2020. 3. 4. 14:50ㆍsecurity
[04 March, 2020]
○ controversial points marked in red
○ notation (question or refutation) marked in blue
○ domestically relevant issue highlighted in yellow
#1 Getting to Less - Kathleen Hicks
Since World War II, U.S. defense spending has followed a well-worn pattern of rising during major operations and falling (although never by equal measure) in their aftermath. At the outset of the Korean War, in 1950, military spending grew by a remarkable 290 percent in two years—reaching $692 billion in current dollars and 13 percent of GDP—before declining by 51 percent between 1952 and 1955. During the Vietnam War, it grew again, hitting $605 billion in current dollars and nine percent of GDP in 1968, after which it dropped by 25 percent between then and 1975. But as Cold War tensions rose in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan increased the Pentagon’s budget. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it shrank again under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, with spending falling 34 percent between 1985 and 1997.
Then came 9/11. The wars that followed, in Afghanistan and Iraq, caused defense spending to shoot up again, reaching almost $820 billion and 4.7 percent of GDP in 2010. Spending kept climbing through the Obama administration’s budget for fiscal year 2012, only to run into the budget standoff in Congress and the resultant automatic cuts (or so-called budget sequestration) of 2013. For the next three years, spending fell slightly in accordance with congressional budget caps.
The drop didn’t last long. Soon, Russia annexed Crimea, the Islamic State (or ISIS) emerged in Iraq and Syria, and China expanded its campaign of land reclamation in the South China Sea. And so U.S. military spending started rising again, beginning with the budget for fiscal year 2016, the last one enacted under the Obama administration. It increased even more in 2017, after the inauguration of Trump, who had campaigned on the need to build up the military. During his first three years in office, Trump delivered modest annual growth in defense spending, assisted by the newfound willingness of Republicans to raise spending caps and the availability of the Overseas Contingency Operations account—a budget line not subject to congressionally imposed budget caps that was originally created to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but is now used for a much broader range of purposes. In fiscal year 2020, the United States is set to spend some $738 billion on defense. → a graphical trajectory of the US defense spending over the past (TBD)
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In practice, efforts to wring out savings from efficiency have tended to fall flat. Too often, policymakers have harbored outsize expectations, achieved short-lived results, and dodged politically difficult choices. (Cost-saving strategies)
1. To cut R&D: Compared with procurement, R & D is relatively easy to cut fast - whereas halting production of a major weapons system can threaten thousands of jobs, shutting down a program at an earlier stage of development generally threatens far fewer. Yet R & D is the lifeblood of future capabilities, and cuts made today have consequences a decade down the line, when the military could be forced to forgo its advantage or play an expensive game of catch-up.
2. To defer spending on scheduled maintenance and keep ships, planes, and other equipment in the field longer: Again, the effects are felt years later, this time in the form of higher accident rates and fewer combat-ready units. Poor maintenance partly explains why the Marine Corps saw aviation accidents rise by 80 percent between 2013 and 2017 and why in the fall of 2019 every single one of the U.S. Navy’s six East Coast–based aircraft carriers was sitting in dry dock.
3. To concentrate on reducing staff at headquarters: But the savings achieved from such efforts are usually far less than projected. Predictably, for example, even though Congress directed the Defense Department to cut $10 billion through administrative efficiencies between 2015 and 2019 (Clinton and Obama administration), the Pentagon failed to substantiate that it had achieved those savings. The reason these efforts rarely succeed is that they merely shift the work being done by civilians to others, such as military personnel or defense contractors.
4. To assume away missions despite strong evidence that they will remain relevant: Perhaps the most egregious example of this was the George W. Bush administration’s failure to plan for the occupation of Iraq.
5. To avoid politically challenging cuts: Personnel costs are one of the touchiest targets. Closing military installations is another third rail. The Defense Department itself admits that it has 19 percent excess capacity domestically, and by consolidating or closing unneeded facilities, Congress could reap major savings. But legislators, fearful of the political consequences of shutting down bases in their own districts, have declined to do so.
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Strategic fallacies have been equally unhelpful in the quest for defense savings. Consider Trump's repeated pledge to bring U.S. troops home. Overseas military spending is a tempting target, since it is politically safer to cut than funds spent at home. But keeping forces stationed on allied soil is often cheaper than moving them to the United States, where their presence is not subsidized by foreign governments and where significant new spending would be needed to house, train, and deploy them.
Or look at Warren's call for "shutting down a slush fund for defense spending" - liquidating the entire Overseas Contingency Operations account and using the freed-up money for nondefense priorities. That proposal is also deeply misguided: the majority of the account covers expenses not directly related to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. It pays for efforts as varied as the stationing of ground and air forces in Europe, naval operations in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean and the ability to scramble jets over American cities in the event of an emergency. → Risks of diverting the account
Nevertheless, military capabilities still have an important role to play. The United States’ armed forces underwrite its economic prosperity and strengthen its alliances. American diplomacy is stronger when it rests on military prowess, which gives credence to both commitments to allies and threats to enemies. To maintain that type of credibility, the United States will need to keep forces deployed overseas, especially in Asia and Europe. It will need to reaffirm its commitment to extended nuclear deterrence for its treaty allies, which has the added benefit of strengthening nonproliferation by reducing their incentives to go nuclear. It will need to contribute to combined efforts to head off threats in the air, the sea, space, and cyberspace. And it will need to retain its counterterrorism and crisis-response capabilities in and around the Middle East, even as it reduces its overall force levels in the region.
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For too long, Washington has had an overly militarized approach to national security. A world in which the United States’ primacy is fading calls for a new approach, especially as authoritarian competitors pursue new strategies to hasten the decline of American power. The time is right, then, for a grand strategy that expands the range of foreign policy tools well beyond what defense spending buys.
It’s also worth remembering that the core of the United States’ fiscal challenge is not discretionary spending, such as the budget for defense, but the inability to make up the shortfall between declining tax revenue and the increasing costs of the social safety net and growing interest on the national debt. In other words, the United States may not be able to finance the future it seeks primarily through defense savings. But it can build a better and more efficient defense for its future. → A significantly timely message among many heated debates over the cuts in defense spending
Source (Full Text):
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-02-10/getting-less