The Defense/Deficit Paradox

High defense budgets have bloody consequences. But tying defense spending to deficit reduction rests on faulty logic.

Think of the irony in Jim Lobe’s article, “US Defense Spending Set for Downward Course.” Lobe wants to reduce the defense budget, mostly for the right reasons. Yet he shows the only realistic way, politically speaking, to reduce the defense budget is to tie it to cutting the deficit. But cutting the deficit is, of course, exactly the wrong thing to do in our current economic crisis. Moreover, it is by no means certain that a deficit reduction effort will end up cutting defense — look at Lobe’s comments about companies announcing layoffs. You can rest assured that these layoffs will be strategically targeted across the county to maximize the political pain in Congress — a typical extortion strategy that flows naturally out of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex’s (MICC) earlier political engineering maneuvers. Meanwhile, while the companies are firing workers, they are increasing the spending for their lobbying efforts to prop up defense budgets.

In this context, efforts to stimulate and rebuild the economy by using larger deficits will take the pressure off the Pentagon. Yet we know defense spending creates fewer jobs per dollar than spending on just about anything else. Moreover, we also know that “cost-plus” subsidies (a system in which firms bill the government based on the cost of a product plus a percentage of this cost) grossly distort our manufacturing and R&D activities and thereby weaken our international competitiveness along the lines first described by Seymour Melman (author of After Capitalism) in the 60s and 70s. We need to recognize that cost plus is an inversion of standard capitalist free market practices, whereby industries have an incentive to reduce costs as much as possible in order to increase profit margins. In the case of defense spending, the government distorts this process, in effect providing incentives to balloon costs as much as possible. Not only does this represent a huge waste of fiscal resources, but it ultimately contaminates the civilian economy. The minute companies like Boeing or McDonnell Douglas begin to accept military contracts under this cost plus arrangement, it begins to undermine their private sector work practices, even though the companies have historically tried to separate the two divisions.

Furthermore as Pierre Sprey, John Boyd, Tom Christie, Ernie Fitzgerald, and myself (and others) have shown (e.g. here), the increased defense budgets actually make us weaker by fueling the MICC’s propensity to field smaller numbers of overly complex, high-cost weapons that do not work as advertised, while creating a perpetual force structure aging and modernization crisis. Perhaps even more importantly, the military’s obsession with technology (which is directly related to its lust for high budgets) also results in a psychological techo-dependency that debases its tactical and strategic thinking. This corruption rewards bureaucratic operators, drives out our best military thinkers, and it ultimately manifests itself in primitive techno-strategies that unnecessarily increases the spillage of blood as well as money but do not produce predicted results.

In Vietnam, for example, the body count mentality led to, among other things, the dropping far more bombs on North Vietnam than the Brits and Americans dropped on Germany in WWII (by a factor of 3 to 5), killing over one million Vietnamese, and we still lost. A contemporary case of substituting technology for thinking is our use of robotic drones in a primitive assassination strategy that is killing large numbers of innocents in AFPAK: it is hugely expensive, it creates enemies faster than we can kill them, and it fuels lasting desires for revenge in vendetta cultures where the highest sense of personal honor demands a eye for an eye. Moreover, to the extent we are killing the older leaders, they are being rapidly replaced by younger, more radical leaders who are more determined to fight it out to the end. Once again we are in a war that can not be won and this time it is quite possible that this assassination craziness will eventually produce some kind of bloody blowback back home in the good ole USA (not nucs, but car bombs, suicide bombers, or some other primitive response — these kinds of operations are easily deployed over long distances) — which, of course, will amplify the pressure for even larger defense budgets. QED.

Chuck Spinney is an American former military analyst for the Pentagon and has been a fierce critic of wasteful defense spending.