Quote Originally Posted by ipopescu View Post
I began reading this 2001 book on defense budgets and force structure, Holding the Line, edited by Cindy Williams (currently at MIT, formerly in a high-level position at the Congressional Budget Office.) It is a compilation of the conventional wisdom regarding defense planning for the 2000-2010 period as it was viewed at that time. It seems so incredibly dated, hard to believe it's merely a decade old: the main worry was that the coming 4 trillion budget surplus may mean defense spending would rise over the 2000 level of $300 billion that DoD anticipated for the next five years. The military was said to be worried that in addition to being able to sustain one conventional Major Theater War AND multiple "lesser contingencies" (stability and peacekeeping operations, you know, stuff that doesn't require much attention in terms of dedicated resources), it may not have enough available forces for a SECOND conventional Major Theater War. No talk whatsoever of CT or COIN or irregular warfare, although the contributors (civilian and military professionals alike) proclaim with certitude that they are offering the solutions to move the military form Cold War structure to what's required in the 21st century. The recommendations suggested further cuts in structure, on the grounds that we only really need to win one MTW and do lesser interventions (by which I take to mean everything that's not MTW), so the capabilities for a potential second war could be eliminated. And our "likely" adversaries are so weak that we would surely have some overmatch left anyway, given our technological supremacy.

Thinking about how people who are kind of doing studying and writing about this stuff for a living could be proven so "wrong" (if that's the right word) over such a short period of time, I was left with a renewed appreciation for humbleness and flexibility in all efforts to design the "necessary" forces for coming wars. I fully understand why Ski and Ken talk about too much "creating and changing force structure." Constant reform and adaptation are obviously needed as threats evolve and enemies change, but I'm almost coming to believe that there are some hidden virtues in the much-maligned bureaucratic resistance to changing the way the military works.
I think there is general agreement that we have a means/ends mismatch in our current defense strategy. But there are always two solutions to such a mismatch: increase your means or diminish your ends. That's the shape the debate is taking now.

I thought the contours were pretty clear at the Heritage Foundation symposium earlier that week that SECDEF addressed on Tuesday morning. One school of thought (led by Heritage and AEI) is that we need a significant increase in the defense budget for about a decade to recapitalize. People like former Senator Jim Talent at Heritage advocate 4% of GDP. People like Toim Donnelly at AEI also support a significant force size increase.

The other argument (expressed very powerfully by Chris Preble of the Cato Institute at the Heritage symposium) is that we need to diminish our commitments. Chris contends that the bulk of our defense spending is actually defending other nations that could well afford to pay for their own security rather than defending Americans. The Stanley Foundation policy brief that Frank Hoffman and I did last year, while not as extreme as the Cato position, also argued that we need to be more circumspect in what we plan and budget for. Specifically, we took issue with the scenarios that are used to justify a force increase post-Iraq and Afghanistan such as the occupation and stabilization of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, or something similar. Frank and I were not sanguine about the threat from terrorist bases in distant lands or uncontrolled nuclear weapons. We just didn't think that long term occupation and attempted social and political re-engineering of flawed states is the most effective way to address these threats.

Basically, we could build a 5 million person force, and missions would emerge to occupy them. What we need to ask ourselves is whether, in this time of mounting economic, environmental, and social challenges, we really want to underwrite the security of other nations who spend much less than we do on their own defense (and I mean on a per capita basis, not in the aggregate).