Summary: The United States now spends almost as much on defense in real dollars as it ever has before -- even though it has no plausible rationale for using most of its impressive military forces. Why? Because without political incentives for restraint, policymakers have lost the ability to think clearly about defense policy. Washington's new mantra should be "Half a trillion dollars is more than enough.
What exactly is perplexing to Betts?
If Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in the Pentagon's budgeting office 20 years ago and awoke today, his first reaction would be that nothing had changed. President George W. Bush has asked for $505 billion for the peacetime U.S. military establishment in 2008 -- almost exactly the amount, in real dollars, that President Ronald Reagan sought in 1988. Rip would start scratching his head, however, when he discovered that the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union itself had imploded more than 15 years ago and that Washington now spends almost as much on its military power as the rest of the world combined and five times more than all its potential enemies together.
To answer the query of the learned Dr. Winkle, one has only to consult the changes in our world from 20 years ago rather than make a comparison between today and a score years ago assuming a static generation in between.
Twenty years ago, we spent far more of our GDP on defense and would have counted ourselves lucky to emerge from a bloody conventional war still holding the charred ruins of Western Europe.
Today, we face an environment where we want to fight our enemies as far from our heartland as possible and with as few casualties as possible. Oh, and if we could not kill too many of the enemy or wreck their cities that we will rebuild after, that would be just great.
Our standards for defining a victory have gone up tremendously and so our defense spending has not continued its 1990s decline. Plus we are at war, of course.
Look, if we become "disciplined" enough in our ideas of national defense to accept higher casualties, we could cut our defense spending a great deal. Robots? Precision long-range weapons? Passive and active protection for troops? Training and pay/benefits? All could be slashed if we would only accept higher casualties--ours, theirs, and innocents caught in the middle.
If we could become "disciplined" enough in our ideas of self defense to accept that we should not contemplate fighting far from our shores and instead just focus on meeting any enemy that comes within 1,000 miles of our shores, we could slash our defense spending tremendously.
Honestly people, accept the "discipline" of being unable to help defend Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, or the Persian Gulf and our defense needs melt away.
Have the "discipline" to abandon the ability to carry out an Afghanistan campaign! We can have a Vegas policy! What happens in Waziristan, stays in Waziristan!
And yes, it is appropriate to note that even today our burden of defense as a portion of our GDP is much smaller than twenty years ago. Betts discounts that inconvenient truth, but he'd have to in order to argue that our defense budget is too big for our needs and capacity to afford.
So there you go. Just have the "discipline" to risk defeat and we can cut our defense spending tremendously. "Disciplined" that may be. But it really weakens the whole "defense" concept.
We can afford to defend ourselves. Count our blessings instead of trying to level the playing field in favor of other nations that can't afford our standards of security.
I swear, why are proponents of disarmament so dishonest in their arguments that they don't just say they think we spend too much? Instead, they have to come up with some catchy term that tries to hide their real views. "Disciplined defense" joins "vigorous diplomacy" as another idea for retreat dressed up in the garb of a warrior.
