The Power Problem
I wanted to take a moment to recommend a new book by Chris Preble, the top foreign policy guy at Cato, called The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. The book’s got a good explanatory subtitle, but to briefly sketch the thesis Preble argues that our over-large military establishment isn’t just a waste of money, but actually harmful to our security. The reason is that it spawns a self-justifying ideology about the appropriate American role in the world that leads us to repeated foreign policy blunders. If we had much less military capacity, we would have a much narrower definition of the strategic purpose of our military—to defend the country against threats—and would find that we were happy with that equilibrium. But the large military spawns a grandiose strategic concept that winds up writing checks that even a gigantic military can’t cash.
I think this analysis is dead on. My prescription would not be quite as radical as Preble’s. I think the main flaw with it is that he doesn’t take his own analysis seriously enough—for a variety of reasons, it’s just not going to be the case that America suddenly decides to abandon its aspirations to play a global leadership role. Under the circumstances, I think it’s important to try to think of plausible ways for us to play that role in a constructive way rather than a self-defeating and destructive one, rather than just kind of saying from the sidelines that we should abandon the whole thing. That said, my own views are sufficiently far outside the mainstream that I hardly see any point in quibbling with people who would exercise even more military restraint than I would.
The video of a recent event that Preble did with my colleague Larry Corb and The American Conservative’s Scott McConnell is also worth watching. It shows that the coalition of people calling for a serious rethink of American strategy and defense spending priorities—a group in which I would include myself—is as ideologically diverse as we are ineffective in actually getting our way. Barack Obama’s taken a lot of good steps so far, but realistically the gap between the change we need and the change we’re going to get remains pretty big.
29 Responses to “The Power Problem”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
April 25th, 2009 at 8:49 am
“The reason is that it spawns a self-justifying ideology about the appropriate American role in the world that leads us to repeated foreign policy blunders”
I think a certain former president/WW2 general was on to this a long time ago.
April 25th, 2009 at 9:22 am
If Obama can shepherd in a massive reduction in war spending while giving us 8 years of fiscal lunacy (continuing from Bush’s
then the Cato guys, the Austrians, and unaffiliated sorts like me might consider it a wash. But I don’t think Obama has any real interest in a reduction of the military. He seems to be going the other way.
April 25th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Comes down to the old dictum, “For the guy who only owns a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
April 25th, 2009 at 9:27 am
In addition to making us trigger happy, our super-powerful military makes other nations nervous. Of course, being weak has its own problems in international relations, but we should not pretend that being astoundingly strong is free of cost.
Just ask the Athenians, who built long walls to the sea so that no one could ever besiege them on land. As it happens, the existence of the walls encouraged Sparta to attack (in part because an invulnerable Athens made Sparta afraid), and the results are well known.
April 25th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Excuse me.
Well known.
April 25th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I think the main flaw with it is that he doesn’t take his own analysis seriously enough—for a variety of reasons, it’s just not going to be the case that America suddenly decides to abandon its aspirations to play a global leadership role.
Oh ye of little faith! We just need a more imaginative approach to spreading the anti-militarist gospel. We need to devise more wingnutty messages that will sell to conservatives, and then send our cadres out among the wingnut websites to insinuate messages like the following into the conversation:
1. The US military is the chief tool at the disposal of liberal ivy elites for the spread of One World Global Socialism.
2. The US military is an over-bloated Big Government agency and military spending fosters a culture of welfare dependency.
3. The US military promotes the social advancement Negroes and Mexicans within American society.
4. The US military is a direct threat to the freedom loving patriot militias who are the true guarantors of American Liberty.
5. The South will never rise again as long as the US military stands in its way.
6. The US military supports and funds thousands of atheistic scientists and doctors who spread evolutionary thinking and give people abortions.
7. The US military has unpatriotic rules against torturing people.
8. Many modern military technologies, including explosives technologies, were invented by Europeans. Dynamite was even invented by a Swede.
