November 11 is, more properly, Armistice Day- not the day peace was achieved, but the day when the warring nations paused, to rebuild their destroyed economies and re-arm for the continuation of the conflict.
There’s a lesson in there someplace- maybe more than one.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Your idea of “a US Army more oriented to selectively playing a constructive role in other people’s conflicts around the world” is basically what Thomas PM Barnett is pushing for; he calls it the “SysAdmin” force (in contrast to the traditional high-tech “Leviathan” force).
Regarding your question, “is the marginal dollar of defense spending more useful than a marginal dollar of civilian development assistance, of a beef-ed up foreign service, of enhanced domestic infrastructure spending?”, I think you will also find Barnett in sympathy with you there, not to mention Secretary of Defense Robert Gates himself; see in particular his Gates’s Landon Lecture from about a year ago:
“What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security – diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development. … We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years.”
It’s this kind of thinking that has Barnett and others pushing the idea of Obama retaining Gates for at least a year or two more.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:59 am
is the marginal dollar of defense spending more useful than a marginal dollar of civilian development assistance, of a beef-ed up foreign service, of enhanced domestic infrastructure spending?
That question is almost the crux of the matter, but it leaves out the “cui bono” part of it. America is by inclination an isolationist country, which has (at least heretofore) been sold an internationalist foreign policy with every manner of conjured up phantasm and chimera.
We have only supported this costly interventionism because we have been led to the utterly unfounded and irrational belief that our lives depend on it. Minus the fear-mongering, the foreign aid dollar will be weighed, not only against domestic public uses, but against just letting us keep that money in the first place. (not against intervening in Bosnia or Sudan or wherever myself, just saying this is how it is likely to play out politically)
November 11th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Serial catowner has obviously never met a Bosnian refugee if s/he says that peacekeeping is not a useful activity. A stance of strict pacificism is an indulgence, not a practical worldview, if only because it is a POV that not everybody shares.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Re: I think the criterion for involvement of our military has become less a national threat of survival than the threat not getting all the neat things we’d like to have.
Even by that criterion, all we really need to do is keep the sea lanes wide open, more a chore for the nvy (and air force) than for the army
November 11th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Honest question:
Is the rest of the world really free riding on the expense the US pays to keep the sea lanes open or does the US get the money back in some form that isn’t talked about much, such as, for example, leverage in setting exchange rates or something.
It’s as if the richest guy on the block paid for the police and nobody else paid taxes. Not only is this an obvious situation where some organization would be expected to form to collectively bear the cost of this common good, but seeing the situation persist makes me wonder if somehow the police aren’t in some subtle way, paying the rich guy back under the table.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Matt’s post is interesting, but doesn’t address the argument that maybe the best way to reduce our commitments to defense spending (in it’s broadest sense) is to institute a worldwide, verifiable regime focuses on reducing the amount of weaponry available to both state and non-state actors. We could then maintain our military superiority at a much smaller cost.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:33 am
For 2009, the US military spending is ~$700 billion. $500 billion on-budget, $200 billion off-budget (Afghan, Iraq, some nuclear upkeep). We spend almost more than the rest of the world…combined.
There is no justification for a military that size when we have no comparable threat. In 2001, it was ~$300 billion and 19 guys with boxcutters threw this country for a loop it hasn’t got over yet. Let’s face it, military spending is pork, pure and simple.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Two initial reservations about Matt’s way of conceptualizing the issue:
1. Our national security interests include more than just preserving our continued existence; they also include preserving our prosperity, influence over others and a certain degree of independence and liberty.
2. Also, you can’t just base the appropriate size of a military establishment on some other economic measure like GDP, just as you cannot base the appropriate size of any other industry on the overall size of the economy. The US is a provider of security to other countries; it’s one of the things we export. So one of the questions we should ask is what we are getting in return for the security we provide. Is the price right? How are we being paid for the service we provide in keeping the shipping lanes open around the world, or doing peacekeeping in Bosnia?
