Europe vs. The Washington Post's War Agenda

Fred Hiatt and his crew have published an unsigned editorial, chastising NATO countries for failing to spend enough money on their military forces. I'll outsource in part to Dan Larison's preemptive strike:

It may be obvious, but Gates’ two examples of non-U.S. NATO failings have nothing to do with European defense. Certainly, the limitations of European military power show that their governments remain dependent on the U.S. for security, but there are few worse ways to persuade European governments and publics that they have the wrong priorities than to lecture them on their insufficient support for Afghanistan and Libya....

As for Libya, it is important to remember that the governments that have contributed nothing to the war never wanted to attack Libya, and they wanted to keep NATO out of it all together. Gates directed his ire at several of these governments the other day, as if Germany, Poland, and Turkey should be expected to pitch in to support a military campaign they explicitly opposed. These are not the governments that wanted the U.S. to engage in combat missions in Libya, because they didn’t want any outside government taking military action in Libya. What Gates should have acknowledged when faced with the refusal of German, Polish, and Turkish governments to participate in bombing Libya is that Libya is not properly a matter for NATO and should never have been a NATO mission.

Hiatt's crew complains,

As [Gates] made clear, this country can no longer afford to do a disproportionate share of NATO’s fighting and pay a disproportionate share of its bills while Europe slashes its defense budgets and free-rides on the collective security benefits.

And Gates has different priorities than the nations of Europe, who see significant benefit in "free riding". For that matter, I don't recall Hiatt and his crew coming out against austerity measures in Europe. Even if we ignore how popular it would be for European nations to announce tens of billions in new military spending as they slash domestic programs, the question arises: how is increasing military spending consistent with austerity? As Hiatt knows from his own paper, Britain's austerity measures include significant cuts in military spending.

Hiatt's crew complains that Europe places too many restrictions on the rules of engagement when it commits troops to NATO ventures, and that Libya should be more important to Europe than it is to the U.S., presumably because it's closer? They also complain that the nations involved in the bombing of Libya don't have the resources to carry out a perpetual campaign:

Even fully participating members have failed to train enough targeting specialists to keep all of their planes flying sorties or to buy enough munitions to sustain a bombing campaign much beyond the present 11 weeks.

That should frighten every defense ministry in Europe. What if they had to fight a more formidable enemy than Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s fractured dictatorship?

Can we be honest for a moment? The fact that the European nations who wanted to participate in the Libyan adventure cannot sustain a 12 week bombing campaign against a nation in North Africa does not mean that they cannot defend themselves. The fact that they impose strict rules of engagement on their troops when deployed for NATO missions in Africa or Asia does not mean that, if faced with military invasion, they would apply those same rules. The fact that nobody is talking about using nuclear weapons in Libya does not mean that, when Europe faced an actual and potentially imminent existential threat, the probable use of nuclear weapons in its defense was not taken for granted.

I also expect that if the nations of Europe did perceive a growing, potentially existential threat, they would buy some additional planes and bombs in response. One reason not to do so is that, used or not, the ongoing cost of training, support and maintenance is significant. Another reason not to do so is out of recognition that when you have greater military capacity there's always somebody, within the state or on the outside, who wants you to use it. When President McCain says, "It's time to invade... Iran", it's easier to respond, "We can't" than "We won't."

In specific relation to Libya, the priorities here have less to do with Europe's ability to defend itself from proximate or imminent threats, and more to do with its unwillingness to pour huge amounts of money into overseas adventurism. Yes, sometimes threats do arise in other continents, and under some circumstances it may make sense to take military action in those nations as a matter of self-defense. But humanitarian missions, as the Libyan adventure was initially described, are not a matter of self-defense. And as should be obvious to anybody who has paid even slight attention to world history, past or present, military interventions often do not go as planned and often carry serious repurcussions. George W. Bush and Tony Blair presented Gadafi as proof positive of the success of the "War on Terror", and now he's a poster child for the evil despots of the world who must be removed at any cost... which in a sense takes us back to Reagan's time, except that Reagan put a pretty low ceiling on the cost he was willing to incur to depose Gadafi. How is this mission vital to Europe's interests?

