The Cold War Is Over, but U.S. Preparation for It Continues.

• Author: Higgs, Robert
• Position: Etceteras ...

As George W. Bush's administration took office in January 2001, you could almost hear the sighs of relief coming from the Pentagon and the corporate headquarters of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, Litton Industries, and other big defense contractors. After all, the Bush campaign had championed a $45 billion increase in annual military spending over the next decade. Appearing at a Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination as secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld advocated an even greater increase, remarking that "it is not a time to preside and tweak and calibrate," though the administration's tactics dictated that the big increase not be requested immediately (Rumsfeld qtd. by Jaffe and Schlesinger 2001; see also Jaffe and McKinnon 2001). Just eleven days later, the press disclosed that "the dash for missile-defense profits is on" (Jaffe and Squeo 2001, A24). Nor were the missile defense system contractors the only ones who stood to benefit from the new administration's defense program. Bush's budget, introduced at the end of February, called for an increase of $14.2 billion, or 4.8 percent, in defense spending, but the budget's proposed "contingency reserve" held additional funds that could be tapped by the military ("Bush's Budget Balance" 2001, A14), and the Pentagon has been no stranger to supplemental appropriations. As the preliminary maneuvering proceeded, with an eye toward fiscal year (FY) 2003 and beyond, Rumsfeld's staff produced a plan to increase the weapons procurement budget by 42 percent over seven years, "with big increases for fighter jets, ballistic-missile defense, cargo planes and bombers" (Jaffe 2001, A28). Throughout the military-industrial-congressional complex (hereafter, the MICC), the pork-hawks preened their feathers and prepared to take flight. (1)

The Latest Cycle

The MICC, it seemed, was setting out on another of the recurrent upsurges that have marked the history of defense spending since the onset of the Cold War. The first such upsurge--the most significant one, in view of its long-term consequences--occurred concurrently with the Korean War, though much of it pertained to the buildup of forces intended for deployment in Europe and elsewhere, not in Korea. The second buildup financed the U.S. misadventure in Vietnam. The most recent upswing was the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, which receded in the first half of the 1990s. Examining what might be viewed as the Cold War norm or baseline of defense spending during the fiscal years 1955-65 and 1974-80, when neither substantial mobilization nor demobilization was occurring, we find that real defense spending during those years averaged $281 billion (dollars of 1999 purchasing power) per year. (2) On a graph, the three upsurges and their subsequent abatements appear as discrete hills sitting on that Cold War plateau (Higgs 1994, 288).

If the Cold War had continued to the present, we might have expected that defense spending during the past several years would have returned to the level of the Cold War norm, and indeed it has done so. During the six fiscal years from 1995 through 2000, the average level of annual defense spending was $278 billion (dollars of 1999 purchasing power)--almost exactly equal to the Cold War norm. (3)

Such an equality, however fitting it might seem in the sense of conformity to a statistically descriptive pattern, raises a serious policy question: Given that the Cold War ended a decade ago, why is the defense establishment plowing ahead as if nothing had changed and even beginning to enlarge its bite on the taxpayer's purse? After all, it was to fight the Cold War that the historically extraordinary magnitude of defense spending was ordained in the first place, back in the early 1950s. That immense rate of spending was continuously maintained--even when the United States was not engaged in a hot war or in any other military upsurge--in order, one presumes, to meet continuing threats posed by the USSR, its satellites, and its proxies, and especially to deter an attack on the NATO domain by the mighty Soviet forces in Europe. Today, however, the Soviet Union is a receding memory; ten years have passed since it disintegrated. The Soviet forces that remained in the hands of the Russians have suffered decay, disorganization, and demoralization. In the words of Lt. General Alexander I. Lebed, "Russia doesn't have an army anymore. It has only toy soldiers, formations of boys with no capacity." (4) Of the USSR's formidable navy, "little remains but rusting surface vessels and old, undermaintained submarines" (Creveld 1999, 345). Moreover, the Russians, no longer the avowed enemies of the West, have entered into extensive economic, scientific, cultural, and even military cooperation with the United States and other Western nations. In view of all these developments, where is the big present threat, the one so menacing that it requires military spending equal to that with which the United States waged the Cold War?

