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March 11, 2009America: The Leveraged Leviathian
Jon Hoffman, a military historian, took issue with my post on America's AIG Defense Policy.
His email is reprinted here with his permission:
I'm not sure your analogy between the financial crisis and the Dept of Defense holds up very well. The concept of financial leverage (basically using a small amount of actual money to control a much larger pool of financial assets) has no obvious connection to the way our defense program is run, except that both are bound to a degree by past actions (which could be said of just about everything). A certain amount of defense spending is tied to 'exotic' future products in the form of new technology, but I don't see the analogy of failed connection to underlying assets.Much of the technology is in the form of improvement to legacy systems such as tanks, planes, and ships, or their ability to communicate and process information. If your point is that new spending should pursue entirely new ways of fighting that break all ties to the past, you would be making a leap of faith that would be risky in the extreme. In sum, your analogy needed much more explanation to make it clear and useful.
Your statement that the US far outspends China on defense is true but hopelessly simplistic and not very useful. A large chunk of US spending is on manpower, which costs orders of magnitude more for us than it does for China. We are also funding expensive current wars, requiring the replacement of worn equipment and other expenses that do nothing to improve capability. If you want to seriously compare our military capability to theirs, then look at the numbers and quality of troops and major weapons types. I feel confident we are still ahead of China in most areas, but not by an order of nearly 6 to 1 as you suggest. We may be well ahead in terms of nuclear weapons, but their utility is limited to dissuading the Chinese from launching that sort of attack against us and are unlikely to figure in any other scenario given the obvious constraints on actually using them.
Furthermore, while we have capable allies in the region, we cannot entirely count upon them in a crisis with China and therefore it would be imprudent to calculate their strength as if it were our own. Do you think Japan would come to the defense of Taiwan, given its constitutional and pacifist limitations? Would South Korea come to the defense of Japan, with whom it has longstanding enmity? Would Taiwan help out anywhere else in the region if China blackmailed it with threats of missile attacks?
Your overall point that we need to discipline defense spending is correct, but I think you need to employ stronger and more easily understood arguments to support it.
My response after the jump:
Fair points all. I do think the financial sector analogy could be confusing. Let me just sketch out briefly what I was driving at. When I wrote "leverage" I meant, over-committed. And Professor Hoffman's email reinforces the point - we're nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has placed a huge burden on our ground strength and led to (expensive) calls to increase the size of the Army and Marines. Throw in our Cold War-era obligations to Taiwan and South Korea, responsibilities for policing the Gulf, maintaining 865 military bases around the world and it's little wonder we're spending the money we are.
By "exotic products" I was actually referring not to hardware but to the intellectual investment in a world view that justifies these enormous expenditures as somehow essential to the security of the American people. That exotic notion is "hegemonic stability theory." Suffice it to say that anyone with a passing familiarity with empires knows that most of them expire violently and many of the former imperial powers don't age well (nor do the post-imperial nations they leave in the wake of their inevitable decline).
Finally, regarding the U.S. vs. China. I'm perfectly willing to accept the argument that we should benchmark our capabilities vs. theirs, and not our respective budgets. Still, this has to be done keeping two facts in mind: first, resources are finite. We can't expect to fight manpower intensive counter-insurgencies across the Muslim world, retain military dominance in Asia, Europe and the Middle, update our military to keep pace with China and invest in advanced R&D - all while we suffer through the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression. Second, a conflict with China is not predetermined, but the probability increases the more the U.S. asserts its right to dominate Asia. America rejected outside influence over the entire Western Hemisphere when she was a rising power and complained incessantly during the Cold War about Soviet activity in Latin America. It is a stretch to think that a rising China, with a billion people, an industrialized economy, and centuries of being a major center of world power, is going to passively accept American preeminence in her backyard.
There is definitely a case to be made that China could become an aggressive power and wield her Asian hegemony to our detriment, cutting off trade, and perhaps invading or intimidating her neighbors. It's a smart bet to hedge. But if you want your China-fighting military, you have to forsake your nation building colonial corps.
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