Five Percent Is a Lie!

 Or perhaps we can call it a polite fiction.  What am I talking about?  Today, the leaders of NATO countries met and agreed to .... very little.  It is probably the shortest communique in history (see 2023 and 2024 for typical end of summit agreements/commitments).  They agreed to new spending targets and not much else.  No Ukraine, no China, no southern front (how to prevent immigrants from going to Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal), no nothing else.  

And this drives me crazy.  Before I get to the Big Lie, let me explain why I hate this 2% and now 3.5% madness. NATO does not exist to nag members to spend more on their defense, NATO exists to provide security for those in the North Atlantic community (broadly defined).  The 32 members are supposed to work on a variety of security issues, to create greater certainty, to deter Russia and other adversaries, and to reassure the allies.  This involves a lot of issues and lot of challenges.  These summits are like academic conferences--we academics need artificial deadlines to write our papers and leaders need these meetings to force them to reach agreement on tricky negotiations.  That all they got was "historic" commitments to spend more money represents a huge lost opportunity.

The other problem is that % of GDP spent on defense tells us ... that a country spent money, it is an input measure, so we don't know if they spent it well, or whether the country will use those funds to develop capabilities that would help the alliance.  Greece always did well in this measure despite spending mostly on troops aiming their rifles at Turkiye.   Not helping the alliance much especially as Greece never showed up when the alliance needed help.  It is a lousy measure, but it is easy to understand.  It might mean a bit more in the next few years for reasons I suggest below.

But this is life in the Trump era where this summit is a huge success because the alliance still exists.  Woot?  So, maybe we should be happy?  Depends on what you want out of an alliance.

Sure, the first clause of the communique refers to the iron clad commitment of Article V--that each country will respond (as each deems necessary, see the Dave and Steve book) to an attack on any one.  Let's not be too reassured by this since Trump is, well, almost as much as a threat to members as Putin is--given the threats he has made towards Greenland and Canada.  Plus Trump raised doubts about what he thinks A5 means on his flight over.  I am sure I have missed some utterance of his over the course of this day that undermines this "ironclad" commitment.  

Moving on to the big news 5%.  Wow!  Except it is not five percent but 3.5% plus 1.5%.  That is, the countries promise to move from the 2% promise to spending 3.5% of their GDP on defense stuff--planes, ships, tanks, other war material, pay for soldiers, sailors, aviators,etc.  What we usually think of as defense spending.  The 1.5% is spending on stuff that is "defense-related" which can mean pretty much anything--it is pretty elastic.  So, Germany can spend money on infrastructure--roads, ports, railroads, etc that benefit their citizens and that also help the transport of British, French, American, etc tanks, artillery, personnel to the front in the east.  For Canada, this might mean spending on northern ports and infrastructure, subsidies for mining rare earth metals, and other stuff that Mark Carney wants to do and they can call it defense stuff.  So, don't freak out at the 5%.  Freak out at the 3.5% instead as that would move Canada from spending $60b per year to $150b per year by 2035.  Yowza.  I doubt that Canada will get there (unless the economy tanks as the metric is defense spending/GDP).  But Canada will move in that direction.

Are countries doing this to placate Trump?  The change in the math to 5%? Yeah.  The 3.5%?  Perhaps not so much. The 2% standard was set after Crimea. The war in Ukraine since 2022 has taught NATO countires that 2% is not nearly enough--we all need drones, anti-drone tech, anti-air and anti-missile defenses, heaps and heaps of ammunition of all kinds, and a lot more.  So, the standard was going to shift and should shift (as much as I hate the idea of setting a % input standard).  Why 3.5% and not 3?  Well, part of it may be that the Baltics, Poland, and some others were already at 3% or beyond so they want the rest of NATO to catch up.  Part of it is appealing to Trump AND part of it is figuring out how to build militaries that can operate if the Americans stay home.  Europe and Canada have to develop the capacity to fight if the US ops out. 

Because no one can count on Trump to show up in a crisis, and no one knows what the next Republican will be like, but the Euros didn't like that unilateral Bush that much either. 

