Read more at BigThink.com:
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink
Christopher Preble:
It’s true the U.S. military is a costly enterprise. It cost us more as a share of our total output during the Cold War, but in absolute dollar terms we’re spending about as much now as we spent during the Cold War, so the cost to maintain primacy has remained relatively high.
And the question is, could we spend much more on the military to cover some of the gaps between what we ask our military to do and the resources they have to carry out those missions? I think the answer is: we could spend more, but it’s not in our interest to do so, just spending more on the military won’t ensure that the military, for example, will be able to succeed, and some of the conflicts that it hasn’t yet achieved decisive victory.
I think it actually speaks to the limits of military power, that you can spend a lot and you can have the most exquisite military in the world, which we absolutely do, and yet that same military struggles to defeat determined adversaries wielding crude weapons in places like Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan. And I think that really does speak that just spending more money on the problem is not likely to solve the problem, it is likely to encourage us to get more deeply involved in some conflicts that might genuinely be intractable and that ultimately aren’t vital to U.S. national security.
I think that for a country as powerful as the United States, and especially a country with global interests and with a large and capable military, it’s really important to define ahead of time when that military will be used. I use some basic criteria that are consistent with things like the Weinberger Powell Doctrine from the Cold War and early post-Cold War period. Things like: what’s the national security interest at stake? What are we asking our military to do? Will the public support the mission even if the mission gets difficult and costly? Related, how are we going to pay for it? Will the war be paid for by, for example, a war tax or will we pay for it through debt like we did in World War II?
Those sorts of questions are important to ask before we send our military into harms way.
And I think that’s, again, the nature of the U.S. military, because it exists and it is so large and strong and in many places simultaneously, it’s fairly easy for that military to become involved in conflicts before we ask any of those questions. And so I think it’s really important for the American people and for American policymakers to keep in mind some basic criteria for when we use force. The last point I’d make is that war is a perilous enterprise. It involves the threat of violence and the destruction of property and therefore we shouldn’t enter into it lightly.
And so I think when I think of restraint and an instinct of non-intervention, it’s more about just a sort of skeptical eye, it’s a sort of hesitance to use force. That doesn’t mean never using force, it means thinking through it very, very carefully before we do.
I think that one of the great disservices we do to the military is to expect the American people to support it at all costs for any reason, and not expecting the American people to actually scrutinize the missions that we ask of the military to do.
In other words the greatest service that we can do to our veterans is to make sure that there are relatively few of them. That those who do go to war in defense of vital U.S. national security interests are doing so for the right set of reasons and I think it would almost be unpatriotic it seems to me for Americans to not think carefully about the wars that we ask our military to fight.
