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Libya Begets Syria?
A little over a year ago, as members of the Obama administration were pondering military intervention in Libya, skeptics (including The Skeptics) pressed them to explain how that situation differed from other comparable cases elsewhere in the world. If Libya, why not Yemen? Why not Bahrain? Why not Syria? We may soon learn the answer to that last question. And their too-permissive—or merely haphazard—approach a year ago might pave the way for an intervention in Syria that would be ill-advised, if not disastrous.
At the time of the Libya debate (to the extent that there was one), the president and his foreign-policy advisers dismissed concerns that the intervention in Libya would set a precedent. “It is true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs,” President Obama said in a televised speech to the nation on March 28, 2011. But, he continued:
that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right. In this particular country—Libya—at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale. . . To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and, more profoundly, our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are.
At other times, the administration alluded to a loose set of guidelines to explain why it might choose to use force, guidelines which the Libya case met but other cases supposedly did not. These included the likelihood that a large-scale loss of life was imminent; the belief that prompt military action would prevent this violence; and the support of the international community, ideally a formal sanction in the UNSC (absent that, the approval of a regional body, such as the Arab League, might suffice).
Notably absent was sufficient consideration of whether our vital strategic interests were at stake. They were not in Libya, and they are not in Syria.
We should strive to avoid foreign intervention in all but very rare cases. Because getting in is always much easier than getting out, the burden of proof must always be on those making the case for war, not those advising against.
Beyond that, we must know what mission the U.S. military has been tasked with performing. We must have a reasonable estimate of the likelihood that it will achieve its mission. And we must have some sense of the likely costs in blood and treasure. Finally, we are a nation of laws, not of men—and decidedly not of one man. The president has very little authority to send troops into harm’s way, and he has none when U.S. security is not at stake (a criteria that Barack Obama endorsed as a senator but abandoned when he assumed a higher office). If the Obama administration is considering military action to remove Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria, it should obtain formal congressional authorization for such action. And it should do that before going to the United Nations.
No other country is afforded such choices. No other country is able to project power over great distances and on very short notice. No other country has a track record of frequent foreign intervention, even when such operations have no direct connection to advancing our own security. This pattern of behavior constitutes our unique power problem. It is precisely because the United States has used force on numerous occasions over the past two decades that we need a particularly stringent set of criteria governing our future interventions. There is an almost endless parade of aggrieved parties calling on Uncle Sam to save them from harm. And when Washington refuses, or merely drags its heels, they will say: You fought to save Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, why do you then refuse to aid Muslims in Northern Africa or the Levant? The United States must have a ready answer.
But the Obama administration, cheered on or goaded by liberal and neoconservative hawks, does not have one. Yet. And its halting signals are likely to embolden those calling for yet another war.
Obama’s Neocon Moment
In his State of the Union address, President Obama emphatically declared, “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Obama sought to put to rest the notion that he is embracing American decline, as GOP candidates Romney, Gingrich and Santorum have accused him of doing. He likewise affirmed his belief in the country’s exceptional place in history.
In particular, this president believes, as his predecessor did, in the necessity of the U.S. military to act beyond its constitutionally mandated function, put out any fires that flare across the globe, and underwrite world security. I examine this in an op-ed published today on CNN.com:
The president sounded like a neoconservative when he declared during his recent State of the Union address that the United States was, and would remain, the world’s “indispensable nation.” Obama’s proposed Pentagon budget, released last week, affirmed his intention to retain most of the U.S. military’s current missions, even when they aren’t needed to safeguard the United States’ vital security interests.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s latest strategy document was carefully designed to convince allies and adversaries alike that the United States can continue to prosecute multiple armed conflicts in far-flung corners of the globe. Taken together, Obama’s strategy document, budget and State of the Union remarks articulate a coherent philosophy on military spending and global engagement that ought to hold a lot of appeal for the neoconservatives in the GOP.
But … our foreign policy leaders have consistently ignored … an argument that should have strong sway at a time of economic uncertainty: this country’s tax dollars can be better spent than on defending wealthy allies who are more than capable of protecting themselves.
This talk of the United States as the “indispensable nation” is straight out of the neoconservative playbook. They should have no quarrel with President Obama’s policies. And it is interesting that while Mitt Romney criticizes the president in this arena, Romney foreign-policy advisor, neoconservative stalwart Robert Kagan, has gotten the president’s attention.
