Deflationary forces were really strong for a decade. Current inflation is high, true. But it is not clear at all that the anti-inflation forces are going to disappear from the world in the long term. Maybe we need a new kind of Hitler, this time from Russia, to give purpose and meaning to our spending. Spending money against him can be a rare consensus, agreed by republicans and democrats alike. Agreeing to spend money against a murderous dictator, that's how the big depression ended for good in the thirties. That's the invasion from Mars Paul Krugman used to talk.
> Maybe we need a new kind of Hitler, this time from Russia, to give purpose and meaning to our spending.
Doubt it'll work. If fixing global warming and lifting our children out of poverty haven't given purpose and meaning to our spending, why would gearing up for war on another continent do the trick?
There's also the problem that "a new kind of Hitler" literally means: not Hitler. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, in 1939 he kicked off WWII, and in 1941 the Hitler-led Axis occupied most of Europe and North Africa. Putin has not worked anywhere near that quickly or extensively!
>>Doubt it'll work. If fixing global warming and lifting our children out of poverty haven't given purpose and meaning to our spending, why would gearing up for war on another continent do the trick?
Because human psychology is predisposed to overvalue immediate threats like war. Duh.
A hypothetical future war is an immediate threat, but global warming that's been happening for decades and 1 in 6 US kids living right now in poverty aren't? And that's so obvious as to warrant a "Duh"? C'mon, man.
You’re conflating different types of threats. That should be pretty obvious.
A war means the potential of direct, immediate bodily harm. People in Ukraine are under that at the moment, and we all live under the threat of nuclear war. It stimulates the fight or flight response.
Poverty and climate change aren’t immediate nor direct threats. You can *call* them such threats all day long until you’re blue in the face, but the only person whose fight or flight response will get stimulated is YOU, and anyone gullible enough to not see the conflation you’re making.
You had a stab at answering my question, which is fine, but unfortunately your answer wasn't robust at all, relying as it did on misusing the word "immediate" — you can try to cover for that with bluster, alleging that things that aren't remotely obvious are obvious, and accusing me of relying on people's gullibility, but your rhetorical chest-puffing won't work on me.
I continue to distrust your dubious generalizations about human psychology, and your newer speculation about how my fight or flight response might work. The floor's still open for you to come up with a better answer to my original question that stands up to 5 seconds' thought.
Great article. I agree with most of what you said. The only real omission in your article IMO is the cyber warfare component. It relatively cheap, the USA has vast skill sets to call on. And it can disrupt both the front line battle field and mainland infrastructure and manufacturing.
I still think that cyber "warfare" should be bundled under "intelligence" along with all the other covert spy stuff. The way you break into a computer to steal government secrets is more or less the same way you'd break into a computer to shut down the electricity, the only difference is what you do once you have access. The results are more dramatic, sure, possibly as destructive as conventional bombing, but they're still covert actions. If a CIA agent blows up a factory, that doesn't mean they're part of the army.
You also can't simply force your way into a difficult cyberwarfare target by adding more manpower and hardware, so the budgeting strategy should probably be different as well.
Reminded of Thomas Rid's paper and book Cyber War Will Not Take Place.
"Thomas Rid argues that the focus on war and winning distracts from the real challenge of cyberspace: non-violent confrontation that may rival or even replace violence in surprising ways. The threat consists of three different vectors: espionage, sabotage, and subversion."
To be fair I don’t think Matt was necessarily calling for cutting military spending as asking military analysts to actually justify our current level of spending and to be less rigid in what we buy. I do not know if aircraft carriers are obsolete either, but given we have so many and we could probably extend their lifespan (and said carriers are already likely better than whatever Russia can offer) perhaps spending so much of our naval budget on them is a mistake. The American military has also clearly done a poorer job developing equipment than we did previously. The F-35 has been a complete struggle and the littoral class ship has also been a disaster. We need to do better and emphasizing that our military establishment has failed isn’t a bad thing.
There's a gigantic mushroom-shaped elephant in the room that you both appear to be ignoring in your posts thus far.
If China's military buildup leaves middle-sized east Asian countries feeling less than confident that the USA is able to deter attacks on them, it's not going to just result in a massive conventional military buildup, it's going to result in some of them pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities, which makes the conventional military buildup largely moot.
Conventional forces still matter even if every single country in a world has nukes, because nukes are an Armageddon weapon where nobody wins/survives in a MAD world, so counties would be very hesitant to pull the trigger. For instance, even if Ukraine has nukes, would they have launched them at Moscow if Putin had only fought over the Donbas? I think not as losing the Donbas is still preferable to being entirely destroyed (even if Russia is destroyed in the process).
Goes both ways. Would Putin and his cronies have risked getting nuked over the Donbas? I doubt it. So we end up with a cold war.
Or, sooner or later, somebody miscalculates and we all end up dying of starvation in a nuclear winter.
One of the many reasons to be very, very angry with Vladimir Putin is, like George W. Bush before him, he increased the incentives for medium-sized states fearing superpower attack to get nuclear weapons.
MAD probably does make the world safer, though. And 2 countries nuking each other would mean a horrible loss of life but doesn't mean the entire world dying. If Pakistan and India accidentally enter a nuclear war, the US wouldn't be enduring a nuclear winter.
I wouldn’t rule it out. As I understand it, if you inject enough soot into the upper atmosphere, you get massive drops in global temperature.
The question is whether the more pessimistic papers that claim a nuclear winter from a small nuclear exchange are assuming implausibly large amounts of soot result from each detonation.
