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America’s Peace Dividend, by Ann Markusen (ed.)
The "Peace Dividend" and the Derivation of U. S. Defense Policy:
A Rejoinder to Lawrence J. Korb,
"U.S. National Defense Policy in the Post-Cold War World"
Earl C. Ravenal *
Introduction: What the Korb Paper Says
The paper, by Lawrence J. Korb, "U.S. National Defense Policy in the Post-Cold War World,"*
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*Presented at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, in the Conference on "The Peace Dividend: What's Happened Since the End of the Cold War," June 14, 2000.
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which addressed the question of what happened to the "peace dividend," raises questions that are important enough, for understanding past and present defense policy and for making future defense policy, to warrant some rebuttal and explanatory elaboration. This is especially the case because the various points in Korb's exposition, which is descriptively informative about the course of U. S. defense policy over the past decade, constitute a theoretical position regarding the making of defense policy, and because it is Korb's position, not mine, that represents the beliefs about, and attitudes toward, defense policy and the making of defense policy that are prevalent among the general public, the journalistic community, and even scholars of defense and foreign policy.
The Korb paper offers a useful concise narrative of the defense decision-making of the decade since 1989 (Bush-Cheney-Powell through Clinton-Aspin and Clinton-Cohen); and Korb's final prescriptive conclusions are sensible, and thus the paper presents an aspect of analytic validity. But, actually, the paper--not just in its tone and its slighting attitude toward defense decision-making during the '9Os--but in the entire "model" on which Korb (explicitly or not) bases his interpretations and judgments, is a diametrically false reading of the derivation of foreign and military policy, and, because of that, either arrives at, or indicates, seriously misleading conclusions about the defense decision-making of (especially); the Bush administration, and about the defense decision-making process in general, and thus the prospects for future defense programs and the specification of what has to be changed (if changes are wanted or needed).
To establish the basis of my critique, I present, here, a number of indications from the Korb paper.
The genesis of the Base Force concept in 1989-91 is attributed repeatedly to General Powell's "fear": of a congressional "stampede" to lower defense budgets OT to ''a large peace dividend"; or "that the Pentagon's political enemies would come after it with a chain saw if there was not an overarching strategy to guide the reductions." [p. 1] Later, the Base Force concept is characterized as a justification for maintaining a significant military force in the post-cold War period" [p. 1]--rather than the more straightforward notion that the new strategy (which established a regional allocation of military effort) was directly responsive to the changing shape of the international system.
Later, Korb concludes that despite the Bush-Cheney-Powell force and personnel reductions--which Korb himself quantitatively cites as amounting to one-third of active military personnel and "parallel cuts in the number of combat units"--nevertheless "the essentials of the U.S. military would remain the same or somewhat smaller." [p. 2].
Then Korb dismisses the Base Force revisions as merely "a change in the way the U.S. rationalized [emphasis added] its force structure" [p. 2], and a response to, what in Powell's imagination, were "demons and dangers of a regional nature." [p. 2].
With regard to the Bush-Cheney-Powell approach to weapons systems modernization, there is no acknowledgement of any possible satisfaction of mission requirements--only the remark that "this approach to modernization put the Pentagon into an arms race with itself..." [p. 3].
Later, there is the summary judgment that the Bush Administration accepted, uncritically, the rationale of the Base Force..." [p. 2].
When it comes to the Clinton administration, Korb is correct in citing the continuity of military policy with that of the prior Bush administration: "...the Aspin-Perry review resulted in a military hardly changed from the Base Force..." [p. 4] "...there were some changes but they were minor." [p. 4] "The QDR...propose[d] some marginal across the board reductions in personnel and weaponry..." [p. 5] But he attributes the continuity of the two-war strategy in the Bottom-Up Review, not to the (actual) continuity of national strategy, but to "the services protec[ing] their vital interests..." [p. 4], and, in Clinton's second term, the explanatory thesis that "William Cohen was no more willing than Perry, Aspin, or Clinton to take on the vested interests in the Pentagon." [p. 6]
In one place, Korb appears to underline what would strike most observers as a sizable reduction in military personnel: "...during the past decade... active duty manpower has been reduced by 770,000 or 36 percent..." But, again, Korb undermines this salient fact with the conspiratorial explanatory comment: "What is more interesting and significant is that the reductions in Army, Navy, and Air Force active manpower are almost exactly the same; 36, 37, and 37 respectively. And that the service shares of the budget remained the same throughout the decade (Army 25%, Navy 31%, and Air Force 25%). [pp. 5-6]
Korb's entire summary interpretation is that "the defense force of 2000 is essentially a smaller or shrunken version of the Reagan era Cold War force..." [emphasis added] [p. 6]; and then his causal attribution of this tendentiously described defense program is to the fact (and it is a fact, of course, but is it the cause?] that "the Pentagon is a very difficult organization to change radically, and the JCS are very skillful bureaucratic infighters." [p. 6]
Interestingly, there is some indication, in Korb's exposition, of a possible strategic reason--namely "the two war concept"--for the allegedly excessive defense program. But, in character with Korb's bureaucratic explanatory thesis, he puts the matter perversely: "The NDP...pointed out that the two war concept is not only obsolete but is primarily a device for justifying a Cold War lite force structure." [p. 6]
Ultimately, Korb describes the FY 2000 defense budget--which could be taken, in terms of requested authorization, as the Pentagon's (051) $267 billion or as the entire ''National Defense" line item (050) of $282 billion [sources: OMB, DoD]--as being "over 90 percent of the Cold War average..." [p. 6] In calculating the Cold War total, Korb is obviously using costs inflated to Year 2000 dollars, which he elsewhere in his paper [p. 4] cites as "10 trillion." That $10 trillion, divided by the, say, 44 years of the Cold War from 1947 through 1991, comes to an average annual defense expenditure of $227 billion a year, and would yield a result that over-fulfills Korb's characterization. Actually, a then-year statement of aggregate defense costs (using 050 National Defense outlays) over the 44 years of the Cold War from 1947 through l991, is $4.825 trillion, yielding an average annual defense expenditure of $107.2 billion*
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*See my more complete statement of defense costs. and my discussion of their significance, in the section below.
