Congress and the Power of the Purse: Paying for the Ear, Eye, Hand and the Fist
James Callard
February 14, 2011
"Conventional wisdom holds that the state with the largest army prevails, but in the information age, the state (or the nonstate actor) with the best story may sometime win."
Joseph S Nye, Jr., Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2010
"Do we really need eleven carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?"
Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, 3 may 2010
Recent events in Egypt are another data point reminding us that the nature of warfare and national security policy have fundamentally changed, while the drivers affecting national security policy and strategy, both rational and irrational, remain unchanged. Domestic politics and Congressional involvement often provide the most irrational input in what we do, what we buy, and why we buy it—all in the name of national security.
Today Congress has the least amount of military experience in history. They rely on the military industrial complex, lobbyists and the wars we are currently involved in to drive policy. But what if Joseph Nye is right and the nature of warfare has dramatically changed? What if we are fighting the wrong wars with the wrong capabilities? What if those lobbyists are mainly interested in having us buy stuff created to fight yesterday´s wars and maintain jobs in their congressional districts regardless of the usefulness of what is being bought and built?
Buying the right stuff isn´t easy, but it is important, particularly when one could argue today that one of the main causes of our current economic crises was cutting taxes by $2 trillion and creating another huge "defense" bureaucracy—Department of Homeland Security, and embarking on two very expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If Ike was right, and our security as a nation is directly tied to our economic strength, we have work to do.
The ideal national security strategy is based on our values and interests. That we use economic, military, diplomatic and informational power in the world to sense or know what is going on in the world, to help or lend a hand to others, and as a last resort, to use the fist or force to protect our values and interests. Our national security should allow the United States to project power and influence with more credibility and less vulnerability. Actually that is a pretty radical statement. In contrast, a Marine general was quoted recently as saying: We must be careful not to sacrifice our honor by failing to put our people´s necks on the line." Two very different views on what we value.
For the sake of argument, let´s say I am right and that we should invest in capabilities that do not project vulnerabilities and attrition. Then we need to recognize that a smaller footprint overseas is important and that projecting mass increasingly represents vulnerability without credibility. This means we should avoid wars requiring occupation forces. Gunboat diplomacy that puts an $80 billion dollar aircraft carrier with 5,000 people in range of a massive Chinese cruise missile attack is not very smart. Buying amphibious landing craft for the Marines may make us feel good, but is a total waste of money. In the information age, capabilities that give us safe access and precision trump mass or massed forces—be it precision knowledge or precision action.
So to project power and influence with more credibility and less vulnerability we need to reorganize and rebalance our processes and organizations, and reject force that is vulnerable or no longer credible in the information age.
First, we start be recognizing we need a national security budget not a defense budget. This is huge. National security is by far our biggest line item, but your average citizen or congressman has no idea how expensive it is because we don´t call it what it is.
The national security budget must be evaluated from cradle to grave, life cycle cost versus operational cost, and in terms of risks and unintended consequences. For example, aren´t homeland defense and the VA part of our national security? Why do we keep calling the defense budget and the budget for the wars we are fighting two different things? It is all national security. By not calling it what it is, we cannot effectively evaluate our national security strategy or its costs. We don´t get the proper balance of diplomatic, military, informational, and economic capabilities. Getting the right blend of hard and soft power is what Joseph Nye calls smart power and it is an art. Getting to smart power starts with creating a transparent national security budget.
For example, we constantly hear how we could cut the budget by reducing the percentage of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid. In a recent poll most Americans believe 25 percent is spent on foreign aid when, in fact, it is about 1 percent of the budget. According to one recent study by a retired Army colonel, the military budget is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined, in personnel terms and in budgetary terms, the mismatch is far greater, on the order of 350:1. And we have a huge increase in the VA budget because we dramatically increased the input. Isn´t the increase in wounded warriors a cost of our national security strategy?
Second, we need to quit buying and using forces that apply mass rather than precision. In the information age, mass is primarily a vulnerable target. I can´t tell you how many military exercises I have been involved in where the goal was to put people in harm´s way as fast as possible. In one "futures war game" the good guys lost three carriers in the first day. We quit using them because no president would want to lose three 80 billion dollar assets and 15,000 men and women in the first couple days of warfare. We used slides depicting Monty Python´s lost of legs and an arm to show forces left. Good for a laugh but the reality was, the lost of those carriers was not even in the out brief. Aircraft carriers are still $80 billion dollar sacred cows, even though they project power and influence with less credibility and more vulnerability.
The same goes for maintaining ground forces overseas and continuing the wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan. We need not occupy to contain the threat from Afghanistan. Regardless of outcome (we will declare victory and leave eventually,) and in hindsight, Congress would never have approved a ten year occupation to stabilize a region. We have already spent $1.121 trillion. The 2011 request for Iraq is $51B, and Afghanistan $120B. Our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan must be on the table and at the very least; Iraq must pay for US presence beyond 2011.
We need to quit projecting vulnerabilities and attrition, and leverage our technological and competencies. And as Joseph Nye suggests, "military power still matters, but the power of narrative, the power of soft power, of attracting others, is becoming more important in an information age." Bytes become more valuable that bullets and bayonets.
The challenge for the new Congress is daunting and it is difficult to be optimistic. I am reminded of a Congressman from Indiana´s thoughts on what you can get done: "When you first go to Washington DC, you go there to save the world…eventually you decide to just save the nation…then it is down to just saving your state…and eventually it was just saving the Indiana Dunes…"
Joseph S Nye, Jr., Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2010
"Do we really need eleven carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?"
Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, 3 may 2010
Recent events in Egypt are another data point reminding us that the nature of warfare and national security policy have fundamentally changed, while the drivers affecting national security policy and strategy, both rational and irrational, remain unchanged. Domestic politics and Congressional involvement often provide the most irrational input in what we do, what we buy, and why we buy it—all in the name of national security.
Today Congress has the least amount of military experience in history. They rely on the military industrial complex, lobbyists and the wars we are currently involved in to drive policy. But what if Joseph Nye is right and the nature of warfare has dramatically changed? What if we are fighting the wrong wars with the wrong capabilities? What if those lobbyists are mainly interested in having us buy stuff created to fight yesterday´s wars and maintain jobs in their congressional districts regardless of the usefulness of what is being bought and built?
Buying the right stuff isn´t easy, but it is important, particularly when one could argue today that one of the main causes of our current economic crises was cutting taxes by $2 trillion and creating another huge "defense" bureaucracy—Department of Homeland Security, and embarking on two very expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If Ike was right, and our security as a nation is directly tied to our economic strength, we have work to do.
The ideal national security strategy is based on our values and interests. That we use economic, military, diplomatic and informational power in the world to sense or know what is going on in the world, to help or lend a hand to others, and as a last resort, to use the fist or force to protect our values and interests. Our national security should allow the United States to project power and influence with more credibility and less vulnerability. Actually that is a pretty radical statement. In contrast, a Marine general was quoted recently as saying: We must be careful not to sacrifice our honor by failing to put our people´s necks on the line." Two very different views on what we value.
For the sake of argument, let´s say I am right and that we should invest in capabilities that do not project vulnerabilities and attrition. Then we need to recognize that a smaller footprint overseas is important and that projecting mass increasingly represents vulnerability without credibility. This means we should avoid wars requiring occupation forces. Gunboat diplomacy that puts an $80 billion dollar aircraft carrier with 5,000 people in range of a massive Chinese cruise missile attack is not very smart. Buying amphibious landing craft for the Marines may make us feel good, but is a total waste of money. In the information age, capabilities that give us safe access and precision trump mass or massed forces—be it precision knowledge or precision action.
So to project power and influence with more credibility and less vulnerability we need to reorganize and rebalance our processes and organizations, and reject force that is vulnerable or no longer credible in the information age.
First, we start be recognizing we need a national security budget not a defense budget. This is huge. National security is by far our biggest line item, but your average citizen or congressman has no idea how expensive it is because we don´t call it what it is.
The national security budget must be evaluated from cradle to grave, life cycle cost versus operational cost, and in terms of risks and unintended consequences. For example, aren´t homeland defense and the VA part of our national security? Why do we keep calling the defense budget and the budget for the wars we are fighting two different things? It is all national security. By not calling it what it is, we cannot effectively evaluate our national security strategy or its costs. We don´t get the proper balance of diplomatic, military, informational, and economic capabilities. Getting the right blend of hard and soft power is what Joseph Nye calls smart power and it is an art. Getting to smart power starts with creating a transparent national security budget.
For example, we constantly hear how we could cut the budget by reducing the percentage of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid. In a recent poll most Americans believe 25 percent is spent on foreign aid when, in fact, it is about 1 percent of the budget. According to one recent study by a retired Army colonel, the military budget is about 210 times larger than USAID and State combined, in personnel terms and in budgetary terms, the mismatch is far greater, on the order of 350:1. And we have a huge increase in the VA budget because we dramatically increased the input. Isn´t the increase in wounded warriors a cost of our national security strategy?
Second, we need to quit buying and using forces that apply mass rather than precision. In the information age, mass is primarily a vulnerable target. I can´t tell you how many military exercises I have been involved in where the goal was to put people in harm´s way as fast as possible. In one "futures war game" the good guys lost three carriers in the first day. We quit using them because no president would want to lose three 80 billion dollar assets and 15,000 men and women in the first couple days of warfare. We used slides depicting Monty Python´s lost of legs and an arm to show forces left. Good for a laugh but the reality was, the lost of those carriers was not even in the out brief. Aircraft carriers are still $80 billion dollar sacred cows, even though they project power and influence with less credibility and more vulnerability.
The same goes for maintaining ground forces overseas and continuing the wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan. We need not occupy to contain the threat from Afghanistan. Regardless of outcome (we will declare victory and leave eventually,) and in hindsight, Congress would never have approved a ten year occupation to stabilize a region. We have already spent $1.121 trillion. The 2011 request for Iraq is $51B, and Afghanistan $120B. Our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan must be on the table and at the very least; Iraq must pay for US presence beyond 2011.
We need to quit projecting vulnerabilities and attrition, and leverage our technological and competencies. And as Joseph Nye suggests, "military power still matters, but the power of narrative, the power of soft power, of attracting others, is becoming more important in an information age." Bytes become more valuable that bullets and bayonets.
The challenge for the new Congress is daunting and it is difficult to be optimistic. I am reminded of a Congressman from Indiana´s thoughts on what you can get done: "When you first go to Washington DC, you go there to save the world…eventually you decide to just save the nation…then it is down to just saving your state…and eventually it was just saving the Indiana Dunes…"
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