Military Spending Must Only Go Up

In an article at Commentary, Arthur Herman complains that Defense Secretary Gates is proposing cuts in military spending.

Altogether, the Gates Pentagon has slated $300 billion to be axed, including $100 billion in the next five years through reduced overhead and cuts in low-priority programs. And as all this happens, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will grow to spend five federal dollars for every dollar spent on defense.

First the factual error: Gates has not proposed cutting the military budget. He has proposed reallocating the money from his proposed cuts "from administrative overhead to force structure", and has proposed that military spending continue to increase.

What we need is modest, sustainable growth over a prolonged period of time that allows us to make sensible investment decisions, and not have these giant increases and giant decreases that make efficiency and doing acquisition in a sensible way almost impossible.

And the logical error, of course, is that the cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are not affected by whether or not there are cuts in the military budget. Herman continues,

But the Obama-Gates drawdown signals a more ominous trend—a unilateral shift away from maintaining an American military that is truly second to none toward something far more modest in size and scope. A peacetime drawdown, such as took place after World War II and after the Cold War, is entirely appropriate and to be expected. But imposing one while a war—not one war but two, actually—is ongoing is an innovation, and not a welcome one.

Nothing in Gates' proposal suggests that he intends to reduce the size and scope of the military, unless you mean on the administrative side. Nothing in Gates' proposal even slightly resembles a peacetime drawdown, let alone something that would make the U.S. military to be "more like those of our European allies".

Herman also finds it problematic that the shift in the military from fighting two conventional, large-scale, land-based conflicts at the same time is being shifted in favor of fighting one such conflict along with a greater capacity to deploy and act quickly in potentially numerous locations where the U.S. is not fighting a conventional military:

The era of relying on the Abrams tank, the B-52, and carriers like the USS Eisenhower to defend American interests was coming to an end. In their place would be a smaller, swifter, and more flexible force, able to perform a range of operations, from protecting the homeland “in cooperation with domestic agencies” to executing counterinsurgencies and humanitarian missions.

There's nothing new there, of course - Donald Rumsfeld was advancing a similar concept for the military before 9/11. (Herman later touches on that fact, but is intentionally vague about the similarity of Rumsfeld's conception to what he now opposes.) Frankly, there's something to be said for not having to spend three to six months transporting your equipment by air and sea before you can launch a military action. Contrary to Herman's expectation, not every future conflict in which the U.S. will be involved is going to be a war of choice against a weak opponent. Frankly, if the U.S. remains prepared for a single large-scale conflict against one of the world's stronger militaries, it shouldn't have any problem simultaneously kicking down the doors in two nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Herman criticizes Gates for his role in trimming the CIA in the post-Cold War era,

Those same tensions are now rising at the Pentagon. Gates is setting in motion a scramble to get rid of what we have now in order to create room for what’s to come. The result is supposed to be a leaner but more fully ready and versatile force. But what if we end up not with something better but—as with the CIA in the 90s—a calamity waiting to happen?

Sort of a cross between poisoning the well ("Gates has been wrong before, so why should we trust him now") with an appeal to tradition ("We've been doing things in a particular way in the past, so we should assume that approach is better than the alternatives").

Although Herman concedes that the U.S. has "an abnormally large nuclear-weapons arsenal relative to the rest of the world", he stomps his feet at the idea of cuts,

During the Cold War, America’s overwhelming nuclear strength not only made all-out war with the USSR unimaginable; it also prevented regional conflicts like Korea and Vietnam from escalating into hot clashes between the world’s biggest nuclear powers. No one can say how our decline as a nuclear behemoth will affect the dynamic of our long-term dealings with China and Russia, especially when they have learned that we are prepared to throw away our greatest advantage in the nuclear sweepstakes—our missile defense—at the stroke of a treaty pen, while rogue nations like North Korea and Iran are allowed to continue their nuclear- and ballistic-missile programs unchecked.