On the other hand, with the tons of CO2 we are injecting in to the atmosphere, a lot of soot injected in to the atmosphere may help global warming for a few years/decades.
There are two dangers in reviewing China, the first is underestimating it and the second is overestimation.
When looking at the PLA we need to ask what is the PLA designed for? What missions is it supposed to do?
Consider all the neighbors China has. The threat it receives from the US is one of many. The Chinese military is heavily oriented towards internal security, border security and trying to keep the US military at arms length. The PRC is threatening to its neighbors but not directly to the USA. It threatens US interests, no doubt, but we need clarity about what we are discussing.
It would likely taken Japan and Korea well under one year. They have shadow programs now and control the full nuclear fuel cycle and design and build reactors in bulk.
I think Theodore Roosevelt formulated exactly the right idea on foreign policy when he said "speak softly, and carry a big stick" - the US should always seek peaceful relations with other countries, and should approach every situation with the goal of solving problems through negotiation first, but should be ready to hit harder than anybody if negotiation doesn't work and our adversaries insist on picking a fight, not only because we can't count on other countries sharing our preference for peace and need to be prepared if things go sideways but because of the deterrent effect you cite.
I think the right balance is significant military spending and investment in our international alliances (NATO and a similar network we should seek to build in the Pacific among Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, etc. to deter China), with no stupid, pointless wars of choice like Iraq.
I would like to point out that while the F-35 had some procurement issues and went way overbudget, the product is by all accounts a highly effective weapon system.
But I think Matt had a good point that we should spend some money developing weapons systems that might not be too useful for the US military, but would be very useful for allies (official or unofficial)
For example, the US military spends comparatively few resources on ground to air defense systems. We have the Stinger missile a man portable system to shoot down low flying targets, and the Patriot missile which is primarily an anti-ballistic missile system, and we helped develop the Iron Dome which is apparently only useful for shooting down unguided rockets from Hamas. On the other hand, the Soviets, in addition to MANPADS, have a short ranged system (pantsir), medium ranged system (Buk) and long range (S-300).
Now, it makes sense that the US military doesn't spend too many resources on air defense. The US Air Force is the most powerful air force in the world. And the US Navy is arguably the second. So in any engagement with US troops involved, we can assume air supremacy. But as the invasion of Ukraine is showing, we can't always commit US troops and therefore US air power.
So maybe we should develop a full spectrum of air defense solutions, including both missiles, computers, and radars designed for export. It probably shouldn't be our absolute top-of-the-line tech and there should be some focus of reducing maintenance and operations costs and improving ease of use. But even with those constraints, I'm sure we can develop a system better than what the Russians have. It might be especially useful for a hypothetical island nation that has a hypothetical large, belligerent, nuclear armed neighbor that is making hypothetical revanchist noises.
American military doctrine has long held that arming allies helps to keep the fight "over there." So spot on in pointing out the importance of developing capabilities that might not be immediately useful for the USM, but can prove decisive for allies. Every Russian bird shot out of the sky in Ukraine is one that can't menace the Baltics, for example, so NATO has every interest in getting S-300s and equivalent systems into the hands of the Ukrainians, beyond humanitarian or geopolitical concern for a not-quite-ally.
These systems need not be state-of-the-art. And, in fact, shouldn't be, given the higher likelihood of battlefield capture. They should be cheap, effective, robust, and easy-to-maintain. Which might also hone an engineering mindset that could be useful for American military hardware, generally, which has swung too far in the too-precious-to-risk direction.
My objection to America's huge military is that much of the foreign policy community ( neocons, especially) see military action as the first choice solution in foreign policy questions. "We've got the biggest damn hammer in the world so we're going to effing use it.". Because the public, in general, does not engage with foreign policy the scope for counterproductive actions is greater. The neocons in the Bush Adminstration never really paid a price for their mad project of democratization through invasion.
Definitely a drawback, though you have to weigh that against the drawback of having too weak a military. For example, Germany can get away with being too cheap because it has the US to protect it, but the US can not.
Its like watching your parents fight about defence procurement...
More seriously, I think the 'fog of peace' effect is so underestimated. Almost no one predicted the Ukraine-Russia, and in fact no one even predicted they'd be peer competitors at all. Destroying small militaries and then failing at counterinsurgency, which is how the US gets fighting experience, is a poor substitute for a proper war.
I think we basically have no idea what WW3 will look like and need to hedge our bets. For example, if logistics really wins wars, maybe being able to churn out 1000s of mediocre tanks/jets a month will be better than having the best tank in the world. Or maybe they'll be completely irrelevant. Gotta have those plan Bs.
Logistics has nothing to do with churning out tanks and more with transporting fuel, ammo, and other supplies.
Also, there were folks who did predict the UA would do well against Russia. They were logistics experts and folks who had studied the Russian army and UA (including their culture).
The discussion of aircraft carriers seems limited to forward projection of air power over hostile land -- the idea of F/A-18s bombing stuff in hostile territory is not anywhere near their only function.
Carriers also function to maintain air superiority over the fleet itself while at sea or bringing air support to friendly land. They are a projection of air defense that protects all kinds of sea craft, including attack and support vessels. The aircraft they support play anti-sub roles, etc. The full mission scope is just not being appreciated. Its role in the fleet is non-negotiable. A bunch of small missile ships out on an island is not a complete navy and would be highly vulnerable to air-to-sea, land-to-sea attack or sub-to-surface-vessel attacks. The sinking of the Moskva is much more inline with the concept of a carrier-less navy than one with carriers, that line of logic is just completely invalid.
