The Boston Globe kindly published a piece I wrote about the lack of strategy guiding Pentagon spending, but gave it the somewhat misleading title and subtitle: “The Pentagon’s Bloat: Accounting tricks and self-interested politicians ensure that US military spending will remain immune from any real ‘hard choices.’”*
The article doesn’t really bemoan bloat, in the standard sense of wasteful or inefficient pursuit of objectives. It complains about excessive objectives—our overly capacious definition of security—and explains the cause.
My argument is that it would be terrific if Ashton Carter, the new Secretary of Defense, and the military service chiefs were correct in their contention that they cannot execute the U.S. security strategy without exceeding the $499 billion cap that law imposes on 2016 Pentagon spending. They made that claim in requesting a budget that requires raising the cap by $34 billion or eliminating it, another $51 billion for war and relief from future years’ caps.
Our current “strategy” isn’t really one. Strategy, by definition, requires prioritization among competing threats and methods of defending against them. Our government uses that word to rationalize the avoidance of those choices. The primacy theory that best describes our approach to security is really a justification for a log-roll of disparate military interests and goals, most only vaguely related to our safety. A poorer state facing more pressing threats would have to choose among those objectives, which is what strategy does. Poverty demands choices that wealth avoids. And as realists explain, big threats unify preferences, lowering obstacles to strategy formation.
The United States has long been rich and safe enough to minimize choices among defenses and avoid strategy. So we get the phony, listicle sort: recitations of nice things that we hope U.S. military power might accomplish, justified as security objectives. That has the effect of conflating safety with values, and promoting a sense of insecurity.