Matt Yglesias

Spending Trends in Afghanistan

Something that I think gets underplayed in coverage of the Afghanistan debate is the extent to which our commitment to Afghanistan has already escalated substantially in the recent past. In his recent report for the Carnegie Endowment, Gilles Dorronsoro cites this data from Amy Belasco’s classic September 2009 Congressional Research Service page-turner “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11″ (PDF):

One point here is that we now seem to be looking at the consequences of a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to Afghanistan. Maybe if we’d just been spending $30-$40 billion a year from the get-go the situation never would have deteriorated to the point where we’re looking at appropriations of $170 billion and rising. Another point is that it’s a little bit odd that the big escalation debate is happening now, since any further increases in expenditures will probably be smaller than the increase that already happened back when nobody was paying attention.

A third, loosely related point, is that the question “how much are we spending on the war in Afghanistan” is a surprisingly difficult research question. You would think this would be the kind of thing that hardly requires a CRS report, but there’s no more straightforward way for members of congress to figure out what they’ve appropriated than to have someone research it. And it’s full of sentences like “In a recent report, GAO raised questions about whether DOD war cost reporting accurately captures the split between Afghanistan and Iraq” and so forth. The whole issue is surprisingly murky.

Reconstruction for the USA

Ryan Avent asks what would happen if for just one year we spent as much on infrastructure investments as we do on the Department of Defense:

With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that. Which makes one wonder: where are all the economists, wringing their hands over cost-benefit analyses of these defense expenditures? Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense? Have a look at this if you’re unsure.

And while the gains to new investments in infrastructure (and not just in transportation) would be large, it isn’t as though we lack critical needs. What was the cost, human and economic, of the I-35 bridge collapse? Of the Metro crash and resulting limitations on service? Of the Bay Bridge shutdown? And of course, investments in infrastructure constitute positive contributions to the economy, which ultimately strengthen our ability to direct resources toward defense. Aimless defense spending, on the other hand, may well make us poorer and less secure.

Ryan’s link was to my post comparing America’s 2007 defense spending to other countries:

Under the circumstances, I think it’s clear that the marginal dollar spent on defense has a very low value. And of course though Ryan’s thought-experiment is a fun exercise, you couldn’t build out a national HSR network in one year no much how much money you spent. So the real point would be something like if we took 10 percent of the defense budget and re-allocated that to infrastructure, we could have a national HSR network in ten years. And we’d still be spending over triple what our nearest rival spends.

Something worth noting is that for a hegemonic power suffering from slow-but-steady (but very slow) relative decline, wasting money on national security expenditures actually erodes our hegemony. Meaningful U.S.-Chinese security competition is a generation or two away. By that time, money that was spent in 2009 on fighter planes or nuclear submarines or transportation infrastructure in Afghanistan isn’t going to be doing us any good. By contrast, spending money on preschool in 2009 does improve the U.S.-Chinese balance of power in 2049—investment in early childhood education pays enormous dividends, but it takes a long time to turn tiny babies into productive adults. And transportation is just the same. The construction of heavy rail mass transit in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington was extremely expensive but has paid consistent dividends for decades and if properly maintained will continue to do so forever.

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the quote, but someone told me he heard a Chinese official tell him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China.” I don’t really think we should view that contrast in a paranoid light, but if you do want to take a paranoid view of the American national security situation it makes a lot more sense to worry about that than to worry that someone in a cave might build a bomb.

America Spends A Lot on Defense

Yesterday, congress appropriated a $680 billion for the Department of Defense in FY 2010. Chris Preble observes that, shockingly enough, this $680 billion isn’t even the whole bill:

The defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security budget weighs in at $42.8 billion. This comprises the visible balance of what Americans spend on our national security, loosely defined. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget, money dedicated to the care and maintenance of the country’s huge nuclear arsenal.

All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.

Preble says that this enormous expenditure “flows directly from our foreign policy.” But it’s worth also saying that our foreign policy flows from the vast scope of our defense spending. My biggest concern about the war in Afghanistan isn’t overblown feasibility concerns, but the failure to take seriously David Obey’s point that we should put this in some kind of cost-benefit framework. Arne Duncan doesn’t have a $700 billion per year budget to play with as he tries to help American kids learn. Jay Rockefeller doesn’t get to say “I could make this health plan really good by kicking the ten year cost up to $7 trillion.” People are starving in Ethiopia for want of a fraction of the DOD’s daily budget in food aid.