Or maybe think of it another simplistic way: In a fight over control of the sea, imagine two navies, one with and one without carriers. How does that battle go?
When you look at military spending, raw tabulations of dollars paid, number of tanks, jets, personnel etc…are very misleading data sets. You need to really ask what are you trying to do with your military? For a country like America which is so far away from the other great powers it needs “power projection.” The US military, although nominally for US defense is really about fighting enemies “over there” to prevent threatening states from dominating Eurasia and less about securing the literal borders of our nation which is done through CBP.
If Americans want the ability to influence the military calculus of countries in other hemispheres then the US needs an expeditionary oriented military—i.e. one with large tonnage ships and long range aircraft with overseas basing. It also needs highly trained professional soldiers.
If we want to forego the ability to influence military events far from our shores we could save a lot of money on our military budget. But we would have to accept that other countries could block us out of their regions entirely without us being able to do a thing about it.
Like our self-imposed defeat in Afghanistan, it sounds good but in reality it is ugly.
Great comment. The "tyranny of distance" affects planning for any major confrontation with Russia or China, which would in both cases happen closer to their home turf than America's (thankfully for Americans).
Russia may be under-performing in Ukraine, but it still can invade and hope to occupy a country that is right next to it. How would the United States get sufficient forced to Ukraine to defend it? It would take months, even with existing forces in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
And, for Russia to roll into the Baltics would be similarly logistically easy. NATO would be on the back foot trying to mount a defense or counter-attack.
Similar problem in the Western Pacific. The United States has the huge initial advantage of forward bases in Japan, Guam, Hawaii, and elsewhere. But supplying them involves a long (and vulnerable) supply chain. And it takes time. Take one or all of those bases out with an initial volley of missiles and it would take weeks or months to resupply or repair them. Reinforcements would have to steam over from halfway across the world. By that time, China may have successfully expelled Americans from the entire West Pacific.
Meanwhile, anywhere in the South or East China Sea or Taiwan Strait that China might be operating would be very much home turf. Easily patrolled by a larger (if less capable) Chinese Navy, as well as legion land-based air assets. American military assets operate at the very limit of their communications and with just as much as they can bring with them.
It would be interesting to include consideration of spending effectiveness and waste in this discussion. My sense is that US defense spending is analogous to US health care spending: comparatively more expensive than other countries’, with numerous indicators of uneven and notable instances of poor outcomes. It’s not just overpriced toilet seats; somehow, whole categories of unglamorous but sundry capabilities needed for US military commitments, like trucks, radios, and helicopters end up woefully undercapitalized. Examples: the HUMMVEE/MRAP debacle of the post 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Army’s current helicopter procurement—if it happens—will be the first all-new helicopter since Vietnam. There is a collision of various intractable factors here, including the entrenched cultures of the services, DoD civilians, and the parastatal defense industry, as well as the durable bipartisan consensus about supporting the troops.
I'm surprised neither Matt nor Noah made the analogy of defense acquisition to transit project spending. Since they're both heavy into the transit beat.
The analogy is that political, regulatory, and structural factors drive up costs and schedules so much that it can be hard to justify even straightforwardly useful projects. There are too many stakeholders and too many misaligned interests. And ultimately very little market discipline because they're quintessential public goods.
I would be very surprised if the key but unglamorous parts of military spending, especially logistics, are more undercapitalized in the US than in other countries. We are seeing on a daily basis the Russian failure to invest in logistics, in sufficient precision ordinance, in NCO training etc. Similarly, the Europeans ran out of smart bombs after like 3 days of bombing Lybia. The US has been fighting wars and supplying troops 1000s of miles from home for decades. We may not have figured out counterinsurgency completely, but i do think that better than anyone else we can supply troops all of the world. (Of course, when a war starts we'll wish we had even way more sea lift, airlift, smart bombs, trucks, etc...but I bet we'll be in a better spot than anyone else.)
Bigger diiferences in military budgets between both sides are best for everyone.
One thing that folks almost always forget, if we do get into a conflict, the more the overmatch by one side, the shorter the war and the lower the total casualties on both the winning AND THE LOSING SIDES. The longest and bloodiest wars occur with two equally marched sides.
In addition, people are more likely to wrongly guess their chances, and thus start a war, if the two sides are more even.
Minor points:
The Chinese military directly owns large parts of their economy so the actual resources spent on their defense are widely believed to be much larger than the official defense budget. Again, the latter is widely believed to be heavily fudged. To see what their PPP budget in reality is, one can compare what it buys and in this respect China is at least on par with us on air force and naval spending.
Of course, inefficiency, political friction. and gross corruption matter too. For example:
China seems to have way to many types of fighters in production, over 5, which increases their cost per fighter (we aren't that much better across NATO)!
The US is widely believed to have way too many bases for its military size but can't close the extra because of politics.
In 3rd world kleptocracies, like Russia, much of the defense budget goes directly into the private bank accounts of presidents, their cronies, and top generals. This probably accounts for much of the underperformance of the Russian army now...
Redundancy and resiliency (in bases, for example) create inefficiency, but also help to hedge against risks and make it easy to scale up military personnel and training quickly.
For example, think about the lack of naval shipyard capacity that is hampering efforts to produce but also maintain existing American naval assets (widely believed to be too few to keep up with China's militarization). What would happen if even just one of the four major American naval bases were taken out by an attack tomorrow? It wouldn't even take a missile strike or bombardment. The pandemic has taught us that just losing a bunch of workers to illness is enough to shut down an operation for weeks!