Except there's no basis in fact for this appeal to fear. The U.S. with its smaller, updated nuclear arsenal will remain capable of destroying the entire world several times over. Compared to the U.S., China's nuclear arsenal is and will remain tiny, but Herman would have us tremble in our boots at the thought of a military conflict with China - If that's all it takes to rattle the world's only superpower, why does Herman think the continued, massive U.S. nuclear deterrant won't intimidate other nations? ("They U.S can only wipe our entire country off the face of the earth 100 times? I scoff at their weakness.") Herman's overstatement seems to reduce to "No military program can ever be cut, because any cut could make us weaker". As for missile defense, there are legitimate questions as to what it could achieve even if the technology works. (But Herman has his baggy pants on and is performing that classic dance - "U can't touch this.")

Herman isn't content to argue that the old way of arming the nation must be maintained - he's simultaneously insisting that new defense technologies render it too vulnerable to even weak nations:

In the larger strategic picture, it’s also one where relatively cheap but deadly accurate anti-ship, cruise, and ballistic missiles will allow not only big powers like China and Russia but also third-rate ones like Iran and Syria (or even terrorist bands like Hezbollah) to threaten our aircraft carriers off the Taiwan coast or in the Persian Gulf, and where electronic anti-satellite warfare and cyberattacks can, at minimal expense, deny us command and control of those same forces.

Apparently he sees no contradiction between asserting that the massively expensive ships and war planes that he insists cannot be cut will be useless even against a piddling opponent like Hezbollah, and his notion that we must maintain and even expand expand our military's use of and dependence upon them.

Yet here Gates and the Pentagon find themselves in a painful dilemma. Their ultimate goal is to modernize our forces so that we can avoid spending more money: but every modernizing solution requires spending more, not less.

I guess it bears repeating: Gates has proposed spending more money, not less. That being said, there's no logical basis for the assertion that "every modernizing solution requires spending more" money.

As you have no doubt inferred, the editorial's foundation is an appeal to fear ("Rethinking our military and its spending will make us weak, vulnerable and subject to terrorist attacks.")

In the end, there remains only one alternative: to shrink the mission. If you want to see the results of a shrinking CIA budget and mission, visit lower Manhattan. What might follow from Gates’s career-capping years at the Obama Pentagon could make Ground Zero look like a war game.

When people are in a state of fear they don't think very well. So is the issue here that Herman is trying to create a state of fear, or is it that he's working from a state of fear? (What else do we have in that finale? A false dichotomy, a non sequitur....)

The End of the "Combat Mission" in Iraq

It is telling that, with the end of the combat "mission", the U.S. will continue to have about 50,000 troops in Iraq backed up by over 100,000 contractors. Sure, we're told, the "combat mission" is over but, should the need arise, it's pretty clear that the U.S. is maintaining the capacity to engage in fierce ground combat - at least for now, whatever's necessary to sustain the interim government and to prevent the resumption of civil war.

it's telling that while Republicans like John Boehner are crowing that "the surge succeeded", a claim that is true only to the extent that we ignore the fact that it failed to produce the results G.W. Bush described as the measure of its success. To the extent that the surge helped build a sustainable period of relative calm, assuming it actually proves to be sustainable, let's give its planners the credit their due. But back to Gates:

The uneasy peace of Baghdad, Mr. Gates said, had come at great cost, with 4,427 U.S. service members killed and another 34,265 wounded. And the mission, he said, was incomplete. Iraq is still without a coalition government months after its election and political compromise remains elusive.

"Sectarian tensions remain a fact of life, al Qaeda in Iraq is beaten, but not gone," Mr. Gates said. "This is not a time for premature victory parades or self-congratulations."

If the "project" in Iraq is to end with a bang or a whimper, both of the political parties are desperately hoping for a whimper. While attempting to avoid any "Mission Accomplished" moments, we're effectively declaring victory while maintaining huge numbers of combat forces in Iraq, ostensibly only until the end of 2012, such that we can quickly suppress any coup, civil war or popular uprising. It's telling that while Boehner wants to claim victory on behalf of his party, he's not willing to take the stance that the withdrawal is premature, a charade that leaves us ready to resume combat at a moment's notice, pulling the "you're letting enemies of the state know when we'll be gone" card (as Republicans are apt to do with Afghanistan) or (as might somebody at the extreme of his party) the treacherous act of a closet Muslim President. He's also not pointing out that the date set as the target for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops comes conveniently after the next Presidential election, convenient timing for any incumbent.