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in which case Korb's notion of present excessive defense spending (now almost triple the "Cold War average") would seem to be overwhelmingly compelling. But the point is actually the opposite: the irrelevance and inappropriateness of this measure (''the Cold War average"). It tells you nothing about what the defense program's tangible items (forces, weapons; operating tempo, readiness; deployments) have to cost; or why--causally, systemically--they have to cost what they cost. Yet it is that logic--running from foreign policy, through strategy, through military missions, to forces-weapons-doctrines, to required resources of money and personnel--not Korb's bureaucratic, or organizational, or military-industrial-complex model, or some model of the cognitive mind-set of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-in short, it is a rational causal model--that determines the size and composition of the defense program.
These are not random and casual gleanings; nor do they constitute just a "tone" of discourse. Rather, they are expressions of a consistent attitude toward the making of defense policy, and the motives of its makers. More than that, they imply a "model" of the derivation of the nation's defense policy, and the relationship (if any) of that defense policy to the nation's foreign policy. I believe--as a fundamental point--that Rorb's model is false--even though it represents the model that, unfortunately, is prevalent among the public, the media, and the defense academics; and that it lacks any account of a linkage of defense policy to foreign policy.
Now, in order to apply Korb's paper more specifically to the issue of the "peace dividend," it is useful to "codify" the argument that is embodied in that paper. This argument appears to have several strands:
The Outline of a Rebuttal
The following is a set of propositions that summarily states an argument that is almost diametrically opposite to the argument of Korb's paper.
The Bush Administration's Defense Policy: Transcending the Cold War*
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* This section is adapted from Earl C. Ravenal, ''The Bush Administration's Defense Policy: Transcending the Cold War," in Rosanna Perotti and Meena Bose (eds.), The Foreign Policy World of George Bush (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000).
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The "standard" notion, looking retrospectively at the foreign and military policies pursued in the Bush administration, is that President Bush, his Secretary of State James Baker, his Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, failed to "adjust" to the end of the Cold War, and simply perpetuated, mindlessly, the same old Cold War defense programs and force structures. In this view, the Bush administration failed to adjust, specifically, to the demise of the Soviet Union, the vertical decline of Russian military power and international political influence, the diffuse array of lesser threats, the obsolescence of "containment," and the opportunity to distribute a "peace dividend" from the U. S. defense budget. Such critics looked, for evidence, mostly to the apparent-hovering of the defense budget, in current dollars, near "Cold War levels."
Related criticism would center on the alleged mindlessness of the Bush foreign and defense policies, the lack of coherence, the absence of a unifying "theme," the eschewing of any "vision" of where the United States, or the world, should be going. Critics such as, for example, Fouad Ajami, reviewing James A. Baker's The Politics of Diplomacy,*
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* "Lucky Jim," review in The New Republic, January 1, 1996.
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would emphasize, and deride, the security team of 1989-93 for its shallow manipulation, its smattering of luck masked in the pretense of skill and energy, its substitution of blunt bullying for any intellectual conceptualization of the diplomatic process--and a few other things.
But, using a rather different "model" of the security process, and fixing on operational criteria for real achievement and significant action, I find that very little of the standard superficial critique is true, Yes, the Bush administration continued to insist on American primacy in international politics, and it actually broadened a kind of "containment" to extend to all regions of the world and all types of adversaries--something I have remarked elsewhere.*
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* Earl C. Ravenal, Designing Defense for a New World Order (Washington, D. C.: Cato Institute, 1991).
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But, on the levels of both foreign policy and national strategy (and, for that matter, the further levels that constitute a model of the defense policy process: military missions, forces-weapons-operational doctrines, and budgetary resources), the Bush administration instituted real and far-reaching changes.