One more thing--the additional spending on defence is .... not going to fund American defense contractors.  That may be what Trump expects, but everyone wants a heap of strategic autonomy from the unreliable Americans.  Carney has talked much about how buying 75% of defense stuff from the US is not right.  Monday, he signed a deal with the EU as part of an effort to buy more European defense stuff.  Will this tilt the sub purchase towards Germany/Norway and away from South Korea?  No idea.  But expect other stuff to be made in Europe and then perhaps assembled or something in Canada.

 I am a bit buzzed right now since I have had half dozen media interactions today--lots of concern, confusion, consternation about the big announcement.  Again, the key is this: it is a massive increase in defense spending--to 3.5% of GDP.  The extra 1.5% is just justification for other spending priorities in most cases.

 Let me know if you have questions or additional info.   

Comparison as the Thief of Joy: Military Spending Edition

The quote "comparison is the thief of joy" is all about envy, right?  Because the comparative method has given much joy to me over the years and much career success.  Plus my students loved my comparing of apples and oranges.

Anyhow, I saw this figure today and I could not help but think comparatively:

European Security and the NBA

One of the things I have marveled at over the past few years is how many professional sports trades are less about winning and more about getting under some kind of spending cap.  The NBA transaction wire is almost entirely about manipulating one's cap situation.  Why is this relevant for European security?  Because the Dutch military just made a deal to trade most of its armor (Leopard tanks) to Finland in exchange for money.  This is very much like many trades that seek to dump an expensive player in exchange for draft picks or contracts that can be dropped much sooner.

Perhaps the future of defence procurement will involve hiring the cap experts of the NFL and NBA, who know how to value talent and how to find places that will take expensive contracts off their hands.  Perhaps Canada will find a way to get someone else to take on the F-35 contract in exchange for .... hmmm ... a really good goalie or perhaps some draft picks.

New Paradigms in Fighter Planes?

One of the dangers of twitter is that one can end up pontificating about something which is outside of one's expertise.  Latest example: I was RT-ing a piece that was critical of the F-35 and got this reaction:

@smsaideman @drfarls Once again the flawed assumption is that the F-35 is a hardware rather than a software project.
— Henry Cobb (@henrycobb) January 10, 2014

At first, I was flummoxed.  Isn't the F-35 a plane made of various materials, one that can be broken if one drops something sufficiently heavy on it?  Yes, but much of the special-ness of the plane is not the design of the structure of the plane but the code that is going into it, that will allow it to do special stuff.

Ah.  Well, I get that.  Of course, this raises all other kinds of problems, which I always remember when I get a new computer (woot!)--that the new computer has new and different software issues.  It is faster and better than my old machine but is still buggy.  Making a plane so heavily reliant on complex software makes me very nervous.  Again, I am not an expert, but defense contracting over the past twenty years does not fill me full of faith.  Will the promises be kept?  Will the adversaries figure out ways to mitigate the advantages?

Of course, the argument is that if the adversary comes up with ways to fight the F-35, the code can be written and improved without having to build new planes.  Maybe.

All I really know is that this plane is very expensive, that its procurement process is very flawed, and that providing the adversary with only one plane to figure out does not seem that "strategic" to me.

Perhaps the fact that we have two competing faiths here--those that resolutely believe in the plane and those that resolutely do not believe in the plane--is the real problem.  Defense procurement should not be a matter of faith, right?

Sequestration and Professional Military Education

Sure, this meme is played out, but I had to post this for a couple of reasons:

1. My job as Program Chair for the Foreign Policy Analysis section of this week's ISA has become a bit more complicated with profs at the various War Colleges and government officials dropping out due to sequestration.
2. My co-author will be unable to attend the ISA either, so we cannot chat about the joys of having our book in the publication process.

Some inside baseball here, but you get the drift:




H/T to Andrew Exum for the tweeted link.

Circle of Crap continued

The other day I discussed the circle of crap in honor of my family's garage sale.  I have also blogged about the Canadian submarine problem.  I cannot believe I did not put them together: that the Canadian sub procurement process was part of a high tech circle of defense crap.  The Canadians bought a set of used British subs that have remained broken ever since.  The only question about whether there are more operational subs in the West Edmonton Mall than in the Royal Canadian Navy is whether there are any operational subs at the Mall. 

Of course, even four subs is way too few for a country with three large coasts, given that even in good times, one usually has a sub undergoing training/refit/etc for each that is deployed.  Two subs at sea for three coasts?  Hmmm.  Anyhow, Canada may still pay less for these four subs and their repairs than for four new subs, but the "savings" seems to be evaporating mighty quickly.

