Morning Fog

The Future Of U.S. Security

Hardly had I clicked to publish my last post when I read David Ignatius's column on "the debate over U.S. strength," which takes a new book by Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Strategic Vision," as a springboard for a discussion of two competing conceptual frameworks for the future exercise of U.S. power in the world.  Ignatius, paraphrasing Brzezinski, wrote this paragraph:

'A wake-up line in Brzezinski’s book is that there are “alarming similarities” between America today and the Soviet Union just before its fall, including a “gridlocked governmental system incapable of enacting serious policy revisions,” a back-breaking military budget and a failing “decade-long attempt to conquer Afghanistan.”' 

Quite an arresting statement, considering my own opinion a couple of hours ago that I didn't think the U.S. was about to break apart!   Neither does Brzezinski, really, but he does use this comparison to awaken us to the need to think seriously about what kind of defense establishment we need, and how we should use it.   

On this broader issue, Ignatius's column is well worth reading, as is, I suspect, Brzezinski's book.  (The latter can be ordered directly from amazon.com by clicking the icon in the right-hand margin.)  

Whacking "American Citizens"

Just yesterday, I mentioned that there might be cases where it's legitimate for immigrants not to have exactly the same rights as U.S. citizens - but equality under the law  wasn't one of them.

Now let's put the shoe on the other foot.   Do U.S. citizens have superrights that grant them some godlike status to enjoy even when they themselves have spurned the protections of the U.S. Constitution?   That's really the argument that the ACLU and other critics are making regarding the nonaccidental droning death of Anwar al-Aulaqi (or al-Awlaki - it seems we can take our pick of spellings of Arabic names these days) and his pal Samir Khan, both of whom, apparently, were at one time American citizens.

I say "at one time," because surely even the ACLU does not suppose that either of these gents was really an "American" in any but the most meaningless, bureaucratic, de jure sense, i.e., by virtue of having been born in the U.S.  (Incidentally, very few countries of the world choose to define citizenship by place of birth; most define it by the nationality of the parents).

U.S. citizenship law is complex, and I know it has changed in some ways since the days when I was schooled to interpret it as a consular officer, but I do recall there are provisions for a citizen born in the U.S. of foreign parents to choose his citizenship at age 18; there are provisions for any U.S. citizen to renounce his citizenship.  Bureaucrat-lawyers may want to argue that because Anwar and Samir had not stopped by their local U.S. consulate in Sanaa to fill out the paperwork for that, they were still "Americans."  But I think realistically we all understand how this pair of terrorists probably couldn't find time in their busy schedules to make the trek to the Yemeni capital from their mountain hideout.  I think we also understand that fulfilling the niceties of U.S. regulation probably was not high on this dynamic duo's list of priorities.  (Or shall we suppose that they treasured their U.S. citizenship and planned to come back and live in the U.S. after it became a Muslim state?)

In fact, both had clearly chosen to define themselves as belligerents in the war of terror against the U.S.  That to me is all we need to know.  In World War II I'm certain there were some American-born Germans fighting on the German side; I'm going to go out a limb here and guess that our troops storming Omaha beach did not wait to return fire until they had seen the passports of the soldiers firing at them.  The ACLU's concern for legal niceties may be valuable at times but it seems out of place here: quixotic but not noble, pedantic and not useful. 

The Fallacy Of "Endless War" Prognoses

In my last post I suggested that a forecast of "endless war" in our future may be based on built-in biases (i.e. the source of the forecast, and self-deception about our interests) that distort our vision of the future. 

To see how our outlook has been blurred, I'd like to examine the main ongoing military efforts that have conjured up for us the concept of endless conflict:  

Iraq:  It's not our business to bring democracy to other countries; democracy will mean little to them, and stands a good chance of not lasting, if it doesn't develop organically from within; and it may be tainted if it has to be imported by foreign intervention.  For me it was clear from George W. Bush's campaign rhetoric before he was elected that he wanted us back in Iraq.  Chemical and biological weapons?  There are a lot of legitimate questions about the evidence on that, but it was a great pretext.  If we are frank with ourselves, we will admit that Iraq was little more than a puerile attempt to exact revenge on Saddam Hussein for surviving the Gulf War, led by Bush and (perhaps more influentially) by holdover advisors from 1990 (Cheney and others), who had been among those left with egg on their faces ten years earlier.  A war of choice, through and through.