In order to understand policy change--even to discern policy change--you have to transcend diplomatic chit-chat and resort to a comprehensive and accurate model of the foreign policy process. The Bush administration's "New World Order" was not a mere phrase, but a prescription for a definable type of international system as the object of U. S. foreign policy, with tangible requisites for national strategy and defense programs. The Bush world-view and national strategy were not beyond fault--and ultimately I identify the strains and contradictions and instabilities, and thus have to define it as transient and transitional, and pose an alternative national choice. But it was real and serious and different, particularly in that it pointed to, though it failed to attain, a different structure of the international system, and it stipulated--though in the long run the nation could not sustain--a national strategy and defense program appropriate to America's role in a New World Order.
In the terminology and typology of international systems that I employ--(1) the unitary imperium of a dominant state; (2) a truly systemic representation of "collective security"; (3) the bipolar confrontation of blocs; (4) a true multipolar balance of power; (5) the fragmented world that I call "general unalignment," characterized by the regionalization of power--the Bush administration seriously aimed at creating a regime of collective security. But this regime was to be a peculiarly American variant: An American-dominated and American-underpinned collective security, with the United Nations Security Council more as a cover for essentially unilateral American action, or for American-led ad hoc and pragmatic coalitions (as in Desert Storm), rather than a true and autonomous source of security initiatives.*
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* Translated into the parlance of the second Clinton administration's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, this represents ''assertive multilateralism," with the emphasis on the "assertive" rather than the "multilateralism."
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In opting for this large-scale choice of collective security, the Bush administration was responding to the menu of international systems that it confronted when it came to office in 198g, and soon thereafter: a choice --of the systems available, among the five differentiable "ideal-types"-between collective security and general unalignment. Spokespersons of the Bush administration would have put it--and did often put it--in terms of a choice between the kind of "engagement" what was available to the United States, and a retreat into "isolationism" and the accommodation of disorder in salient and not-so-salient areas of the world and the acquiescence to domineering, aggressive, and hostile nations and governments in their regions. The rhetoric may have been tendentious, but the choice of worlds was real.
Actually, the world was beginning to emerge out of a brief, though significant, structure that approximated a multipolar balance of power--a manageable though mutually wary consortium of great powers, dealing with each other directly in the currency of alignment and forcible opposition. The semblance of such a multipolar balance of power had been urged and partially installed through the truly radical and inventive--though widely misapprehended and misattributed--diplomacy of President Nixon and his Security Advisor and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.*
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* This diplomatic revolution was the subject of the paper: Earl C. Ravenal, "The Nixon Doctrine as History and Portent," in Leon F:riedman and William Levantrosser (eds.), Richard M. Nixon: Cold War Patriot and Statesman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.
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Contrary to virtually all popular formulations, the world did not move "from bipolarity to multipolarity" in, say, 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, or 1991, with the demise of the Soviet Union. It had been moved from its acknowledged structure of bipolar confrontation to a version of multipolar balance of power in about 1970 to 1973, through the deliberately structural diplomacy of Nixon and Kissinger, in such episodes as the courting of China, and the partial reception of the Soviet leader Brezhnev's overtures to detente in 1972 and 1973, and the chilly treatment of the European Community exemplified in the 1972 "Year of Europe" and the threat to estrange the United States from the protection of NATO. It was a further impending transformation of the international system that challenged the Bush administration, at the most "abstract" level of statecraft: the unruly and unconstructive behavior of the key multipolar balance of power players, the incipient rise of four or five new aspiring regional gehemons, and the loosening or fracturing of some key alliances and groupings. This fragmentation caused or allowed a plethora of diffuse and functionally different "threats" to emerge, both directly to regional order and indirectly to the sense of stability--if not really to the stability itself--of the United States. The response of the Bush administration--and it was a deliberate choice between the available large-scale structural alternatives of collective security and general unalignment--was the former, the New World Order.
And the national strategy that could be virtually deduced from this choice of objective international systems would be called the "Base Force Concept." This defense policy, in its ramifications of military missions and force strUctures and budgets, will be introduced in the followlng discussion.
The real, or operational, point of departure for an examination of the Bush administration's political-military stance toward the world is its defense program for Fiscal Year 1992.*
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* Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Annual Report to the President and the Congress for Fiscal Year 1992 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 19911. It is dated January 1991 but was delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 21, 1991.
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This defense program, developed in the mid-Bush administration, emerged in the context of Desert Storm. In a sense, the Persian Gulf war--the emphasis on the geographical region, the way America fought the war, the commitment of the portion of America's active force structure--was a representation of the shift in America's national strategy that had already been accomplished by the Bush national security organizations.
In this document, the Bush administration planned a significant reduction of general purpose forces, measured by the decrease from 21 land divisions at the start of 1990 to 17 land divisions at the end of 1992 (and, beyond that, to 15 land divisions in 1995 if the administration were! to survive into a second term). More important, in terms of the Bush administration's defense purposes, was a restructuring of the regional attributions of forces. This feature, which is not on the explicit surface, must be inferred from various indications in the Secretary of Defense's- 1992 "posture statement." The regional attribution of forces, which incorporates the simultaneity of planned response to a number of separate geographical contingencies, is the most revealing expression of a national strategy, in the general purpose force dimension.