For this reason, I would argue that the US needs more "redundant" naval bases, and not less. Right now, there is no way that the American Navy could recover from a catastrophe like Pearl Harbor because there just isn't the industrial base to replace or repair multiple surface fleet losses! If the US' participation in WWII lasted only 4 years, it wouldn't even be able to accelerate existing weapons system designs in that time to recover from losses that were routine during the Battle of the Atlantic or the clashes with Japan in the Pacific!
Ditto for even land bases, as how would the military have the capacity to quickly scale up if there were an actual near-pear war? All of a sudden, you'd likely have to re-institute the draft and have an influx of perhaps millions of new soldiers. Where to put them? Building out infrastructure takes years, you can't just switch it on!
I'm seeing this dilemma in real time here in Sweden, which has just recently nearly doubled its military spending and toying with joining NATO. In the last two decades, Sweden closed Cold War Era military bases all over the country and reduced itself from a robust network of naval bases to only a single (very vulnerable) naval base. Now, it's buying back much of the same formerly military property at a huge markup, and it will take years to even get the same bases (often the same exact buildings repurposed) back to where they were in 1990. The "peace dividend" seems a dubious false-economy now.
Geez, every time I become frustrated with some of your points I find something that strikes me as spot on reminding me why I read you and that I need to check my own beliefs for heavy bias and resistance to new ideas.
So many people are too focused on actual dollars that they lose sight of the nature of our military power. The US has always really been a maritime power. While the great land battles our armies have fought in are the stuff of lore (Battle of the Bulge, for example) it is really our maritime operations that have set us apart from our enemies (Normandy, the WW2 island hopping campaign in the Pacific) that have truly set us apart. And since WW2 our naval dominance has kept international shipping safe and efficient, unmatched by anyone on the planet. And, as sexy as the job of fighter-pilot is, it is the surface warfare officers and the fleets they command that make the difference in the world. China understands this. It is why they are rapidly building up their navy and creating new islands where none previously existed. It is also why Taiwan is such a flashpoint. Look at where it sits relative to China's coast and where we have Naval bases or at least friendly ports. Control of Taiwan greatly reduces the strategic danger of having to contend with forces in Japan and the Philippines.
So yes, money spent on naval power is important. But the other things the US seems to be lacking are visionary thinking and rigorous training. Recent events involving our navy and the numerous accidents are a concerning sign of directing dollars to the wrong things. The Marine Corps takes pride (or at least it did when I served) in returning budget dollars to the Navy every year. We were taught to make do with lesser weapons. We accepted the the Army's hand-me-downs and learned to use them better. When I served in the late 80's and early 90's the First Tak Battalion at Pendleton was still using M60 tanks to train. It wasn't until the Operation Desert Shield that they received used Abrams tanks form the Army, which were being upgraded with newer versions.
In short, not only do we need to continue to spend, but we MUST reevaluate HOW we have been spending over the last 4 decades. I was heartened to see the Commandant of the Marine Corps consider a radical realignment of mission for the Corps. This is the type of think that is required to remain a relevant global military power. Otherwise we are just the distribution arm of Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and the other arms manufacturers.
Great article. And loved the reference to the Washington.
A couple of other reasons why unless we're going to dramatically reshape our strategic commitments, we need to outspend China:
First, the US will likely (hopefully) have to fight China or Russia thousands of miles from home. That away game is really hard, and means we must spend a ton on sea lift, air lift, forward bases, expeditionary units like aircraft carriers, and escorts for these long sea lanes just to get to the fight. It's way cheaper for the home team to just to build land based fighters, land based missiles, short range submarines, etc. But if we want to defend Japan or Taiwan we have to be able to fight in the South China Sea.
Another point is that because the US has so many priorities and operates in so many places, everything is more expensive. One surprising example is that our ships must be able to operate from the Arctic to the Persian Gulf, requiring massive heating and cooling capacities at great weight and cost. Similarly, a maritime war with China would place a premium on long range aircraft, but we can't exclusively build those because we need smaller, nimbler aircraft for a potential European or Middle Eastern war. The Chinese military can focus largely on a war in the China Seas with the US and thus get comparable power there much cheaper.
I wonder at what point it makes more sense to specialize. The F-35 seems like an example of a weapons system designed to do everything, but ending up disappointing a bit because of it.
Could it be that a Ford-class aircraft carrier is the same? Might there be a place for surface warships that are specifically designed for operating in the EMEA spheres of the Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Baltic Seas, where proximity to coastlines, shorter ranges, and proximity to NATO allies make for a completely different design spec? Where your near-peer adversary is Russia?
While battle groups that traverse the vast, world-spanning Pacific must deal with the tyranny of distance, long-rang air-wing capability, over-the-horizon defense and offense, island warfare, and amphibious warfare? And your near-peer adversary is China?
Maybe having two completely parallel forces (and industrial bases) focused on these two adversaries and battle spaces is actually optimal?
Deflationary forces were really strong for a decade. Current inflation is high, true. But it is not clear at all that the anti-inflation forces are going to disappear from the world in the long term. Maybe we need a new kind of Hitler, this time from Russia, to give purpose and meaning to our spending. Spending money against him can be a rare consensus, agreed by republicans and democrats alike. Agreeing to spend money against a murderous dictator, that's how the big depression ended for good in the thirties. That's the invasion from Mars Paul Krugman used to talk.