April 25th, 2009 at 9:57 am
I haven’t read the book; but on the other hand this is a very long-standing debate in the US, and any discussion is going to have to be rooted in the history of how we ended up where we are. That we’ve been clumsy and had many failures (both in our aims and our execution) is obvious. That we could have in a broad strategic sense acted much differently since 1940 — trying harder to avoid getting into World War II, say, or not adopting containment as our strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union afterwards — strikes me as kind of a fantasy.
It’s clear we haven’t done a very good job figuring out what our strategy should be going forward since the collapse of communism. But in general I think it’s likely that politics abhors a vacuum… and if we weren’t there, someone else perhaps not so friendly to our interests would be rushing to fill the void.
April 25th, 2009 at 9:57 am
A decline in American military expenditure will be mandated by our fiscal calamity. Well not totally mandated. We will see how far we can go in reducing government services and money transfers to citizens before push really comes to shove.
Mixed up with all that however is the psychological necessity of a large plurality of citizens and unanimity among our political and power elites of absolute military dominance. Our unquestioned dominance in military material is as important to many as air. Life without it cannot be conceived by many. Our military might is seen by many as an existential necessity.
Obama just proposed a 3% DOD budget increase and you know the reaction. Imagine if a cut had been proposed. Under normal circumstance and now extra ordinary circumstance cutting the military is a political impossibility. Under what circumstance could even a proposal to cut be made?
I hesitate to make this point. Violence against politicians who propose cutting military spending is highly probable. If not directly against them then against somebody, anybody, to lash out. The looming necessity of cutting something with 10%+ of GDP deficits is going to become an existential challenge for our political system. That’s what the Tea Parties and Texas secession is all about. There is going to be blood.
April 25th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Not a bad title! I’m glad he got it before Martha Nussbaum did.
/rimshot
April 25th, 2009 at 10:50 am
If Obama can shepherd in a massive reduction in war spending while giving us 8 years of fiscal lunacy (continuing from Bush’s
then the Cato guys, the Austrians, and unaffiliated sorts like me might consider it a wash. But I don’t think Obama has any real interest in a reduction of the military. He seems to be going the other way.
To be fair to the Cato Institute, it’s clear you haven’t read a goddamned thing they’ve published in the last 8 years. As much as I have my disagreements with them, they (and might I add, the “Austrians”) are in reality as far from your caricature of them as could be.
April 25th, 2009 at 10:56 am
To second larry birnbaum, and to wonder about Preble’s thesis from not a nationalistic but a global POV, if we weren’t the hegemon would our savings equal the costs in our inability to influence policy (maybe yes, but hard to say, no?)?
And would the rest of the world – the part not paying the onerous cost of our military but (possibly – I don’t insist this) reaping its benefits – like the alternatives? Lord knows it would be fun to see the Europeans forced to spend some coin to pick up some of our slack!! But what if they didn’t?
April 25th, 2009 at 11:05 am
This country cannot bring itself to limit the weapons that result in tens of thousands of deaths of its own citizens every year. We worship the power to kill. That will never change until, as it will someday, it causes our destruction as a free society.
April 25th, 2009 at 11:44 am
The thing is that when you’re the strongest military power in the world, you want to stay that way. And the biggest danger is that if you think you’re the strongest military power in the world, there’s a small possibility that someone will have developed some kind of tactics or put some technology to use to defeat you, but you won’t actually know that you can be defeated until it happens. So what’s the solution? Pick a lot of little fights all over the world on a regular basis to ensure that your military is constantly being tested from different angles. It’s not simply the “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” problem. The process of maintaining your status as the “strongest” necessitates constant testing and refining in the form of involving yourself in regular fighting…. which costs more money. The system feeds on itself.
April 25th, 2009 at 11:56 am
I don’t think that Matt understands that there is no way to try to rule the world ‘constructively’. No matter what we tell ourselves, such projects are never born of our better natures. Matt, like many of the elite, simply assumes that his beliefs are born of education and logic. It never even occurs to people like him that his narrow class interests might come into play when decided what is and is not impossible.
People like Matt, or larry, simply believe that it is there right as the upper class to rule the world, just as they assume that what is good for their priveleged asses must be good for America!