Like Kagan and Romney, President Obama believes the world is better off with the United States doing for wealthy allies what they should be doing for themselves: securing their interests. President Obama talked of “fairness” in his State of the Union and a “shared sacrifice” among citizens in these trying economic times. But this sacrifice apparently does not extend beyond the borders of the United States. Under President Obama, as under a Romney presidency, the American taxpayer will continue to pay for the security of Europe and East Asia, and our troops will be saddled with a nearly endless list of missions. That isn’t fair, nor is it wise.
On Afghanistan, Panetta Leaves Questions Unanswered
Secretary Panetta’s announcement that the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan will end as early as mid-2013 is a positive development. But it is long overdue and still leaves too many questions unanswered. After more than ten years of war in Afghanistan, the administration should follow through on its commitment to end combat operations and withdraw all troops by 2014. Continuing to narrow our objectives will make this war winnable.
Politically, this makes perfect sense for the Obama administration. It is a shot across the bow of his political opponents and those wishing for an indefinite combat mission in Afghanistan. Secretary Panetta’s announcement allows the administration to get on the side of voters who want to draw-down in Afghanistan. By opposing any draw-down, his critics side with the much smaller segment of the American people who still support the nation-building mission.
President Obama is in a position similar to the debate over Iraq in his 2008 presidential campaign. He argued in 2008 that he would end a grinding war he inherited. The president can claim victory (and vindication) in Iraq and argue that if you liked the first act, you’ll love the second. He will end another grinding war he inherited—and conveniently gloss over the fact that he sent more troops to Afghanistan than President Bush ever did.
Of course, these developments are neither new nor are they a sure thing. Despite the media attention given to this announcement, it was somewhat predictable. Panetta acknowledged that this was always part of the plan behind the scenes. Buried in the coverage of Panetta’s statement are multiple qualifiers. He admitted that no decision has been made on the number of troops that will leave in 2013. The secretary offered no details on what this transition from combat operations would look like. Indeed, the line between an “advise and assist” mission and combat operations is a sketchy one. A spokesman clarified that U.S. forces could still be involved in combat operations in 2014. In the end, our policy has not changed. It is still unclear how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan at the end of 2013.
But to the extent that Panetta’s recent statement reaffirms the administration will adhere to the timeline of withdrawal, it is an encouraging sign. It signals to the Afghans that they must take responsibility for their own security, and it provides an incentive for them to continue to put themselves in harms way and take the initiative.
Let’s hope that this is indeed a confirmation of the administration’s commitment to a withdrawal. The United States should have scaled-down to a limited, targeted counterterrorism mission many years ago. A large-scale, nation-building mission has never been necessary to protect the vital interests of the United States and hunt down the few remaining terrorists in Afghanistan that aim to strike the homeland.
The strategic misconceptions that guide our current mission in the country are overwrought, lack evidence, and are based on worst-case scenarios. We should continue to transition to a counterterrorism mission that utilizes intelligence, special operations forces, and our considerable technological advantages, such as UAVs. And we must continue to encourage the Afghan people to take responsibility for their security and their nation.
Civilian Personnel: The Missing Piece in the Pentagon’s Budget Puzzle
While most news stories have accurately characterized the Obama administration’s proposed military spending cuts as “modest,” the Pentagon is planning significant reductions in the number of active-duty troops in the Army and Marine Corps. Both forces will be larger than they were in 2001, but the active-duty Army will fall from a post-9/11 high of 570,000 in 2010 to 490,000. The Marine Corps will go from 202,000 to 182,000.
The DoD should likewise reduce civilian personnel.
The reason the Pentagon’s plan places so much emphasis on personnel is stated clearly in the document (pdf):
Military personnel costs have doubled since 2001, or about 40% above inflation, while the number of full-time military personnel, including activated reserves, increased by only 8% during the same time period.
Ben Friedman and I have argued for an even smaller Army and Marine Corps, on the understanding that we should not permanently station U.S. troops in Europe and Asia. Such forward deployments are not essential to U.S. security and might ultimately undermine global security by encouraging other countries to defer spending for their own defense.
But the current proposal is clearly a step in the right direction, and it reflects the fact that Washington—and the American people—are not anxious to repeat the bitter experiences of the past decade. The costs of regime change followed by aggressive counterinsurgency are almost never outweighed by the benefits. We don’t have to build nations in order to destroy terrorists. The Army and Marine Corps grew to fight these types of wars, and they will now shrink back to nearly pre-war levels.
