Up or down votes on defense procurement.

I just wanted to point quickly at a policy brief CNAS put out by Ethan Kapstein on reforming America’s defense procurement. The brief is derived from a longer article from the journal Business and Politics that compares the American system to the recently-reformed French analogue. The upshot is to underscore the importance of recruiting expert engineers as procurement officers, careful ex-ante cost analysis, and limiting the role of Congress. It’s pretty straightforward, but here’s something I didn’t know: the French National Assembly makes up or down votes on military budgets whole, like the U.S. Congress can do for trade bills. Kapstein doesn’t take the plunge and recommend it, but maybe he should have. I’ve heard worse ideas—like continuing the expensive, delayed, shoddy status quo.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Military , procurement

Shaking your money makers—and when I say ’shake’ I mean Tobin tax.

There has long been a tacit maxim in public policy that new proposals will ideally be financed by new taxes that are relevant to the proposal. Solutions to tragedy of the commons problems, for example, advocate taxing intemperate corporations or actors to force them to internalize the externalized costs of their action. One of my favorite examples of this is taxing cigarettes to pay for treatment of childhood asthma or lung cancer research. (Of course, the maxim is a socially suboptimal solution—even if smokers pay for treatment of kids with asthma, they’ve still created kids with asthma!) The maxim is not always followed, but it’s usually thought of desirable if a proposal can be pitched that way; it’s rhetorically compelling to argue that those who cause a mess should be the ones responsible for cleaning it up.

The last week has seen an interesting trend away from this maxim in international deliberations over climate change. Two new proposals have called for levying the vast sums that fly about the international financial system in order to assist developing countries in transitioning their economies to more sustainable footings. The first is George Soros’ well-publicized idea to release Special Drawing Rights money for the loans, an idea that apparently caught China’s eye. S.D.R.s are reserve assets backed by the gold reserves of the International Monetary Fund which are indexed to a basket of important currencies and often used to provide liquidity to countries facing capital shocks—essentially a virtual currency. If S.D.R.s can be used to bail developed countries out of a financial crisis they created—and they did, to the tune of $150 billion—why not use them to transition developing economies away from reliance on carbon.

The second is a very old, and very compelling idea that has gained a surprising new life among European leaders. In parallel to the announcement that they would lead a €2.4bn commitment to help developing countries adjust, Sarkozy and Gordon Brown called on the IMF to seriously consider the imposition of a Tobin tax on international financial transactions. Originally developed by the American economist James Tobin as a way to alleviate the radically destabilizing effects of international currency speculation, the proposal advocates that major financial exchanges impose a miniscule tax (one tenth of one cent on the dollar) on all large international transactions. The sum would be negligible for legitimate foreign direct investment but would be debilitating for currency speculators. Jeff Frankel’s work [pdf] for NBER on the subject is an extraordinarily clear and balanced investigation of Tobin’s proposal. Tobin also made a suggestion regarding what to do with the revenue earned from the tax (which could be vast): end poverty. Now the revenue is supposed to be used for structural adjustment assistance.

In both cases, the maxim seems to have fallen by the way-side: international financial institutions are to be held responsible for solving global warming. Of course, there may well be nothing wrong with this: solving global warming is clearly a moral imperative and international politicians should use the most effective means at their disposal to do so (provided they do not cause comparable harm, of course). It got me to thinking, though, that Thomas Pogge would see nothing wrong with considering Tobin’s original proposal as satisfactory of the responsibility maxim: his arguments that the global financial architecture as complicit in causing and perpetuating global inequality would lead him to the conclusion that a Tobin tax, or some S.D.R.-like provision scheme, are not an unfair way of addressing global poverty. Is he wrong? Maybe not. Why shouldn’t we hold a system that creates wealth efficiently for developed countries but not for undeveloped countries responsible for redressing the imbalance?

a.j.m.

Filed under: International Organization, sustainability, the next order , pogge, poverty, tobin tax

The urban professional’s sartorial trilemma.

