Wonks: Room for cuts, but not through sequester

Kate Brannen 
11/16/12 
Politico

The wonks agree: The Pentagon has many places to look to save money, but sequestration is not the way to do it.

The total amount of cuts to the Pentagon under sequestration — about $1 trillion over the next decade — is doable, they say. But the way sequestration would cut — arbitrarily and too quickly — is a terrible way to do business. 

Instead, reports from the Center for American Progress, and now the Stimson Center and the Project on Defense Alternatives, all argue for spending cuts stretched out over the next five to 10 years that still allow the Pentagon to meet its strategic objectives.

The reports share some common themes and recommendations:
 
Scale back today’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. Make the Army smaller and avoid protracted ground wars. Continue to cut DoD waste and use manpower more efficiently. Bring troops back to the United States rather than keeping them permanently stationed overseas.

“The vast majority of people in Washington understand the fiscal crisis we’re facing and the need for defense to play a part in its resolution,” said Barry Blechman, co-founder of the Stimson Center, in an interview with POLITICO.

Blechman, along with 14 other defense strategists, former military officers and international affairs experts — including retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright and retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula — met over the last year to come up with a new defense strategy. The study was funded through a grant from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

The Stimson Center unveiled the final product — a glossy report, titled “A New U.S. Defense Strategy for a New Era: Military Superiority, Agility and Efficiency” — at the National Press Club on Thursday.

The group says it endorses the changes DoD is already making to rebalance its forces toward the Asia-Pacific region, but argues that “more far-ranging changes should be implemented over time.”

The report concludes that a military that is smaller, but remains expeditionary and able to respond quickly to problems around the world, would better serve the country.

The last 10 years have shown what the U.S. military is very good at, while at the same time exposing other areas where it’s been less successful, Blechman said.

“[U.S. forces] are incredible in terms of their reach, their agility, their flexibility, their ability to reach out anywhere, almost instantly, and do a lot of damage or to do humanitarian aid, and to sustain that for a period of time,” Blechman said.

Those capabilities should be supported and enhanced over the next 10 years, according to the Stimson Center report.

What should be avoided are long, protracted wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blechman said.
“We can’t impose governance, security and democracy in foreign societies with different values that have internal conflicts, and that haven’t particularly invited us in to do that. It’s not a job that the military is well suited for,” he said.

The Army should preserve the counterinsurgency lessons it’s learned in its doctrine and at its schools, but it should not be sized to fight protracted ground wars, Blechman said. Therefore, the Army could scale back to 30 brigade combat teams, which is just a few fewer than the Army is already considering.

A report from the Project on Defense Alternatives, also released Thursday, agrees that costly nation-building efforts and counterinsurgency campaigns should be jettisoned.

It advocates for a national security budget that is similar in size to what would happen under sequestration, but proposes to phase in the spending cuts over five years, which is a more dramatic change than the Stimson Center report recommends.

The Project on Defense Alternatives sees the defense budget stabilizing at about $462 billion in today’s dollars.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who’s been an outspoken advocate for scaling back spending at the Pentagon, endorsed the plan.

“This report makes the case, very persuasively, that we can save money if we scale back the U.S. assertion that we need to be everywhere. We’re overextended,” Frank told reporters on a conference call Wednesday.

The Stimson Center report also embraces a small nuclear weapons arsenal. It recommends making those reductions through a new bilateral treaty with Russia, which would also be required to make similar reductions.

Blechman said he was surprised how easily the group agreed to the recommendation to reduce nuclear weapons.

Some members of the group, like Cartwright, argued for even steeper cuts, Blechman said.

A recent paper from the Ploughshares Fund projects that current plans for nuclear weapons and related programs could cost approximately $640 billion over the next decade.

The Ploughshares Fund, whose goal is a world free of nuclear weapons, is mounting an ad campaign it’s calling the “$640 billion question,” which asks whether the government should spend that money on nuclear weapons or invest it in other equipment the military needs.

This week saw groups target some of the larger strategic questions to some of the sillier aspects of defense spending.

In a report that grabbed the attention of journalists, budget hawk Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) outlined at least $69 billion in savings in areas of the defense budget that he says have little to do with national security.

For example, DoD has funded a project aimed at improving the flavor of beef jerky. It’s also produced a reality cooking show, called “Grill It Safe.”
 
“We must eliminate waste and duplication to refocus the Pentagon to its true mission: fighting and winning the nation’s wars,” Coburn said in the report, which was released Thursday.

Gordon Adams, who worked at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton Administration, applauded Coburn’s report, but told POLITICO it didn’t address the more serious instances of DoD mission creep, like the development aid, governance assistance funds and public diplomacy programs that can be found in the defense budget.

Adams was part of the task force that worked on the Stimson Center report.

Another area where there is consensus is DoD’s escalating personnel costs.

On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office reported the extent to which these costs are eating up the Pentagon’s budget.

CBO said that even when adjusted for inflation, military pay and health care costs have risen steadily over the last decade, sometimes faster than salaries and wages in the private sector. It also noted that while 1.4 million military personnel serve on active duty, a total of nearly 10 million people are eligible for military health benefits.

Reforms in this area could and should be implemented, Blechman said, but at the same time Iraq and Afghanistan vets should be provided the medical care, and vocational and educational support they deserve.

Lambert Guard Unit Appears Headed To Israel

By Harry Levins, Post-Dispatch Senior Writer

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 22 April, 2006

Unofficially, word among enlisted airmen at Lambert Field's Air National Guard complex holds that the 131st Fighter Wing will soon fly its F-15 Eagle fighters to Israel for exercises with the Israeli air force.

Officially, Air Guard officers will say nothing about any such exercise.

If the St. Louis-based Eagles indeed lift off and head east toward Israel, they'll continue a long-running but remarkably low-profile series of joint military exercises between the two countries.

Some people who pay attention to such affairs expressed surprise. Among them is military historian Jerry Morelock of Fulton, Mo., managing editor of Armchair General magazine. From 1990-94, he served on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon as an Army colonel - and in that post, he said, "I don't recall anything like that. This is a new one for me."

Similarly surprised was aviation historian Walter J. Boyne of Auburn, Va., a retired Air Force colonel. He said he found it hard to imagine such an exercise, "particularly at this time, because things are so sensitive." In particular, he cited the suspicion by some that "we're going to whack Iran" to prevent that nation from developing nuclear weapons.

The St. Louis Eagles lack any whack, at least with bombs. The planes are C-model Eagles, designed to shoot down other fighters. Only E-model Eagles tote bombs - and the Air Guard here has no E-model Eagles.

At any rate, from EuCom headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, Navy Lt. Corey Barker said: "The exercises are not based on real-world events. They are designed to increase interoperability and understanding."

Still, when Middle East scholar Victor Le Vine of Washington University first heard of the exercise, he said, "Maybe these are tests in preparation for that strongly denied possibility of an attack on Iran."

Like many others, Le Vine was unaware that since 1984, the United States has regularly and routinely held joint military exercises on Israeli soil.

For example, retired Air Force officer John Correll of Annandale, Va., edited Air Force magazine from 1984-2002 and still keeps a hand in as contributing editor. He said, "No, I've not heard of that - and yes, it's a surprise."

But others who were unaware of the exercises expressed no surprise. Among them was historian Richard Kohn of the University of North Carolina.

"Our relationship with Israel is close and so long-standing that any kind of interchange or joint training would hardly be surprising," said Kohn, once the chief historian of the Air Force.

Similarly, military writer (and retired Army officer) Ralph Peters of Warrenton, Va., said: "It doesn't surprise me that such exercises would take place. But given the current tension with Iran and the Middle Eastern penchant for conspiracy theories, whether combined exercises at the present time are a good idea is another issue entirely."

Len Nordeen of Webster Groves - he's the author of "Fighters over Israel," a history of the Israeli air force - said: "I don't know anything about it, but it doesn't surprise me. You're talking about a very experienced air arm."

He added, "In the war on terror, the sharing of techniques is a valuable thing."

Low profile

News organizations have covered past U.S.-Israeli exercises, which began under President Ronald Reagan. But the coverage has been scant - and much, if not most, of it has been in the foreign press. Why the low profile?

It's a matter of perception, said Carl Conetta of a think tank called the Project on Defense Alternatives. From Bethesda, Md., he spoke of "trying to appear to maintain balance and even-handedness in the region." He said the joint exercises had accelerated since the Persian Gulf War, "but we're not crazy about advertising this stuff."

Likewise, Middle East scholar Juan R. Cole of the University of Michigan said: "Every time you have big headlines about U.S. exercises with Israel, you might provoke demonstrations or even attacks. By and large, this is something you don't want to advertise."

Washington University's Le Vine said: "The Israelis are nuts about security. So the less others know about what goes on militarily, the better. Besides, why give others propaganda weapons to use against Israel and the United States?"

But retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Shlomo Brom showed no qualms about discussing such exercises. "This is nothing unusual," said Brom, now a visiting scholar at the congressionally chartered U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. "Each year, the U.S. Air Force is involved."

St. Louis University political scientist Timothy Lomperis agreed.

"The fact that there has been an ongoing and special military relationship between the U.S. and Israel is a 'well-kept secret' that's well-known to all sectors of the Middle East," said Lomperis, an Army veteran of the Vietnam War. "Muslim countries don't like these exercises - but they know the exercises go on."

But U.S. military officials won't talk about them.

