Areas of my expertise professional experience

Lorelei Kelly had a great post on how we Spend More on Defense but Purchase less Security.

We’re spending upwards of 500 billion this year, more when you add in the war costs (then the numbers make my head explode Wheeeeeee!) A pittance of this money is dedicated to funding the direction that our whole ship of state needs to go (away from the bully principle and toward the
persuasion one) But the skeptic in me thinks that the USA never will right itself with all the gold-plated barnacles on its hull.

She throws out a few examples.

1. She pokes wholes in the idea of bribing Poland to take an unproven ground base missile defense base.
2. Kelly then attacks legislation that would pin the military budget to 4% of GDP. The legislation is a result of the fact that while we are spending more on defense the economy as a whole has generally managed to grow faster. That’s a good thing. National defense isn’t some video game where as you grow stronger all of your enemies get more challenging. Our spending should be based on the threats we face, not the size of our economy.
3. She points out that the airforce is falling apart. We rely heavily on older fighters but we can’t replace them at a 1:1 rate because all of our recent systems, the B-2, the F-22, the F-35, are basically luxury models. Famously Norm Augustine, onetime head of Lockheed Martin, has noted that if present trends continue the Air Force will eventually just be down to one uber-aircraft. I’d add to this that the Air Force has also had problems with its nuclear mission.

The general problem here is that in an environment of U.S. defense supremacy we have failed to make hard choices. As Kevin Drum notes in a review of Fred Kaplan’s new book there’s a philosophy that: "’the Pentagon should focus on weapons and strategies that would give the United States such overwhelming superiority that other countries wouldn’t even bother trying to compete.’ The goal wasn’t American power, it was uncontested American power."

Anyone familiar with the term asymmetrical warfare will of course realize that this is lunacy. Our power can always be contested, if our conventional military strength is practically invulnerable than foes will invest their efforts on finding unconventional weaknesses. At the same time, our other national interests e.g. climate change and disaster response will go begging.

Since the cold war, we’ve consistently been spending will beyond the point of diminishing returns on technological aspects of our conventional capacity. Not surprisingly, these programs face massive overruns and delays. At the same time, we’ve been unwilling to cut back the scope of other key missions, (do we even need fleets of nuclear bombers at this point?) and these overly ambitious missions are putting strain on our forces.

Defense reform efforts aimed at doing more with less or doing the same thing only better may result in short term improvements but are doomed to failure. We need to make hard choices about what we should be doing and do that right.