While the Mundell-Fleming trilemma remains undoubtedly important and all that, consider a similar impossibility triad nearer to the hearts of young urban professionals. Start by recognizing three desirable properties of a morning commute: wearing dress clothes, riding a bicycle, and leaving the house fully dressed. A brief reflection on each will suffice to establish their definition and inherent appeal. First, moderately attractive dress clothes are necessary for a young professional to project an air of authority, competence, and attractiveness. For the more discerning specimens of said group, chinos, car shoes, and silk v-necks will not suffice; pleated wool slacks (which get caught in a chain and dislike moisture), long skirts (which clash with a bike’s top tube), leather-bottomed shoes (which dislike pedals), ironed dress shirts and blouses (which bags wrinkle) are a must. Further compounding the problem, most office-suitable dress clothes are poorly suited to the climatological extremes of a city like Washington. Second, in a fairly flat and congested city like Washington, riding a bike is imperative. It’s faster than a car, avoids the parking conundrum, keeps you out of a metro tube, and lets you feel the world before sitting in meetings all day. Third, leaving the house fully dressed allows many benefits: there is no awkward switching phase in a lobby bathroom, it saves precious bag space, and lets one adjust and arrange things in the comfort of one’s home.

Clearly, all three are desirable, but for any given trip, only two of the three are possible. Of course, as with Mundell-Fleming and other trilemma, points in the interior of the triangle are possible options. And, of course, some slight compromises can be made on each point to try to slip the trilemma’s grasp: the shoe leather on the bottom of oxfords can be replaced by rubber; vests can ameliorate the shirt-wrinkling trouble; a mixte can let a girl wear a skirt; for those who prefer clipless pedals, a pair of oxfords can be left under the desk at work, as can an odd jacket on the back of a door. Still, the trouble seems inescapable. Feel free to send along any other coping methods you’ve found.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Cloth , bikes

A primer on the Naxalite insurgency.

Many Americans who have been trained to fixate on Islamist terrorism—who watched the Mumbai attacks of this time last year in horror—will be surprised to learn that India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently described not Islamist terrorists but a Maoist insurgency as India’s greatest security threat. But so he did. I knew very little about the Naxalites before reading about them tonight, so I thought I’d pass a primer on.

The Naxalite insurgency is a surprisingly widespread and well-organized campaign that originates in the central-Eastern Chhattisgargh state and has spread from there, usually in forested areas populated sparsely by adivasis (still-marginalized tribal peoples). Violence has been throttling up lately, and deaths from the conflict reached nearly 1,000 last year; some estimates place the strength of the insurgent force at 20,000. The New York Times points out that the number of Indian security forces killed approaches the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan last year. The insurgents employ sophisticated tactics that appear to aim at waging a sustainable fight that cuts to the center of the Indian state—before entering a new region, insurgents will conduct detailed social surveys to determine which social grievances can be exploited; Iron ore investment and roads are being pushed out of forested regions; IEDs and landmines plague the police forces; and a number of ambushes have surrounded and killed large numbers of official troops (including seventeen in October).

The government’s official response (which, according to the Indian constitution, must be deployed by state authorities) has only recently taken the problem seriously. October and November of this year saw the preparation of some 70,000 counterinsurgency troops for combat in the region (more than the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan). The government’s previous policy rightly drew widespread criticism: official opted to provide arms and training for the Salwa Judum, a—supposedly spontaneous—group of militant villagers and child soldiers from the region, who reportedly have a penchant for raising noncombatant villages, summary execution, rape, and other wartime atrocities. Caught between two vicious paramilitary groups, the local population is being pressed into refugee camps.

Unfortunately, the only response available are the usual COIN platitudes—areas must be swept and development projects must win over the local population, &c. Being an expert in neither India nor counterinsurgency, of course I can’t do any better. But, as the Economist recognizes, the Naxalite insurgency is a frightening one, that strikes at the very heart of frailties in the Indian state: “Other terrorists attack the Indian state at its strong points—its secularism, its inclusiveness, its democracy. Naxalism attacks where it is weakest: in delivering basic government services to those who need them most.”

a.j.m.

