Persistent Conflict

Spencer Ackerman has a smart post up about General George Casey’s conceit that the American strategic environment is characterized by “an era of persistent conflict”. As Spencer says, the key thing here is that “one man’s Era Of Persistent Conflict is another man’s Era Of Persistent Peace.” In other words, far from “persistent” conflict what we’re actually looking at is a persistent absence of large-scale security threat to the United States and, thus, a US Army more oriented to selectively playing a constructive role in other people’s conflicts around the world. Spencer

It’s possible that the second definition prevails, and our Army becomes more like, say, Australia’s — primarily used for assistance in a regional conflict, rarely for centrality in major war-fighting. (Apologies to the Aussies if I’ve misunderstood your national posture, but this is how it appears from Washington D.C.) That, I suppose, wouldn’t be terrible, provided it wouldn’t invite attack from a superior adversary.

I think we can be pretty sure it wouldn’t invite an attack from a superior adversary. Among other things, it’s the Navy rather than the Army standing between us and the Chinese — I don’t think we need to worry about offensive military operations from Mexico. The real issue, to my mind, is if we’re going to have a military oriented around this sort of thing, how big does it really need to be?

The correct answer, I think, is “pretty big.” We’ve got the world’s largest GDP. We’ve got the world’s third-largest population. And we’re very close to the top in per capita GDP — way higher than the other large population countries. So it makes a ton of sense for us to have the biggest and most expensive military establishment in the world. But it doesn’t need to be the most expensive by such an absurdly large margin. A lot of the rhetoric around the military suggests the idea (“fighting for our freedom”) suggests they’re really poised on the border to fend off a Canadian onslaught or, at a minimum, holding the Soviets at bay in the Fulda Gap. In reality, they’re doing no such thing. Acting as a the main guarantor of the freedom of the seas, peacekeeping in Bosnia, training friendly security forces in the Philipines, and the like are useful things to do (occupying Iraq less so) but none of them are essential to the continued existence of the United States.

Which is fine. Tons of stuff the federal government does, from wage-indexing Social Security to fighting AIDS in Africa to the National Parks System is hardly essential to the continued existence of the country. By the same token, most of our individual expenditures are for things that aren’t required for subsistence. We’re a rich and powerful land, so we needed be guided in either our individual or a collective decisions by a strict necessity test. Being a 21st century American is cool like that.

But this perspective does mean that a US military facing a strategic environment of persistent peace needs to be able to justify its budgetary claims in perspective — is the marginal dollar of defense spending more useful than a marginal dollar of civilian development assistance, of a beef-ed up foreign service, of enhanced domestic infrastructure spending? There’s some quantity of defense spending such that the answer is “yes.” But one can’t help but suspect that the point of describing persistent peace as “persistent conflict” is to obscure these trade-offs. To try to put the military’s operations in the Horn of Africa on a whole different plane than USAID’s relief work in Pakistan when on the merits it all deserves to be considered comprehensively.