Other savings are possible, but not likely to be achieved in the near future. The president will ask Congress to authorize use of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process for changes in physical infrastructure. However, some members of Congress are already linking arms to prevent another round of base closings. Still, another BRAC (if it is ever convened) won’t generate significant savings in the next five years, and perhaps not in the next 10. Additionally, the proposal calls for Congress to empower “a commission with BRAC-like authority” to review the full range of costs associated with the military retirement system, with the added stipulation that any “reforms should only affect future recruits.” Thus, any potential savings will not materialize in the near term.
Obama’s State of the Union Signals Grand Strategy Status Quo
It was clever, though a bit too opportunistic, for the president to begin and end his State of the Union address with references to Iraq, and the sacrifices of the troops. The war has been a disaster for the United States, and for the Iraqi people, of course. But the subject has always been a win-win for him. Whenever he talks about Iraq, it serves as a not-so-subtle reminder about who got us into this mess (i.e. not him).
Others might gripe about the president wrapping himself in the troops, and the flag (or, in the case of this speech, the troops’ flag). But Americans are rightly proud of our military, and there is nothing wrong with invoking the spirit of service and sacrifice that animates the members of our military. (There is something wrong with suggesting that all Americans should act as members of the military do, a point that Ben Friedman makes in a separate post.)
But while some degree of chest-thumping, “America, ooh-rah” is to be expected, this passage sent me over the edge:
America is back.
Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. …Yes, the world is changing; no, we can’t control every event. But America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs – and as long as I’m President, I intend to keep it that way.
Have we learned nothing in the past decade? Have we learned anything? To say that we are the indispensable nation is to say that nothing in the world happens without the United States’ say so. That is demonstrably false.
Of course, the United States of American is an important nation, the most important, even. Yes, we are an exceptional nation. We boast an immensely powerful military, a still-dynamic economy (in spite of our recent challenges), and a vibrant political culture that hundreds of millions of people around the world would like to emulate. But the world is simply too vast, too complex, and the scale of transactions in the global economy is enormous. It is the height of arrogance and folly for any country to claim indispensability.
The president is hardly alone, however. Many in Washington—including some of his most vociferous critics in the Republican Party— celebrate the continuity in U.S. foreign policy as an affirmation of its wisdom. The president’s invocation of the “indispensable nation” line from the mid-1990s is merely the latest manifestation of a foreign policy consensus that has held for decades.
But the world has changed, and is still changing. Our grand strategy needs to adapt. When we embarked on the unipolar project after the end of the Cold War, the United States accounted for about a third of global economic output, and a third of global military expenditures; today, we account for just under half of global military spending, but our share of the global economy has fallen below 25 percent.
What we need, therefore, is a new strategy that aims to promote our core interests, but that doesn’t expect U.S. troops and taxpayers to also bear the burdens of promoting everyone else’s. After all, the values that are so important to most Americans, and that the president cited in his speech last night, are also cherished by hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people in many countries around the world. It is reasonable to expect them to pay some of the costs required to advance these values, and to sustain a peaceful and prosperous international order. Our current strategy still presumes that it is not.
Playing to Our Strengths—and Why COIN Doesn’t
A recent editorial in the Boston Globe noted with some glee that the Obama administration strategy document released last week included the “acknowledgement that America’s brief and unhappy foray into counterinsurgency operations has come to an end.” The Globe editorialists conclude “Given the checkered history of counterinsurgency, and its cost in lives and money, its demise is hardly unwelcome. Even better to read of it in the very document that hopes to guide how the United States conducts wars the next time around.”
As a COIN skeptic from well before the publication of FM 3-24 (when COIN was called nation-building), I am inclined to claim some vindication. Often with Justin Logan in the lead, I have probably written more about this subject than any other (including here and here). More broadly, Cato has been a hospitable venue for skeptical views of nation-building as a cure for terrorism, including these two fine papers that explained why we didn’t need to repair/reconstruct weak or failing states in order to defeat al Qaeda, and this paper by Jeffrey Record on why COIN/nation-building was inconsistent with America’s strategic culture, and therefore likely to fail.
Tonight on Stossel: Ron Paul, War, and Military Spending
The GOP presidential candidates will participate in yet another debate tonight from South Carolina in anticipation of the primary there on Saturday. I hope that the moderator, CNN’s John King, will bring up some of the major national security issues at hand, namely military spending.