> Maybe we need a new kind of Hitler, this time from Russia, to give purpose and meaning to our spending.
Doubt it'll work. If fixing global warming and lifting our children out of poverty haven't given purpose and meaning to our spending, why would gearing up for war on another continent do the trick?
There's also the problem that "a new kind of Hitler" literally means: not Hitler. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, in 1939 he kicked off WWII, and in 1941 the Hitler-led Axis occupied most of Europe and North Africa. Putin has not worked anywhere near that quickly or extensively!
>>Doubt it'll work. If fixing global warming and lifting our children out of poverty haven't given purpose and meaning to our spending, why would gearing up for war on another continent do the trick?
Because human psychology is predisposed to overvalue immediate threats like war. Duh.
A hypothetical future war is an immediate threat, but global warming that's been happening for decades and 1 in 6 US kids living right now in poverty aren't? And that's so obvious as to warrant a "Duh"? C'mon, man.
You’re conflating different types of threats. That should be pretty obvious.
A war means the potential of direct, immediate bodily harm. People in Ukraine are under that at the moment, and we all live under the threat of nuclear war. It stimulates the fight or flight response.
Poverty and climate change aren’t immediate nor direct threats. You can *call* them such threats all day long until you’re blue in the face, but the only person whose fight or flight response will get stimulated is YOU, and anyone gullible enough to not see the conflation you’re making.
You had a stab at answering my question, which is fine, but unfortunately your answer wasn't robust at all, relying as it did on misusing the word "immediate" — you can try to cover for that with bluster, alleging that things that aren't remotely obvious are obvious, and accusing me of relying on people's gullibility, but your rhetorical chest-puffing won't work on me.
I continue to distrust your dubious generalizations about human psychology, and your newer speculation about how my fight or flight response might work. The floor's still open for you to come up with a better answer to my original question that stands up to 5 seconds' thought.
@Splainer
Perhaps you should leave your usual circles and go talk to average folks about their "problems".
And the things on their mind. Don't mention climate change, just see what they care about right now.
I mean, how many people can rattle off in their head that 1 and 6 kids lives in poverty?
Great article. I agree with most of what you said. The only real omission in your article IMO is the cyber warfare component. It relatively cheap, the USA has vast skill sets to call on. And it can disrupt both the front line battle field and mainland infrastructure and manufacturing.
I still think that cyber "warfare" should be bundled under "intelligence" along with all the other covert spy stuff. The way you break into a computer to steal government secrets is more or less the same way you'd break into a computer to shut down the electricity, the only difference is what you do once you have access. The results are more dramatic, sure, possibly as destructive as conventional bombing, but they're still covert actions. If a CIA agent blows up a factory, that doesn't mean they're part of the army.
You also can't simply force your way into a difficult cyberwarfare target by adding more manpower and hardware, so the budgeting strategy should probably be different as well.
Reminded of Thomas Rid's paper and book Cyber War Will Not Take Place.
"Thomas Rid argues that the focus on war and winning distracts from the real challenge of cyberspace: non-violent confrontation that may rival or even replace violence in surprising ways. The threat consists of three different vectors: espionage, sabotage, and subversion."
To be fair I don’t think Matt was necessarily calling for cutting military spending as asking military analysts to actually justify our current level of spending and to be less rigid in what we buy. I do not know if aircraft carriers are obsolete either, but given we have so many and we could probably extend their lifespan (and said carriers are already likely better than whatever Russia can offer) perhaps spending so much of our naval budget on them is a mistake. The American military has also clearly done a poorer job developing equipment than we did previously. The F-35 has been a complete struggle and the littoral class ship has also been a disaster. We need to do better and emphasizing that our military establishment has failed isn’t a bad thing.
The F-35s are selling like hotcakes to allies, if you’ve noticed.
And the key pacing foe is China, not Russia. We do need actual military experts in the discussion to discuss where money should be spent.
There's a gigantic mushroom-shaped elephant in the room that you both appear to be ignoring in your posts thus far.
If China's military buildup leaves middle-sized east Asian countries feeling less than confident that the USA is able to deter attacks on them, it's not going to just result in a massive conventional military buildup, it's going to result in some of them pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities, which makes the conventional military buildup largely moot.
Conventional forces still matter even if every single country in a world has nukes, because nukes are an Armageddon weapon where nobody wins/survives in a MAD world, so counties would be very hesitant to pull the trigger. For instance, even if Ukraine has nukes, would they have launched them at Moscow if Putin had only fought over the Donbas? I think not as losing the Donbas is still preferable to being entirely destroyed (even if Russia is destroyed in the process).
Goes both ways. Would Putin and his cronies have risked getting nuked over the Donbas? I doubt it. So we end up with a cold war.
Or, sooner or later, somebody miscalculates and we all end up dying of starvation in a nuclear winter.
One of the many reasons to be very, very angry with Vladimir Putin is, like George W. Bush before him, he increased the incentives for medium-sized states fearing superpower attack to get nuclear weapons.
MAD probably does make the world safer, though. And 2 countries nuking each other would mean a horrible loss of life but doesn't mean the entire world dying. If Pakistan and India accidentally enter a nuclear war, the US wouldn't be enduring a nuclear winter.
I wouldn’t rule it out. As I understand it, if you inject enough soot into the upper atmosphere, you get massive drops in global temperature.
The question is whether the more pessimistic papers that claim a nuclear winter from a small nuclear exchange are assuming implausibly large amounts of soot result from each detonation.