A spokeswoman for the Air Guard here referred all questions to the U.S. European Command, whose geographic turf includes Israel.

Navy Lt. Barker of EuCom said that "due to force-protection concerns and Department of Defense policy, we will not be able to discuss any upcoming exercises."

Restraining Order: For Strategic Modesty

Harvey Sapolsky, Benjamin H. Friedman, Eugene Gholz and Daryl G. Press
World Affairs, Fall 2009

Even in an era of globalization, when information, people, goods, services, and, yes, weapons, armies, and terrorists may travel much more efficiently than in the past, geography still matters. At the start of the Cold War, the United States chose to relinquish the protection given by wide ocean buffers and relatively unthreatening neighbors to protect poor and depleted European and Asian allies whose own geography made them vulnerable to Soviet expansion. Today, however, the Cold War is long over, these allies have grown prosperous, and it's time for America to reclaim its strategic depth.

The Cold War left a legacy that has been difficult for Americans to transcend. The global network of American bases and military commands is ready for use, and many U.S. allies, despite their posturing complaints about U.S. policy, often encourage our interventionism as a way of ducking responsibility for maintaining their own security. It is also true that post-Cold War conflicts that developed in or near the collapsed Soviet empire, and the violent ethnic rivalries and failed states of Africa and Asia, have tempted U.S. intervention. When President Obama and other policymakers claim that security is indivisible-that instability anywhere threatens American security and prosperity everywhere-they are saying that the United States must undertake the burden because someone has to do it.

The United States would be better off pursuing a different grand strategy, one that would regain the advantages of our geography and accustom our friends once again to carrying the responsibility for their own security. Though we are the globe's strongest nation-with a very powerful military, the world's largest economy, and an enticing culture-we have neither the need nor the resources to manage everyone else's security. We can meet the challenges of globalization and terrorism without being the self-appointed and self-financed global police force.

Restraint would offer the opportunity to reinvigorate the foundations of America's strength. Foreign distractions, among other causes, have led the United States to neglect its transportation infrastructure, its educational system, its finances, and its technology base. If we were to restrain the global interventionism that has become our second nature since the end of World War II, we could ensure our safety while preserving our power to deal more precisely with threats that may materialize in an uncertain future.

***

The first virtue of a restraint strategy is that it husbands American power. It acknowledges both America's great strengths-a combination of human and physical resources unmatched in the world-and the limitations of our power, which is easily dissipated in wasteful attempts to manage global security.

No nation or ideology now menaces American security in the same ways or to the same degree that the Soviet Union and Communism did during the Cold War. Instead, a variety of ethnic, religious, and nationalistic conflicts oceans away from us now obsess our policymakers, even though those conflicts have little to no prospect of spreading our way. To be sure, radical Islamists have attacked Americans at home and abroad, and while these attackers should be hunted down, they do not pose an existential threat, only a difficult and distracting one. Killing or capturing the criminals who attack Americans makes sense; trying to fix the failed states they call home is hopeless and unnecessary. The United States is safer than ever. The challenge now is staying safe.

The U.S. military is supposed to stand between America and hostile nations, but its forward deployment actually puts our forces between others and their own enemies. Alliances once meant to hold a coalition together against a common foe now protect foreign nations from adversaries that in most cases have no direct dispute with the United States. Although our allies are capable of fending for themselves, the fact that they can take shelter under an American umbrella allows them to defer taking responsibility for their own security. The United States should now use tough love to get our allies off our security dole. We need to do less so others will do more.

Restraint should not be confused with pacifism. Calling for America to come home is different today than it was during the Cold War, when there was a world to lose. Today it is not a call for capitulation or disarmament, though it does provide an opportunity for force reductions. The restraint strategy requires a powerful, full-spectrum, and deployable military that invests heavily in technology and uses realistic training to improve capabilities and deter challenges. Restraint demands a military with a global reach that is sparingly used.

Similarly, restraint is not isolationism. Isolation avoids economic and diplomatic engagement and eschews potential profits from the global economy and the enrichment that sharing ideas and cultures can offer. The United States would be foolish to decline these opportunities. Restraint does not mean retreating from history, but merely ending U.S. efforts to try to manage it. Restraint would rebalance global responsibilities among America and its allies, match our foreign objectives to our abilities, and put domestic needs first.

***

A strategy of restraint would treat alliances as a means, not an end. Alliances are a way of sharing the price of working toward strategic goals. Three conditions should be met for the United States to enter-or retain-an alliance.

• Does the potential partner need American help? If it has not tried to manage a given situation with its own resources or regional partners, then the United States should demur.
• Secondly, is it in America's immediate interest to help, or alternatively, does the partner especially deserve American help? The United States should continue to work closely with countries with whom it has a special relationship or to whom it owes a special debt, in addition to those countries with which the United States shares a pressing strategic dilemma or opportunity.
• Finally, can the United States constructively engage or intervene? U.S. assistance only makes sense when practical actions are likely to improve the situation. Because preserving alliances is not itself an important goal of the restraint strategy, no alliance should be permanent.

As global threats and opportunities evolve, American alliances should also evolve. More broadly, the United States should recognize a variety of positive relationships with other countries beyond the special category of ally. A policy of restraint means cooperating with other countries at a less intense level through ad hoc coalitions, friendly diplomatic engagement, trade agreements, cultural exchanges, and other means.

Policymakers should consider both the opportunities and the costs of alliances. Alliances are like off-balance-sheet liabilities whose risks only show up as costs on the rare occasions when the alliances get involved in high-profile crises and conflicts. Under the current dispensation, we often extend guarantees to our allies without considering the huge payouts.

Alliances are costly for another reason. They cause us to spread our military assets around the world, giving potential enemies U.S. targets in their own backyards rather than forcing them to pay the price of attacking the United States by crossing the oceans that separate us from them.

Moreover, policymakers generally ignore the investments alliances require in a larger U.S. force structure. In the past, politicians have often explained that America's partners help pay the cost of basing the American military-a proposition that was always questionable but is certainly not true today as American forces shift to Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian bases. American taxpayers often pay for basing rights rather than being paid for the military shield they provide our allies. (Even when Japan and Germany shared the burden of paying for Cold War bases, the United States paid full cost to train, equip, and develop the power-projection forces suited to America's established, long-term alliance commitments.)

Under a strategy of restraint, the United States would stop giving away American support. During the Cold War, interventionists could credibly argue that the vulnerability of allies was a direct threat to the United States, so we could not, for instance, afford to gamble that West Germany would resist Soviet blandishments if America's military shield was diminished or withdrawn altogether. Because everyone knew that we would ultimately come to the defense of a crucial ally, no matter how disloyal its diplomatic behavior or how small its defense investment, the United States was often hogtied in its alliances. Today, our own security is not so inseparably linked to that of our allies; the threats they face are less severe than in the Cold War, and they can afford to defend themselves.

***

Under a policy of restraint, the United States would remain deeply enmeshed in the global economy. U.S. firms will continue to sell their products abroad as eagerly as they do now, and consumers around the world will still buy American products. Nor would the adoption of restraint affect the movement of global capital. American investors will still seek high returns abroad, and foreigners will still invest in the United States.

Some policy analysts suggest that political instability abroad would disrupt the global economy, interfering with trade and investment. They presume that growing economic interdependence means that the United States has an economic interest in policing the globe.

Although globalization heightens economic ties between countries, those ties mitigate U.S. vulnerability to overseas shocks. Globalization has multiplied the alternatives for almost every economic relationship. There are now alternative suppliers for the goods we consume, alternative consumers for the products we manufacture, alternative locations in which we can invest, and alternative sources of capital for our firms. A common metaphor for the global economy-a complex web-is on the mark. The structure of that web can survive even if a few strands are severed. Profit-seeking actors respond quickly to disruptions by searching for the next-best alternative.

If there is trouble in the Strait of Malacca, ships will quickly reroute through the nearly-as-convenient Straits of Lombok or Makassar. If disruptions abroad make it harder to sell U.S. bicycles in Korea, manufacturers will sell them in Portugal. Because of globalization, the United States depends more on access to the global economy as a whole but depends less on any specific economic relationship.

The oil market seems to stand out as an exception. Disruptions to oil supply routinely cause huge price spikes and painful adjustments. But the danger of oil disruptions does not require that Washington police the Middle East; rather, the United States ought to retain large stockpiles of oil and other critical materials.

The U.S. government has already amassed approximately 700 million barrels of oil. If you add the stockpiles in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and China, the total for the industrialized world is approximately 1.5 billion barrels of oil. And those are only government-controlled stocks; most analysts believe private holdings exceed official stockpiles. When one compares these massive reserves against plausible disruptions, government-controlled stockpiles alone count as more than sufficient to maintain global supply.

The extreme flexibility of the global economy adds to restraint's appeal as a strategy for the United States. The global economy is not a rigid chain with links that must be protected. It is a flexible, constantly changing web that needs no global policeman to direct its traffic.

***

Three guidelines would shape U.S. counterterrorism policy under a strategy of restraint. The first is the importance of discernment, because we create enemies by too loosely defining who they are. The second is that a foreign policy that is less active in the Muslim world will diminish terrorism directed against Americans. The third is that counterterrorism should be mainly a policing and intelligence exercise. Military force has a role, but the over-militarization of counterterrorism wastes resources and likely will generate more problems than it solves.