Also, what is the impact on our own society and democracy of having such a large defense establishment? I would suggest that some of the social phenomena wee saw during the election, including the frightening and cognitively unbalanced ravings of a deeply paranoid, hard-right, authoritarian and jingoist minority – a dangerously sizable minority – are not unrelated to the fact that the United States is a country deeply invested in the war business. Militaries are the most hierarchical, secretive, violent and undemocratic institutions in existence, no matter how professional they become. Their very existence and prevalence tends to promote and model undemocratic and illiberal values and codes of behavior. If you have a large military, you end up with a sizable number of military-loving jingoists.
My suspicion is that the price is not right, and that in our vast military economy we spend a fortune on what are ultimately unproductive or even counterproductive make-work activities: employing soldiers, making weaponry, building bases that don’t pay for themselves in terms of the security benefits they provide. To justify the continued spending, our military leaders and the political lackeys who service them are disposed to look out constantly for jobs they can pitch that will employ those soldiers, bases and weapons from time to time, deplete them, and require more spending. And some of these pitches not only do nothing to enhance our security, but even damage it – as was clearly the case in Iraq.
Just as we saw recently that an unregulated, freewheeling financial services industry will ultimately start producing products that don’t just grease the wheels of capitalism, but run those wheels right off the tracks, so we should worry that an over-indulged and freewheeling military establishment soon moves beyond the business of selling the mere threat of death and destruction to enhance security, but starts selling a lot of actual death and destruction that damages that security, while entertaining the worst and most dangerous elements of our society.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:24 am
The correct answer, I think, is “pretty big.” We’ve got the world’s largest GDP. We’ve got the world’s third-largest population. And we’re very close to the top in per capita GDP — way higher than the other large population countries. So it makes a ton of sense for us to have the biggest and most expensive military establishment in the world. But it doesn’t need to be the most expensive by such an absurdly large margin.
It’s not an “absurdly” large margin. There is no “right” answer to the question of how much we should spend on the military. It’s a political issue, not an empirical one.
Remember, even our progressive President-elect Obama wants a bigger military.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Spending $650 billion per year on a military budget, when the worldwide military budget is 1.1 trillion is not an efficient use of resources. The opportunity cost is way out of whack here. Especially given our current economic outlook, an efficient commitment to the military could still be met on much less money, and we could devote these resources to better investments, such as our human and physical capital (e.g. health care and infrastructure). Alliances could be further forged in this multi-polar world to make up for the down-sizing.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Remember, even our progressive President-elect Obama wants a bigger military.
Progressive? I supposse that too is a political issue and not an empirical one but I don’t think Obama is progressive.
I also think we spend at least $400-500-billion more on the military than we should.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Spending $650 billion per year on a military budget, when the worldwide military budget is 1.1 trillion is not an efficient use of resources.
What amount of military spending would be an “efficient” use of resources, then? How do you calculate it?
November 11th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Progressive? I supposse that too is a political issue and not an empirical one but I don’t think Obama is progressive.
I don’t either, but Matthew Yglesias keeps insisting that Obama is progressive, so I like to draw attention to the silliness of that claim in light of Obama’s actual policies.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
How many thousands of overseas military bases do we have now? 7,000? 8,000? It’s insane.
Oops, that should have been, how many hundreds? 700? 800? but I still think it’s insane.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
@ 9- We may have helped, unilaterally, a few thousand Bosnians, while, still unilaterally, we sponsored deathsquad killings of hundreds of thousands in Central and South America.
If, OTOH, our assistance in Bosnia was as part of an international force carrying out international resolutions for resolving conflict, that is to be applauded.
However, considering the extent to which the CIA has worked with Albanian mobsters, and knowing that for decades the US had intended to encourage ethnic strife in order to splinter Yugoslavia, I am still inclined to take a dim view of the whole matter.
November 11th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
“how big does it really need to be?”
That’s the right question to ask …
“The correct answer, I think, is “pretty big.” We’ve got the world’s largest GDP. We’ve got the world’s third-largest population. And we’re very close to the top in per capita GDP — way higher than the other large population countries”
And all those factors relate to our ability to have big forces; none of them implies any “need”. I would suggest that the correct ballpark estimate for what the USA *needs*, as a
large peaceful country with no threatening neighbors, is
“about the same as Canada”. Now if you *want* more, so that you can futz around all over the globe in various vastly expensive and often counter-productive adventures, that’s something else altogether. But you hardly *need* anything, because there’s just no plausible threat to the US, or even its major allies, since the USSR collapsed.