Is the United States Militarily Weak?

The United States suffers no shortage of defense Jeremiahs. In their circle, the Munich analogy remains ever fresh, the danger of appeasement and isolationism ever present. Thus, for example, retired Lt. General William E. Odom, though conceding that "today the Russian military does not present a serious threat to NATO," has warned that Russia's armed forces are "down but not out" (Odom 1996). (Don't tell that story to the crew of the Kursk.) John F. Lehman, a former secretary of the navy, and Harvey Sicherman, writing in February 2001 and drawing on their forthcoming book America the Vulnerable, fretted about the erosion of U.S. military capacities and urged various maneuvers "to steer clear of the `Pearl Harbor' cycle whereby only a disaster brings effective action" (Lehman and Sicherman 2001). The title of one recently published alarm speaks for itself: While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today, by Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan (2001).

Conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation have never met a military budget big enough to satisfy them. In 1996, Heritage analyst Baker Spring perceived "a serious mismatch between [U.S.] security commitments and the military capabilities needed to fulfill those commitments." Soon, he anticipated, the United States "will have to decide between remaining a global power capable of preventing wars or [sic] becoming a mere regional military power, condemned to fight and possibly lose them." In his view, projected defense budgets placed the nation "on a forced march along the path to military weakness and withdrawal" (1996, 1, 7).

Neoconservatives, worried about what they perceive to be the flabby character of contemporary Americans, have urged greater military spending as support for a Teddy Roosevelt-style interventionist foreign policy, notwithstanding the enormous costs of such forthrightly macho globalism and its negligible likelihood of success in carrying out the neocon quest to spread "democracy" (Muravchik 1996; for a compendium of recent essays along these lines, see Kagan and Kristol 2000).

Although their fighting spirit no doubt merits a standing ovation, such observers of the contemporary military scene deserve low marks for their appreciation of the relevant facts. The United States today is anything but militarily weak. It bestrides the globe better equipped to defend its vital national interests than any preceding imperial power ever was. One has only to consider some pertinent comparisons.

According to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 1999 the United States accounted for 36 percent of world military expenditure. U.S. allies Japan, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy ranked second through sixth, respectively, and as a group accounted for 26 percent. Russia ranked seventh, with military spending that amounted to 3 percent of the world total, and China ranked eighth, spending substantially less than Russia (SIPRI n.d.b.). (5) Russia "experienced sharp cuts in its military expenditure and arms procurement during the 1990s" (SIPRI n.d.b.). At the end of the 1990s, the United States was spending twenty-two times more than a group of seven so-called rogue states-Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, and Sudan (Center for Defense Information [CDI] n.d.d.). Because world military spending fell faster than U.S. military spending between 1985 and 1999, the U.S. share of the world total increased, from 30 percent to 36 percent (CDI n.d.h.)

It is possible, of course, that the amounts spent might fail to reflect differences in actual military capabilities, but other data show that U.S. capabilities are genuine. Whether one considers active troop strength, reserve troop strength, heavy tanks, armored infantry vehicles, airplanes, helicopters, or major warships, the United States and its allies possess a preponderance of the warriors and the tools of war, greatly exceeding the troop strengths and the number of weapons platforms in the hands of all potential adversaries combined (CDI n.d.f.). Beyond this numerical dominance, the United States and its allies possess important additional advantages of superiority in weapons technology as well as in communications, intelligence, logistics, training, maintenance, and mobility.

Listening to recent defense critics and presidential challengers, we might suspect that U.S. forces lack readiness to fight, but for the most part such suspicions lack a sound basis. Readiness, as former assistant secretary of defense Lawrence J. Korb, has commented, "is a slippery and poorly understood concept" as well as % hot-button political issue, subject to unlimited manipulation." In 1995, Korb concluded that "the current readiness gap, like others since the 1970's, was designed and manufactured by the Pentagon to serve its...