The restraint strategy distinguishes terrorists who attack the United States from those who do not. We should work with states around the world to combat all terrorists-those who intentionally target noncombatants. The U.S. government should share information on suspected terrorists with other states, track their movements across borders, freeze their bank accounts, arrest them when they enter U.S. territory, and encourage other nations' counterterrorism efforts.

Terrorists who target America and its citizens are another matter. In pursuing them, a restraint strategy would employ all of the above policy tools while also pressuring countries to act against these organizations within their own borders. If a host country is unable or unwilling to hunt terrorists who attack America, the United States itself should act. That could include covert action directed at the terrorists, air strikes, small-scale raids, or in extreme circumstances an invasion.

By contrast, declaring war on terrorists who do not target Americans invites obscure violent groups around the world to make us their enemies. A lack of discrimination in choosing whom to attack also strengthens terrorists by granting them recognition and encourages alliances between otherwise separate terror groups. Our enemy today, for instance, is not Islam, not Islamism, not Islamic fundamentalism, not Wahabism, not Salafists, and not even jihadists, per se. Our enemies are those who attack Americans and those who shelter them.

Most jihadists are fighting their local governments. In the long term, their struggle will probably fail. But their defeat will have to come at the hands of their compatriots, not from the liberal forces led by the United States. American participation in the political conflicts in the Islamic world makes the United States a target of the terrorists involved in those conflicts, and American involvement feeds the conspiracy theories that make supposed evildoers in Washington the excuse for all that goes wrong in the Middle East. Non-intervention in Middle Eastern politics should not be regarded as appeasement, but as a key component of counterterrorism.

In the rare circumstances in which the United States needs to invade or even occupy part of the Muslim world, as in Afghanistan, the U.S. military should diminish its footprint and limit its stay. The United States should not shrink from stating that we believe that liberal democracy is a good form of government, but we should model democracy rather than insisting that others adopt it. Though we should not be mute in the face of egregious human rights violations, Americans should stop telling people in the Muslim world how to run their countries.

Overseas, foreign intelligence organizations and policemen collect the most useful counterterrorism intelligence and do most of the work apprehending and interrogating terrorists, because they have local contacts and language skills. The United States should continue to provide intelligence support, particularly technical support, to these foreign counterterrorist agencies. Such cooperation may occasionally cause the kind of blowback that a policy of restraint seeks to avoid, but in cases like Pakistan's, where the terrorist threat is high enough, the benefit of intelligence cooperation outweighs this cost. In any case, the blowback from cooperation with law enforcement and intelligence agencies will be much less severe than that generated by the current American strategy with its emphasis on military force and occupation.

The principal military role in counterterrorism should be the use of special operations forces to assist foreign governments in attacking anti-American terrorists. In some circumstances, U.S. special forces might direct air strikes or directly attack terrorist facilities when local forces are unable or unwilling to do so. But locals should take the lead.

Restraint also rejects the idea that fixing failed states is a good way to protect America. Failed states are rarely hospitable sanctuaries for terrorists-they inevitably get dragged into local fighting. The Afghanistan example is often deployed to warn of the danger of failed states, but al-Qaeda was a guest of the country's leaders, the Taliban. The problem was not state failure, but state support. Equally important, failed states are usually produced by deep political cleavages, which the United States cannot easily fix with a military intervention. Rather than try to solve the problem of state failure-which needlessly ensnares the United States in faraway disputes-Washington should act against terrorist groups who plan to attack Americans. A more preventive approach will simply produce hostility and run up bills.

A common objection to the strategy of restraint is that the absence of U.S. security guarantees and troops abroad will impel more nations to fend for themselves and therefore build nuclear weapons, heightening proliferation. What this view misses is that U.S. military hegemony is as likely to encourage nuclear proliferation, as states balance against us, as to prevent it. In addition, this objection exaggerates the dangers of proliferation. The spread of nuclear weapons does not necessarily threaten the United States. Indeed, the acquisition of nuclear forces by some of our friends will enhance their security and dampen their desire for American guarantees. Even the spread of nuclear weapons to so-called rogue states is not overly threatening because we can deter them.

America's non-proliferation efforts should focus on terrorists, whom we doubt can be reliably deterred. Fortunately, developing nuclear weapons is not easy for a terrorist group. They face financial constraints, major technical challenges (Pyongyang's experience refutes the canard that it is simple to build an A-bomb), and trouble hiding their activities from intelligence and police surveillance. U.S. intelligence agencies should continue to exploit these difficulties-launching sting operations to catch rogue states or individuals who seek to pass nuclear material to terror groups and direct action against terrorists who demonstrate an interest in obtaining such weapons.

***

Each of the two main strategic alternatives to restraint, primacy and global engagement, suffers from major flaws. Primacists seek to contain peer-competitors to America, especially China. They hope to dissuade Beijing from building a military to match its growing economic power. Some even want to destabilize the Beijing government by accelerating China's liberalization in ways that would make modernization difficult to control, or by trying to embarrass the government (militarily or otherwise) in a way that would cause decades of political and economic disarray.

Such an anti-China strategy is unwise. First, it is far from guaranteed that China will continue its economic rise or successfully manage the social strains that its government already faces. And a policy of active containment (let alone a policy of destabilization) may even make it easy for leaders in Beijing to rally nationalist sentiment against the United States and distract attention from their own failings. This sort of anti-China strategy accomplishes only one thing for sure: it turns tomorrow's potential adversary into today's certain one.

A second strategic alternative to restraint is to continue America's muddled approach to international politics: global engagement, often mistakenly called "selective engagement." Advocates of this policy seek to protect the U.S. economy, as well as other overseas interests, by enhancing international law and order. In this telling, the United States is the sheriff, working with locals to keep the outlaws at bay while institutions for global governance take root.

This strategy vastly overstates America's ability to engineer the global system. We lack the expertise to manage distant corners of the world, and our efforts too often fan nationalist and tribal opposition. Ordering the world according to our liking involves picking winners and losers. The losers will blame us for their problems, the winners will resent our role in their success, and both sides will blame us when things go awry.

Global activism costs us in two other crucial ways. First, it forces us to violate our values when local stability requires tactical alliances with unsavory regimes. Second, it discourages our friends from becoming self-reliant, leaving us with weaker partners when we truly need them. Restraint better protects American interests.

***

Implementing a strategy of restraint will be difficult because it requires us to overcome a belief that became ingrained in our worldview during the Cold War: the assumption that if we did not manage security affairs in every corner of the globe we would find ourselves on the defensive in a great ideological and military contest. Americans have learned to think it is our duty to fret over conditions in the Baltics, the Balkans, the Bosphorus, the Beqaa valley, the Persian Gulf, the Pashtun region, Thailand, Taiwan, and East Timor. Almost every country, no matter how small, distant, or unfamiliar, has been labeled "strategic" by some American official.

The second obstacle to overcome is our global military command structure. The geographically based commands reflexively lobby for involvement in their regions. Their plans drive our thinking about larger national security issues and impose unbounded demands on our resources. Regional commanders overshadow our diplomats and overburden our defense budget. The more Unified Combatant Commands the United States has, the longer the list of certified threats and the less flexible our ability to respond due to the earmarking of forces. Doing away with the regional commands will improve strategic planning and our ability to weigh challenges and allocate our limited resources.

Some U.S. overseas bases vital to ongoing operations may have to be retained. Continuing arrangements with a few other nations may be necessary for fleet access. But a network of forward bases gives us an incentive to meddle and advertises our willingness to defend our hosts. We have been gradually reducing our global military presence for two decades. It is time to complete the mission. A homecoming for American forces would be a clear statement of our intent to follow a new grand strategy.

Restraint would also allow reductions in defense spending and force structure and help us realign military spending. For instance, restraint reduces the likelihood that the United States will find itself conducting two simultaneous high-intensity ground wars. The balance in forces should shift accordingly, and ground forces would absorb more than a proportional share of cuts. The United States spends vastly more on defense than any other country, and despite the cuts will retain military dominance in air, ground, and naval combat.

***

A defense strategy of restraint would allow us to again make use of the natural barriers that separate us from most sources of danger in the world. That strategy encourages our allies to defend themselves. It stops us from occupying foreign countries under the misguided perception that we can and ought to remake them. It diminishes the perception abroad that the United States has become a revolutionary power bent on remaking the world, and it demonstrates that we intend to spread liberal values by example rather than force. This strategy husbands our power rather than wasting it fighting conflicts that need not involve us.

An America that is not on call for every conflict that breaks out in every corner of the world will have the time and resources to address the financial and infrastructure issues that weaken our domestic health and international power. The burden of providing security for others long after the need disappeared has simply caused us to neglect too much at home. More watchful waiting and less international meddling will preserve our security and wealth. We need to reclaim our strategic depth and stop our friends from free riding on our military. It is, finally, time to come home.

Harvey M. Sapolsky is a professor of public policy and organization at MIT. Benjamin H. Friedman is a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at Cato Institute. Eugene Gholz is an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Daryl G. Press is an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College.