In my analysis, ground forces (and, along with them, roughly proportional segments of tactical air and surface naval forces) primarily allocated to a European contingency decrease from the FY 1990 program's 11-2/3 divisions to the FY 1992 program's 7-1/3 divisions. Correspondingly, ground forces dedicated to an ''other regional" (other than Europe or East Asia) contingency increase from the 5-2/3 divisions of FY 1990 to the 6-2/3 divisions of FY 1992. (Ground forces identified for East Asia decrease moderately from 3-2/3 to 3 divisions.)
What this reflects is the arrival of the post-Cold War world, or the implementation of Bush's New World Order. This is more than a mere slogan. It acquired a tangible, operational concomitant in our force structure and defense budget. In effect (without quite putting it in such terms], Bush moved from Reagan's "1-1/2 (ample) wars"--which followed Carter's "1-1/2 (NATO-weighted) wars" and, before that, Nixon's "1-1/2 wars," which radically shifted from Johnson's and Kennedy's "2-1/2 wars"--to a new force-sizing concept that could be called "two times three-quarter wars," since a possible second war (such as that in the Persian Gulf*) might be as large as the (now scaled down) European war.
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* Or in Northeast Asia. My designation "two times three-quarter wars" would later be called "two major regional contingencies."
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That was still a formidable defense establishment. The New World Order was not self-enforcing. It depended on American power. To address the possible simultaneity of conflicts, the United States had to have fairly large and redundant forces. To confront a variety of possible adversaries, it needed a range of modern, capable forces, in turn requiring advanced technology and considerable research and development. To cope with initial defense (not just counterattack) in other regions, it had to have ready, deployed or deployable, units and forward logistical bases and pre-positioned equipment on land and sea; and for this, it needed allies that would have to be favored in various military, diplomatic, and economic ways.
In other words, collective security does not mean net burden shifting. Rather, it creates liabilities (commitments to allies, military and economic assistance) at the same rate as assets (bases, overflight, cooperative forces, some financial contribution]. In a sense J with the Bush New World Order, the United States was acquiring every nation's enemies.
True, without a permanent adversary in the form of the Soviet Union, the United States might decline some invitations to conflict. But Bush's 1992 defense program was still a prescription that was expensive and potentially escalatory. Though "beyond" the containment of a single adversary (and its proxies and sympathetic revolutionary movements), it was expressive of a globalization of containment. It universalized threats, and it hoped to collectivize the military response, always under American direction. America remained the world's policeman--perhaps even more so, since it undertook to protect against a full spectrum of challenges in any and all regions.
In order to measure how far the Bush administration traveled, from the true Cold War defense program that marked its accession to the true post Cold War military stance at which it would plan to arrive six years later (were it to remain in office), it is useful to make a direct comparison of the force structure and budgetary cost of the FY 1990 defense program with the probable force structure and budgetary cost of the projected FY 1996 defense program.*
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* Secretary of Defense Richard B. Cheney, Statement Before the House Armed Services Committee, in Connection with the FY 1990/FY 1991 Amended Budget for the Department of Defense, April 25; 1989, along with the news release "Amended FY 1990/FY l991 Department of Defense Budget," April 25, 1989. Those two documents are to be read in conjunction with the outgoing Reagan administration's FY 1990 defense budget: Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci, Annual Report to the Congress, Fiscal Year 1990 (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 17, l989).
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The "original" Bush defense program would have required, for FY 1990, $296 billion in budgetary authority; 2,121,000 military personnel; a general purpose force structure that included 21 land divisions (18 Army and 3 Marine), 25 Air Force tactical air wing equivalents, and 14 aircraft carrier battle groups with 13 Navy tactical air wings; and the standard triad of strategic nuclear forces. The military personnel and the force structure would have remained constant through FY 1996, and the 1996 defense budget, in current (then-year) dollars, would have amounted to $381 billion. Over the seven years from l990 to 1996, this program would have produced cumulative defense costs of $2.361 trillion.*
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*All defense budget figures used in this study are for budget authority (not outlays) for the subcategory 051 Department of Defense (not the entire category 050 National Defense, which also includes 053 Atomic Energy Defense Activities [mostly production of nuclear warheads in the Department of Energy] at $11.8 billion for 1992 and 054 Defense-related Activities [mostly civil defense and the standby maritime fleet] at $.8 billion for 1992. The figure also excludes the added deployment and war costs for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, which were represented by a supplemental appropriation request of $15 billion (net of allied pledges of $54.5 billion) for FY 1991.
In representing force structure, I do not count reserve units. In costing active combat forces, I take the cost of reserve forces as a kind of support cost and distribute it over the active units.