Border Defense and Military Spending

There's no dispute. Whether you're talking dollars or comparing U.S. expenditures to those of other nations, the U.S. spends a vast amount of money on its military. If you add in the cost of the nation's ongoing wars, the U.S. outspends every other nation in the world, combined. I'll credit Reihan Salam with being one of the few conservatives to directly address this issue, specifically for recognizing that the expenditure flows from our nation's expectations of the military and its role in the world, but that there is room for legitimate debate over that role.

Here are a couple of things that a President might not like to talk about, but has to think about. In many parts of the world, fresh water sources are being depleted. In many parts of the world, global warming threatens the food supply and will cause desertification. The drug war is destabilizing many nations, including Mexico. As things get worse in the rest of the world, it is likely that more people will attempt to illegally enter the United States. And while we can talk about measures that might be taken to reduce carbon emissions, how other countries might be assisted in developing their own economies and preparing strategies for potential food and water shortages, or how legalization of certain drugs would reduce the cash flow to drug cartels around the world, the fact is that Congress isn't prepared to take any serious action on any of those issues. Meanwhile, odds are that additional nations are going to join "the nuclear club," some of which are likely to be hit in the not-so-distant future by shortages of affordable food and fresh water.

Within that context, if you're the President, you might prefer to cut the military budget and redefine the role of the military, hoping that you can form military coalitions to address future problems. Or you might look at the future and perceive a need to maintain or even to expand the role of the military in order to be reasonably able to unilaterally defend U.S. interests as the global situation deteriorates. In that latter context, your Defense Secretary might sound a lot like Robert Gates, looking for ways to cut spending not in order to reduce military spending but to be able to maintain or expand the mission of the military without increasing the military budget. (By doing things such as reducing retirement benefits for military personnel.)

Yes, it's a fair retort, "But we could start taking steps, right now, to fix those problems or at least to mitigate their effects." But you know what? You can easily pass the military budget. You can easily pass supplemental war spending. You can easily pass a $600 billion border security bill, with the opposition party arguing "It's not enough". But when it comes to revisiting the nation's approach to drugs, carbon emissions, or whether there's an alternative to being a military hyperpower in a world that is likely to become less stable, you're likely to get Congressional consensus on only one thing: "We can't cut the military budget; if anything, we should spend more."

Governing Like Bush?

Michael Gerson's the latest to pen an "OMG! He's Just Like Bush!" column about Barack Obama - the type of column that suggests that his only sources of information about Obama are party memos and McCain's campaign ads.

Conservatives have generally feared that Obama is a closet radical. He has uniformly voted with liberal interests and done nothing to justify a reputation for centrism.

Until now.

Because there is no evidence that Obama is a cautious politician with a history of working from consensus and not making waves. Oh, wait. I guess there is plenty of evidence if you base your analysis of Obama's record on, you know, his record. I believe Larison overstates his case in respect to the implications of this:

Most people in the broad “middle” seem to be relieved by Obama’s moves in the last few weeks, so I have to conclude that they don’t have much of a problem with conventional Washington thinking, either. The majority is not just getting the government they deserve, but apparently it is also the government they want. When it fails them, as it is going to do, I don’t want to hear them complaining about the problems of the status quo.

Our system is constructed to impede radical change. If you want disappointment, elect your ideological hero in the form of a Dennis Kucinich or a Ron Paul, and see how his agenda for reform never even gets out of the starting blocks. But that aside, it's always been readily apparent that Obama's far from being the socialist revolutionary the McCain campaign, and portions of the right-wing punditocracy, attempted to argue. But back to Gerson:

Obama's appointments reveal not just moderation but maturity - magnanimity to past opponents, a concern for continuity in a time of war and economic crisis, a self-confidence that allows him to fill gaps in his own experience with outsize personalities, and a serious commitment to incarnate his rhetoric of unity.

Again, which part of this wasn't apparent from Obama's record?

Obama is benefiting from being the only player on the stage - all his pretensions of moderation could be quickly undermined by a liberal Congress, unhinged by its expanded majority. And Obama's social liberalism could still turn Washington into a culture-war battlefield.