Citation:  Harvey Sapolsky, Benjamin H. Friedman, Eugene Gholz and Daryl G. Press, “Restraining Order: For Strategic Modesty,” World Affairs, Fall 2009; http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/restraining-order-strategic-modesty

Clear and Present Safety: The United States Is More Secure Than Washington Thinks

Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen
Foreign Affairs, Mar/Apr 2012

Last August, the Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney performed what has become a quadrennial rite of passage in American presidential politics: he delivered a speech to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. His message was rooted in another grand American tradition: hyping foreign threats to the United States. It is "wishful thinking," Romney declared, "that the world is becoming a safer place.The opposite is true. Consider simply the jihadists, a near- nuclear Iran, a turbulent Middle East, an unstable Pakistan, a delusional North Korea, an assertive Russia, and an emerging global power called China. No, the world is not becoming safer."

Not long after, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta echoed Romney's statement. In a lecture last October, Panetta warned of threats arising "from terrorism to nuclear proliferation; from rogue states to cyber attacks; from revolutions in the Middle East, to economic crisis in Europe, to the rise of new powers such as China and India. All of these changes represent security, geopolitical, economic, and demographic shifts in the international order that make the world more unpredictable, more volatile and, yes, more dangerous." General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concurred in a recent speech, arguing that "the number and kinds of threats we face have increased significantly." And U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reinforced the point by claiming that America resides today in a "very complex, dangerous world."

Within the foreign policy elite, there exists a pervasive belief that the post-Cold War world is a treacherous place, full of great uncertainty and grave risks. A 2009 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 69 percent of members of the Council on Foreign Relations believed that for the United States at that moment, the world was either as dangerous as or more dangerous than it was during the Cold War. Similarly, in 2008, the Center for American Progress surveyed more than 100 foreign policy experts and found that 70 percent of them believed that the world was becoming more dangerous. Perhaps more than any other idea, this belief shapes debates on U.S. foreign policy and frames the public's understanding of international affairs.

There is just one problem. It is simply wrong. The world that the United States inhabits today is a remarkably safe and secure place. It is a world with fewer violent conflicts and greater political freedom than at virtually any other point in human history. All over the world, people enjoy longer life expectancy and greater economic opportunity than ever before.The United States faces no plausible existential threats, no great-power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon. The U.S. military is the world's most powerful, and even in the middle of a sustained downturn, the U.S. economy remains among one of the world's most vibrant and adaptive. Although the United States faces a host of international challenges, they pose little risk to the overwhelming majority of American citizens and can be managed with existing diplomatic, economic, and, to a much lesser extent, military tools.

This reality is barely reflected in U.S. national security strategy or in American foreign policy debates. President Barack Obama's most recent National Security Strategy aspires to "a world in which America is stronger, more secure, and is able to overcome our challenges while appealing to the aspirations of people around the world." Yet that is basically the world that exists today. The United States is the world's most powerful nation, unchallenged and secure. But the country's political and policy elite seems unwilling to recognize this fact, much less integrate it into foreign policy and national security decision-making.

The disparity between foreign threats and domestic threatmongering results from a confluence of factors. The most obvious and important is electoral politics. Hyping dangers serves the interests of both political parties. For Republicans, who have long benefited from attacking Democrats for their alleged weakness in the face of foreign threats, there is little incentive to tone down the rhetoric; the notion of a dangerous world plays to perhaps their greatest political advantage. For Democrats, who are fearful of being cast as feckless, acting and sounding tough is a shield against gop attacks and an insurance policy in case a challenge to the United States materializes into a genuine threat. Warnings about a dangerous world also benefit powerful bureaucratic interests. The specter of looming dangers sustains and justifies the massive budgets of the military and the intelligence agencies, along with the national security infrastructure that exists outside government-defense contractors, lobbying groups, think tanks, and academic departments.

There is also a pernicious feedback loop at work. Because of the chronic exaggeration of the threats facing the United States, Washington overemphasizes military approaches to problems (including many that could best be solved by nonmilitary means). The militarization of foreign policy leads, in turn, to further dark warnings about the potentially harmful effects of any effort to rebalance U.S. national security spending or trim the massive military budget- warnings that are inevitably bolstered by more threat exaggeration. Last fall, General Norton Schwartz, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, said that defense cuts that would return military spending to its 2007 level would undermine the military's "ability to protect the nation" and could create "dire consequences." Along the same lines, Panetta warned that the same reductions would "invite aggression" from enemies. These are a puzzling statements given that the U.S. defense budget is larger than the next 14 countries' defense budgets combined and that the United States still maintains weapons systems designed to fight an enemy that disappeared 20 years ago.

Of course, threat inflation is not new. During the Cold War, although the United States faced genuine existential threats, American political leaders nevertheless hyped smaller threats or conflated them with larger ones. Today, there are no dangers to the United States remotely resembling those of the Cold War era, yet policymakers routinely talk in the alarmist terms once used to describe superpower conflict. Indeed, the mindset of the United States in the post-9/11 world was best (albeit crudely) captured by former Vice President Dick Cheney. While in o/ce, Cheney promoted the idea that the United States must prepare for even the most remote threat as though it were certain to occur. The journalist Ron Suskind termed this belief "the one percent doctrine," a reference to what Cheney called the "one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon." According to Suskind, Cheney insisted that the United States must treat such a remote potential threat "as a certainty in terms of our response."

Such hair-trigger responsiveness is rarely replicated outside the realm of national security, even when the government confronts problems that cause Americans far more harm than any foreign threat. According to an analysis by the budget expert Linda Bilmes and the economist Joseph Stiglitz, in the ten years since 9/11, the combined direct and indirect costs of the U.S. response to the murder of almost 3,000 of its citizens have totaled more than $3 trillion. A study by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that during an overlapping period, from 2000 to 2006, 137,000 Americans died prematurely because they lacked health insurance. Although the federal government maintains robust health insurance programs for older and poor Americans, its response to a national crisis in health care during that time paled in comparison to its response to the far less deadly terrorist attacks.

Rather than Cheney's one percent doctrine, what the United States actually needs is a 99 percent doctrine: a national security strategy based on the fact that the United States is a safe and well- protected country and grounded in the reality that the opportunities for furthering U.S. interests far exceed the threats to them. Fully comprehending the world as it is today is the best way to keep the United States secure and resistant to the overreactions that have defined its foreign policy for far too long.

Better than ever

The United States, along with the rest of the world, currently faces a period of economic and political uncertainty. But consider four long-term global trends that underscore just how misguided the constant fear-mongering in U.S. politics is: the falling prevalence of violent conflict, the declining incidence of terrorism, the spread of political freedom and prosperity, and the global improvement in public health. In 1992, there were 53 armed conflicts raging in 39 countries around the world; in 2010, there were 30 armed conflicts in 25 countries. Of the latter, only four have resulted in at least 1,000 battle-related deaths and can therefore be classified as wars, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program: the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Somalia, two of which were started by the United States.

Today, wars tend to be low-intensity conflicts that, on average, kill about 90 percent fewer people than did violent struggles in the 1950s. Indeed, the first decade of this century witnessed fewer deaths from war than any decade in the last century. Meanwhile, the world's great powers have not fought a direct conflict in more than 60 years-"the longest period of major power peace in centuries," as the Human Security Report Project puts it. Nor is there much reason for the United States to fear such a war in the near future: no state currently has the capabilities or the inclination to confront the United States militarily.

Much of the fear that suffuses U.S. foreign policy stems from the trauma of 9/11. Yet although the tactic of terrorism remains a scourge in localized conflicts, between 2006 and 2010, the total number of terrorist attacks declined by almost 20 percent, and the number of deaths caused by terrorism fell by 35 percent, according to the U.S. State Department. In 2010, more than three-quarters of all victims of terrorism-meaning deliberate, politically motivated violence by nonstate groups against noncombatant targets-were injured or killed in the war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Somalia. Of the 13,186 people killed by terrorist attacks in 2010, only 15, or 0.1 percent, were U.S. citizens. In most places today-and especially in the United States-the chances of dying from a terrorist attack or in a military conflict have fallen almost to zero.

As violence and war have abated, freedom and democratic governance have made great gains. According to Freedom House, there were 117. And during that time, the number of autocracies declined from 62 to 48. To be sure, in the process of democratizing, states with weak political institutions can be more prone to near-term instability, civil wars, and interstate conflict. Nevertheless, over time, democracies tend to have healthier and better-educated citizens, almost never go to war with other democracies, and are less likely to fight nondemocracies.

Economic bonds among states are also accelerating, even in the face of a sustained global economic downturn. Today, 153 countries belong to the World Trade Organization and are bound by its dispute-resolution mechanisms. Thanks to lowered trade barriers, exports now make up more than 30 percent of gross world product, a proportion that has tripled in the past 40 years. The United States has seen its exports to the world's fastest-growing economies increase by approximately 500 percent over the past decade. Currency flows have exploded as well, with $4 trillion moving around the world in foreign exchange markets every day. Remittances, an essential instrument for reducing poverty in developing countries, have more than tripled in the past decade, to more than $440 billion each year. Partly as a result of these trends, poverty is on the decline: in 1981, half the people living in the developing world survived on less than $1.25 a day; today, that figure is about one-sixth. Like democratization, economic development occasionally brings with it significant costs. In particular, economic liberalization can strain the social safety net that supports a society's most vulnerable populations and can exacerbate inequalities. Still, from the perspective of the United States, increasing economic interdependence is a net positive because trade and foreign direct investment between countries generally correlate with long-term economic growth and a reduced likelihood of war.