Afghanistan:  Bush was right to conduct an immediate smack-down after September 11; given the evidence of the Taliban's playing host to Bin Laden, the American people would have expected nothing less.   It was quick and effective, and here we could actually have said "Mission Accomplished," except that we chose to stay. Democracy?  We may hope, but after a decade, the realistic assessment is more in line with the CIA's current prognosis:  stalemate.  We turned a war of necessity into a war of choice.

Libya:  The smoke hasn't quite cleared yet, but it appears that we accomplished something at a relatively low cost and without a perpetual U.S. presence.  Here we supported an indigenous and self-generated movement toward change (will it be democracy? No one can tell at this point).  By letting local leaders take the lead, we avoided branding whatever political change occurs in Libya with the bad smell of foreign intervention.  So, I credit the Obama administration with having learned some important lessons from the past decade.  A war of choice, but one that was kept limited.  

Of course, many politicians - and not just Republicans - have been critical of the Libya effort, bewailing our failure to lead, or our failure to commit to spend billions over many years, in an environment of budget austerity, on an effort that has almost nothing to do with core U.S. interests.  But keep in mind that these are the politicians who have got into the habit of thinking that war is (politically) easy.  They just don't get it. 

It seems to me that much of our defense effort has far more to do with projecting U.S. power and maintaining supremacy in the world than with specific national interests.  I don't suggest we need to retreat within our borders and close the shutters; what happens elsewhere in the world often affects us profoundly.  But the military response isn't always called for. Rather than endless war, we should expect endless watchfulness, and a sober assessment of our real needs.  (This is where the "war on terrorism" comes in; a matter of security, sometimes using military power, but not truly a war.)

After September 11, 2001, we quickly created the "Department of Homeland Security." What does it do?  It defends our country from foreign threats.  But wait ... "defense" ... we already have a Department for that!  That one used to be called the War Department, and that's what it still is, really.   This confusion of defense and warmaking underlies our current dilemma of "endless war," costs us a bundle, and fuzzes our thinking about security policy.

On War

In the last couple of weeks before the tenth anniversary of what we in the U.S. now universally refer to as "nine-eleven," it's only natural that we look back on the intervening years to assess our security posture.  Everybody is producing articles on it, including a current series in the Washington Post.  I was struck by today's installment, which touts "an era of endless war" as the Pentagon's assessment not just of the past decade, but of our future. 

Certainly the nature of the threat to U.S. security is changing.  We learned that from Vietnam, but didn't really move to reflect it in our strategy until much more recently.  But to predict endless war depends on our underlying assumptions and biases about our interests in two important respects:

First, the built-in bias of an all-pro military force.  The current predictions arise, interestingly, about a generation after we abandoned conscription.  By now, senior military leaders and planners have never experienced anything but an all-volunteer force.  That has its advantages, and I've discussed its disadvantages on many occasions before, but to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  I'm not saying it's conscious deception; in fact it derives from earnest professional competence, to seek to plan for every eventuality.  However, let's not base our security strategy solely on the advice of a phalanx of professionals whose job is to see things in terms of endless war.  Or as it's been said before: "War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military."  [This World-War-One quote is variously attributed to Briand or Clemenceau.] 

Second, our historical tendency to deceive ourselves about the nature of our interests and how we respond to threats.  Since at least WWII, political leaders have recognized the power of motivating a population to support war by defining it, not in terms of U.S. interests, but in the framework of the greater good.  This usually means that we are told we're fighting for democracy, or to support democracy, or to "bring democracy" to some other nation.   Occasionally it's actually true, but it gets badly stretched when the target country has little or no democratic experience.  It works as a motivator for the cannon fodder, but it seems those who make policy too often abandon their sense of reality and come to believe it themselves. 

The upshot of the two above points is that political leaders have found it considerably easier to lead the country into war (and by corollary, much harder to get us out of it!).   If we define our interests realistically we have far less reason to perceive the future in terms of "endless war." 