Personally, I’d prefer not to find out.
On the other hand, with the tons of CO2 we are injecting in to the atmosphere, a lot of soot injected in to the atmosphere may help global warming for a few years/decades.
There are two dangers in reviewing China, the first is underestimating it and the second is overestimation.
When looking at the PLA we need to ask what is the PLA designed for? What missions is it supposed to do?
Consider all the neighbors China has. The threat it receives from the US is one of many. The Chinese military is heavily oriented towards internal security, border security and trying to keep the US military at arms length. The PRC is threatening to its neighbors but not directly to the USA. It threatens US interests, no doubt, but we need clarity about what we are discussing.
It would likely taken Japan and Korea well under one year. They have shadow programs now and control the full nuclear fuel cycle and design and build reactors in bulk.
I’ve enjoyed the back-and-forth here.
Does anyone have a similar set of articles looking at military spending in Europe/India/Japan?
The PPP study does look at those countries, and the Our World in Data data includes them! Not sure about articles though. 😊
I think Theodore Roosevelt formulated exactly the right idea on foreign policy when he said "speak softly, and carry a big stick" - the US should always seek peaceful relations with other countries, and should approach every situation with the goal of solving problems through negotiation first, but should be ready to hit harder than anybody if negotiation doesn't work and our adversaries insist on picking a fight, not only because we can't count on other countries sharing our preference for peace and need to be prepared if things go sideways but because of the deterrent effect you cite.
I think the right balance is significant military spending and investment in our international alliances (NATO and a similar network we should seek to build in the Pacific among Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, etc. to deter China), with no stupid, pointless wars of choice like Iraq.
I would like to point out that while the F-35 had some procurement issues and went way overbudget, the product is by all accounts a highly effective weapon system.
But I think Matt had a good point that we should spend some money developing weapons systems that might not be too useful for the US military, but would be very useful for allies (official or unofficial)
For example, the US military spends comparatively few resources on ground to air defense systems. We have the Stinger missile a man portable system to shoot down low flying targets, and the Patriot missile which is primarily an anti-ballistic missile system, and we helped develop the Iron Dome which is apparently only useful for shooting down unguided rockets from Hamas. On the other hand, the Soviets, in addition to MANPADS, have a short ranged system (pantsir), medium ranged system (Buk) and long range (S-300).
Now, it makes sense that the US military doesn't spend too many resources on air defense. The US Air Force is the most powerful air force in the world. And the US Navy is arguably the second. So in any engagement with US troops involved, we can assume air supremacy. But as the invasion of Ukraine is showing, we can't always commit US troops and therefore US air power.
So maybe we should develop a full spectrum of air defense solutions, including both missiles, computers, and radars designed for export. It probably shouldn't be our absolute top-of-the-line tech and there should be some focus of reducing maintenance and operations costs and improving ease of use. But even with those constraints, I'm sure we can develop a system better than what the Russians have. It might be especially useful for a hypothetical island nation that has a hypothetical large, belligerent, nuclear armed neighbor that is making hypothetical revanchist noises.
American military doctrine has long held that arming allies helps to keep the fight "over there." So spot on in pointing out the importance of developing capabilities that might not be immediately useful for the USM, but can prove decisive for allies. Every Russian bird shot out of the sky in Ukraine is one that can't menace the Baltics, for example, so NATO has every interest in getting S-300s and equivalent systems into the hands of the Ukrainians, beyond humanitarian or geopolitical concern for a not-quite-ally.
These systems need not be state-of-the-art. And, in fact, shouldn't be, given the higher likelihood of battlefield capture. They should be cheap, effective, robust, and easy-to-maintain. Which might also hone an engineering mindset that could be useful for American military hardware, generally, which has swung too far in the too-precious-to-risk direction.
Yes!
My objection to America's huge military is that much of the foreign policy community ( neocons, especially) see military action as the first choice solution in foreign policy questions. "We've got the biggest damn hammer in the world so we're going to effing use it.". Because the public, in general, does not engage with foreign policy the scope for counterproductive actions is greater. The neocons in the Bush Adminstration never really paid a price for their mad project of democratization through invasion.
Definitely a drawback, though you have to weigh that against the drawback of having too weak a military. For example, Germany can get away with being too cheap because it has the US to protect it, but the US can not.
Its like watching your parents fight about defence procurement...
More seriously, I think the 'fog of peace' effect is so underestimated. Almost no one predicted the Ukraine-Russia, and in fact no one even predicted they'd be peer competitors at all. Destroying small militaries and then failing at counterinsurgency, which is how the US gets fighting experience, is a poor substitute for a proper war.
I think we basically have no idea what WW3 will look like and need to hedge our bets. For example, if logistics really wins wars, maybe being able to churn out 1000s of mediocre tanks/jets a month will be better than having the best tank in the world. Or maybe they'll be completely irrelevant. Gotta have those plan Bs.
Logistics has nothing to do with churning out tanks and more with transporting fuel, ammo, and other supplies.
Also, there were folks who did predict the UA would do well against Russia. They were logistics experts and folks who had studied the Russian army and UA (including their culture).
The discussion of aircraft carriers seems limited to forward projection of air power over hostile land -- the idea of F/A-18s bombing stuff in hostile territory is not anywhere near their only function.