A final trend contributing to the relative security of the United States is the improvement in global health and well-being. People in virtually all countries, and certainly in the United States, are living longer and healthier lives. In 2010, the number of people who died from aids- related causes declined for the third year in a row. Tuberculosis rates continue to fall, as do the rates of polio and malaria. Child mortality has plummeted worldwide, thanks in part to expanded access to health care, sanitation, and vaccines. In 1970, the global child mortality rate (deaths of children under five per 1,000) was 141; in 2010, it was 57. In 1970, global average life expectancy was 59, and U.S. life expectancy was 70. Today, the global figure is just under 70, and the U.S. figure is 79. These vast improvements in health and well-being contribute to the global trend toward security and safety because countries with poor human development are more war-prone.

Phantom menace

None of this is meant to suggest that the United States faces no major challenges today. Rather, the point is that the problems confronting the country are manageable and pose minimal risks to the lives of the overwhelming majority of Americans. None of them-separately or in combination-justifies the alarmist rhetoric of policymakers and politicians or should lead to the conclusion that Americans live in a dangerous world.

Take terrorism. Since 9/11, no security threat has been hyped more. Considering the horrors of that day, that is not surprising. But the result has been a level of fear that is completely out of proportion to both the capabilities of terrorist organizations and the United States' vulnerability. On 9/11, al Qaeda got tragically lucky. Since then, the United States has been preparing for the one percent chance (and likely even less) that it might get lucky again. But al Qaeda lost its safe haven after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and further military, diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement efforts have decimated the organization, which has essentially lost whatever ability it once had to seriously threaten the United States.

According to U.S. o/cials, al Qaeda's leadership has been reduced to two top lieutenants: Ayman al-Zawahiri and his second-in-command, Abu Yahya al-Libi. Panetta has even said that the defeat of al Qaeda is "within reach."The near collapse of the original al Qaeda organization is one reason why, in the decade since 9/11, the U.S. homeland has not suffered any large-scale terrorist assaults. All subsequent attempts have failed or been thwarted, owing in part to the incompetence of their perpetrators. Although there are undoubtedly still some terrorists who wish to kill Americans, their dreams will likely continue to be frustrated by their own limitations and by the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of the United States and its allies.

As the threat from transnational terrorist groups dwindles, the United States also faces few risks from other states. China is the most obvious potential rival to the United States, and there is little doubt that China's rise will pose a challenge to U.S. economic interests. Moreover, there is an unresolved debate among Chinese political and military leaders about China's proper global role, and the lack of transparency from China's senior leadership about its long-term foreign policy objectives is a cause for concern. However, the present security threat to the U.S. mainland is practically nonexistent and will remain so. Even as China tries to modernize its military, its defense spending is still approximately one-ninth that of the United States. In 2012, the Pentagon will spend roughly as much on military research and development alone as China will spend on its entire military.

While China clumsily flexes its muscles in the Far East by threatening to deny access to disputed maritime resources, a recent Pentagon report noted that China's military ambitions remain dominated by "regional contingencies" and that the People's Liberation Army has made little progress in developing capabilities that "extend global reach or power projection." In the coming years, China will enlarge its regional role, but this growth will only threaten U.S. interests if Washington attempts to dominate East Asia and fails to consider China's legitimate regional interests. It is true that China's neighbors sometimes fear that China will not resolve its disputes peacefully, but this has compelled Asian countries to cooperate with the United States, maintaining bilateral alliances that together form a strong security architecture and limit China's room to maneuver.

The strongest arguments made by those warning of Chinese influence revolve around economic policy. The list of complaints includes a host of Chinese policies, from intellectual property theft and currency manipulation to economic espionage and domestic subsidies. Yet none of those is likely to lead to direct conflict with the United States beyond the competition inherent in international trade, which does not produce zero-sum outcomes and is constrained by dispute-resolution mechanisms, such as those of the World Trade Organization. If anything, China's export-driven economic strategy, along with its large reserves of U.S. Treasury bonds, suggests that Beijing will continue to prefer a strong United States to a weak one.

Nuclear fear

It is a matter of faith among many American politicians that Iran is the greatest danger now facing the country. But if that is true, then the United States can breathe easy: Iran is a weak military power. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Iran's "military forces have almost no modern armor, artillery, aircraft or major combat ships, and un sanctions will likely obstruct the purchase of high-technology weapons for the foreseeable future."

Tehran's stated intention to project its interests regionally through military or paramilitary forces has made Iran its own worst enemy. Iran's neighbors are choosing to balance against the Islamic Republic rather than fall in line behind its leadership. In 2006, Iran's favorability rating in Arab countries stood at nearly 80 percent; today, it is under 30 percent. Like China's neighbors in East Asia, the Gulf states have responded to Iran's belligerence by participating in an emerging regional security arrangement with the United States, which includes advanced conventional weapons sales, missile defenses, intelligence sharing, and joint military exercises, all of which have further isolated Iran.

Of course, the gravest concerns about Iran focus on its nuclear activities.Those fears have led to some of the most egregiously alarmist rhetoric: at a Republican national security debate in November, Romney claimed that an Iranian nuclear weapon is "the greatest threat the world faces." But it remains unclear whether Tehran has even decided to pursue a bomb or has merely decided to develop a turnkey capability. Either way, Iran's leaders have been su/ciently warned that the United States would respond with overwhelming force to the use or transfer of nuclear weapons. Although a nuclear Iran would be troubling to the region, the United States and its allies would be able to contain Tehran and deter its aggression-and the threat to the U.S. homeland would continue to be minimal.

Overblown fears of a nuclear Iran are part of a more generalized American anxiety about the continued potential of nuclear attacks. Obama's National Security Strategy claims that "the American people face no greater or more urgent danger than a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon." According to the document, "international peace and security is threatened by proliferation that could lead to a nuclear exchange. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, the risk of a nuclear attack has increased."

If the context is a state-against-state nuclear conflict, the latter assertion is patently false. The demise of the Soviet Union ended the greatest potential for international nuclear conflict. China, with only 72 intercontinental nuclear missiles, is eminently deterrable and not a credible nuclear threat; it has no answer for the United States' second- strike capability and the more than 2,000 nuclear weapons with which the United States could strike China.

In the past decade, Cheney and other one-percenters have frequently warned of the danger posed by loose nukes or uncontrolled fissile material. In fact, the threat of a nuclear device ending up in the hands of a terrorist group has diminished markedly since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal was dispersed across all of Russia's 11 time zones, all 15 former Soviet republics, and much of eastern Europe. Since then, cooperative U.S.-Russian eaorts have resulted in the substantial consolidation of those weapons at far fewer sites and in comprehensive security upgrades at almost all the facilities that still possess nuclear material or warheads, making the possibility of theft or diversion unlikely. Moreover, the lessons learned from securing Russia's nuclear arsenal are now being applied in other countries, under the framework of Obama's April 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, which produced a global plan to secure all nuclear materials within four years. Since then, participants in the plan, including Chile, Mexico, Ukraine, and Vietnam, have fulfilled more than 70 percent of the commitments they made at the summit.

Pakistan represents another potential source of loose nukes. The United States' military strategy in Afghanistan, with its reliance on drone strikes and cross-border raids, has actually contributed to instability in Pakistan, worsened U.S. relations with Islamabad, and potentially increased the possibility of a weapon falling into the wrong hands. Indeed, Pakistani fears of a U.S. raid on its nuclear arsenal have reportedly led Islamabad to disperse its weapons to multiple sites, transporting them in unsecured civilian vehicles. But even in Pakistan, the chances of a terrorist organization procuring a nuclear weapon are infinitesimally small. The U.S. Department of Energy has provided assistance to improve the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, and successive senior U.S. government o/cials have repeated what former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in January 2010: that the United States is "very comfortable with the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons."

A more recent bogeyman in national security debates is the threat of so-called cyberwar. Policymakers and pundits have been warning for more than a decade about an imminent "cyber-Pearl Harbor" or "cyber-9/11." In June 2011, then Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said that "bits and bytes can be as threatening as bullets and bombs." And in September 2011, Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described cyberattacks as an "existential" threat that "actually can bring us to our knees."

Although the potential vulnerability of private businesses and government agencies to cyberattacks has increased, the alleged threat of cyberwarfare crumbles under scrutiny. No cyberattack has resulted in the loss of a single U.S. citizen's life. Reports of "kinetic-like" cyber- attacks, such as one on an Illinois water plant and a North Korean attack on U.S. government servers, have proved baseless. Pentagon networks are attacked thousands of times a day by individuals and foreign intelligence agencies; so, too, are servers in the private sector. But the vast majority of these attacks fail wherever adequate safeguards have been put in place. Certainly, none is even vaguely comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, and most can be offset by commonsense prevention and mitigation efforts.

A new approach

Defenders of the status quo might contend that chronic threat inflation and an overmilitarized foreign policy have not prevented the United States from preserving a high degree of safety and security and therefore are not pressing problems. Others might argue that although the world might not be dangerous now, it could quickly become so if the United States grows too sanguine about global risks and reduces its military strength. Both positions underestimate the costs and risks of the status quo and overestimate the need for the United States to rely on an aggressive military posture driven by outsized fears.