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In contrast, a plausible projection of what the Bush defense program would have been by FY 1996, based on the administration's own anticipated budget requests and on the assumption that Congress would tend. to accept the more moderate requests of that administration, is $283 billion (in current dollars) 7 1.7 million military personnel; and a force structure of 15 land divisions t12 Army and 3 Marine), 15 Air Force tactical air wings, and 12 aircraft carriers with 12 Navy air wings, in addition to a nuclear triad reduced by a strategic arms reduction treaty. Taking the actual performance of the Bush administration, which reduced its initial anticipated requests and further acquiesced in congressional reductions in FY 1990 and FY 1991, and reflecting its requests through 1996, I calculate that those seven years of defense programs would have totalled $1.g64 trillion. Thus, the Bush administration would have delivered, over seven years, savings of $397 billion, compared with projections at the time of its inauguration in 1989.
Though far from representing an extreme non-interventionist foreign policy and national strategy--which might, in theory, have produced an additional $300 billion of savings over those seven years--the Bush defense program delivered a substantial "peace dividend," shifted the regional emphasis of our defense from Europe to several other areas of the world, notably the Persian Gulf Middle East-Southwest Asia, and trimmed our force structure by--across the board--about 28 percent. That is not a negligible achievement; and the point here is that it is not mindless drift, but a real and deliberate shift to a post-Cold War national strategy and defense posture--the first phase of an intelligent adjustment to what were seen as the post-Cold War conditions of the international system. The Bush-Cheney-Powell Base Force Concept, the planning assumption of what I call "two times three-quarter-size wars," the inclusion of NATO-Europe in an "Atlantic Force" (along with the Persian Gulf-Middle East-Southwest Asia), and the emphasis on the Persian Gulf as the source of the principal force requisite for that Atlantic Force, already operationally shifted the United States out of the Cold War defense policy stance. The Base Force Concept was the strategic correlative of Bush's New World Order.
One can make another kind of comment--more prescriptive and more anticipatory of the kinds of debates that would ensue in the years following the departure of the Bush administration in January l993: The target force structure and defense budget of the Bush administration represent about the least that the United States could provide to sustain that administration's "regional force strategy" of two three-quarter-size wars, and, in turn, Bush's foreign policy of a New World Order. It became fashionable among liberal critics, and among the campaigning Clinton defense advisors, to suggest that the same American global influence, projected into every significant part of the world, could be implemented with a defense structure radically smaller than that of the Bush administration. After all, the foreign policy watchwords of the Clinton administration, "Engagement and Enlargement [of Democracy],"*
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*The White House (principally W. Anthony Lake, the President's National Security Advisor), A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, February 1996).
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cursorily describe foreign policy objects not much different in scope (though the Bush administration eschewed, for the most part, the "enlargement" factor) from those of the Bush administration. And the national strategy laid down in Secretary of Defense Les Aspin's "Bottom-Up Review"*
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* Les Aspin, Secretary of Defense, Report on the Bottom-Up Review (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1993).
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posited military missions (two nearly simultaneous major regional contingencies) not much different from those envisaged in the Bush-Powell Base Force Concept and regional force strategy.
Yet, in the end, the Clinton administration sought to make only modest further reductions in the tangible Bush defense program, roughly on the order of 12 percent.*
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See Earl C. Ravenal, Defending America in an Uncontrollable World: The Military Budget, l997 to-2002 (manuscript for the Cato Institute, Washington, O. C., 1997).
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Such fiscally-inspired cuts are not radical. And so, perversely) the initially critical Clinton administration gave a back-handed validation of the Bush defense planning process, though beginning to risk a mismatch of military missions and forces. It is fair to conclude that the liberal critics of the Bush administration's foreign policy and national strategy actually prefer those concepts, but do not want to pay for them. The bottom line is that a Bush-type world order requires a Bush-sized defense budget. If critics do not want that defense budget, they have to consider adjusting American foreign policy to a different kind of world: a much more fragmented international system- which I call "general unalignment"--with a dozen and a half regional powers playing various autonomous roles, and most of them not particularly subject to American dictates or desires. I might accept such a world; others would not. The point is that what is at stake here, is, literally, a choice of worlds.
The Cost of Defense
Of course, the question that is being asked, here, is "how much is (or was) enough?" Beyond that question is: "enough for what?" And underlying that question is: what do things cost?
In other words, to make jutgments about whether the cost of something--here, the defense program of this or that administration--is or was too high, OT too low, or about right--you have to know:
(a) How to cost things like defense programs in the first place, in terms of their aggregates and their significant elements. This means that, in turn, you have to know what those significant elements are (not reserve units, not most individual overhead items and many support items, not even line items such as procured weapons systems except insofar as they are absorbed into and allocated to the "output" units such as combat forces), in other words, the combat forces (the force structure, taken on a "full-slice" basis--that is, with all support and overhead allocated) are what is significant in the defense program, in terms of costing, and counting.