  This post has become too long; in the next, I'll elaborate.

Can The CIA Speak With Many Voices?

David Ignatius, in the Washington Post, wonders how new CIA Director Petraeus will handle a difference of view that exists between himself and his analysts at the agency concerning Afghanistan.  (The agency's experts say our efforts have led to a stalemate, at best; Petraeus believes we're making progress.) 

Ignatius correctly points out that Petraeus will have to find a way to give his analytical staff the "independence" and leeway they need to produce honest assessments.  He seems to imply, though, that it would be OK for the general to continue to voice his own opinion (if it conflicts).  That would be a bridge too far.  As Director, Petraeus will need to assure himself that agency intelligence analysis is as accurate as possible, takes all factors into account, etc. -- but he cannot conceivably profess a divergent view publicly.   The CIA has had enough trouble in the past shaping its product to fit political needs;  when they do, they (and the country) come a-cropper.

Fortunately I don't think there's much reason to worry.  As Ignatius himself says, Petraeus has acknowledged the potential problem and promised to work around it.  If he doesn't, I'd say he won't be long in the job.   

The Military Entitlement

I've argued for some time that if we are to put our national budget on a diet, and cut costs enough to restore both a degree of fiscal responsibility AND a degree of flexibility in government spending, we can't continue to be straitjacketed by the huge percentage of our outlays now being taken up by "entitlements." 

Lately politicians have rather cautiously approached this taboo subject too, but they tend to focus on "fixing" social security and medicare through a combination of cost cuts and premium increases, while ignoring the 800-pound sacred cow on the books -- military spending.  That, to me, seems unreasonable.  We must include military spending in our search for cuts.

Naturally there are those who don't see it that way, including most members of the military services.  Their views are, I think, fairly well represented by retired Col. Andrew Bacevich's thoughtful piece, "Don't Rewrite the Rules..." this weekend.  But I think Bacevich leaves out a couple of pertinent points, and unrealistically inflates others.

He argues that reduced retirement benefits could put an end to the all-volunteer army.  Personally, I would welcome a return to conscription, but our politicians have found it easier to fight long wars of choice if the fighting is being handled by guys and gals who volunteered for it.   So if we can't get the draft back, let's look closely at this premise. 

It's true that as we switched to a volunteer force after Vietnam, benefits and active duty salaries were enhanced considerably as an incentive to volunteer.  However, the retirement system for the military is pretty much the same now as it was forty years ago, so it can't be seen as an incentive built for volunteers.  If we're honest with ourselves, most of us who are now in, or have served in, the military will concede that when you're 18, or 20, or 22 and thinking of a military career, you don't look 30 years ahead and consider the retirement benefits in any studied way.  

I think this is true in any career, it's just human nature.  You're considering starting salary, benefits like health care maybe, but definitely not the retirement system.  I know I didn't.   And to be frank, it would worry me to think that many of our professional military people were worried about their retirement plan at that age.  If they are, maybe they'd be better off as CPAs or insurance salesmen.  Finally, this whole argument ignores a key fact of our age:  The pattern of careers has changed; a "typical" working life will be divided into a half-dozen or more stints with different employers, possibly doing very different work.  No one nowadays expects to be with the same employer his entire working life.

In fact to me, it's because we have a professional, all-volunteer force that we can and should look at the costs of their overall compensation.  When we had a bunch of draftees, we could get all dewy-eyed thinking of the poor bums who served while their buddies stayed home, built careers, and stole their girlfriends; and we built a compensation package for the relatively small corps of "lifers" accordingly.  We haven't got out of that habit yet, but that citizen soldier no longer exists.  We should look at a professional force with a much clearer eye.  When we do, we'll see that his/her dependence on a pension is no more dire than seniors' dependence on social security or medicare.  (Perhaps it's even less as the military pensioner begins younger.) 