Since the end of the Cold War, most improvements in U.S. security have not depended primarily on the country's massive military, nor have they resulted from the constantly expanding definition of U.S. national security interests. The United States deserves praise for promoting greater international economic interdependence and open markets and, along with a host of international and regional organizations and private actors, more limited credit for improving global public health and assisting in the development of democratic governance. But although U.S. military strength has occasionally contributed to creating a conducive environment for positive change, those improvements were achieved mostly through the work of civilian agencies and nongovernmental actors in the private and nonprofit sectors. The record of an overgrown post-Cold War U.S. military is far more mixed. Although some U.S.-led military eaorts, such as the nato intervention in the Balkans, have contributed to safer regional environments, the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened regional and global security, leading to hundreds of thousands of casualties and refugee crises (according to the O/ce of the un High Commissioner for Refugees, 45 percent of all refugees today are fleeing the violence provoked by those two wars). Indeed, overreactions to perceived security threats, mainly from terrorism, have done significant damage to U.S. interests and threaten to weaken the global norms and institutions that helped create and sustain the current era of peace and security. None of this is to suggest that the United States should stop playing a global role; rather, it should play a diaerent role, one that emphasizes soft power over hard power and inexpensive diplomacy and development assistance over expensive military buildups.

Indeed, the most lamentable cost of unceasing threat exaggeration and a focus on military force is that the main global challenges facing the United States today are poorly resourced and given far less attention than "sexier" problems, such as war and terrorism. These include climate change, pandemic diseases, global economic instability, and transnational criminal networks-all of which could serve as catalysts to severe and direct challenges to U.S. security interests. But these concerns are less visceral than alleged threats from terrorism and rogue nuclear states.They require long-term planning and occasionally painful solutions, and they are not constantly hyped by well-financed interest groups. As a result, they are given short shrift in national security discourse and policymaking.

To avoid further distorting U.S. foreign policy and to take advantage of today's relative security and stability, policymakers need to not only respond to a 99 percent world but also solidify it. They should start by strengthening the global architecture of international institutions and norms that can promote U.S. interests and ensure that other countries share the burden of maintaining global peace and security. International institutions such as the un (and its a/liated agencies, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency), regional organizations (the African Union, the Organization of American States, the European Union, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and international financial institutions can formalize and reinforce norms and rules that regulate state behavior and strengthen global cooperation, provide legitimacy for U.S. diplomatic efforts, and offer access to areas of the world that the United States cannot obtain unilaterally.

American leadership must be commensurate with U.S. interests and the nature of the challenges facing the country. The United States should not take the lead on every issue or assume that every problem in the world demands a U.S. response. In the majority of cases, the United States should "lead from behind"-or from the side, or slightly in the front-but rarely, if ever, by itself. That approach would win broad public support. According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' most recent survey of U.S. public opinion on international affairs, less than ten percent of Americans want the country to "continue to be the pre-eminent world leader in solving international problems." The American people have long embraced the idea that their country should not be the world's policeman; for just as long, politicians from both parties have expressed that sentiment as a platitude. The time has come to act on that idea.

If the main challenges in a 99 percent world are transnational in nature and require more development, improved public health, and enhanced law enforcement, then it is crucial that the United States maintain a sharp set of nonmilitary national security tools. American foreign policy needs fewer people who can jump out of airplanes and more who can convene roundtable discussions and lead negotiations. But owing to cuts that began in the 1970s and accelerated significantly during its reorganization in the 1990s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (usaid) has been reduced to a hollow shell of its former self. In 1990, the agency had 3,500 permanent employees.Today, it has just over 2,000 staffers, and the vast majority of its budget is distributed via contractors and nongovernmental organizations. Meanwhile, with 30,000 employees and a $50 billion budget, the State Department's resources pale in comparison to those of the Pentagon, which has more than 1.6 million employees and a budget of more than $600 billion. More resources and attention must be devoted to all elements of nonmilitary state power-not only usaid and the State Department but also the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the National Endowment for Democracy, and a host of multilateral institutions that deal with the underlying causes of localized instability and ameliorate their effects at a relatively low cost. As U.S. General John Allen recently noted,"In many respects, usaid's efforts can do as much- over the long term-to prevent conflict as the deterrent effect of a carrier strike group or a marine expeditionary force." Allen ought to know: he commands the 100,000 U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan.

Upgrading the United States' national security toolbox will require reducing the size of its armed forces. In an era of relative peace and security, the U.S. military should not be the primary prism through which the country sees the world. As a fungible tool that can back up coercive threats, the U.S. military is certainly an important element of national power. However, it contributes very little to lasting solutions for 99 percent problems. And the Pentagon's enormous budget not only wastes precious resources; it also warps national security thinking and policymaking. Since the military controls the overwhelming share of the resources within the national security system, policymakers tend to perceive all challenges through the distorting lens of the armed forces and respond accordingly. This tendency is one reason the U.S. military is so big. But it is also a case of the tail wagging the dog: the vast size of the military is a major reason every challenge is seen as a threat.

More than 60 years of U.S. diplomatic and military efforts have helped create a world that is freer and more secure. In the process, the United States has fostered a global environment that bolsters U.S. interests and generally accepts U.S. power and influence. The result is a world far less dangerous than ever before. The United States, in other words, has won. Now, it needs a national security strategy and an approach to foreign policy that reflect that reality.

Micah Zenko is a Fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. Michael A. Cohen is a Fellow at the Century Foundation.

Citation: Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen, “Clear and Present Safety: The United States Is More Secure Than Washington Thinks,” Foreign Affairs (Mar/Apr 2012).

America's costly war machine

Fighting the war on terror compromises the economy now and threatens it in the future.

Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz
Los Angeles Times, 18 September 2011

Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.

Many of these costs were unnecessary. We chose to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with a small, all-volunteer force, and we supplemented the military presence with a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. These decisions not only placed enormous strain on the troops but dramatically pushed up costs. Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.

To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon spending spree that accompanied it and a battery of new homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11.

How have we paid for this? Entirely through borrowing. Spending on the wars and on added security at home has accounted for more than one-quarter of the total increase in U.S. government debt since 2001. And not only did we fail to pay as we went for the wars, the George W. Bush administration also successfully pushed to cut taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, which added further to the debt. This toxic combination of lower revenues and higher spending has brought the country to its current political stalemate.

There is only one other time in U.S. history that a war was financed entirely through borrowing, without raising taxes: when the Colonies borrowed from France during the Revolutionary War.

Even if we were to leave Afghanistan and Iraq tomorrow, our war debt would continue to rise for decades. Future bills will include such things as caring for military veterans, replacing military equipment, rebuilding the armed forces and paying interest on all the money we have borrowed. And these costs won't be insignificant.

History has shown that the cost of caring for military veterans peaks decades after a conflict. Already, half of the returning troops have been treated in Veterans Administration medical centers, and more than 600,000 have qualified to receive disability compensation. At this point, the bill for future medical and disability benefits is estimated at $600 billion to $900 billion, but the number will almost surely grow as hundreds of thousands of troops still deployed abroad return home.

And it isn't just in some theoretical future that the wars will affect the nation's economy: They already have. The conditions that precipitated the financial crisis in 2008 were shaped in part by the war on terror. The invasion of Iraq and the resulting instability in the Persian Gulf were among the factors that pushed oil prices up from about $30 a barrel in 2003 to historic highs five years later, peaking at $140 a barrel in current dollars in 2008. Higher oil prices threatened to depress U.S. economic activity, prompting the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and loosen regulations. These policies were major contributors to the housing bubble and the financial collapse that followed.

Now, the war's huge deficits are shaping the economic debate, and they could keep Congress from enacting another round of needed stimulus spending to help the country climb out of its economic malaise. Many of these war debts are likely to continue to compromise America's investments in its future for decades.

Citation: Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Los Angeles Times, 18 September 2011

What's Wrong with Weapons Acquisitions?

Escalating complexity, a shortage of trained workers, and crass politicization mean that most programs to develop new military systems fail to meet expectations

Robert N. Charette
Spectrum, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
November 2008

In the vast and varied world of advanced military technology, the U.S. Army's proposed Aerial Common Sensor aircraft was neither the biggest nor the sexiest. But it was very important to the U.S. Army. The Army desperately needed the ACS to replace its Guardrails, a fleet of small, piloted reconnaissance aircraft that first began flying in the mid-1970s.

The Army was so keen on the ACS, in fact, that it showcased the program to Congress and the American public as an example of cost-efficient and timely procurement. The service was still smarting from several high-profile failures, including the cancellations of the Crusader howitzer and the Comanche helicopter. And so, in August 2004, when the Army awarded a US $879 million five-year contract for the ACS to a team from Lockheed Martin and the Brazilian aircraft company Embraer, it had high hopes. Lockheed did too: it stood to earn an additional $7 billion once the plane entered production.

Almost immediately, things started to go wrong. Barely four months after signing the paperwork, the contractors revealed that their aircraft, based on an Embraer commercial jet, was rated for only 9 gs of force, not the 16 that the Army wanted. Fixing the problem drove up the plane's weight, putting it 1400 kilograms over its safety threshold.

A panel brought in to assess the ACS concluded that the program was "un-executable" and estimated it would cost at least another $900 million and two more years to get it back on track. So the Army canceled the program 18 months after it formally began, paying Lockheed $200 million for its trouble. The Army is now faced with spending $462 million over the next eight years to keep those old Guardrails flying.

To summarize: a big, basic technological problem emerged long after such an obstacle should have been spotted and resolved, in a program that would have been hugely over budget and behind schedule had it been left to run its course. But those factors aren't what made the ACS unusual. The Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Congress's investigative arm, recently scrutinized 72 major defense programs and found that only 11 of them were on time, on budget, and meeting performance criteria. No, what set the ACS apart was that it was not allowed to linger for years, racking up more costs and delays-it was actually canceled. Less than 5 percent of major defense programs ever suffer that fate, the GAO says.