Out of all the GOP contenders, it is clear that Ron Paul is the only candidate still standing that offers an alternative to the entrenched Republican foreign policy views. Some have called his foreign policy positions naïve and outside the mainstream. Others point to the fact that Ron Paul is so popular precisely because he is outside the mainstream and presents a different perspective on the intertwined issues of national security and military spending. Of course, the “mainstream” views on foreign policy are relative: what is common thinking inside the Beltway is not usually representative of the country.
Tonight at 10 PM EST on Fox Business Network’s Stossel, a host of experts will discuss Ron Paul’s foreign policy views, war, and whether the federal government has gone too far in its Constitutional obligation to defend the homeland. I will be discussing military spending and argue that we can cut the Pentagon’s budget and be more secure for it.
Setting the Record Straight on Military Spending Levels
As David Boaz recently demonstrated, the jeremiads emanating from Washington over proposed cuts in military spending are unfounded. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post is only the latest to decry the “damaging blow to our military” that will be done by “massive defense cuts.”
Not only is Pentagon spending not at its lowest level in 60 years, as the Heritage Foundation claimed, it will not fall to such a level even if the Budget Control Act’s sequestration spending caps are implemented. David shows that charts can obscure the relevant facts or contribute to poor arguments.
But charts can also help shed light on the truth. For example, in the first chart below, prepared by my colleague Charles Zakaib, one might conclude that the reductions being contemplated as an outgrowth of President Obama’s strategic review (the brown line) would represent a dramatic cut in the Pentagon’s base budget. The automatic sequester cuts (the red line at the bottom) appear even more draconian.
What the Pentagon’s New Military Strategy Should Look Like
President Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey are scheduled to brief the media tomorrow morning on the recently completed strategic review that will inform the Pentagon’s budget priorities for the coming five to ten years. Early indications suggest that the status quo will hold. And that is bad news for U.S. troops, and U.S. taxpayers.
Obama, Panetta, and Dempsey should clearly spell out:
- The types of missions that the U.S. military will be expected to perform on a regular basis
- Those operations that the military will occasionally conduct on short notice, and for short periods of time
- How defense capacity can be augmented in those very rare cases calling for significant mobilization of additional resources.
Some suggest that the strategy document will abandon the requirement that the Pentagon must be prepared to fight two sustained ground wars at the same time, something that the country hasn’t done since well before Barack Obama was born. Such a change, if true, should be welcomed.
It is significant the president is attending, and the most important questions should be reserved for him. It is particularly incumbent upon the civilian leadership within the Obama administration, beginning with the president himself, to spell out their intentions regarding the use of force, and of the role of the U.S. military more broadly. These should go beyond vague signals; our military leaders shouldn’t be forced to guess what missions that they will be asked to perform. The president must tell them.
A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Cutting the Military Budget
The New York Times has posted a handy tool for calculating savings from the Pentagon’s budget over the next ten years. I went through the exercise, and my plan resulted in cuts of $1.144 trillion over ten years. Had I checked all of the boxes in the Times’s calculator, it would have generated savings of up to $1.4 trillion.
Though I support reform of the the military retirement system, I think some of these proposals go too far (they would have saved up to $86.5 billion). We should continue to spend money recruiting the very best force, comprised of the most-qualified men and women ($5 billion), and we might find it hard to do that if/when the economy improves. Tuition assistance is a key factor driving recruitment, and I wouldn’t scale that back ($5 billion). (Full disclosure: I attended college on an NROTC scholarship.) We need the best possible services for families, and I could foresee problems with closing elementary and secondary schools on bases ($10 billion). And I have no particular quarrel with military bands ($0.2 billion). My ideal military will be smaller and more elite, but likely better compensated than today’s force. And retirees would continue to receive many benefits not enjoyed by their fellows who never served, but we should experiment with ways to control costs. The key take-away, and the one stressed in the accompanying story by Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker, is that it is possible to reduce military spending, and the resulting force will still be larger and more capable than any conceivable combination of rivals.
A few additional observations:
1) The Times’s calculator cites my and Ben Friedman’s contribution to the Sustainable Defense Task Force report, “Debts, Deficits, and Defense,” but the main part of the report was the work of the entire task force, and they deserve proper credit. I am particularly grateful to Carl Conetta and Charles Knight of the Project for Defense Alternatives.