We'll also see that unlike social security recipients and medicare beneficiaries, military members pay nothing - not a cent - out of pocket for their retirement plan.  (They pay social security taxes, and receive social security benefits in addition to their military pension.)  How could we possibly consider it fair that we stand to be increasing premiums for medicare, requiring higher or longer pay-ins for social security, but don't ask our military members to contribute something toward a pension most other people would consider very generous?  What it really boils down to is whether we want to create a privileged military class; I posit that we don't - no more than we have already.

All that said, I also believe, as Bacevich does, that the military life makes more demands than most civilian occupations, and that there should be a defined benefit retirement system that covers them.  Ideas now being proposed, about jettisoning the current system in favor of a 401(k) plan, are just as misguided as the suggestion that we do away with social security and put private savings accounts in their place.  These "solutions" benefit only banks, investment advisors, and other financial institutions, to the detriment of retirees.  Keep the pension, but certainly - for new recruits - institute a reasonable payment to come from the beneficiary.  

Gates, The U.S., and Europe Revisited

A bit of followup on my previous post ("Gates's Frank Talk on NATO Allies"), which made the point that Europe has consistently spent about two to three percent less of its GDP on defense than the U.S.  That's spending of 2% by the Europeans versus about 5% by the U.S.  It's a huge difference, and one that explains a lot about lagging U.S. performance in a variety of domestic indicators of progress.   It's also one that our political leaders and pundits alike have tended to ignore.

Exhibit A is the Washington Post's editorial on Gates's rant, "Bob Gates's Sermon To Europe."  The Post took Gates to task for failing to acknowledge that the U.S. is also cutting back on defense expenditures, just as the Europeans are, in the current economic downturn.  Even if that is true (and the pittance in cuts that has been proposed so far raises serious doubts that it is), the Post seems to have missed the point that the imbalance has prevailed for decades, and it cumulative effects are far-reaching.

Exhibit B: Richard Haass's op-ed piece suggesting that Europe doesn't really matter any more.  He makes a persuasive case (not that he's the first to do so) but along the way, he makes the claim that NATO's marginalization cannot be attributed to "what Europeans collectively are spending on defense ($300 billion a year)."  Sorry, I'd suggest that it is at least partly that -- but again, it's the percentage, not the absolute amount, that requires our attention. 

Exhibit C: George Will calls NATO a "Potemkin alliance," and at least broaches the cost issue, but he skirts around it in the usual conservative-mantra terms:  Those foolish Europeans want to "finance their welfare states," unlike us he-man Americans, who know that things like health and education should always take a back seat to spending on our military.  This line of thought perpetuates our rationalizing our overspending on defense as "necessary," when in reality what's needed is a zero-based approach to what our defense really should be in the twenty-first century.

Incidentally, I can agree with Haass's and Will's mutual theme that NATO is obsolete, having by and large achieved its purpose; yet I also predict we'll stick with it as long as we can, because it provides us and Europe a common purpose.  Absent collective defense and security interests, we and Europe go our separate ways, and in most other respects (the most important one being economic interests and trade) we are competitors, not allies. 

Gates's Frank Talk On NATO Allies

In being brutally frank regarding our NATO allies' wimpiness in participating in commonly agreed defense projects, outgoing Defense Secretary Gates has called attention to a couple of problems in the U.S.-Europe relationship.  Both relate to the very imbalanced see-saw between the U.S., on the one end, and our NATO allies on the other.  One problem has to do with participation in, and funding of, defense efforts but the other, not much addressed in recent reportage of Gates's speech, has to do with an imbalance in how the two ends of the see-saw define the tasks the Alliance undertakes (or should undertake). 

Gates noted that our allies have generally been cutting their defense budgets, leaving the U.S. to pick up more costs, and that their forces have been less involved in recent NATO efforts, while attaching conditions to their involvement when they are engaged.  He almost makes it sound like a new problem, but it isn't.  

In fact, serious differences between what allied countries including Canada spend on defense, and what the U.S. spends, have existed for decades.   It's true that the U.S. GDP, even in these economically slow times, is greater than the NATO allies'.  So shouldn't we spend more?  That makes sense, but a more prudent and fair measure of expenditures would contrast defense expenditures of NATO members as a percentage of GDP.  Conveniently, NATO itself provides this information in an annual report, "Defense Expenditures of NATO Countries, 1990-2010."    (You'll need to scroll down to Table 3 in this report.)  To cut to the chase, you'll see that in 2009 (the last year for which complete figures are available) the U.S. spent fully 5.0% of GDP on defense, while our most engaged allies (France, Germany, the U.K) spent respectively 2.1, 1.4, and 2.7%.  Other allied countries, with a couple of anomalies, have consistently spent well less than 2%.  Previous years, going back two decades, on average show the same pattern.