Filed under: War , COIN, India, Naxalites

This just-in from the annals of Republican strategy

Read this Wonk Room piece for a good plain-English summary of Jon Kyl’s obstructionist tactics on nuclear issues to date.

Where Bergmann sees confusion and equivocation, I just see one facet of a larger Republican strategy to discredit and derail the president’s agenda. Kyl has ported many talking points from the health care debate to the START issue with little modification.

In July, the Post got its hands on the Republican health care talking points. A “key message point” was that the Administration was moving waaay too fast to resolve a problem as large and complex as health care (emphasis mine unless otherwise noted).

The Obama Experiment with our health could change everything we like about our health care — and our economy.

This big a risk, that risky an experiment is not something leaders on either side should rush through Congress in a few days or weeks.

Slow down, Mr. President. We can’t afford to get health care wrong.

President Obama is experimenting with America, too much, too soon, and too fast.

The Republican message on START is eerily similar: By working to get New START signed by December, the administration is playing fast and loose with US nuclear posture. A GOP memo on the START follow-on released in September warned

If the Administration can complete an agreement consistent with these principles and submit it with sufficient time for the Senate to complete a thorough review by the time START expires, then it is more likely to gain the two-thirds majority necessary for Senate consent.

And in June, Kyl warned the Administration in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that

Similarly, US desire to complete the negotiations quickly is resulting in too many concessions, particularly on missile defense: “…we may end up abandoning a needed defense of the U.S. and our European allies from the looming Iranian threat.

Other, frankly facile arguments include the length of the proposals themselves. Remember all that griping about a health care bill too long for most Americans to read? From the GOP memo, again:

Nine years and 700 pages later, the United States and Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on July 31, 1991.

The Moscow Treaty is three pages long and came to pass after six months of negotiation.

The message comes through loud and clear: by negotiating a big bad arms control treaty, rather than a short and sweet one, the President only has himself to blame if the Senate fails to ratify the treaty. (A pettier blogger might point out that if the Moscow Treaty had been a little longer and included half the verification measures set to expire in four days, maybe Rose Gottemoeller wouldn’t have spent the bulk of the last few months in the belly of an airliner.)

Kyl, who as GOP whip has got his hands into most Senate business, thinks that by politicizing the arms control he can drag it and the president down more effectively than if he had to argue the treaty on its merits. This is where the parallels between the health care debate and START end, because while the White House has all hands on deck for health care, there has been woefully little high-level engagement of Congress on nuclear issues.

SORT notwithstanding, the Senate hasn’t ratified an honest-to-god treaty in years. If Obama hopes to accomplish any meaningful fraction of his disarmament agenda, he needs to start engaging and educating key senators and their staff. Indeed, he should have started a long time ago. But that hasn’t happened, and Kyl has moved in to fill the vacuum with half-truths, cheap-shots, and the lowest of low politics.

Brian

Filed under: Arms Control, Domestic , New START

Cheaper guns and better butter?

This incredibly wonky table from a report by the people who bring you Foreign Policy in Focus caught my eye last week.

One thing that’s obvious is how lavishly more expensive the stuff on the right is compared to the stuff on the left. Not only that, but relatively small shifts in resources from the left column to the right can produce disproportionately positive improvements in overall security. By scrapping a single DDG-1000 you could double the amount of money spent on nonproliferation, etc. Given the success of Nunn-Lugar programs, that could be money more efficiently spent.

Politics gets in the way of the right decisions—no arms controller worth her political salt would advocate cutting the stockpile stewardship budget before the CTBT is ratified, and weapons platforms have historically had stronger constituencies than the often idiosyncratic reforms on the right.

But what often gets left out in these types of discussions is why weapons platforms are so expensive relative to measures that, while less sexy, could have a huge impact on long-term security, and whether this relationship is tenable.