Carriers also function to maintain air superiority over the fleet itself while at sea or bringing air support to friendly land. They are a projection of air defense that protects all kinds of sea craft, including attack and support vessels. The aircraft they support play anti-sub roles, etc. The full mission scope is just not being appreciated. Its role in the fleet is non-negotiable. A bunch of small missile ships out on an island is not a complete navy and would be highly vulnerable to air-to-sea, land-to-sea attack or sub-to-surface-vessel attacks. The sinking of the Moskva is much more inline with the concept of a carrier-less navy than one with carriers, that line of logic is just completely invalid.
Or maybe think of it another simplistic way: In a fight over control of the sea, imagine two navies, one with and one without carriers. How does that battle go?
When you look at military spending, raw tabulations of dollars paid, number of tanks, jets, personnel etc…are very misleading data sets. You need to really ask what are you trying to do with your military? For a country like America which is so far away from the other great powers it needs “power projection.” The US military, although nominally for US defense is really about fighting enemies “over there” to prevent threatening states from dominating Eurasia and less about securing the literal borders of our nation which is done through CBP.
If Americans want the ability to influence the military calculus of countries in other hemispheres then the US needs an expeditionary oriented military—i.e. one with large tonnage ships and long range aircraft with overseas basing. It also needs highly trained professional soldiers.
If we want to forego the ability to influence military events far from our shores we could save a lot of money on our military budget. But we would have to accept that other countries could block us out of their regions entirely without us being able to do a thing about it.
Like our self-imposed defeat in Afghanistan, it sounds good but in reality it is ugly.
Great comment. The "tyranny of distance" affects planning for any major confrontation with Russia or China, which would in both cases happen closer to their home turf than America's (thankfully for Americans).
Russia may be under-performing in Ukraine, but it still can invade and hope to occupy a country that is right next to it. How would the United States get sufficient forced to Ukraine to defend it? It would take months, even with existing forces in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
And, for Russia to roll into the Baltics would be similarly logistically easy. NATO would be on the back foot trying to mount a defense or counter-attack.
Similar problem in the Western Pacific. The United States has the huge initial advantage of forward bases in Japan, Guam, Hawaii, and elsewhere. But supplying them involves a long (and vulnerable) supply chain. And it takes time. Take one or all of those bases out with an initial volley of missiles and it would take weeks or months to resupply or repair them. Reinforcements would have to steam over from halfway across the world. By that time, China may have successfully expelled Americans from the entire West Pacific.
Meanwhile, anywhere in the South or East China Sea or Taiwan Strait that China might be operating would be very much home turf. Easily patrolled by a larger (if less capable) Chinese Navy, as well as legion land-based air assets. American military assets operate at the very limit of their communications and with just as much as they can bring with them.
It would be interesting to include consideration of spending effectiveness and waste in this discussion. My sense is that US defense spending is analogous to US health care spending: comparatively more expensive than other countries’, with numerous indicators of uneven and notable instances of poor outcomes. It’s not just overpriced toilet seats; somehow, whole categories of unglamorous but sundry capabilities needed for US military commitments, like trucks, radios, and helicopters end up woefully undercapitalized. Examples: the HUMMVEE/MRAP debacle of the post 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Army’s current helicopter procurement—if it happens—will be the first all-new helicopter since Vietnam. There is a collision of various intractable factors here, including the entrenched cultures of the services, DoD civilians, and the parastatal defense industry, as well as the durable bipartisan consensus about supporting the troops.
I'm surprised neither Matt nor Noah made the analogy of defense acquisition to transit project spending. Since they're both heavy into the transit beat.
The analogy is that political, regulatory, and structural factors drive up costs and schedules so much that it can be hard to justify even straightforwardly useful projects. There are too many stakeholders and too many misaligned interests. And ultimately very little market discipline because they're quintessential public goods.
I would be very surprised if the key but unglamorous parts of military spending, especially logistics, are more undercapitalized in the US than in other countries. We are seeing on a daily basis the Russian failure to invest in logistics, in sufficient precision ordinance, in NCO training etc. Similarly, the Europeans ran out of smart bombs after like 3 days of bombing Lybia. The US has been fighting wars and supplying troops 1000s of miles from home for decades. We may not have figured out counterinsurgency completely, but i do think that better than anyone else we can supply troops all of the world. (Of course, when a war starts we'll wish we had even way more sea lift, airlift, smart bombs, trucks, etc...but I bet we'll be in a better spot than anyone else.)
Agreed here. Folks commenting on the US military need to take a look at other militaries around the world first, I think.
Bigger diiferences in military budgets between both sides are best for everyone.
One thing that folks almost always forget, if we do get into a conflict, the more the overmatch by one side, the shorter the war and the lower the total casualties on both the winning AND THE LOSING SIDES. The longest and bloodiest wars occur with two equally marched sides.
In addition, people are more likely to wrongly guess their chances, and thus start a war, if the two sides are more even.
Minor points:
The Chinese military directly owns large parts of their economy so the actual resources spent on their defense are widely believed to be much larger than the official defense budget. Again, the latter is widely believed to be heavily fudged. To see what their PPP budget in reality is, one can compare what it buys and in this respect China is at least on par with us on air force and naval spending.
Of course, inefficiency, political friction. and gross corruption matter too. For example:
China seems to have way to many types of fighters in production, over 5, which increases their cost per fighter (we aren't that much better across NATO)!
The US is widely believed to have way too many bases for its military size but can't close the extra because of politics.
In 3rd world kleptocracies, like Russia, much of the defense budget goes directly into the private bank accounts of presidents, their cronies, and top generals. This probably accounts for much of the underperformance of the Russian army now...