(b) How force structures are related--through the military miss-ions for which they are generated and kept in, or mobilized into, the active force structure--to national strategies; for instance, what ''building blocks" of forces, for one regional contingency, can be determined from the forces that the United States deployed to and around the Persian Gulf for the Gulf War in 1990-91.
(c) Thus, what difference it makes (or should make), in terms of our defense program and its cost, whether this country pursues one or another national strategy.
(d) And finally, how (even, if you think, tenuously) a certain national strategy logically implements a given foreign policy (that is, roughly, the nation's "stance" in and toward the world, in terms of its role and its situation); this will tell you what difference it makes if we adopt this or that national strategy.
If you do not have a good intellectual grip on (a "model" of) the items above, the you cannot make secure and valid judgments about how much was or is or will be enough, or should or should have been enough, for a theater campaign, a war, or a half century of Cold War.
Perhaps the main points--structural, theoretical--of the above are (1) that there are linkages (rational, not just "rationalizations") among foreign policy and strategy and military missions and forces-weapons-doctrines and budgets; and (2) there are consequences of contemplated changes, and' if you want to make those changes, you should know those consequences, and--more important--you have to accept them.
The foregoing is, more or less, a methodological footnote, but it is unavoidable, especially since (1) the Korb paper does not invoke the essential linkages--(a) between defense programs and national strategies, which linkage he does not, methodologically, take seriously, or, at least, literally; (b) between national strategies and foreign policies, which linkage he does not even take into his account; (2) the Korb paper replicates a misconception (which, unfortunately, is endemic among the public, the journalistic community, and even the defense-academic profession), regarding the cost to the United States of the Cold War, which Korb (assenting to the statement of the late Les Aspin) puts at "$10 trillion" [p. 4].
The cost, to the United States, of our grand strategy of containment throughout the Cold War (which is the cost of engaging in the Cold War, rather than avoiding the Cold War) can be expressed as the difference between, on the one hand, some baseline, which we could have maintained anyway, otherwise, and, on the other hand, the strategy of containment. The counterpart of the cost, on the other side of an equation [or, of course, an "inequality"], is the benefit of that strategy of containment. Without an expression of the benefit (and this, again, implies a conceptualization of a baseline), there cannot be a "cost-benefit" calculation or a cost-benefit judgment (as Korb makes, in his paper, with regard to a future prescribed defense program [p. 7]).
| Substantively, then, what did the Cold War cost? | |||
| The entire outlay for ''national defense" (line item (51), during 1947 through 1991, was | $ 4,825 billion | ||
| of which strategic nuclear programs cost or 24+ percent | 1,173 billion | ||
| and general purpose force programs cost or 76- percent. | 3,652 billion | ||
| An alternative strategy of retrenchment or non-intervention would have cost | 1,988 billion | ||
| of which strategic nuclear programs would have cost | 782 billion | ||
| and general purpose force programs would have cost | 1,206 billion | ||
| Thus, the cost of containment [comprising extended deterrence and forward defense/alliance] was | 2,827 billion * | ||
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*The year-by-year elements of these costs are presented in the chart that follows in the text. These figures are taken from the much longer and more detailed discussion in Earl C. Ravenal, "The Gost of Defense: History, Methodology, Theory," paper presented to the [nternational Studies Association, Los Angeles, California, March 15, 2000.
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| "National Defense" | Non-Intervention | Save | ||||||||||
