The Long Haul:Fighting and Funding America's Next Wars

Robert Work, a senior defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, is more sanguine when it comes to the prospects for continued supremacy at sea. In his chapter on the U.S. Navy, Work does not advocate increasing the navy's size but instead proposes shifting its priorities to meet immediate strategic needs more effectively. He recommends deploying a mixture of various aircraft carriers, including some smaller vessels that are better suited to counterterrorism operations. In addition, Work calls for the navy to expand its light, fast coastal combat fleet while cutting procurement of its most advanced destroyers.

STRIKING A BALANCE

The authors' shared concern that the Pentagon is not adequately preparing for more immediate midrange threats is valid. But some of their recommendations are a good deal stronger than others. Kagan's arguments for maintaining a larger standing army are persuasive and, indeed, seem already to have been accepted by the new post-Rumsfeld leadership at the Pentagon. It is not at all obvious, however, that the United States really needs a Marine Corps that is still capable of conducting forced-entry amphibious landings, as Hoffman argues. The U.S. Marines are far more likely to be called on to fight brutal, street-by-street battles of the sort they have been waging in Iraq than to be asked to storm ashore as they did over half a century ago at Inch'on and Iwo Jima. The idea of spending huge sums on yet more medium-range fighter bombers, instead of giving top priority to developing new global strike systems, also seems dubious. Finally, Work's assumption that the size and budget of the U.S. Navy will remain essentially constant may be overly conservative given the expansion in China's fleet and its ongoing development of air, sea, and submarine capabilities that are designed to target U.S. naval forces off its coasts.

By identifying an array of shortcomings in current programs and laying out some specific, plausible alternatives, Of Men and Materiel performs a vital service. Still, in their eagerness to correct what they regard as Rumsfeld's excessive focus on high-tech future warfare, the book's authors may tilt too far in the opposite direction. There is a danger that their proposals could leave the United States well prepared to win the last war (against Islamist irregulars), only slightly more capable of fighting the next one (against a nuclear-armed Iran, for example), and less well positioned to deter the one after that (perhaps against a fully modernized Chinese military). Instead of sacrificing investments in long-term transformation in order to spend more on current capabilities, the nation will have to find ways to do both.

POLITICAL CALCULUS

There is no doubt that the United States can afford to spend much more on defense if and when it needs to. The obstacles to doing so are more political than economic. The Congressional Budget Office now projects that after having reached a post-9/11 peak of four percent of GDP last year, defense spending is set to gradually descend back toward a post-Cold War average of around three percent, which it is expected to reach by early in the next decade. Taking into account the various shortfalls they identify, Schmitt and Donnelly propose that defense spending should instead be raised to five percent of GDP and held there indefinitely. Such a figure, they rightly note, would still be low by Cold War standards, and it is well within the nation's ability to afford. The problem, of course, is that shifting even one or two percentage points of GDP from one category of activity to another is no simple matter; it involves large, consequential choices about taxing, spending, and borrowing that are invariably painful to certain constituencies and hence politically controversial.

According to the economist and former National Security Council (NSC) official Robert Hormats, these choices will be even more difficult to make today than in the past. Hormats' comprehensive and valuable new book, The Price of Liberty, examines how the nation has financed its wars from the founding of the republic to the present day. For the first 150 years of its history, the United States generally maintained only a small navy and a minuscule army; the primary challenge was raising vast sums quickly to cover the temporary costs of an emergency. This was done through both increased borrowing (from domestic and foreign lenders) and temporary tax increases (on imports and domestic transactions and, later, on personal incomes and corporate profits). As Hormats makes clear, political struggles between different interest groups and regions, rather than pure economic or strategic rationales, determined how much money came from each source.

From their experiences in wartime finance, the nation's early leaders drew two basic lessons. First, and perhaps most important, they understood that a shared sense of sacrifice was essential to maintaining social cohesion and political support during times of war. Second, although it was acceptable to accumulate debt in an emergency, paying it off promptly was crucial to preserving the nation's creditworthiness and hence its ability to borrow in future crises.