2) Ben and I published a stand-alone report a few months later with some numbers drawn from the SDTF report, and with some additional detail surrounding our proposals that were not endorsed by all SDTF members. Our savings were calculated against the baseline from fiscal year 2010, and these numbers are now a bit dated.
3) When I hit the submit button comparing my choices with others who participated in the exercise, I discovered 80 percent of respondents supported the plan to reduce forces in Europe and Asia. That sort of systematic restructuring is necessary to ensure that we don’t impose undue burdens on what will necessarily be a smaller force. As I have said repeatedly, if we are going to spend less, we must expect our troops to do less, and expect other countries to do more.
A Few Final Thoughts on Iraq
The news from North Korea is dominating the media cycle this morning, but I feel compelled to offer a few final thoughts regarding Iraq before the images of the last U.S. troops departing the country fade too far into the past.
As the lead author of the monograph Exiting Iraq, as well as at two major papers and more op-eds than I care to count, you would think that I would be exultant that this long war has finally ended.
I am not. My chief regret is that those vocal few who worked to stop the war failed, and that those of us who pushed for a speedy end succeeded only in the latter sense. It ended, but the end wasn’t swift.
The supporters of this war tried to paint war opponents as hostile to American servicemen and women, but their efforts have failed. Most Americans now oppose the war, and yet the vast majority of Americans also support the troops. They understand that the blame for this war falls on those who promoted it, not those tasked with executing it.
Most Americans supported the war at the outset, but they did so on false pretenses. Some believed that Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda. Others thought him to be involved in the events of 9/11. Still others were focused on his supposed capacity for building and deploying mass casualty weapons. A few, perhaps many, Americans believed all of these things. But when these dubious rationales all fell away, we were left with just one justification – establishing a representative government in Iraq — and that rationale was found wanting. Very few Americans believe that U.S. military personnel should be in the business of promoting democracy by force. I strongly suspect that war supporters knew this all along, which is why they worked so hard to hype the supposed threat that Saddam posed to the world.
And, in a more general sense, that explains the precipitous decline in support for this war. Americans grew tired of Iraq because the costs far exceeded the benefits, and this would have been true even if the benefits were more tangible (if, for example, U.S. troops had found a vast stockpile of Saddam’s nukes in a tunnel somewhere).
Military leaders knew that war is never cheap or easy, but the rest of the Inside-the-Beltway crowd told the public at large that this war would be. Perhaps average citizens should have known better, and perhaps they would have paid more attention if they knew that they (or their sons and daughters) might be called to fight. But the wars of the 1990s were not particularly costly, and the first war of the post-9/11 appeared in the summer of 2002 to have followed that earlier pattern. Of course, the war in Afghanistan is now in its eleventh year.
And yet, a stubborn few in Washington refuse to admit what most Americans concluded long ago. I was most discouraged by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s comments over the weekend:
“As difficult as [the Iraq war] was,” and the cost in both American and Iraqi lives, “I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world,” he added.
One could say that he was simply performing his role as SecDef. Perhaps he believed that suggesting that the war wasn’t worth it would be discouraging to the troops, and disrespectful to the sacrifices that they made. But that simply plays into the fiction that one has to be anti-military in order to be anti-war. The opposite is closer to the truth.
Even David Frum, one of the war’s most enthusiastic supporters, the man who is credited with coining the term “axis of evil” and who later co-authored a book The End to Evil, admitted in response to a hypothetical question to the GOP candidates, “knowing everything you know now,” would you have supported the decision to go war?:
“No….The world is a better place without Saddam, but as with everything, the question is one of costs and benefits. The costs to the U.S. were too high, the benefits to the U.S. too few.”
In 2008, Americans elected as president a man who opposed the Iraq war before it began, and, in the process, turned aside one of the war’s leading advocates. And yet President Obama’s national security team is at pains to state clearly what is abundantly clear: This war was a mistake, and we should collectively vow to reject the flawed logic and the radical ideology that spawned it. If the Obama team can’t say that, what hope is there that they — or we — have learned anything from this awful affair?
Kim Jong-il Is Dead
The AP and others are reporting that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has died at the age of 70. This has long been expected, but what comes next is unclear. The best case scenario would be a smooth transition to new leadership, one that is committed to opening up North Korea’s ossified political system and reforming its decrepit economy. That is unlikely, however. If a power struggle ensues, the North Korean people will be caught in the middle. The countries with the most at stake in the event of a complete collapse of the DPRK — especially South Korea and China — should take the lead in helping the North Koreans to sort out their future.
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