Arms and the West

Analogies are always inexact, but from no corner of history is there one that would give us cause for optimism about the West’s trend toward disarmament since 1991.  There doesn’t have to be a Nazi Germany on the horizon, or even a Soviet Union, for this trend to be dangerous.  The logical vulnerability in comparing everything to the 1930s is not that there is no Nazi Germany today; it’s that too many people harbor the illusion that danger only comes in that form.

Danger’s more common forms usually start – deceptively – with political intimidation, typically in neglected and hard-to-defend spots.  In such spots even a weaker nation can generate a relative imbalance of force.  So can terrorists and pirates; but an enduring axiom in all these cases is that restoring order and security requires, at a minimum, the means of reversing the local power imbalance, and of taking territory and securing it for political purposes.  It requires, in other words, great-power-size conventional forces, and the will to use them.

We can “fight back” against regional predators, guerrilla movements, and nihilist bombers using essentially symmetrical, defensive means; and for some ancillary objectives counterinsurgency tactics are indispensable. But if our aim is to actually achieve a decisive outcome, with conditions changed from menace and insecurity to order, the remedy must include conventional forces wielded on the state-based war model.  This is something insurgent leaders like Lenin and Mao Zedong were very clear on:  guerrilla tactics weaken central government; counterinsurgency tactics cannot, by themselves, establish it.  For that, conventional armed force is essential, which is why guerrilla leaders who become national leaders gain national political control by the use of conventional massed force, in whatever form is common to the time.

Declining to maintain such forces is inherently a signal about the will of great powers to guarantee borders, regional order, and security.  The West has been sending such a signal for some time. Gordon Brown’s is the latest communiqué: another round of major cuts in Britain’s military, announced this week.  The Royal Navy and Air Force will soon be only half their strength of 2003 – the RAF down to an astounding 31,000 personnel, with additional squadrons cut and five bases closed.  But France and Germany have taken drastic force cuts in the last decade as well, and Barack Obama is cutting major US defense programs and planning to spend less in the coming years on procurement and modernization.

Our low priority for defense spending is one of two current patterns that are reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s.  Defense spending in NATO Europe averages 2.6 percent of GDP, at or below the percentages of Britain, France, and the US between 1919 and 1937.  The Europeans’ spending has also declined absolutely since 1992:  the four European G-8 members all spent less on defense in 2008 than in 1992, reckoned in constant US dollars.  America’s percentage hovers around 4.0, and Canada’s was at 1.3 last year.  Japan’s 2008 spending was slightly above 1 percent of GDP, and Australia’s was 1.8.

The other pattern is a turn in our defense planning away from the ideas of state-based threats and politically decisive use of the military, in favor of emphasizing factors like international “guarantees” and transnational problems (terrorism, piracy), and then designing our forces to fit them, as if they are conditions we must accommodate rather than shape. This trend is a powerful echo of the interwar years eight decades ago.

The US decided this summer to cease force planning based on handling two major (i.e., Iraq-size) contingencies at a time, an assumption we had used since 1990.  What we discarded was more than the “two contingencies,” however; the vagueness of the new approach, the idea that all our planning factors are up for grabs, is an indicator that we effectively discarded the concept of securing decisive outcomes, period.  Taken together, these steps back in our planning posture inevitably mean envisioning a military less capable of imposing order and political outcomes.

In Europe, meanwhile, our allies dither over an EU military force; one thing they can’t agree on is whether there will even be a “main threat” in the next decade – nor is such agreement really a priority.  The concept of an EU force need not be problematic for NATO defense, but the Union’s somewhat characteristic indecision about what it needs the force for is a less-than-encouraging trend.  It nevertheless gives European military budgeteers a PowerPoint-ready rubric to appeal to, when they can’t make their national defense concepts and budgets come out even.  The uneasy sense that it’s all a PowerPoint exercise is strongly reminiscent of pre-1938 Europe; and with the US having cut the tether to the “two-contingencies” planning factor, NATO’s defense concept is the only one left with any grab-bars on it capable of supporting deliberative weight.  It should be no surprise, therefore, that NATO’s defense concept is, as of July 2009, under comprehensive review.