November 11th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
And all those factors relate to our ability to have big forces; none of them implies any “need”.
How have you determined the amount of security we “need?” It’s not a matter of how much we “need.” It’s a matter of how much we want and are willing and able to pay for. The more money you have, the more protection you can afford.
November 11th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
“How have you determined the amount of security we “need?”"
There’s a good argument that you “need” enough military force
to deter actual existing enemies from aggression against your own territory and perhaps even your own key allies. That’s how you could justify a big force in Europe during the Cold War
(the Warsaw Pact really did have big competent forces); or the US presence in South Korea (there really is a big army in North Korea that could come in and destroy Seoul).
But beyond that, the idea that large expensive standing military
forces buy you “security” is just bogus. It’s better to have a lot of friends and allies and a lot of goodwill, than to have a honking big sabre to rattle. See 9/11. Those big nuclear and conventional forces deter attacks by other big conventional or nuclear forces. But who’s going to mount a big attack ? Since the collapse of the USSR, there’s no hostile power with the slightest ability to conduct large-scale operations far from its own territory. And the powers that might act unconventionally or stealthily (Al Qaida, Iran, Hezbollah) aren’t very responsive to military action – as shown by the mess in Iraq, and the recent Israeli debacle in Lebanon. Chasing a mosquito with a jackhammer is not a good plan.
The idiocy of the “more is better” school of strategic thought is most apparent in the size of our nuclear force. One hundred nukes is enough to cause a global ecological (and thus economic) catastrophe. Five hundred nukes would be plenty to guarantee absolute destruction of any opponent’s population centers. How many do we have ? The answer is supposedly secret (mostly to hide its absurdity) – but it’s reckoned to be about 6500 nukes deployed. For anyone sane, that’s about 15x more than we could possibly need. And more makes us *less* secure, because it adds to the risk of losing weapons or accidental detonation – a very small but non-zero risk.
November 11th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
There’s a good argument that you “need” enough military force to deter actual existing enemies from aggression against your own territory and perhaps even your own key allies.
But deterrence isn’t an either/or. It’s a matter of degree. More deterrence is better than less.
It’s better to have a lot of friends and allies and a lot of goodwill, than to have a honking big sabre to rattle.
Those are obviously not exclusive goods. A bigger military does not mean fewer friends and allies. “Walk softly, and carry a big stick.”
Those big nuclear and conventional forces deter attacks by other big conventional or nuclear forces. But who’s going to mount a big attack ? Since the collapse of the USSR, there’s no hostile power with the slightest ability to conduct large-scale operations far from its own territory.
They wouldn’t need to conduct large-scale operations far from their own territories to create a serious threat to the national interests of the United States or its allies. Many unstable and undemocratic countries have significant military capability and could start serious regional wars.
November 11th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
“But deterrence isn’t an either/or. It’s a matter of degree. More deterrence is better than less.”
Actually “deterrence” is binary: either your opponents are
deterred, or they aren’t. The question is whether more weapons and more forces increase the probability of achieving deterrence. And it’s pretty obvious that weapons, and military force in general, for deterrence are goods with a rapidly diminishing marginal utility. There’s a big difference between zero nukes and 1 nuke; there’s a fairly big difference between 1 nuke and 10 nukes. But there’s *no* practical difference between an opponent with 500 nukes and an opponent with 10000 nukes; either way they can fry you, and you’d better not mess with them.
“Those are obviously not exclusive goods. A bigger military does not mean fewer friends and allies. “Walk softly, and carry a big stick.””
When your foreign aid budget is $20B, and your military budget is $600B, as a practical matter I’d say that it’s pretty clear that the choice of a huge military budget is consuming resources which could otherwise be used to win friends. So hell yes, they *are* exclusive.
“They wouldn’t need to conduct large-scale operations far from their own territories to create a serious threat to the national interests of the United States or its allies. Many unstable and undemocratic countries have significant military capability and could start serious regional wars.”
Like who ? And what kind of threat to what “national interest” ? Instead of this vague pessimism, you’ve got to name names and places; and then you’ve also got to argue how the current $600B/year military will deal with those issues better than the late-Clinton $300B/year military. Yes, there *are* threats from relatively small conventionally-weak countries; but they’re the kind of threats for which a big conventional military doesn’t help much (see IDF vs Hezbollah).