Problems in defense acquisitions have existed for decades. What's new is the economic scale. The Pentagon now spends about $21 million every hour to develop and procure new defense systems. As recently as the mid-1990s, the largest of these cost tens of billions of dollars. Today, some, like the Army's Future Combat Systems, now range in the hundreds of billions. Topping the charts is the F-35 jet fighter, which is expected to cost taxpayers an astounding $1 trillion to develop, purchase, and operate. That sum is close to what the United States spent to fight both the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The spiraling costs are linked to schedule delays that are equally troubling. In 2007, the GAO estimated that current programs in development were experiencing an average delay of 21 months, with a few programs nearly a decade behind schedule. A 2007 GAO report to Congress noted that because of such delays and cost overruns, "not only is the buying power of the government reduced and opportunities to make other investments lost, but the warfighter receives less than promised."

Behind the deterioration is a convergence of factors, say analysts both inside and outside the Defense Department New military systems are more technologically complex than ever before, and they rely increasingly on unproven technologies. Defense programs are now "so massive and so fanciful we don't know how to get there," says Katherine Schinasi, the GAO's managing director of acquisitions and sourcing management. And engineers, scientists, and technicians skilled enough to design, build, and debug such complex systems are scarce. The ranks of DOD acquisitions managers have also been thinned, even as the number of major military programs has risen.

Too often, also, politics trumps technology and even common sense. DOD managers and service brass aren't the only people who have a stake in which military systems get developed and which don't: congressmen, defense contractors, lobbyists, and economic development officials are all aggressive players in the weapons-acquisition process, all pushing for their own pet projects. The result is a proliferation of development efforts that the Pentagon cannot fully fund and that are nearly impossible to cancel. Politics also leads contractors to overpromise on what they can deliver and leads DOD staffers to turn a blind eye when those promises aren't met.

The situation has become so dire that even former top defense officials are weighing in with uncharacteristic pessimism and alarm. "The [U.S.] military has been living in a rich man's world," says Jacques Gansler, a former undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics. "Very little attention has been paid to cost. We're coming up against a very serious fiscal crisis."

This month, U.S. voters will elect a new president. Whoever takes office in January will need to make reforming the weapons-acquisition process a high priority. "The next president is going to need to set the tone very, very quickly," says David M. Walker, who was head of the GAO until March. "If we don't make some fairly dramatic and fundamental acquisition reforms soon, we could find ourselves in a situation in the not-too-distant future where we have a lot of things that people wanted but not enough of what we really need."

Army Gen. Edward Hirsch was a blunt-talking man who spent many years after retirement trying to improve the acquisition process. Among other things, he was instrumental in establishing the School of Program Managers at the Defense Acquisition University. The DAU, at Fort Belvoir, Va., provides mandatory training for the Defense Department's 140 000 military and civilian acquisitions personnel.

Shortly before he passed away last year, at 85, Hirsch told me that he was deeply troubled by the present state of affairs. He felt that the process the Pentagon uses to develop and acquire new military systems actually works against those who try to follow it. "Put good people into a system that is designed for failure--it isn't going to work," Hirsch said.

On the surface, at least, it's hard to see why Hirsch felt the way he did: the defense-acquisition process looks perfectly logical. Acquiring a major defense system generally consists of nine steps, each step having multiple criteria that must be met before moving on to the next step. A "major" program in the DOD realm is any acquisitions effort whose research, development, testing, and evaluation costs exceed $365 million or whose procurement costs exceed $2.19 billion, in FY 2000 constant dollars. There are now roughly 95 such programs on the books. It's a traditional top-down approach that should be familiar to any engineer:

First, you determine and validate your national and military strategies and ensure that they align;

Second, identify the missing defense capabilities you will need to carry out your strategies;

Third, identify alternative approaches and their technical feasibility;

Fourth, select the best approach in terms of technology, cost, and schedule;

Fifth, get the budget and schedule for your approach approved;

Sixth, design and then implement the system;

Seventh, test the system in operational conditions;

Eighth, produce the vetted system in the quantities needed; and

Ninth, support and upgrade the system until its retirement from service.

Repeat each step as necessary.

The process is intentionally long and iterative, each step aimed at reducing the risk of failure and increasing the likelihood of meeting cost, schedule, and technical promises. You might expect then that the normal outcome would be a successful defense system. In fact, though, the process has nearly the opposite effect.

It now takes years-more than 110 months on average-for a major military program, once funded, to wend its way through this process. Some programs last even longer: the Marines' EFV amphibious vehicle is projected to take more than 20 years before it gets fielded. While the weapons program makes its way slowly and methodically through the nine steps, the defense strategy that gave rise to it moves on, in response to new threats, shifting geopolitics, and changing imperatives.

So why does the Pentagon stick with such a slow and flawed system? Because many in the DOD believe that following "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of regulations that say, 'do this and not that' and 'check this over five times'â¿¿" means that acquisition risk is under control, says the GAO's Schinasi.

Moreover, the best way to protect yourself from accusations of failure is to simply follow the process, says Thomas Lassman, a historian with the Pentagon-sponsored Defense Acquisition History Project. "Then you can't be blamed," Lassman says, "because you followed procedures correctly."

The complexity of military systems stems increasingly from their interconnectedness to other systems. One of the Pentagon's biggest, most ambitious, and most controversial programs is the Future Combat Systems (FCS), a sprawling effort to digitally link battlefield vehicles, sensors, and communications gear and improve their interoperability. The FCS consists of 14 individual systems, including manned and robotic ground and air vehicles, software radios, and satellites, as well as an overarching network and operating system tying those components together. Developing such enormous "systems of systems" poses technical and management problems that are neither well defined nor well understood. The software alone-95 million lines of code for the FCS, at last count-poses a daunting challenge. Nobody has yet figured out a way to develop reliable, secure software for much smaller projects. Yet now the DOD is contemplating systems beyond the FCS that would require more than a billion lines of code.
$21 million: Amount the Pentagon Spends Per Hour To Procure New Defense Systems

Another factor contributing to program failure is the shortage of technically trained people, especially systems engineers. A systems engineer translates technical needs into an overall system architecture that creates the best operational capability at the most affordable cost. As a project proceeds and goals or needs shift, systems engineers have to determine the difficult but necessary cost, schedule, and performance trade-offs to keep everything on track. As programs get bigger and more complex, the need for rigorous systems engineering increases.

But the ranks of DOD systems engineers have not increased. "One of the reasons we have such problems in systems engineering today is that we don't have people with the training and experience," says Paul Kaminski, a former U.S. undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology who recently headed up a National Research Council study on the state of systems engineering in defense. "Gaining the needed expertise," he adds, "is not a 3-year proposition but a 10- to 15-year proposition." In canceling the contracts for the U.S. Navy's Littoral Combat ship program in 2007, Pentagon officials cited inadequate systems engineering as one of the main causes of the huge cost overruns that prompted the cancellations.

Systems engineers are not the only professionals in short supply. Over the past two decades, the DOD has outsourced much of its scientific and engineering expertise to industry. In many of its programs, the Pentagon now has one private contractor for every full-time civilian employee. In some cases, the DOD has admitted, contractors are doing jobs that should be performed only by federal employees, such as weapons procurement and contract preparation. The DOD has also outsourced the systems integration and management of some of its most critical programs, including the FCS.

The Pentagon believes outsourcing saves money, but the practice has depleted the ranks of technical, managerial, and contractual personnel who can provide effective oversight of the department's defense acquisitions. As Norman Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin, told me, "If you're not smarter than your suppliers, you can't manage them effectively."

The situation will only get worse. This year alone, nearly one-fourth of the United States' 637 000 aerospace workers are eligible to retire. Both Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, two of the biggest U.S. defense contractors, report that well over half of their workers will reach retirement age within the next five to 10 years. The same is true of DOD federal employees. Younger workers are not rushing in to replace them. Many students who pursue scientific and technical disciplines don't want careers in defense-related work. The implications for the DOD are grim.

Though personnel skilled in the arts of managing acquisition programs are on the wane, the programs themselves are on the rise, along with the Pentagon's budget. The FY 2009 defense budget of $488 billion is the largest in real terms since World War II and 6 percent higher than this year's budget. Meanwhile, the total projected development costs for the 95 or so major weapons systems currently in the pipeline have more than doubled in the last seven years, from $790 billion in 2000 to $1.6 trillion in 2007.

There are no quick or easy solutions to labor shortages and escalating costs, but the standard response in the private sector is to lean more heavily on automation and information technologies. But the DOD seems not to have benefited from technological advances that would make development less expensive. "One might have thought that more efficient production methods, including computer-aided design and manufacturing, microminiaturization of components, and the employment of greater computing power, all would have reduced costs or at least held them level," former DOD comptroller Dov Zakheim told a Washington, D.C., audience in January 2005. The fact that they haven't, he said, is "not easy to fathom."
Definition: Next-war-itis n: The creation of complex and expensive machinery for possible future conflicts while ignoring the present need for affordable weapons.

Ironically, the solution supported by the DOD and military service chiefs, as well as some members of Congress, is not to make acquisitions more efficient but to spend even more money. They advocate setting aside an amount equal to at least 4 percent of the annual U.S. gross domestic product for defense. At the current GDP of about $16 trillion, that would mean an annual defense budget of $640 billion.

