Sure to be on everyone's mind today is the release of the National Security Strategy, a 55-page memo that outlines the Obama administration's ... national security strategy. Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin has obtained a copy for you to peruse here. While I'll leave the broader commentary to folks like Marc Lynch, I thought Andrew Exum's comments, which appear in my RSS feed but not (yet?) is now on his blog, were worth highlighting:
Considering the financial crisis from which our country is still emerging, I am surprised there is not more in the National Security Strategy about the environment of scarcity in which the United States now operates. Strategy is, in part, about setting goals, prioritizing those goals, and matching resources to each goal. Aside from the section about spending tax-payer money wisely -- which seems more about reducing fraud, waste and abuse than anything else -- there seems to be little acknowledgment that the United States might not be able to pursue all of our national security goals as vigorously as we might like in part due to spending constraints.I'm still trying to understand how the acknowledgment that the United States must address its deficit to ensure our future security squares with a bold statement like 'the United States of America will continue to underwrite global security'. That is an especially bold claim considering the fact that this document seems to consider security to include not just physical security but economic security, food security, medical security and addressing problems of governance and reducing poverty outside America's borders.
First, we cannot discard the distinction between short-term deficits that grow our economy in a time of recession and long-term debt that increases our fiscal problems -- the deficit we are currently running is strengthening our economy. Exum mentions his concern that "soon and very soon the annual interest on the national debt will be larger than our defense budget." Well, sort of -- this year we are spending about $708 billion at the Defense Department and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Interest payments on the national debt will be higher than that, should we do nothing, by 2018. That's something of an academic point, however, since it's hard to imagine the defense budget not increasing in the next eight years, though it's a scenario worth imagining.
I don't point that out to suggest that Exum's overall point is wrong; rather, to prevent unnecessary hyperventilating about the debt, which, over the long-term, is a problem that can't be solved even if we zeroed out the Defense budget -- we need an approach that raises some taxes, cuts some spending, and continues our efforts to rein in medical-cost growth. While stressing the debt in relation to the Defense budget may seem like a good way to assert some prudence, our political dynamics are such that national security spending is sacrosanct and a "more brutal prioritization of efforts" will be directed at fragile domestic programs. It's worth mentioning here that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done yeoman's work to trim his own budget of unnecessary programs and expenditures, and Exum has been a vocal supporter of those efforts.
More important to our national security goals, though, is economic growth, the ability to produce more than we did before. While the U.S. economy is still vastly larger than even our near-peer competitors, our growth is forecast to be much more sluggish, and as The End of Influence points out, it seems inevitable that the U.S., in the long-term, won't be the dominant economic player anymore. Hence the focus on developing shared global prosperity and reinforcing multilateral security structures -- by the time the U.S. is outstripped as global leader, we want those norms to be strongly set in place. That's the macro economic strategy for national security reflected in this paper.
In the near-term, though, I'd be curious to hear more about what Exum would have prioritized, particularly around the two ongoing conflicts that reflect his experience. Right now, Gates is trying to kill several contracts relating to jet engines and transport planes he doesn't want, and Congress is fighting him. Unfortunately, though, I think the politics of any major Defense Department cuts will have to come when we are not at war and when our corrupt contracting system is reformed. The nexus of political opportunism and crony capitalism may be too much to overcome until then.
-- Tim Fernholz