The other side of the coin is that the U.S. has generally been content to outspend its allies in this manner because it enabled us to steer the ship.  Despite some occasional turbulence with prickly allies, Washington has been able to call the shots more often than not; to guide NATO decisions and policies in the directions the U.S. wanted; to retain command (or a very senior voice in command) of military forces in operations.  

This is the part that may now be under greatest stress.  Since the Cold War ended, the common bonds that originally brought this collection of allies together in NATO has faded away - not perhaps for the new members from the former Soviet sphere of influence, who  look to their freshly minted membership in NATO to protect them from an overweening Russia, but certainly for many of the members of longer standing.   Europe does not share our perception of the threat posed by terrorists in faraway Afghanistan, and sees less justification for military operations so far from home.  Within the Alliance, only the U.S. maintains a firm global outlook (the U.K. and France shared it once but seem to be fading), or the ability to project military force halfway around the globe.  For the rest, to be "Candide," it's back to Voltaire:  "Il faut cultiver nôtre jardin."

Ultimately, U.S. foreign policy has long been based on the assumption that the interests, traditions, and outlook that we share with Europe are one of the pillars of our foreign and defense policy.  Is that linkage falling apart, or is it just under stress?  That's something Presidents will need to decide, but I suspect we'll stick with what we know for quite a while to come, and seek to preserve our ties and cooperation with Europe.

Meantime, the cost issue is not insignificant.  I've always thought it's the unmentioned and unmentionable root of what I see as a key U.S. domestic problem, what I call the "Third World Superpower."  We are loath in the U.S. to acknowledge what statistics make clear:  by many measures, in education, health, infant mortality, crime, poverty, infrastructure, and hunger to name a few, we now lag behind many of the European countries.   What could that extra three percent of GDP, the difference between what our Allies generally spend and what we generally spend, do for us if it were redirected toward some of our pressing domestic needs? 

Our current level of "defense" spending impoverishes us.  Many don't think so (yet); others would deny that there's a link; some would argue that we can still have guns and butter.  I think it's inevitable, long term if not short, that we will need to face this music, define our international interests more precisely, reemphasize inexpensive diplomacy over expensive military hardware, and scale back our ambitions to fit. 

"Documentary" Film Of Value - Fair Game

Another film we recently watched in the Morning Fog household was "Fair Game," which tells the story of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent who was publicly outed by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson.

Of course this movie isn't really a "documentary," but a fictional drama based upon real people and occurrences.  Its appeal as a film depends heavily on the drama of the two main protagonists, the seeming unfairness of their treatment, and the coldly impersonal way a bureaucracy destroys at least one career and a couple of lives.  All drama, even if based on reality.

But it's valid to call the film a documentary in one regard.  That's the one that drew my attention and that makes the flick "worthwhile."  It documents the tendency of the CIA to tailor its product -- supposedly the unbiased analysis of a wealth of raw information -- to what it knows its consumer - usually a President and his senior staff - wants to hear.  That, of course, makes the product worthless.  If viewers might be tempted to suppose this case is a rare hiccup in an otherwise smoothly running system, there's plenty of evidence around to demonstrate it's not.

In the Plame case (according to the film), the agency's analysts (some of them) made the proper call:  The now-notorious aluminum tubes were not at all similar to anything that might constitute parts for a nuclear weapon; they should be ignored.  But the false positive (i.e., that the tubes were intended for Saddam's nuclear program) had more political resonance, and there were enough politically motivated bureaucrats in the agency to turn the agency's "intel" 180 degrees.  Black became white. These reports reached the willing ears of White House minions who were totally uneducated regarding intelligence and didn't know the difference between intel (a synthesis of reports from various sources, evaluated for their reliability, credibility, and convergence with other reports) and raw data (meaningless factoids until placed in context).  The rest is history.