And for those in the market for any kind of military hardware, think twice before buying from the snake oil salesman with the lovely British accents.

Conservative Means What?

Newest item on the Conservative agenda is an old item--de-funding the US Agency for International Development.  I guess they see this as a waste of money and a bunch of hippies spreading cash among the corrupt third world types.  I guess they have not been reading the news/reports from Iraq and Afghanistan where USAID has been a key component of the COIN effort.  See here for a good rant about what they are missing and putting it into perspective--the money going into USAID vs money spent on Defense.  Given how hand-in-glove USAID has been with the US (and Canadian, and probably other) armed forces, it is strange to see Conservatives be so anti-national security.

I do enjoy the irony that conservative used to mean something about resistant to change, making hard-nosed by reasonable decisions about budgets, but now it pretty much means unreasonable, unthinking, knee-jerk opposition to anything that does not fit into their increasingly narrow ideology.  I do think there will be a reckoning within the GOP over how far to the right they can go.  We might not be there yet, but it is not that far away either.

Tales in Bureaucratic Politics

To keep two new carrier projects, the British Navy is proposing very deep cuts.  So deep that the carriers may not have any planes to launch.  This leads to all kinds of speculation--like building big carriers and then either using them for helos (which will not operate too well if anyone else has planes) or just have them standby in mothballs.  Contracts are a bitch, apparently.  Seems like the need to make a hard choice is making it hard to make a decent choice.  Hard decisions do not have to be bad ones, but that seems to be the only ones being taken seriously right now.






HT to Pete Trumbore for linking to this.

Either/Or vs Both

Fred Kaplan has another excellent column addressing the cuts that SecDef Gates wants to make in the defense budget.  The basic point is that Gates is trying to change how the Pentagon operates but not really cut spending much.  Gates wants to change the culture, trying to reduce the number of expensive senior officers, reduce reliance on contractors (woo hoo!) and so forth, and shift savings towards procurement.  That is: reduce overhead and get more stuff.  Kaplan notes that this is probably unsustainable in a time of deep budget deficits where the military is really the heart of the non-mandatory spending.  Kaplan almost makes it seem that Gates is fooling himself into thinking that smaller but steady growth in the defense budget is likely.  Perhaps. Or perhaps Gates is cutting the overhead before he is compelled to cut further into the procurement side of things. 

It is clear that Gates is serious about buying stuff that is necessary and no more.  He is already running into heaps of opposition for cutting F-22 engines from the shopping list and for other cuts, but I don't think Gates is unrealistic.  The defense budget is going to have to go down.  It is just too big at a time where deficits are too big and the foreign threats are relatively small.  The US is spending way more than the rest of the world.  Some of the budget declines will occur "naturally" as the Iraq mission goes away, but we are stuck in Afghanistan for a few more years.  So, the US will have to really re-think how many subs it needs, how many carriers it needs, and so forth.  The number of brigades may be less likely to be cut given how stretched the Army is right now, as the past decade has taught us that war is still labor intensive, revolution in military affairs be damned.

But Kaplan is right, basic questions will need to be asked--what do we need, how many do we need, what tradeoffs need to be faced.  Gates is right--the era of endless money is at an end. 

The New US Air Force

Is looking pretty good. See this discussion of SecDef Gates's decisions and what the US Air Force will look like in ten years--a mix of conventional and irregular capabilities. The traditionalists and the defense industry will whine, but being prepared for multiple threats and not over-investing in any one direction seems like a smart way to go.

Something Old, Something New: Shifting Defense $$

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is attempting cut and shift some of the hundreds of billions of $$ the US spends on defense, and is, unsurprisingly, running into some opposition. Neither the effort nor the obstacles should be much of a surprise. The wars of this decade have revealed, once again, that the US prepares for the wars it wants to fight, not so much the wars it is going to fight, to paraphrase the worst Secretary of Defense in US history (that would be Rumsfeld). Gates wants more spending on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can loiter over the battlefield, and less on super-advanced fighter planes that cost hundreds of millions of dollars per plane. He would like to spend less on the planned next generation of army vehicles and more on those that can resist roadside bombs (improvised explosive devices---IEDs).