April 25th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
I like it. We withdraw, and Pakistan nukes India eliminating one of our larger competitors. Israel would likely nuke Iran, inflaming the ME after which Israel takes over the oil fields. China takes over Taiwan, Russia regains eastern Europe, and so on and so forth.
With a little luck we are the last intact economy standing as in the fifities, and life is good.
April 25th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
The original Tea Parties were mostly a protest against paying for the wars fought by far off autocrats against their relatives over who was going to take the throne of other far off autocracies.
The reason the constitution talks about “well armed militias” is because the original vision of this country was one with as small a standing army as possible.
Abolish the Army.
The only justified purpose of the Army (not the Air Force or Navy/Coast Guard) is to defend against Invasion.
This country’s citizens are so well armed that we have no need for a terrestrial military, other than to oppress others abroad.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
The original Tea Parties were mostly a protest against paying for the wars fought by far off autocrats
… on the ocean and landward frontiers of the homeland of those very same party-goers.
Back to the post:
Under the circumstances, I think it’s important to try to think of plausible ways for us to play that role in a constructive way rather than a self-defeating and destructive one, rather than just kind of saying from the sidelines that we should abandon the whole thing.
This is kinda cop out, no? I mean, it’s hardly controversial to say ‘we’re going to keep on doing what we’re doing, but we’re going to do it the “right” way instead of the “wrong” way’ This is exactly the platform Kerry ran on, and even largely the platform Obama ran on.
April 25th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
“If we had much less military capacity, we would have a much narrower definition of the strategic purpose of our military—to defend the country against threats—and would find that we were happy with that equilibrium. But the large military spawns a grandiose strategic concept that winds up writing checks that even a gigantic military can’t cash.”
This is basically correct; by creating a large military institution, the institution itself attempts to justify its own continuation. That it may not be particularly equiped to handled all situations/interventions/policies doesn’t matter. However, there are likely many unintended consequences of simply taking a knife to the military; these need to be throughly explored. For example, if we were to close bases in South Korea and Okinawa, how would this play in the region? It appears that we have an overly large footprint in this region, and this might be an area where we could cut back. But a detailed analysis might reveal that South Korea, say, would likely revert to militarism in response to the North Korean threat. Should this be a concern? Anyway, now that we have this military with a very extensive footprint and influence, it may be more difficult to cut back than we imagine.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
soullite, you’re drawing a completely incorrect inference from what I said. I suppose we could get into a big discussion about ethics and practicality, and about the relationship between what is good and what works. But the short version is, I don’t believe that it’s our “right” to rule the world.
In any case I can’t imagine that Yglesias would be happy to be lumped together with me. I’m certainly not happy to be lumped together with him. On national security I think he’s a (post-)modern version of what the communists used to call a “useful idiot.”
April 25th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
The looming necessity of cutting something with 10%+ of GDP deficits
What does this mean?
April 25th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
To be fair to the Cato Institute, it’s clear you haven’t read a goddamned thing they’ve published in the last 8 years. As much as I have my disagreements with them, they (and might I add, the “Austrians”) are in reality as far from your caricature of them as could be.
Read these few sentences and tell me what you’re saying about Cato.
Every Austrian I’ve heard mention the Iraq War has called for its end. They think the military-industrial-complex is almost as evil MY and his cabal of social democrats.
Plus, I have no idea how that smiley-face ended up there.
April 25th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
This is one of those domains where there exists an enormous amount of potential for staking out some common ground between progressives, right libertarians, and even some of the remaining elements of the old paleo-conservative crowd. Unfortunately long established cultural antipathies will likely prevail.
Another domain for such potential cooperation would be reforming the criminal justice system and ending, or at least dramatically curtailing, the war on drugs. Unfortunately progressives still tend to be so terrified of the ghost of Willie Horton that I hold out little hope for much real progress here either.
April 26th, 2009 at 2:12 am
I’ll have to read the book, but for the time being – what strategic role does he propose that the US pull back on?
Right now, the US military is based around having an absolute advantage in conventional warfare on land, sea, and air, as well as having Flexible Response (meaning that we can use certain amounts of force to counter certain threats, from skirmishes and peacekeeping up to full-blown conventional wars a la “Soviets through the Fulda Gap” scenario.