Would even that much be enough? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed that U.S. military strategy still focuses on winning conventional force-on-force wars and that it lacks the systems to fight asymmetrical or irregular wars against, for example, insurgents and militias. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has criticized his own agency for what he calls "next-war-itis." The military services and defense contractors, he says, are too focused on creating complex and expensive machinery for possible conflicts far into the future and not sufficiently attentive to providing affordable weapons that the military can use right now.

So, given the fast-changing military imperatives of these times, what constitutes a successful acquisition program? There is no straightforward answer to that question, partly because in the realm of military acquisitions, there is no universally agreed upon definition of a "successful" program Jacques Gansler, now a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, has a definition that seems as good as any other: one that "satisfies a military need for an intended cost and intended schedule."

By that definition, most major defense programs would be failures. The fact that only 5 percent ever do get canceled means that the defense community doesn't hold itself to a high standard.

"The definition of success in DOD is to start a program," the GAO's Schinasi says. "That turns on the program's funding. [Success] has nothing to do with the eventual fielding" of a system.

Ronald Fox, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, adds that after a program gets funded, the definition of success changes again. "A successful program is one that hasn't been canceled," says Fox, who has studied defense acquisitions for over 40 years.

Defined that way, "success" can look an awful lot like what many people would call failure. Seven years ago, the U.S. Air Force awarded a $3.9 billion contract to Boeing to outfit its C-130 cargo aircraft with digital cockpits, which are equipped with monitor screens rather than analog gauges. But Boeing grossly underestimated how much engineering work it would require to modify the C-130's many different configurations. By last year, the program had gone so far over budget that it triggered a congressionally mandated review. The Air Force's response was not to cancel the program but rather to cut the number of planes getting the upgrade from 519 to 222, thereby "saving" a projected $560 million. Nevertheless, the total program still came in $1.4 billion over budget.

Why not just cancel such a program? For one thing, cancellation means lost jobs-and votes. Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, puts it this way: "Most of the time what [the acquisition process] is trying to achieve is only partially 'equipping a soldier in the field.' It is also concerned with getting a congressperson reelected, advancing the career of a bureaucrat, and making certain that the defense-industrial base is sustained during periods of low demand." Politicians, urged on by lobbyists and defense contractors, routinely support programs that should have been killed or should never have been funded, he says.

That sort of collective conspiracy extends to the wildly optimistic promises that contractors make to win funding. Such optimism usually takes the form of "understating the cost [of a program] and overstating the technical requirements," says Fox. For example, company A claims it can produce its widgets for $1 apiece and that they will accomplish X, Y, and Z; it will win out over company B, which pitches its widgets at a more realistic $5 and says they will do only X.

The contractors are not solely to blame for this shell game. "Before you know whether the system will work, you have to define the price of all the units you expect to buy," notes Ron Kadish, former director of the DOD's Missile Defense Agency and now a vice president at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. The cost estimate is always going to be wrong, he says, but everyone, including the DOD and military service procurement officials and Congress, pretends that it is correct. This intellectual dishonesty leads to expectations that can never be met.

"The bureaucratic incentives at work in the acquisition system militate fairly strongly against honesty," says the Lexington Institute's Thompson. "Until a weapon system is put into operational test and then must perform, there are lots of rewards for understating costs, for understating technical challenges, and for exaggerating the speed at which costs and technical problems can be overcome."

To be fair, part of that exaggeration stems from the real engineering problem of designing a system that has to meet some theoretical threat 5 or 10 or 15 years from now. If you had to design a car of the future, what technology would you put in it? Would it rely on just what's available today, or would it need to accommodate a power source or steering mechanism that doesn't yet exist? Even when you settle on a design, innovations will inevitably arise during the many years that your system is in development.

Dependence on unproven technology is anathema in the commercial world, but it's common in defense programs. The design for the Army's Crusader howitzer, for instance, relied on 16 "critical" technologies, including advanced armaments, ammunition handling, and mobility. But only six of those technologies had ever been demonstrated outside the laboratory when the Crusader entered development in 1994. Subsequent problems with those untested technologies contributed to the doubling of the program's development cost-and ultimately to its cancellation in 2002.

In their landmark 1962 book, The Weapons Acquisition Process: An Economic Analysis , Harvard professors Merton Peck and Frederic Scherer noted that the fundamental objective of acquiring any military system is that it either create a qualitative superiority over an enemy's weapon system or neutralize the enemy's superiority-not only today but into the future. Thus the eternal push for better fighting technology, from sharpened stones to GPS-guided bombs.

Each technological advance a country achieves should not only enhance its own military position but should also degrade the enemy's. For example, making a bomber stealthy enables it to be more destructive to the enemy's key installations. This situation is quite different from the commercial world. Buying an iPhone may rock your world, but it won't have any ill effects (except maybe envy) on your friend who owns a Motorola Razr.

This mind-set tacitly encourages the DOD to demand, and contractors to propose, ever more sophisticated technology. As one former senior military program manager put it, "to sell a program today, you need to claim that it is 'transformational' in some way."

But that quest for the "transformational" is now colliding with the hard reality that many of the fundamental technologies in today's weapons systems are already very advanced. The engines, avionics, and flight controls in military aircraft, for instance, are all close to the limits of what is possible. Even incremental advances come at enormous cost.

And so the infatuation with immature and exotic technologies, with their high costs and risks. James Finley, deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, admits that in many programs "technology is being pushed too fast, too soon."

The widespread inability to meet promises creates a vicious circle: lowballed cost projections allow too many programs to be approved; as the projections for each program repeatedly get revised upward, the defense budget balloons; eventually, cuts have to be made, resulting in what military critic Chuck Spinney has termed the "defense death spiral." In congressional testimony in 2002, Spinney described the spiral as "shrinking combat forces, decreasing rates of modernization, aging weapons inventories, with the rising cost of operations creating continual pressure to reduce readiness."

Over the last six decades a dozen or so blue-ribbon panels and at least a hundred initiatives have called for detailed, concrete reforms in defense acquisitions. So there isn't much doubt that something is fundamentally wrong. What is most disheartening is that everyone knows it and nobody-not DOD management, not the military services, not Congress-has done much about it. "The problem in Washington isn't what we don't know but what we don't want to know," says defense analyst Thompson.

The most recent of these reform efforts was the 2005 Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment, led by Ron Kadish. The panel came up with 35 recommendations in all, some repeating earlier committees' findings, some new to that report. Among the people I interviewed who had read the Kadish report, nearly everyone said that three of the recommendations in particular would have an immediate impact on the acquisitions process, without having to change existing regulation or win congressional approval.
25 percent of the 637 000 U.S. Aerospace Workers are currently eligible to retire

The first of these involves trying to break the defense death spiral by returning to a "block program" approach, in which systems would be built incrementally in capability, instead of trying to satisfy every mission requirement in the first increment. The second recommendation is that programs be "time certain," meaning that most programs would have to deliver some useful operational capability within five years. That requirement would force contractors to use only technologies that are essentially mature, rather than ones that would need to be invented on a schedule.

The third recommendation is to fund only those programs that have an 80:20 cost confidence level, meaning the program has an 80 percent chance of meeting its estimated cost target. Traditionally, the DOD has aimed for a 50:50 confidence level, and some programs don't even reach that cutoff. The Army's FCS program, for instance, was approved in 2003 with "somewhere down around [a] 28 percent chance of success," according to then Army chief of staff Peter J. Schoomaker.

If the DOD were to implement all three recommendations-funding only those programs that it deemed to have an 80 percent chance of succeeding, could deliver operational capability in five years, and could be developed incrementally-it would effectively cut the number of new programs by up to 25 percent. Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the military services have shown no great willingness to scale back, even though it would likely mean getting systems out into the field more quickly.

Still, the DOD's Finley insists that the department is at least attempting to implement all of the Kadish panel's recommendations. But will they in fact fix a broken system? Finley is quite optimistic, but even he admits, "I can't predict the will for change."

Indeed, if there's one sentiment that has been repeated more often than any other in the past 60 years of failed attempts at acquisition reform, it is the need for "the will to change." That quality always seems to be in short supply.

In this election season, neither of the two presidential candidates has had much to say about reforming defense acquisitions. That's disappointing but not surprising. No politician wants to be accused of not supporting the troops. Any suggestion that defense spending be reined in has become, like Social Security, a political third rail. Most defense experts are skeptical that the Pentagon or Congress or the White House will fundamentally alter the current way of doing business. There is too much money and too many jobs at stake.

But reform will have to come. Each day that the acquisition process continues to operate ineffectively and inefficiently is another day that the troops are not getting what they need, the country is less secure, and much-needed programs, both civilian and military, don't get funded.

The next administration will need to choose wisely, and soon.

ROBERT N. CHARETTE, an IEEE Spectrum contributing editor, is a self-described "risk ecologist" who investigates the impact of the changing concept of risk on technology and societal development. In writing the cover story, "What's Wrong With Weapons Acquisitions?", he spent over 18 months interviewing dozens of industry and government defense-acquisition experts. "Everyone knows the acquisition process desperately needs to change," he says. "Unfortunately, no one I spoke to believes it will change until there is a major national crisis."

Citation: Robert N. Charette, What's Wrong with Weapons Acquisitions?, IEEE Spectrum (November 2008)