| Fiscal Year | Outlay $Bil | %Nuc. | $Nuc. | %GPF | $GPF | %Nuc. | $Nuc. | %GPF | $GPF | %Nuc. | $Nuc. | $Tot. |
| 47 | 13 | 20 | 3 | 10 | 67 | 2 | 33 | 3 | 1 | 7 | 8 | |
| 48 | 9 | 2 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 7 | ||||
| 49 | 13 | 3 | 10 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 7 | 8 | ||||
| 50 | 14 | 3 | 11 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 7 | 8 | ||||
| 51 | 24 | 5 | 19 | 3 | 6 | 2 | 13 | 15 | ||||
| 52 | 46 | 9 | 37 | 6 | 12 | 3 | 25 | 28 | ||||
| 53 | 53 | 11 | 42 | 7 | 14 | 4 | 28 | 32 | ||||
| 54 | 49 | 30 | 15 | 34 | 10 | 11 | 5 | 23 | 28 | |||
| 55 | 43 | 13 | 30 | 9 | 10 | 4 | 20 | 24 | ||||
| 56 | 43 | 13 | 30 | 9 | 10 | 4 | 20 | 24 | ||||
| 57 | 45 | 14 | 31 | 9 | 10 | 5 | 21 | 26 | ||||
| 58 | 47 | 14 | 33 | 9 | 11 | 5 | 22 | 27 | ||||
| 59 | 49 | 15 | 34 | 10 | 11 | 5 | 23 | 28 | ||||
| 60 | 48 | 14 | 34 | 9 | 11 | 5 | 23 | 28 | ||||
| 61 | 49 | 15 | 34 | 10 | 11 | 5 | 23 | 28 | ||||
| 62 | 52 | 26 | 14 | 38 | 9 | 13 | 5 | 25 | 30 | |||
| 63 | 53 | 14 | 39 | 9 | 13 | 5 | 26 | 31 | ||||
| 64 | 55 | 14 | 41 | 9 | 14 | 27 | 27 | 32 | ||||
| 65 | 51 | 13 | 38 | 9 | 13 | 4 | 25 | 29 | ||||
| 66 | 58 | 15 | 43 | 10 | 14 | 5 | 29 | 34 | ||||
| 67 | 71 | 18 | 53 | 12 | 17 | 6 | 36 | 42 | ||||
| 68 | 82 | 24 | 20 | 62 | 13 | 20 | 7 | 42 | 49 | |||
| 69 | 82 | 20 | 62 | 13 | 20 | 7 | 42 | 49 | ||||
| 70 | 82 | 20 | 62 | 13 | 20 | 7 | 42 | 49 | ||||
| 71 | 79 | 19 | 60 | 13 | 20 | 6 | 40 | 46 | ||||
| 72 | 79 | 13 | 60 | 13 | 20 | 6 | 40 | 46 | ||||
| 73 | 77 | 18 | 59 | 12 | 19 | 6 | 40 | 46 | ||||
| 74 | 79 | 19 | 60 | 13 | 20 | 6 | 40 | 46 | ||||
| 75 | 86 | 21 | 65 | 14 | 21 | 7 | 44 | 51 | ||||
| 76 | 89 | 21 | 68 | 14 | 21 | 7 | 47 | 54 | ||||
| 77 shift FY | 97 | 23 | 74 | 15 | 24 | 8 | 50 | 58 | ||||
| 78 | 104 | 25 | 79 | 17 | 26 | 8 | 53 | 61 | ||||
| 79 | 116 | 28 | 88 | 19 | 29 | 9 | 59 | 68 | ||||
| 80 | 134 | 32 | 102 | 21 | 34 | 11 | 68 | 79 | ||||
| 81 | 158 | 38 | 120 | 25 | 40 | 13 | 80 | 93 | ||||
| 82 | 185 | 44 | 141 | 29 | 47 | 15 | 94 | 109 | ||||
| 83 | 210 | 50 | 160 | 34 | 53 | 16 | 107 | 123 | ||||
| 84 | 227 | 54 | 173 | 36 | 57 | 18 | 116 | 134 | ||||
| 85 | 253 | 61 | 192 | 41 | 63 | 20 | 129 | 149 | ||||
| 86 | 273 | 66 | 207 | 44 | 72 | 22 | 135 | 167 | ||||
| 87 | 282 | 68 | 214 | 46 | 71 | 22 | 143 | 165 | ||||
| 88 | 290 | 70 | 220 | 47 | 73 | 23 | 147 | 170 | ||||
| 89 | 304 | 73 | 231 | 49 | 76 | 24 | 155 | 179 | ||||
| 90 | 299 | 72 | 227 | 48 | 75 | 24 | 152 | 176 | ||||
| 91 | 273 | 20 | 55 | 218 | 37 | 72 | 18 | 146 | 164 | |||
| 4,825 | 2431 | 1,173 | 7569 | 3,652 | 782 | 1,206 | 391 | 2,446 | 2,837 | |||
| 24 % | 76% |
|
||||||||||
| 40-46 | 305 | 2 | ||||||||||
| 92-96 | 1,409 | 238 | ||||||||||
This is not to say that $2.8 trillion is a lot or a little, or that containment was worth it or not worth it.. For those two kinds of judgments, you need to know more about the carrying capacity of the nation's "political economy" (that is, its political-constitutional and social and economic system); and about the probable adverse (one assumes) consequences, for the United States (and conceivably for "the world" as a whole) if the United States had retrenched to the non-interventionist, "fortress," strategy; and you have to have a good intellectual grip on how you value those consequences.
Implications for Foreign Policy
The little practical irony of this discussion is that I substantially endorse the prescriptive concluding points that Korb makes, on several levels and in several functions of the defense program: strategy, deployments, forces, weapons, organization, procurement, logistics.*
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*Korh's prescriptions can be highlighted as follows [P. 7]:
one-war-plus strategy;
tiered readiness;
reduction of U. S. forces in Europe to 25,000;
reduction of U. S. strategic nuclear forces to 1,000 warheads;
postponement of deployment of missile defense pending technology and diplomacy;
moving frequently used units from reserve to active, and moving heavy armor units from active to reserve;
skipping a generation of full production of new weapons systems;
improvements and tightening of military personnel benefits.
