Cow Most Sacred: Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable

In defense circles, "cutting" the Pentagon budget has
once again become a topic of conversation. Americans should not
confuse that talk with reality. Any cuts exacted will at most reduce
the rate of growth. The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays
today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a
situation without precedent in modern history.

The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at
any time during the Cold War -- this despite the absence of anything
remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a
"peer competitor." Evil Empire? It exists only in the fevered
imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a
rust-bucket Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously
the ravings of radical Islamists promising from deep inside their caves
to unite the Umma in a new caliphate.

What are Americans getting for their money? Sadly, not much.
Despite extraordinary expenditures (not to mention exertions and
sacrifices by U.S. forces), the return on investment is, to be generous,
unimpressive. The chief lesson to emerge from the battlefields of the
post-9/11 era is this: the Pentagon possesses next to no ability to
translate "military supremacy" into meaningful victory.

Washington knows how to start wars and how to prolong them, but is
clueless when it comes to ending them. Iraq, the latest addition to the
roster of America's forgotten wars, stands as exhibit A. Each bomb
that blows up in Baghdad or some other Iraqi city, splattering blood all
over the streets, testifies to the manifest absurdity of judging "the
surge" as the epic feat of arms celebrated by the Petraeus lobby.

The problems are strategic as well as operational. Old Cold War-era
expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and
standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world. There,
American military activities are instead fostering instability and
inciting anti-Americanism. For Exhibit B, see the deepening morass that
Washington refers to as AfPak or the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of
operations.

Add to that the mountain of evidence showing that Pentagon, Inc. is a
miserably managed enterprise: hide-bound, bloated, slow-moving, and
prone to wasting resources on a prodigious scale -- nowhere more so than
in weapons procurement and the outsourcing of previously military
functions to "contractors." When it comes to national security, effectiveness (what works) should rightly take precedence over efficiency
(at what cost?) as the overriding measure of merit. Yet beyond a
certain level, inefficiency undermines effectiveness, with the Pentagon
stubbornly and habitually exceeding that level. By comparison,
Detroit's much-maligned Big Three offer models of well-run enterprises.

Impregnable Defenses

All of this takes place against the backdrop of mounting problems at
home: stubbornly high unemployment, trillion-dollar federal deficits,
massive and mounting debt, and domestic needs like education,
infrastructure, and employment crying out for attention.

Yet the defense budget -- a misnomer since for Pentagon, Inc. defense
per se figures as an afterthought -- remains a sacred cow. Why is
that?

The answer lies first in understanding the defenses arrayed around
that cow to ensure that it remains untouched and untouchable.
Exemplifying what the military likes to call a "defense in depth," that
protective shield consists of four distinct but mutually supporting
layers.

Institutional Self-Interest: Victory in
World War II produced not peace, but an atmosphere of permanent national
security crisis. As never before in U.S. history, threats to the
nation's existence seemed omnipresent, an attitude first born in the
late 1940s that still persists today. In Washington, fear -- partly
genuine, partly contrived -- triggered a powerful response.

One result was the emergence of the national security state, an array
of institutions that depended on (and therefore strove to perpetuate)
this atmosphere of crisis to justify their existence, status,
prerogatives, and budgetary claims. In addition, a permanent arms
industry arose, which soon became a major source of jobs and corporate
profits. Politicians of both parties were quick to identify the
advantages of aligning with this "military-industrial complex," as President Eisenhower described it.

Allied with (and feeding off of) this vast apparatus that transformed
tax dollars into appropriations, corporate profits, campaign
contributions, and votes was an intellectual axis of sorts --
government-supported laboratories, university research institutes,
publications, think tanks, and lobbying firms (many staffed by former or
would-be senior officials) -- devoted to identifying (or conjuring up)
ostensible national security challenges and alarms, always assumed to be
serious and getting worse, and then devising responses to them.

The upshot: within Washington, the voices carrying weight in any
national security "debate" all share a predisposition for sustaining
very high levels of military spending for reasons having increasingly
little to do with the well-being of the country.