November 11th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Good ol’ Mixner- dumb as bread.
Once you have deterred something, anything more is just overkill, banging the garbage can louder and longer to keep away even more elephants.
Anybody who isn’t deterred by one of our Trident subs won’t be deterred by a few more.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:09 am
Richard Cownie,
Actually “deterrence” is binary: either your opponents are
deterred, or they aren’t.
No, it isn’t “binary.” A threat that is sufficient to deter an opponent from one act of aggression may not be sufficient to deter him from another. Or to deter him from the first act of aggression tomorrow, or next week, or next year. Or to deter his successor in power. Or to deter a different opponent. There is no simple threshold of deterrence beyond which any further increase in military power has no deterrent value. It’s a continuum, not an either/or.
And it’s pretty obvious that weapons, and military force in general, for deterrence are goods with a rapidly diminishing marginal utility.
Huh? How is this “pretty obvious?”
But there’s *no* practical difference between an opponent with 500 nukes and an opponent with 10000 nukes; either way they can fry you, and you’d better not mess with them.
Sorry, you’re unjustifiably generalizing from a single contrived example. Even if it’s true that 10,000 nukes provide no greater deterrence than 500, it obviously does not follow that that’s true for comparisons between lesser numbers of weapons. The capability to nuke all major cities in an enemy country is a much greater deterrent than the capability to nuke just one city. The leader of that enemy country would probably be much less willing to gamble the loss of all his cities than the loss of just one. And no one’s really talking about expanding our nuclear capability, anyway. It’s our conventional forces that need to be maintained. As I already pointed out, our new President-elect (who I’m guessing you voted for) wants to expand our conventional military forces.
When your foreign aid budget is $20B, and your military budget is $600B, as a practical matter I’d say that it’s pretty clear that the choice of a huge military budget is consuming resources which could otherwise be used to win friends. So hell yes, they *are* exclusive.
More unjustified assumptions. You cannot assume that any portion of that $600B would be spent on foreign aid if it were not spent on the military. It’s far more likely that it would be spent on domestic programs. You also cannot assume that foreign aid is more effective at winning friends and allies than offering military protection.
Like who ?
Good grief, is this really not clear to you? Numerous countries in the middle-east, Asia and Africa. The two most obvious candidates right now are Iran and North Korea, but numerous other non-democratic or only nominally democratic countries have substantial military forces and could inflict major damage on the interests and allies of the United States.
What comes across loud and clear in your comments is just your sheer naivete.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:09 am
right says that Europeans and Japanese depend upon the US military for defense. Speaking as a Brit, too right! From an American perspective, in some respects it is a smart move to control all the defense spending of the empire–it guarantees loyalty–but it really isn’t so healthy. The MIC will surely bring down the republic at some stage if it isn’t reformed–the Bush years really ought to be a warning.
November 12th, 2008 at 7:43 am
“The capability to nuke all major cities in an enemy country is a much greater deterrent than the capability to nuke just one city. The leader of that enemy country would probably be much less willing to gamble the loss of all his cities than the loss of just one. And no one’s really talking about expanding our nuclear capability, anyway. It’s our conventional forces that need to be maintained.”
Wrong again. The theory of deterrence assumes that the decision-makers of the opponents are somewhat rational (otherwise they won’t be calculating at all); and no semi-rational leader is going to take an action which he perceives to have a 95% risk of the utter destruction of his biggest city. How many nukes does it take to achieve 95% confidence of annihilating Moscow ? or Tehran ? or Beijing ?
That depends mostly on the reliability and accuracy of your delivery system: but US nukes are the best in that respect. Let’s be really really pessimistic and suggest that only 10% of our nukes would detonate on target:then 1 nuke gives a
survival probability of 0.9; 2 nukes give 0.81 survival; 3 give 0.73; and so on. It takes 28.4 nukes (log(0.05)/log(0.9)) to achieve a survival probability of less than 5%.