To be fair, these are not so simple tradeoffs. The US is fighting insurgents because its opponents cannot fight and win a conventional war. The US supremacy on the conventional battlefield does deter opponents and is worth continued investment. So, opponents have to avoid American strengths and fight guerrilla wars.

This guns vs guns debate is complicated by a couple of other dynamics. One of the big lessons learned during my year in the Pentagon was that there is a fetish for having the very, very best equipment. At the time, Rumsfeld sought to cancel the Crusader artillery system--perhaps one of the few good decisions he made. Well, most of the Army guys in my office on the Joint Staff had backgrounds in Artillery since their planning expertise/experience worked well for serving in the Directorate of Strategic Planning and Policy (J-5). So, I engaged these officers in discussions about the Crusader debate. The more senior officers argued, almost convincingly, that in battle you want to have the most capable weapon system possible. That any additional feature that had some added value in war was extremely desirable. But the problem is that it cost $25 millions a gun, five times as much as the reasonably similar German arty system and 3 times as much as the British system. So, there is often a real quality vs quantity debate. The desire to have absolutely the best means having a smaller number. This has significantly limited how many fighter planes the US has.

The second dynamic is the resistance of the defense contractors, who often fight through a variety of strategies to maintain their systems and their profits, including the famous example of the B-1 bomber. It had components built in nearly every state and in over 400 congressional districts--that is an outcome produced not by a desire for optimal production but for the political survival of a contentious project (Ironically, the B-1 is now better suited, thanks to smart weapons systems, to do the work that is planned for the next generation of fighters). And the same continues today with the new weapons systems. Interestingly, in the NYT piece linked above, it appears that these folks are sitting out this debate. Perhaps it is because Gates is not really cutting that much from the big projects but shifting priorities to other things that defense contractors can build.

The third dynamic is Congress. This is where much of the resistance is based, and where it is most significant. Congress has kept alive programs and bases that Presidents and SecDefs have tried to kill. Partly, there may be an honest difference of opinion about how to weigh the present war concerns with the threats (China, China, China, Russia) down the road. Partly, this is an avenue through which Republicans can fight the Obama Administration--an area of party strength at a time where it is declining everywhere else. But there are Democrats who are also pushing back.

Congress's ability to resist depends on its ability to find allies within the military, and those will always exist. The US Air Force has already faced much criticism for downplaying UAVs, which have been a much greater force multiplier than the F-22. The traditional and likely corrrect story is that the USAF is run by pilots who see their livelihoods, egos, missions, power and future budgets at risk, threatened by UAVs--where the U stands for Unmanned.

My best guess is that Gates will win some of these battles but not all of them. When Americans are dying due to vehicles that are poorly designed for a counter-insurgency campaign, it will be tough for the Army to argue that it needs weapon systems that can only operate in a conventional battlefield. The SecDef does have the power to micromanage, as we saw to great misfortune in 2003-04, so that he can send specific units to Afghanistan even if the USAF resists, such as more helos as ambulances. But on the big projects, the chances of eliminating projects are low as long as the systems are built in a majority of Congressional districts.

At least Gates is confronting the reality that the US does not have unlimited $ to throw at the military and has to face tough choices. Up here in Canada, the tradeoffs are more stark, as the much more limited defense budget means that Canada can really only afford one or two branches if it wants to have quality Forces, but not all three. It needs to choose having an Army or a Navy or an Air Force or two of the three, but it cannot do all three very well. As a result of trying to ignore the difficult tradeoffs, Canada buys used submarines from the UK which break down on their way to their new country. The new focus on Arctic Sovereignty and spending money on ships and planes that can operate way up north (although the new icebreaker may only be ready after global warming eliminates its raison d'etre) should mean that the Canadian Army comes home in 2011 and never goes out in the field again. To be clear, I am an Arctic Sovereignty skeptic since Canada will never be able to buy enough stuff to deter the two likely violators--Russia or the US. But it should be obvious that Canada cannot have it all and must make the hard choices, just as Gates is trying to do. Instead, the Canadian Forces often show up around the world willing to do the hard work but having to rely on others to provide much of the stuff they need.

So, ultimately, Rumsfeld was right--you go to war with the army you have, not the one you would like. But, then, perhaps you should spend more effort thinking about whether one should go to war if it means being unprepared.