There are a whole number of secondary effects that come from this as well. One is that the US is worldwide guarantor of open sea lanes – not from pirates, who usually are a matter of local law enforcement these days, but from other states that might have a temptation to do things like closing sea lanes for strategic purposes and mining other states’ harbors. The other is that the US serves as a local counter-balancer in several regional security area. For example, in East Asia, the US helps make sure that Japan doesn’t need to fully re-arm for defense purposes, that the South Koreans and Taiwanese don’t have to go nuclear, and that none of the states get into a full-blown naval war over disputed areas of the South China Sea.
Cut funding in any significant way, and you’re going to have to re-define or give up those roles in some way. It certainly is possible, and there are alternative “Grand Strategies” out there. The US could, for example, cut back on land power in the form of the Army, but keep the Navy and Air Force, and define its mission around keeping the seas open and threatening to bomb any state that gets too dangerous in its region to other states – but you would lose a lot of your ability to respond to things like an Al-Qaeda-indwelled Afghanistan a la 2001.
Or the US could go back to a defensive, “Massive Retaliation” posture where the Air Force becomes the dominant branch of the military, and US military strategy becomes centered around nuclear weapons and nuclear striking ability. Basically, the idea is that we’d nuke any state that severely disrupted a strategic interest of the US, and develop regional partners (like Thailand in the Eisenhower Administration) who would receive arms and aid, and do a lot of the regional efforts on our behalf. That would be much, much cheaper (since the two biggest costs in terms of the military – Personnel and Operations – would go way down), and it would fit the author’s role of preventing the US from building up an expensive self-justifying doctrine for military usage, but you’d lose a lot of flexibility.
Of course, every strategy will have costs – and in this day and age, one of those costs is going to be that you will probably have to accept higher casualties on the receiving end of your potential attacks. That’s difficult to do in an era of widespread and easy video circulation via phones and the internet.
One thing I also ought to mention is that if you really cut back on this type of pro-intervention doctrine, COIN and peacekeeping efforts will probably suffer as well. They’re dependent on the US being able to deter conventional attacks, as well as Flexible Response and heavy personnel levels.
April 26th, 2009 at 2:40 am
I’ve said for years that the US could reduce its military budget and military personnel to ten percent of its current levels and STILL be able to to defeat any likely national enemy or likely combination of same.
It would require a complete revamp of the military concept, however. The notion of “conventional war” is itself outmoded.
Contrary to Brett’s notions above, none of the functions he cites are relevant to the defense of the United States, which is THE SOLE purpose of any rational military concept.
The US has no reason to be worrying about other states beating each other up over sea lanes and the like – if they mess with US ships, they mess with the US. Being able to deal with any attacking state by definition means being able to deal with ANY state period. Once you can do that, most other “threats” become irrelevant, including things like Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The question is: HOW do you insure the ability to defeat any other state or likely combination of states? The answer entails two things: technology, and personnel training. In short, you have the technology that can be applied by extremely competent personnel (along the monkeys we’re using today) to precise targets that include the leaders of any opposing state and their military leaders and command and control apparatus.
This isn’t rocket science. You don’t need nukes (except maybe the odd backpack nuke), you don’t need long range missiles, you don’t need expensive fighter planes or expensive tanks or expensive battleships. What you need are imagination and competence to deliver precision force are precise targets.
To quote one of my favorite characters, “Armies create problems by killing many, when the solution to all problems is to kill one – the right one.”
April 26th, 2009 at 2:42 am
That should be “not like” not “along”, I don’t where that came from – Alzheimer’s perhaps.
April 26th, 2009 at 7:16 am
Jeff Huber weighs in on expensive weapons systems:
Sticker Shock and Awe
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/apr/06/00025/
April 26th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Great post, Matt. Chris Preble is a courageous and creative thinker. I just got his book and also recommend it.
April 26th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
Brett, without endorsing where you might go with it — thank you for posting a reality-based discussion. A breath of fresh air in these precincts.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:19 am
[...] Matt Yglesias, Chris Preble’s recent book, The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less [...]