Redundancy and resiliency (in bases, for example) create inefficiency, but also help to hedge against risks and make it easy to scale up military personnel and training quickly.
For example, think about the lack of naval shipyard capacity that is hampering efforts to produce but also maintain existing American naval assets (widely believed to be too few to keep up with China's militarization). What would happen if even just one of the four major American naval bases were taken out by an attack tomorrow? It wouldn't even take a missile strike or bombardment. The pandemic has taught us that just losing a bunch of workers to illness is enough to shut down an operation for weeks!
For this reason, I would argue that the US needs more "redundant" naval bases, and not less. Right now, there is no way that the American Navy could recover from a catastrophe like Pearl Harbor because there just isn't the industrial base to replace or repair multiple surface fleet losses! If the US' participation in WWII lasted only 4 years, it wouldn't even be able to accelerate existing weapons system designs in that time to recover from losses that were routine during the Battle of the Atlantic or the clashes with Japan in the Pacific!
Ditto for even land bases, as how would the military have the capacity to quickly scale up if there were an actual near-pear war? All of a sudden, you'd likely have to re-institute the draft and have an influx of perhaps millions of new soldiers. Where to put them? Building out infrastructure takes years, you can't just switch it on!
I'm seeing this dilemma in real time here in Sweden, which has just recently nearly doubled its military spending and toying with joining NATO. In the last two decades, Sweden closed Cold War Era military bases all over the country and reduced itself from a robust network of naval bases to only a single (very vulnerable) naval base. Now, it's buying back much of the same formerly military property at a huge markup, and it will take years to even get the same bases (often the same exact buildings repurposed) back to where they were in 1990. The "peace dividend" seems a dubious false-economy now.
Excellent points
Geez, every time I become frustrated with some of your points I find something that strikes me as spot on reminding me why I read you and that I need to check my own beliefs for heavy bias and resistance to new ideas.
So many people are too focused on actual dollars that they lose sight of the nature of our military power. The US has always really been a maritime power. While the great land battles our armies have fought in are the stuff of lore (Battle of the Bulge, for example) it is really our maritime operations that have set us apart from our enemies (Normandy, the WW2 island hopping campaign in the Pacific) that have truly set us apart. And since WW2 our naval dominance has kept international shipping safe and efficient, unmatched by anyone on the planet. And, as sexy as the job of fighter-pilot is, it is the surface warfare officers and the fleets they command that make the difference in the world. China understands this. It is why they are rapidly building up their navy and creating new islands where none previously existed. It is also why Taiwan is such a flashpoint. Look at where it sits relative to China's coast and where we have Naval bases or at least friendly ports. Control of Taiwan greatly reduces the strategic danger of having to contend with forces in Japan and the Philippines.
So yes, money spent on naval power is important. But the other things the US seems to be lacking are visionary thinking and rigorous training. Recent events involving our navy and the numerous accidents are a concerning sign of directing dollars to the wrong things. The Marine Corps takes pride (or at least it did when I served) in returning budget dollars to the Navy every year. We were taught to make do with lesser weapons. We accepted the the Army's hand-me-downs and learned to use them better. When I served in the late 80's and early 90's the First Tak Battalion at Pendleton was still using M60 tanks to train. It wasn't until the Operation Desert Shield that they received used Abrams tanks form the Army, which were being upgraded with newer versions.
In short, not only do we need to continue to spend, but we MUST reevaluate HOW we have been spending over the last 4 decades. I was heartened to see the Commandant of the Marine Corps consider a radical realignment of mission for the Corps. This is the type of think that is required to remain a relevant global military power. Otherwise we are just the distribution arm of Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and the other arms manufacturers.
Great article. And loved the reference to the Washington.
A couple of other reasons why unless we're going to dramatically reshape our strategic commitments, we need to outspend China:
First, the US will likely (hopefully) have to fight China or Russia thousands of miles from home. That away game is really hard, and means we must spend a ton on sea lift, air lift, forward bases, expeditionary units like aircraft carriers, and escorts for these long sea lanes just to get to the fight. It's way cheaper for the home team to just to build land based fighters, land based missiles, short range submarines, etc. But if we want to defend Japan or Taiwan we have to be able to fight in the South China Sea.
Another point is that because the US has so many priorities and operates in so many places, everything is more expensive. One surprising example is that our ships must be able to operate from the Arctic to the Persian Gulf, requiring massive heating and cooling capacities at great weight and cost. Similarly, a maritime war with China would place a premium on long range aircraft, but we can't exclusively build those because we need smaller, nimbler aircraft for a potential European or Middle Eastern war. The Chinese military can focus largely on a war in the China Seas with the US and thus get comparable power there much cheaper.
I wonder at what point it makes more sense to specialize. The F-35 seems like an example of a weapons system designed to do everything, but ending up disappointing a bit because of it.
Could it be that a Ford-class aircraft carrier is the same? Might there be a place for surface warships that are specifically designed for operating in the EMEA spheres of the Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Baltic Seas, where proximity to coastlines, shorter ranges, and proximity to NATO allies make for a completely different design spec? Where your near-peer adversary is Russia?
While battle groups that traverse the vast, world-spanning Pacific must deal with the tyranny of distance, long-rang air-wing capability, over-the-horizon defense and offense, island warfare, and amphibious warfare? And your near-peer adversary is China?
Maybe having two completely parallel forces (and industrial bases) focused on these two adversaries and battle spaces is actually optimal?
You should disagree with Matt more often. Both reads were more fun as a result.