Russia and China, of course, are increasing their military spending.  Russia announced a significant new increase in defense spending in September 2008, a move that complemented Vladimir Putin’s announcement one year earlier that Russian forces would be returning to their old patrol areas in the air and on the seas.  But Russia’s military spending had already been increasing by over 20 percent a year since 2002.  China, for her part, has officially posted double-digit increases in defense spending through most of the last decade, and US intelligence estimates the actual numbers are higher than those reported by Beijing.  Notably, it is the procurement of major weapon systems that the US concludes is often worked off the books.  CIA’s estimate is that China commits over 4 percent of GDP to military spending; Russia a little less than 4 percent.

(It is evidence of ignorance to dismiss these estimates out of hand, incidentally.  US intel develops very good information on new weapon systems in Russia and China, and uses careful processes to compare the amount of new equipment with the costs incurred for R&D, inputs, and manufacturing.  In a study done in the 1990s by the Defense Intelligence Agency, of previous estimates about the Soviet Union versus ground truth unearthed after 1991, the final determination was that US technical intelligence had been accurate much more often than not, tending in some cases to overestimate the effectiveness of certain weapon or sensor systems, but not erring significantly in calculating things like numbers and effective costs of procurement.  The assessment that China procures weapon systems outside of declared defense spending is reached through credible and proven analytical methods.)

The oft-made point that the US still spends more on defense than Russia or China is superficial in some key ways.  It tacitly posits that all spending is equal, but of course, all military spending is not equal. Russia and China spend far less, per soldier, on personnel than the US (or our G-8 allies), simply because their pay and benefits are much, much lower.  The disparity in spending on current operations is even greater:  Russia has almost none, and China’s naval and air activity, while robust, incurs much less expense than ours because it so rarely involves the long-range deployments that we, and our main NATO allies, are funding 24/365.

US defense spending, on the other hand, has shorted weapons procurement for over 15 years, with the purchase of new equipment representing no more than 15 percent of the defense budget throughout that period.  Procurement costs more per unit for the US and our allies as well, due not as much to the evils of bureaucracy as to the fact that our manufacturing labor, unlike Russia’s and China’s, is effectively unionized, and everyone involved in designing and making defense equipment is paid better, and has greater worker benefits, than his counterpart in Russia or China.  The newest US and European equipment is typically superb, but Russia and China buy more units that are not quite as good, for less.

Obama, of course, now intends to reduce procurement further.  France, Germany, Canada, and Japan, while procuring some things, are shedding others as quickly as possible, and Britain is simply contracting across the board.  Russia and China, by contrast, are concentrating precisely on procurement programs, building up capabilities – like submarine forces, amphibious assault, IT and electronic attack, and missile systems – that ought to leave us in no doubt as to what they intend to be able to do.

If we graphed the defense spending of America’s allies on one line, and that of Russia and China on another, what we would see is the first line on a downward trend, and the second on an upward trend.  If nothing else, this is convincing proof that cutting defense spending in the major democratic nations around the globe doesn’t induce nations like Russia and China to ease up on their military build-ups.

Iran, in some ways an outlier, has had a long, slow military build-up since the early 1990s, and is estimated to spend at least 3.5 percent of her GDP – which fluctuates with the price of oil – on defense.  But this number is misleading in at least two ways.  First, it ignores the fact that Iran literally projects regional power through her support for terrorism, a set of expenses that is, naturally enough, not reported in Tehran’s official military budget.  The regional effect of this effort is significant, however, both politically and economically; and today reaches beyond Lebanon and Israel to Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Eritrea, Somalia, and Yemen.  Second, of course, Iran’s expenditures include her missile and nuclear weaponization programs, lines of procurement that promise a tool of regional power well out of proportion to the dollar figure associated with it.

Ultimately, no nation or alliance that systematically reduced its ability to project and wield military power has been able to continue projecting other kinds of power.  There is no basis whatsoever for any certainty that this pattern has somehow changed.  As the West disarms, it will take less relative force over time for other actors to exert intimidation in many parts of the world, including chokepoints and regional junctions that affect our security. It doesn’t have to be the 1930s again; 2009 will do. History has never once validated the complacent certainties on which people have relied to justify disarming themselves.