Military-Industrial Complex Revisited: Mission Implausable

President Eisenhower’s warning about the "acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the military-industrial complex is as relevant today as it was in 1961. Despite the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military budget is higher today than it was when Eisenhower gave his military-industrial complex speech in 1961. At more than $270 billion per year, the U.S. military budget (in constant dollars) remains near the peacetime cold war average that prevailed during the prime period of U.S.-Soviet rivalry, from roughly 1950 to 1989. This is astonishing considering that Russia has slashed its weapons procurement budget by 77% since 1991, and that Russian forces could barely prevail over a rebel army in Chechnya (inside its own borders), much less project force against neighboring countries.²

Absent a robust Russian military, where is the threat that justifies spending over a quarter of a trillion dollars per year on war and preparations for war? The Pentagon’s answer is simple: there is no longer one powerful superpower adversary to contend with, but U.S. forces still need to be equipped to fight two major regional conflicts simultaneously against "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea.³ And getting hundreds of thousands of troops to these far-away places requires spending almost as much as the United States spent during the cold war—or so the Pentagon claims.

This "two war" scenario is implausible in the extreme. As Michael Klare has masterfully demonstrated in his book, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, Colin Powell devised the two war strategy once he realized that the United States was "running out of enemies" large enough to justify spending hundreds of billions on the Pentagon every year. Klare also demonstrates that the two "major regional conflicts" that are the building blocks of the Pentagon’s new spending scenario both involve theoretical regional adversaries that are far better armed and equipped than existing regional powers like Iraq or North Korea.⁴

Michael Klare is not alone in suggesting that the new threats to U.S. security have been greatly exaggerated. Pentagon budget analyst Franklin Spinney has bluntly asserted that "the Pentagon’s two war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high budget." Merrill McPeak, who served as Air Force Chief of Staff during and after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, has also weighed in on this issue:

For those who question whether conflicts like Vietnam or the Gulf War were essential to U.S. security, McPeak’s estimate of one major conflict every 15 years can be extended to one every twenty to thirty years. And, as we will discuss later, the U.S. military budget could be sharply reduced if our government would take concerted action to prevent conflict. A preventive strategy would be far cheaper and more effective than the current approach of marshaling huge, expensive forces to prepare for contingencies that are unlikely to occur. This point is borne out by the war in Kosovo, where it has become painfully evident that the costly application of high tech military force is the wrong tool for dealing with ethnic conflicts and civil wars. By forcing the withdrawal of human rights monitors and humanitarian organizations that had been operating in the province, the NATO bombing campaign actually made it easier for Serb forces to drive ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo at gunpoint. And by intervening in an internal conflict without seeking the consent of the United Nations Security Council, the United States and its NATO allies have confronted one illegitimate use of force--ethnic cleansing in Kosovo--with another--NATO’s unauthorized bombing campaign. Meanwhile, relatively inexpensive measures that might have stopped the killing in Kosovo sooner--such as a beefed-up monitoring presence by the woefully underfunded Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe or a well-funded United Nations peacekeeping effort--were cast aside in favor of an ill-considered air war.⁶

Figure 3

Global Military Budget, 1997
(billions of $U.S.)

* The figure for NATO does not include the U.S.

Source: The Military Balance, 1998/99, International Institute for Strategic Studies

Lawrence Korb, a top official in the Reagan Pentagon who now serves as the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, has argued that even if one accepts the proposition that U.S. forces need to be ready to fight two major regional conflicts at once, there is still room to make major cuts in the current Pentagon budget. Korb notes that the United States currently spends 19 times more on its military forces than all of the Pentagon’s so-called "rogue states"—Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Cuba, and North Korea—combined (see Figures 2 and 3). Korb also asserts that the Pentagon completely discounts the military capabilities of such key U.S. regional allies as Israel and South Korea, which would reinforce U.S. military power in a major regional conflict in the Middle East or Asia. Once we take into account the relative weakness of the rogue states and the strength of our allies, Korb suggests that there is room to trim at least $40 billion from our current Pentagon budget, even if we accept the highly unlikely scenario of needing to fight two major conflicts at one time.⁷ The point about the relative strength of the United States and its allies is underscored by the fact that the United States and its key allies (NATO, Japan, and South Korea) now account for 62% of total global military spending, up from roughly one-half in the mid-1980s.⁸ In short, despite repeated calls for higher military spending to remedy the alleged "readiness crisis" facing U.S. forces, the United States and its allies currently account for a much higher share of global military spending than they did at the height of the Reagan military buildup in the mid-1980s.

By exaggerating the current threat to U.S. security, the Pentagon is carrying on a long and dishonorable tradition. In fact, in the early 1990s it was revealed that U.S. projections of Soviet military power had been wildly overstated for years as a result of misleading intelligence supplied by people like Aldrich Ames, the CIA agent who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Similarly, in the 1970s, the conservative Committee on the Present Danger pressed the CIA to do a slanted "Team B" assessment of Soviet military power that helped pave the way for Ronald Reagan’s unprecedented peacetime military buildup of the 1980s.⁹

The terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (August 1998) and missile tests by Iran (July 1998) and North Korea (August 1998), and NATO’s air war in Kosovo (inaugurated on March 24, 1999) have prompted politicians and media pundits to demand that the Pentagon be given more money in order to beef up its national security policies. It is essential to offer a compelling alternative to the exaggerated threats and misguided spending priorities that military hawks are promoting in the hopes of dramatically increasing the Pentagon budget, bringing it back to the record-high, Reaganesque levels that prevailed in the mid-1980s.

Figure 3a

Top Five Global Arms Suppliers: 1997

SIPRI Arms Transfer Project, “The 30 Leading Suppliers of Major Conventional Weapons,” updated July 17, 1998. Avaliable on the web at: http://www.sipri.se/projects/armstrade/atsup93-97.html.

If the current threats to U.S. interests don’t justify spending $270 billion a year on the Pentagon, much less increasing the military budget, as conservatives are suggesting, what is driving these enormous expenditures? First and most obviously, the main beneficiaries of cold war military spending—including the Pentagon, the major military contractors, and key members of Congress who routinely steer military dollars to their districts — have been working overtime to keep the military gravy train running. Beyond this institutional pressure for permanently high military spending, there is also a strategic rationale—the notion that the United States should retain the capability to serve as a sort of "globocop," charging to the rescue to restore order, stability, and "free markets" when they are threatened by the forces of evil and chaos. Although it is true that in a number of key instances—such as Somalia and Rwanda—the United States has abandoned the task of policing violent conflicts due to public concern about U.S. casualties, the Pentagon’s strategy and budget remain focused on retaining a capability for global force projection. And in those areas where there are critical resources or potential U.S. investments at risk—such as the Persian Gulf and the oil-and-gas-rich former Soviet Republics of Central Asia—the Pentagon is busily at work providing arms and training, arranging access to bases, and (in the case of the Persian Gulf) prepositioning troops and equipment in readiness for a possible military intervention at some future date. If we were to abandon the outdated notion that the United States needs to maintain the capability to project force to every corner of the globe and focus instead on developing better diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations with other nations, we could afford to cut tens of billions of dollars from our bloated military budget.¹⁰

Mission Implausible: Two War Strategy as "Globocop"