Strategic Inertia:In a
1948 State Department document, diplomat George F. Kennan offered this
observation: "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only
6.3 percent of its population." The challenge facing American
policymakers, he continued, was "to devise a pattern of relationships
that will permit us to maintain this disparity." Here we have a
description of American purposes that is far more candid than all of the
rhetoric about promoting freedom and democracy, seeking world peace, or
exercising global leadership.

The end of World War II found the United States in a spectacularly
privileged position. Not for nothing do Americans remember the
immediate postwar era as a Golden Age of middle-class prosperity.
Policymakers since Kennan's time have sought to preserve that globally
privileged position. The effort has been a largely futile one.

By 1950 at the latest, those policymakers (with Kennan by then a
notable dissenter) had concluded that the possession and deployment of
military power held the key to preserving America's exalted status. The
presence of U.S. forces abroad and a demonstrated willingness to
intervene, whether overtly or covertly, just about anywhere on the
planet would promote stability, ensure U.S. access to markets and
resources, and generally serve to enhance the country's influence in the
eyes of friend and foe alike -- this was the idea, at least.

In
postwar Europe and postwar Japan, this formula achieved considerable
success. Elsewhere -- notably in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and
(especially after 1980) in the so-called Greater Middle East -- it
either produced mixed results or failed catastrophically. Certainly,
the events of the post-9/11 era provide little reason to believe that
this presence/power-projection paradigm will provide an antidote to the
threat posed by violent anti-Western jihadism. If anything, adherence to it is exacerbating the problem by creating ever greater anti-American animus.

One might think that the manifest shortcomings of the
presence/power-projection approach -- trillions expended in Iraq for
what? -- might stimulate present-day Washington to pose some first-order
questions about basic U.S. national security strategy. A certain
amount of introspection would seem to be called for. Could, for
example, the effort to sustain what remains of America's privileged
status benefit from another approach?

Yet there are few indications that our political leaders, the
senior-most echelons of the officer corps, or those who shape opinion
outside of government are capable of seriously entertaining any such
debate. Whether through ignorance, arrogance, or a lack of imagination,
the pre-existing strategic paradigm stubbornly persists; so, too, as if
by default do the high levels of military spending that the strategy
entails.

Cultural Dissonance: The rise of the Tea
Party movement should disabuse any American of the thought that the
cleavages produced by the "culture wars" have healed. The cultural
upheaval touched off by the 1960s and centered on Vietnam remains
unfinished business in this country.

Among other things, the sixties destroyed an American consensus,
forged during World War II, about the meaning of patriotism. During the
so-called Good War, love of country implied, even required, deference
to the state, shown most clearly in the willingness of individuals to
accept the government's authority to mandate military service. GI's,
the vast majority of them draftees, were the embodiment of American
patriotism, risking life and limb to defend the country.

The GI of World War II had been an American Everyman. Those soldiers
both represented and reflected the values of the nation from which they
came (a perception affirmed by the ironic fact that the military
adhered to prevailing standards of racial segregation). It was "our
army" because that army was "us."

With Vietnam, things became more complicated. The war's supporters
argued that the World War II tradition still applied: patriotism
required deference to the commands of the state. Opponents of the war,
especially those facing the prospect of conscription, insisted
otherwise. They revived the distinction, formulated a generation
earlier by the radical journalist Randolph Bourne, that distinguished
between the country and the state. Real patriots, the ones who most
truly loved their country, were those who opposed state policies they
regarded as misguided, illegal, or immoral.

In many respects, the soldiers who fought the Vietnam War found
themselves caught uncomfortably in the center of this dispute. Was the
soldier who died in Vietnam a martyr, a tragic figure, or a sap? Who
deserved greater admiration: the soldier who fought bravely and
uncomplainingly or the one who served and then turned against the war?
Or was the war resister -- the one who never served at all -- the real
hero?