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I particularly appreciate his recommendation to shift down from the present two-regional-war strategy to a "one war plus" strategy. (Here, I would go even further down, to what I would call a "one-war-minus (or hedge)" strategy.*
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I would also: accomplish the "tiered readiness" concept by taking several divisions out of the active force structure whether or not these were placed in the reserves; remove U. S. forces from Europe entirely; retain slightly more strategic nuclear weapons; probably move somewhat earlier to deployment of missile defenses; accomplish the removing of some of the armored units from active status without necessarily putting them into the reserves; probably produce (rather than skip) many of the new weapons systems requested by the Services, but in the smaller numbers appropriate to a smaller force structure.
This is not the place to elaborate my own prescribed national strategy and defense program. I do this in several places, such as Earl C. Ravenal, "The Handwriting on the Wall: The United States and the Impending Denial of Extra-Regional Intervention," paper presented to the International Security Studies Section, International Studies Association, November 11-13, l999, and "'Isolationism' as the Denial of Intervention: What Foreign Policy Is and Isn't," Foreign Policy Briefing, Cato Institute, Washington, D. C., April 27, 2000.
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Thus, Korb is not unmindful of the fact that the simultaneity of military missions is the largest swing factor in the size and cost of defense programs. Yet his model of the derivation of defense programs denies the rational process (what I call the "defense planning process") in which (a) the military missions are derived from the national strategy, and (b) the national strategy--including the simultaneity of contingent military missions are derived from the nation's foreign policy. The key to this is Korb's own citation of the strategic dictum of both the Bush and the Clinton administrations, to the effect that "the U.S. needed to continue to 'shape' the international environment..." [p. 5] In a somewhat diffuse, but recognizable way, this demanding requirement, which is at the hinge of national strategy and foreign policy, virtually dictates a two-war capability.*
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* In one place in his paper, Korb identifies some of the supporting reasoning for a two-war capability, on the part of then-Chairman/JCS General Powell: "Powell argued that U.S. forces could not be sized to defeat just one of the rogues, because that might tempt another potential aggressor...to take advantage of a situation when all U.S. forces were committed against one..." [pp. 2,3] However, Korb still characterizes this reasoning as a "rationalization]." [p. 2] This is in a passage where Korb explains --I think somewhat: disapprovingly--that, after the disappearance of the more explicit and more easily quantified Soviet threat, "the U.S. would shift from a threat based force to a threat and capability based force" [p. 23. I think that it is not hard to recognize the basic sense, in a more diffuse and less imminent threat environment, yet with long lead-times in shaping our forces, of moving to a more generic characterization of military requirements. It is also not hard to recognize that our allies and other dependencies can read, however roughly, the connection between their reliance on the United States and our maintenance of a multi-theater military capability.
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The important methodological and theoretical point is that America's military --or America's "military-industrial complex"--do not invent our foreign policy, and do not fabricate a national strategy to disguise a self-serving scheme to aggrandize their parochial power or their economic status. They receive foreign policy guidance (however imperfectly, and sometimes contradictorily, it may be enunciated), and they, predominantly, try to implement it. To posit otherwise--as, I must acknowledge, do most observers (bystanders, and even former official participants who may be overly impressionable about their own bureaucratic experiences)--is not only to misrepresent the defense planning process, but to cut the intelligible linkage--from foreign policy to resource requirements--that enables us to make the appropriate changes, at the appropriate level of policy, if changes are desired or needed.
There is no free lunch at the foreign policy level. If, and to the extent that, America's national strategy is curtailed, say, to Korb's "one war plus," then America's foreign policy will have to be correspondingly more modest-that is, less interventionist, less confidently interventionist, less globally hegemonic. There may be other, autonomous, reasons that advise a more modest American foreign policy.* But the large practical question
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*I cite such reasons in two papers mentioned in a footnote above: "Handwriting" and "Isolationism" as the Denial of Intervention.
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is how America's present allies (in Europe, in the Western Pacific) and dependents (including the notable case of Israel)--let alone how America's present and future enemies, whether peer competitors or substantial nuisances--will react, especially in their own regional contexts, to America's induced limitations. I myself might be willing to take the consequences; others might not. But there will be consequences.
To have a model of America's defense and foreign policy derivation that eliminates the pivotal connection, and thus-denies the consequences OT prevents the weighing of consequences, is, therefore, an important error. The erroT goes beyond mischaracterizing the "peace dividend" (which really turns out to be a strategy dividend), or mis-stating the cost of defense. To put it somewhat more bluntly: How you think about policy has something to do with what you think about policy.
* EARL C. RAVENAL, a former official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and before that President of an industrial corporation, is emeritus professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and now Distinguished Senior Fellow of the`Cato Institute in Washington, D. C. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, he was awarded the Henry Fellowship to the University of Cambridge, England, and he attended the Harvard Business School and received the M.A. and Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Dr. Ravenal is the author of twelve books and over 200 articles and papers on foreign and military policy. He was a faculty member of the Salzburg Seminar, and a Fellow of the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research at The Johns Hopkins University, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has lectured at over 70 universities, military institutions, and research organizations, in the United States anfl abroad, and has appeared many times on television and before Congressional committees to give expert testimony. Back
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