I suspect that Gerson means this as a caution, or as a distinction from G.W. - But if you look at the history of G.W.'s administration, perhaps instead he's warning us that Obama's first term could look like G.W.'s administration, during his first eight months and starting again with his reelection, where his popularity plummeted and he ran both his administration and (with their active complicity) his party into the ground.

Though Obama's campaign savaged the administration as incompetent and radical, Obama's personnel decisions have effectively ratified Bush's defense and economic approaches during the past few years. At the Pentagon, Obama rehired the architects of President Bush's current military strategy - Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Raymond Odierno. At the Treasury Department, Obama has hired one of the main architects of Bush's current economic approach.

This continuity does not make Obama an ideological traitor. It indicates that Bush has been pursuing centrist, bipartisan policies - without getting much bipartisan support.

Good grief, does Gerson pay attention to anything? When Obama launched his campaign, we were told of the superiority of Bush's war policy, and that Obama's call for ending the war and fixing a date for withdrawal of the troops was defeatism that would reward terrorists. Around that same time, Bush brought in Gates to replace the disastrous leadership of Donald Rumsfeld and within months "every single one of the top commanders running the war ha[d] been replaced." Bush has since negotiated a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. That is, in the face of significant public opposition to his war and his policies, Bush shifted his position from his prior (failed) partisan policies to something to what he would formerly have described as letting the terrorists win.

Gates was appointed by the Senate in a 95-2 vote. When Bush started moving from partisanship toward the positions shared by the majority of Congress and the majority of the American people, he got plenty of support. It isn't Obama who has shifted on these issues - it's Bush.

In terms of treasury, Gerson is apparently talking about Timothy Geithner. There's good reason to believe that Geithner has worked with Henry Paulson to fashion the response to the present crisis in the financial industry, but... you know, funny thing, you would expect the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to be involved in this sort of crisis. Although I am not at all impressed with Paulson's inconsistent approach to this crisis, or his tendency to indiscriminately and unconditionally throw money at banks while refusing to hold bank executives responsible for their incompetence, he's clearly been given a lot of discretion to respond to this crisis. To some degree you have to credit Bush with giving him that discretion, but Bush's desperation is hardly reflective of centrist policy. In normal times, the political center would be horrified by what Paulson has been doing - actually, it's hard to imagine any segment of the political spectrum that wouldn't be horrified. So again, this is a horrible example of Bush's supposed centrism.

Particularly on the economy, Bush has never been a libertarian; he has always matched a commitment to free markets with a willingness to intervene when markets stumble.

I'm not sure what Bush has been "on the economy", other than a failure by the measure of the political left, political right, job market, stock market, housing market.... But I'll grant, he's no libertarian.

Third, Obama is finding the limits of leading a "movement" that never had much ideological content.

This notion of a "movement" seems to emerge from two separate phenomena - the fact that some individuals and loose-knit groups projected their own political goals onto Obama (as, frankly, happens with pretty much any new, charismatic political leader who builds a coalition sufficient to win a national election), and the caricature advanced by people like Gerson. But you know, there's one person whom I've not once heard speak of Obama as a leader of a cohesive "movement" - Barack Obama. And there's a guy who has been willing to disappoint large groups of his supporters on issues such as Iraq policy and FISA, even before he was elected. (Can Gerson guess his name?) But then, Gerson was apparently taken surprise that Obama reappointed Gates, despite, you know, Obama promising to reach across the aisle when composing his cabinet.

Reappointing Gates is also politically savvy, as it makes it harder for Republicans to blame Obama if the Iraq phase-down goes poorly. But whatever Obama's motivations, take a step back and think about what it means for Gates to be accepting this reappointment. He had the alternative of cashing in, big time with a book deal, private sector jobs... think Cheney at Halliburton. It's a testament to his character that he's continuing in the job, and a testament to Obama that he's again willing to disappoint supporters who wanted a clean break from past war policy in order to retain somebody who may in fact be the best available choice for the job. So with regard to Gates, although my reasoning is different, I'll accede to Gerson's conclusion - That's centrism we can believe in.

As for Gerson's having his hopes raised by Obama's "disappointing the ideologues", he may be onto something. After all, had Bush been more willing to stand up to factions exemplified by PNAC, the Club for Growth, the domestic energy industry, etc., his administration might not have been such a miserable failure.