War's end left these matters disconcertingly unresolved. President
Richard Nixon's 1971 decision to kill the draft in favor of an
All-Volunteer Force, predicated on the notion that the country might be
better served with a military that was no longer "us," only complicated
things further. So, too, did the trends in American politics where bona fide
war heroes (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain)
routinely lost to opponents whose military credentials were non-existent
or exceedingly slight (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama),
yet who demonstrated once in office a remarkable propensity for
expending American blood (none belonging to members of their own
families) in places like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It was all
more than a little unseemly.

Patriotism, once a simple concept, had become both confusing and
contentious. What obligations, if any, did patriotism impose? And if
the answer was none -- the option Americans seemed increasingly to
prefer -- then was patriotism itself still a viable proposition?

Wanting to answer that question in the affirmative -- to distract
attention from the fact that patriotism had become little more than an
excuse for fireworks displays and taking the occasional day off from
work -- people and politicians alike found a way to do so by exalting
those Americans actually choosing to serve in uniform. The thinking
went this way: soldiers offer living proof that America is a place still
worth dying for, that patriotism (at least in some quarters) remains
alive and well; by common consent, therefore, soldiers are the nation's
"best," committed to "something bigger than self" in a land otherwise
increasingly absorbed in pursuing a material and narcissistic definition
of self-fulfillment.

In effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned
values still survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative
segment of American society. Rather than Everyman, today's warrior has
ascended to the status of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation
for which he or she fights, the repository of virtues that prop up,
however precariously, the nation's increasingly sketchy claim to
singularity.

Politically, therefore, "supporting the troops" has become a
categorical imperative across the political spectrum. In theory, such
support might find expression in a determination to protect those troops
from abuse, and so translate into wariness about committing soldiers to
unnecessary or unnecessarily costly wars. In practice, however,
"supporting the troops" has found expression in an insistence upon
providing the Pentagon with open-ended drawing rights on the nation's
treasury, thereby creating massive barriers to any proposal to affect
more than symbolic reductions in military spending.

Misremembered History:The
duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled
anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They
differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for
interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize
human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism
that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.

American politics once nourished a lively anti-interventionist
tradition. Leading proponents included luminaries such as George
Washington and John Quincy Adams. That tradition found its basis not in
principled pacifism, a position that has never attracted widespread
support in this country, but in pragmatic realism. What happened to
that realist tradition? Simply put, World War II killed it -- or at
least discredited it. In the intense and divisive debate that occurred
in 1939-1941, the anti-interventionists lost, their cause thereafter
tarred with the label "isolationism."

The passage of time has transformed World War II from a massive
tragedy into a morality tale, one that casts opponents of intervention
as blackguards. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the debate over how
the United States should respond to some ostensible threat -- Iraq in
2003, Iran today -- replays the debate finally ended by the events of
December 7, 1941. To express skepticism about the necessity and
prudence of using military power is to invite the charge of being an
appeaser or an isolationist. Few politicians or individuals aspiring to
power will risk the consequences of being tagged with that label.

In this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s -- always
discovering a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric --
even though the circumstances in which we live today bear scant
resemblance to that earlier time. There was only one Hitler and he's
long dead. As for Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more
mixed than his battalions of defenders are willing to acknowledge. And
if any one figure deserves particular credit for demolishing Hitler's
Reich and winning World War II, it's Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile
and murderous as Hitler himself.

Until Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced
view of World War II that takes fully into account the political and
moral implications of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the
U.S. campaign of obliteration bombing directed against Germany and
Japan, the mythic version of "the Good War" will continue to provide
glib justifications for continuing to dodge that perennial question: How
much is enough?

Like concentric security barriers arrayed around the Pentagon, these
four factors -- institutional self-interest, strategic inertia, cultural
dissonance, and misremembered history -- insulate the military budget
from serious scrutiny. For advocates of a militarized approach to
policy, they provide invaluable assets, to be defended at all costs.