Record Defense Spending, Less Security
26 February 2007 9:11 am by Taylor Marsh
Record Defense Spending, Less Security
Expert guest post by Charles V. Peña
Straus Military
Reform Project Adviser
As many have expected, President George W. Bush has asked Congress for an additional
$93 billion in supplemental funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan
for this fiscal year, on top of the $70 billion already approved. The Department
of Defense proposed budget for fiscal year 2008 is $481 billion plus another
$142 billion in projected war costs, equaling a whopping $643 billion. But such
record spending (U.S. military expenditures now exceed the rest of the world
combined) is not necessary for American security.
The United States is in a unique geostrategic position with friendly neighbors
to the north and south, and vast moats to the east and west. With the demise
of the Soviet Union, the United States no longer faces a serious military challenger
or global hegemonic threat. Given that no other country in the world has significant
global power projection capability, America is relatively safe from a military
invasion. And the vast U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal is a powerful deterrent
against any country with nuclear weapons – even against so-called rogue
states if they eventually acquire long-range ballistic missiles.
So, the United States can afford to spend less on defense and still be secure.
A smaller U.S. military would be highly capable relative to the other militaries
of the world. And downsizing the military does not mean that the United States
would be retreating into a shell and adopting an isolationist posture. Even
if U.S. forces were pulled back from their current forward deployments, the
United States would still be able to project power if vital U.S. security interests
were at risk. Although it is counterintuitive, forward deployment does not significantly
enhance the U.S. military’s ability to fight wars. The comparative advantage
that the U.S. military possesses is airpower, which can be dispatched relatively
quickly and at very long ranges. Indeed, during Operation Enduring Freedom in
Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force was able to fly missions from Whiteman Air Force
Base in Missouri to Afghanistan and back. It is also worth noting that the U.S.
military had neither troops nor bases adjacent to Afghanistan – yet military
operations commenced less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks.
More importantly, the real threat to the United States no longer consists of
nation states, but the terrorist threat represented by al-Qaida, which is relatively
undeterred by the U.S. military. Indeed, an expansive defense perimeter and
forward deployed forces did not stop 19 hijackers from attacking the United
States on Sept. 11, 2001. And U.S. forces abroad – particularly those
deployed in Muslim countries – do more to exacerbate the terrorist threat
than diminish it. We know, for example, that the presence of 5,000 U.S. troops
in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War was the basis of Osama bin Laden’s
hatred of the United States and one of his consistently stated reasons for engaging
in terrorism, including the Sept. 11 attacks. Scaling back the unnecessary U.S.
military presence around the world – particularly in the Middle East –
is likely to do more to reduce America’s profile as a target for terrorism.
Moreover, the shorthand phrase \”war on terrorism\” is misleading because
the term \”war\” implies the use of military force as the primary instrument
of policy for waging the fight against terrorism. But traditional military operations
will be the exception rather than the rule in the conflict with al-Qaida because
our adversary is not a military force to be confronted by massive firepower.
Rather, it is a loosely connected and decentralized network with cells and operatives
in 60 countries around the world. The reality is that the arduous task of dismantling
and degrading the network will largely be the task of unprecedented international
intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, which means the military aspects
of the war on terrorism will largely be the work of special forces in discrete
operations against specific targets rather than large-scale military operations.
Ultimately, larger defense budgets are both unnecessary and unwise because they
do not target the al-Qaida terrorist threat. Most current defense spending continues
to fund a large U.S. military presence deployed to all four corners of the globe,
including the U.S. occupation of Iraq that is a rallying cry for jihad –
much the same as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was in the 1980s. But
having such a large military results in the Madeleine Albright syndrome: \”What\’s
the point of having this superb military that you\’re always talking about if
we can\’t use it?\” In other words, it tempts policymakers to engage in unnecessary
military interventions and deployments, which in turn are a source of the terrorist
threat to the United States.
Charles V. Peña is an adviser to the Center for Defense Information’s
Straus Military Reform Project, senior fellow with the Independent Institute
and Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, military analyst for MSNBC television,
and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism (Potomac
Books).
