You know you’ve been in Washington too long when you start writing stuff like: “A circular firing squad is always fun to watch.”
The line between cocktail hour quips and analysis is often gossamer thin, and blogging makes us all a little desperate for material. Nonetheless, it’s sad when someone like Gordon Adams, once associate director for national security at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), opts for name-calling rather than number-crunching as he does in a “critique” of the arguments we, “flame carriers of the neoconservative vision”—whatever that means—advanced in last Friday’s Washington Post. Gordon got a biscuit, too, from Andrew Sullivan, who is ever vigilant at the “AEI Propaganda Watch.”
Rather than simply join the purse fight, let us try to enlighten you, Dear Readers. Our Post piece urged conservatives to remember that the original sin of government is not to grow, but to do things it shouldn’t do—and that protecting the nation and its interests is indeed the first order of business for government and a function that only the national government can perform.
This is not an argument that the Left or Democrats want to have. To begin with, most Americans have a high regard both for the utility of military power and, especially in a time of war where so few of us actually serve, a strong disposition to give those who defend us everything they might need. So making a principled argument about the futility or sorrows of U.S. power doesn’t resonate much outside the faculty lounge. Thus, the Obama administration has reluctantly agreed that the Iraq surge, for example, was a good thing.
But never letting a good crisis go to waste, the Left saw a golden opportunity in the recession to go after military spending. The fundamental argument has been that, while American military power is good (“No! Really! We believe it!”) we just can’t afford it. President Obama would really like to succeed in Afghanistan—after all, it’s the “good war”—but when confronted with an OMB assessment that a strategically sound approach would cost $889 billion over ten years, blanched at the “opportunity costs.” That is to say, the cost to his domestic programs and priorities. “It’s not in the national interest,” the commander-in-chief told Bob Woodward.
Woodward also recounts how President Obama thinks he’s channeling an inner Eisenhower and his storied “military-industrial complex” speech, the conclusion of which was that “each [government] proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.” Eisenhower’s concern was to constrain the seemingly open-ended military commitment in Korea, which was consuming 14 percent of U.S. economic output. The point of the “balance” he achieved lowered the slice consumed by defense spending to 10 percent of GDP. That math sounds pretty good to a neocon flame carrier.
What Eisenhower did not have to contend with were federal deficits at more than 10 percent of GDP, an accumulated national debt (and associated interest payments) headed toward 90 percent of GDP, and social entitlements (before ObamaCare) nearing 15 percent of GDP. With defense spending, including war costs, currently less than 5 percent of GDP, it’s pretty obvious where any real “balancing” must come from. Indeed, entitlement reform is critical to ensuring that the United States can preserve its strength and finance its wars.
Thus our Post piece was essentially an argument about affordability, balance, and opportunity costs. Even more, we were making an argument about value. It’s very difficult to quantify, in economic or other terms, the value of U.S. security guarantees not only for America but for the rest of the world. Yet it’s evident that our prosperity—and hopes for future growth—would be jeopardized without them.
Gordon Adams thinks we have twisted the facts, but we don’t dispute that the cost of national defense has risen. So has the cost of a car. There are lots of facts out there, but only some of them are relevant to whether the United States can preserve sufficient military strength.
Danielle Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI, where Thomas Donnelly directs the Center for Defense Studies.