Global Defense Spending Map

Via Robert Farley and Visual Economics a useful depiction of world defense spending, that helpfully combines both percent-of-GDP spent (a good measure of intensity) with a pie chart to illustrate overall spending. You can click on the map for a larger image:

A few noteworthy points here:

— Despite overall U.S. dominance of the spending pie, it’s in the Middle East where you see the really defense-preoccupied regimes. That’s when you get when you have a cluster of resource-rich autocracies.

— Not only does the U.S. spend more than China, but we spend a larger share of GDP on defense than China does. Under the circumstances, citing the alleged threat from a “rising China” as a rationale for high levels of defense spending is illy.

— Note the second largest slice of the pie; if the Pentagon’s budget were reduced to $0 the dominant military power on earth would be the European Union. Not that we should drop to zero, but this illustrates how low the objective threat level is.

Just recall that every unnecessary dollar spent on defense is a dollar that can’t be invested productively. Spending too much year after year after year leaves American living standards much lower than they otherwise could be.

Majority Rules for a Day in the US Senate

Killed by 58 Senators

When reading about the full Senate’s decision to back Barack Obama and eliminate funding for the F-22 note that the vote on the amendment stripping the money out passed 58-40. What’s that you say? It passed because more people voted “yes” than voted “no?” Perhaps you’ve been told that that’s not how things work in the United States Senate. Perhaps you’ve been told that “it takes 60 votes” for initiatives to pass in that body.

As you can see here, that’s simply false. The history and tradition of the Senate has always been that measures pass by majority vote. It’s also true that members would, from time to time, take advantage of procedural stalling tactics to delay majority supported legislation, most particularly legislation aimed at securing the physical safety of African-Americans from terrorist violence and similar worthy causes. In recent years, however, a tradition of routine filibustering has arisen and created a de facto 60 vote supermajority threshold. As we see in the F-22 case, however, it’s not a requirement that the Senate operate in this manner. And insofar as a large minority of Senate do decide they’re determined to try to impose a supermajority requirement on Senate action, the most reasonable response is to do away with filibustering altogether.

Gates: Defense Pork Proponents Hurt the Troops

Noah Schachtman offers up some wise thoughts from Robert Gates:

“The grim reality is that with regard to the budget we have entered a zero-sum game. Every defense dollar diverted to fund excess or unneeded capacity… is a dollar that will be unavailable to take care of our people, to win the wars we are in, to deter potential adversaries, and to improve capabilities in areas where America is underinvested and potentially vulnerable. That is a risk that I will not take and one that I cannot accept,” he said.

Gates took particular aim at proponents of the futuristic, $250 million-a-pop F-22 stealth dogfighter. Senior military leaders all say they have plenty of the planes, to ward off any potential foe. Congress keeps trying to force the Pentagon to pay for more — despite the threat of a Presidential veto of any defense bill which contains more F-22 cash. It’s typical, he observed, of a Beltway process that keeps defense programs going forever, regardless of their military value. It’s exactly why Gates’ largely common sense overhaul of the Pentagon’s arsenal is, in its own way, so radical.

This is fundamentally what the F-22 debate is all about. Barack Obama and Robert Gates are trying to bring an end to years of magical thinking about defense spending. George Bush took a federal budget that was in short-term equilibrium but facing large long-term deficits, and decided that the thing to do was to cut taxes dramatically and simultaneously scale up defense spending. Ronald Reagan did the same thing. That’s conservative governance. But in the real world, you have to make decisions. If the country is going to fix its budgetary problems then the Pentagon is going to have to live on a budget. That means choices have to be made.

The Significance of the F-22 Debate

Useless against the Deceptacon threat (wikimedia)

Chris Preble had a good post up on the Cato blog yesterday praising Barack Obama’s veto threat over the F-22 issue. I continue to hope that folks will stay engaged with this question, because I think it’s more important than it first appears. I know that a lot of people, both on the progressive left and the libertarian right, would like to see a more ambitious cutback of the American defense posture than what you see in this initial budget proposal. But viewed in that light I think you need to see the issue on the table right now as whether or not the political system can impose any discipline on the military-industrial complex at all. If it can, then bigger change may be possible in the future. If it can’t, then it can’t.

