The U.S. is wasting its defense dollars.
Max Boot is concerned that the U.S. may achieve a measure of solvency:
The U.S. is currently engaged in three active wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya)â??four if you count the war on terror, five if you count the war on piracy. We are increasingly hard-pressed to stave off the aggressive military designs of a resurgent China. We have to deter a nuclear North Korea and prevent Iran from going nuclear. We have to prepare for the possibility of an implosion in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed, highly unstable state. We have to maintain free movement across the global commons, meaning air and sea-lanes along with outer space and cyberspace. And at the same time we have to perform myriad humanitarian missions, such as the one currently being conducted by U.S. Pacific Command to assist Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami.Is this any time to cut defense spending? Apparently President Obama thinks so.
Note the frame: we have to. But here's the thing: we don't have to. We want to.
Boot titles his post a "Prescription for Decline," the "prescription" being the desire to trim back some of the federal government's defense spending. It's true that cutting defense spending could mean that the U.S. would have to rethink some legacy defense commitments and be less apt to start more unnecessary wars/nation-building boondoggles, but I fail to see why that's a bad thing. Washington is seemingly hell bent on scoring own goals, wasting American resources on vanity projects like the war in Libya or aggressive nation building in Iraq. Doing less of this is vital to staving off decline. I would prefer that we not "starve the beast" to pursue a more rationalized foreign policy, but Washington is not exactly known for being prudent stewards of Americans' money.
Defense spending is not the cause of America's fiscal woes - entitlements are. But a fair share of the U.S. "defense" budget is waste. Not waste in the sense of $500 toilet seats, but waste as in the trillion-dollar investment in Iraq, which has yielded nothing remotely close to the costs. It is wasteful to defend allies in Europe who neither need, nor apparently want, to defend themselves. It is wasteful to build, at a cost of billions, a shambolic state in Afghanistan that will collapse on itself unless we stay there forever.
I do think we should be careful about what and where we cut. I think the ability to ensure our vital sea lanes are secure and to exercise some check on China are worthwhile military expenditures. Maintaining naval and air power that is qualitatively better than both China and Russia combined makes sense. Heck, I'm not even opposed to forward deployments in Asia, an arena where U.S. conventional power (i.e. the thing we're good at) can potentially play a useful balancing role.
But the very fact that Boot can say (somewhat plausibly) that we're fighting five wars at once is a symptom that something's wrong. And it has nothing to do with the fact that Obama wants to shave a few billion off the Pentagon's tab.