So there’s the math: even if your nukes were massively unreliable, you can achieve very effective deterrence of any rational opponent with about 30 nukes. Let’s say you want to play it safe and have 10x overkill – that still only gets you to 300 nukes. Which, perhaps not coincidentally, is about the size of Israel’s stockpile. I’m not a huge fan of Israel (notwithstanding paying my temple dues), but they’re damn smart and they’re definitely in the position of facing real and immediate threats: if 300 is enough for them, it’s enough for anybody.
Now *irrational* opponents – perhaps like Al Qaida – are a different problem altogether. For them, deterrence just doesn’t apply. So you need enough force to defeat them, in some sense of “defeat”. But irrational opponents don’t have much force, because the process of building and maintaining military force very definitely requires rationality and calculation. They might be *evil*; they can’t be completely irrational and uncalculating.
“You also cannot assume that foreign aid is more effective at winning friends and allies than offering military protection.”
So do you really think that you win more friends by having a
military:aid ratio of 600:20 are more than having a ratio of
580:40 ? or 520:100 ? I don’t. I think it’s absurd. And I think the Clinton-era $300B military was perceived by friends and allies as providing quite enough protection.
And the argument that the US is “protecting” anyone looks weak these days, after 8 years of screw-you foreign policy, and in the absence of any global military opponent.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:01 am
I’m not going to respond to each and every one of Mixner’s points. I’ll just observe that what we have here is fundamentally a quantitative question – how much money should the USA spend on its military ? And that to be remotely plausible, any argument on that question has to involve some actual numbers and calculations. MY gave us numbers and calculations, but ones that had no relationship to the “need” for military forces. Mixner’s “arguments” on the other hand, amount to “more is better”, and that’s just no help at all in deciding whether the right number is $100B, $150B (my own preference), $300B (as in 97-99 under Clinton), $600B (what it is now), $1000B, or even $7000B (we spent 50% of GDP on the military in WW2, so presumably it would be possible to do the same right now).
Money spent on the military is real money. It comes out of taxpayer’s pockets, either right now if financed by taxes, or later if financed by borrowing. It needs to be subjected to quantitative cost-benefit analysis, and viewed in relation to other economic priorities.
November 12th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
“There is no justification for a military that size when we have no comparable threat. ”
I’am not American but I have an idea why the size of the US Army is huge : Military industrial Complex (MIC)
The two pillar of USA since the 80s are finance and MIC (with electronics and Boeing).
Now that the finance is collapsing there is only the MIC.
Look at the trade balance there is almost deficit in every field except weapons, and aircraft.
For USA like Russia it’s difficult to manage the shrinking of Army and MIC.
November 13th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and one (Matt) that the first chapter and recurring themes throughout Heads in the Sand helped me think about a lot.
Herfried Munkler’s “The New Wars” and Rupert Smith’s “The Utility of Force” are both really good books that helped me think about this subject too.
I would argue that the solution is some sort of act like the Goldwater Nicholson act (that made the various services work together); that forces the DoD and DoS to work together and devolves additional authroity and staffing to the chiefs of mission.
Right now we’re institutionally incapable of doing that right, and that is both State’s and the DoD’s fault.
There’s a fair level of institutional reform needed in both the military and the State Department to do that. Foreign aid and partnership coming from either should be coordinated and have unity of effort. I would say that it would be better if foreign aid came through the regional or country chief of mission, and the mechanism (military or USAID dollars) worked together.
Anyone who’s worked with State or IRMO in Iraq knows that in between their reconstruction efforts and the military’s, there’s a lot to be done. Most peeps seem to think the military does it better, there, but that’s just one case. We both have lots to learn.
There’s a whole lot of other stuff that can be done within the military, but the decision of what conflicts it will fight in, what objectives it fights towards, and how it’s structured (what capabilities it has) to fight with are civilian decisions. If the government wants to make these better, or encourage work with civilians, or adapt to a more counterinsurgency and persistent international presence (which the military is working towards); it needs to tell the military the scope and who to play nice with (ahem, state; and vice versa).
BTW, implementing this will require additional money to DoS. In many places, esp. persistent conflict zones with both state and DoD presence, state isn’t big enough to keep up. Funding this capability in State will allow the DoD to get operational efficiencies, rather than replicating reconstruction efforts simply because someone told us to and we can’t force the State guys (who are all busy) to help us.
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