At any rate, Preble is doing a talk at New America on the 24th about his excellent book The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free. It’s worth checking out. There hasn’t historically been much liberal/libertarian collaboration on these kind of questions, but hopefully there will be in the future. Making change happen is really hard and we need as broad a coalition as possible.

The Last Manned Fighter?

Mike Mullen thinks the F-35 may be the last manned fighter. Various stakeholders don’t like that idea, but Robert Farley thinks it’s right:

I guess I’m with Mullen; there are currently jobs that manned warplanes can do that drones can’t perform (human pilots are more visually capable than even the best drones, for example), but a) drones are getting better, b) drones are so much cheaper, and c)taking the pilot out means that you can do a lot of funky, interesting things with an advanced airframe. This isn’t to say that the F-35 (or even the F-22) have no role; they’ll continue to be useful frames for the jobs they’re intended to do for a substantial period of time. But I don’t think there’s a next “next generation” of fighter aircraft. And in any case, it appears that the A-10 will remain the platform of choice for fighting the giant robots that undoubtedly will afflict us in the future…

I’m with Farley on this. The point about cost savings is not totally intuitive and I don’t think it’s widely appreciated in the broader political/policy universe at this point but it’s extremely compelling. Given the long-term budget outlook it’s going to be really vital to start taking a real look at ways to get more bang for our defense buck and shifting to more reliance on unmanned aircraft is a very appealing way of accomplishing that goal. The cost differential is large enough that drones don’t need to be “as good” as human pilots before the fact that you could just have a bunch more of them starts to weigh more heavily.

Heritage Slams Mythical Defense Cuts

The Heritage Foundation has a blog post complete with chart claiming to demonstrate that “Obama plan cuts defense spending to pre-9/11 levels”. As Benjamin Friedman lays out this is nonsense:

This is a standard rhetorical device for defense hawks (see the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney and lots of others) so it’s worth pointing out that it’s misleading. The unfortunate truth is that Obama is increasing non-war defense spending this year and seems likely to increase it at least by inflation in the near future.

It’s true that defense spending will probably decline as a percentage of GDP, assuming the economy recovers. But that’s because GDP grows. Ours is more than six times bigger than it was in 1950. Meanwhile, we spend more on defense in real, inflation adjusted terms, than we did then, at the height of the Cold War. The denoninator has grown faster than the numerator.

By saying that defense spending needs to grow with GDP to be “level,” you are arguing for an annual increase in defense spending without saying so directly. That’s the point, of course.

Since economic growth causes real wages to rise over time, there is some reason for thinking that a military sized appropriately to the strategic environment would need real increases in spending to maintain its level of capabilities. But one way or another, the crucial issue is that the appropriate level of defense spending is determined by the nature of the strategic environment, not by the pace of economic growth. The US economy grew rapidly during the 1990s but the level of military threats facing the country didn’t—thus, a decline in defense expenditures relative to GDP was appropriate.

One interesting trope both in the substance and rhetoric of this argument from Heritage is the idea that 9/11 ought to have touched off a large and sustained increase in defense spending. On the merits, this is a little hard to figure out. It’s difficult to make the case that the 9/11 plot succeeded because the gap in financial expenditures between the U.S. government and Osama bin Laden was not big enough. Would an extra aircraft carrier have helped? A more advanced fighter plane? A larger Marine Corps? Additional nuclear weapons? One of the most realistic ways an organization like al-Qaeda can damage the United States is to provoke us into wasting resources on a far larger scale than they could ever destroy. The mentality Heritage is expressing here is right in line with that path.

Against the F-22

There was a good editorial over the weekend in the NYT slamming a House panel for trying to un-kill the unnecessary and too-expensive F-22.

I think the whole controversy highlights the need for a reform that goes beyond the specifics of any particular weapons system, however, namely the need to start structuring debates over defense spending so as to clarify that the money spent on the Pentagon is real money. Right now in political terms, it’s treated like Monopoly money. “Fiscally conservative” Blue Dogs don’t complain about defense spending. Conservative economists talk about “non-defense discretionary spending.” It’s as if—by magic—the federal government’s largest program isn’t a real program, or doesn’t cost money. In that framework, of course no weapons platform ever looks unnecessary.