Along the way, the whole march down the garden path was abetted by a tendency among our political leadership to accept that the CIA is always right.  This is assumed because of all the money we spend on them (nobody really knows how much) and the neat toys they have like satellite cameras, drones, and listening devices.  But the toys are mostly handy for developing those factoids, and when it comes to analysis, other agencies often seem to get better results.  This truth is faithfully reflected during an interagency meeting in the film, when the representative of the State Department's tiny in-house intelligence operation is the one who tries to bat down the false "assessment."

It's often asserted, in the post-nine-eleven, post-economic-meltdown world, that there are too many intelligence agencies and that we could save money by consolidating.  That might be true if we could find a way to insulate the main agency, the CIA, from the political agendas of policymakers.  The way to do that remains as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster.

Paying For Federal Pensions

This graphic appeared in Sunday's Washington Post, though it was prepared by the "National Institute on Retirement Security."  The basic purpose of the chart, and of the article it accompanied, is that employee contributions for federal pensions are considerably less than for defined benefit plans in state/local government or in the private sector.  That is a valid point, though it needs a couple of caveats:

• I think the federal government deserves credit for being ahead of the curve, back in 1980, when it redefined its 100%-traditional pension system into a mixed package of social security, defined benefit, and market-driven 401(k) plans.
• It's futile to compare federal, state/local, and private pension plans on the macro level, as the chart tries to do.  How can we make comparisons, for example, when we don't have any information about the benefit received in return for the input?   How can one federal plan be compared to 1700 state/local plans, or ten times that many private ones, each with its own different benefit structure?  Impossible.

That said, if everybody is going to be tightening their belts by paying a larger share of their defined pensions, I’m sure federal employees will be asked to – and should – pay more also. 

But that brings us to something not even whispered in this chart, or the article:  military pensions, which aren't referenced at all here.  As Morning Fog has argued before, budget cutting is fine IF we don't fence off entire sections of it from any cuts at all.  We can't exempt Medicare, Social Security, or even the U.S. armed forces, from sensible and prudent reductions.  Remember the famous robber Willie Sutton, who was asked why he robbed banks and answered, "Because that's where the money is?"   So, why should we consider cost savings in all entitlement categories?  Same reason.  (Thanks for that wisdom, Willie).

Military personnel pay into social security.  That’s all.  Their defined benefit pensions, which can kick in as early as age 50, are more generous than their civilian counterparts', and cost them nothing at all.  Two pensions for the price of one, plus  - again unlike their civilian counterparts - they are permitted to take federal employment after they retire without any penalty against their social security or pension benefits.   All the Willie Suttons in Congress appear to be overlooking this particular bank.  So for military government employees, the belt-tightening expected will be an increase of $60 per year in the premiums they pay for health care, while for civilian government employees, it will be an additional 5.2% of their salary.  What's wrong with this picture?

Now, I'm not just a civilian lamenting that it's only my ox getting gored.  I've served in the military, including combat zones; my father was an Army lifer; and I spent years in a government pay/retirement system much like the "old" one described in the chart.  So I believe I see all sides of this issue.   And what I see is that we redefined our military after Vietnam, but not our way of looking at it.   

Our current view of military pay and allowances still harks back to a bygone era, when we all shared the potential burden of military service equally (more or less) through conscription.  We who served and risked our lives were the same as everyone else, except that we served and they didn’t.  The generous benefits were designed to compensate for that difference. 

Today’s military is different – all professional, they are government workers who wear uniforms.  Are you thinking about their risking their lives?  They do, but in modern war, not so much more than our police, whose benefits are far less.  The young recruit who joined up right out of high school who got killed last week in Afghanistan?  That is tragic and sad (especially when the life was lost because of politicians playing war as a game) but those unfortunate KIAs won't be collecting a pension, so this isn't about them. Certainly pay and benefits should be commensurate to attract the people we need in the armed forces, but it is neither just nor affordable to continue to subsidize them as if they were hapless GI Joes, or not to expect them to contribute something to a very generous retirement package.