On the one hand, weapons platform development is inherently capital-intensive. Research and development requires significant investment with little guarantee of success. Success is usually considered “worth” the high costs of development. When we had to plan to fight the Soviets over Germany, these costs were justified. On the other hand, we may soon be entering a time when high-technology high-cost weapons platforms are neither militarily necessary nor popular.

Even if counterinsurgency doctrine falls short of becoming the new defense orthodoxy, the needs of current conflicts and the undeniable tendency toward COIN-centric planning means that the average cost of your average weapons platform may get a lot cheaper in the next decade—more A-10 warthog close air fighters (per unit cost: $13 million) than F-22s (per unit cost: $100.1 million). Whether this trend toward building the weapons we need vs. the weapons some people demand depends in part on how effectively Gates’s Pentagon can cleave congress away from the teat of defense contractors.

Meanwhile, look at the stuff on the right—institutional funding/reforms, capacity-building, preventive measures—these measures could quickly get more expensive. For example, according to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

Adaptation actions can be grouped into three broad categories:

(a) Actions that climate-proof socio-economic activities by integrating future climate risk;

(b) Actions that expand the adaptive capacity of socio-economic activities to deal with future and not only current climate risks; (capacity building, or decreasing the opportunity costs of alternative socio-economic activity)

(c) Actions that are purely aimed at adapting to impacts of climate change and would not otherwise be initiated. (costs endogenous to climate change adaptation)

Examples for each category include capacity-building, research and assessments, disaster risk reduction and risk management, and specific interventions. The adaptation component to be funded could either constitute the whole action (Category C) or part of the socio-economic activity (Categories A and B).

Increasing the costs of carbon-positive activities, building the social capacity to respond to climate change externalities, decreasing the opportunity costs of climate-friendly activities, and decreasing the intristic costs of adaptating to climate change…these costs could quickly get pretty high.

It will probably continue to be the case that weapons development is an expensive endeavor. But it remains the case as well that even as the steps on the right column get relatively pricier, the long-term security benefits justify the expense. Institutional reform, capacity-building, direct assistance, preventive measures—even a 100% increase in the resources available for some of these efforts can pay enormous security dividends. Meanwhile, one more attack submarine will do little to improve the chances of catching Bin Laden, and I don’t think we’ll be facing a big attack sub challenge from the Chinese any time soon.

The challenge is to fund the right mix of weapons technologies that can respond to extant physical threats while developing the capacities and funding measures that can reduce the causes of insecurity in the first place. The optimum level of security, in other words, depends on funding the right mix of reactive “kinetic” capabilities and preventive structural reforms. Kinetic capabilities at minimum deny only tactical success to adversaries, and at best they deter attacks in the first place. Long-term international stability depends on addressing root causes, not just on strategic stability. It’s a fundamentally progressive idea whose time has come.

(Hat tip to NoH and Travis Sharp)

Brian

Filed under: Military, the next order , defense spending

Health for the next America.

Nic Kristof owns an important point. The rest of the article is similarly exquisite.

“Why is it broadly accepted that the elderly should have universal health care, while it’s immensely controversial to seek universal coverage for children? What’s the difference — except that health care for children is far cheaper?”

a.j.m.

Filed under: Health , †ime

Elster on solving time inconsistency.

In keeping with this page’s ongoing interest in how governments in general, and democracies in particular, deal with assessing risk and gains across time, consider an argument that Jon Elster makes in Ulysses Unbound (27-8):

Discussing Becker & Mulligan’s argument that people will occasionally solve time inconsistency problems by taking actions that manipulate their discount rate of the future, Elster is skeptical. “The idea that people spend time with their aging parents in order to better appreciate the need for providing for their own old age is in my view nothing short of ludicrous.” Furthermore, people cannot commit to education or religion in order to lower their rate about the future; “if there is a connection, it is more likely the other way around: people who care ore about the future are more likely to choose education or religion.” Importantly for our purposes, this is not just an empirical regularity or a vicissitude of the examples given:

“In fact, I believe the idea that people might engage in such behaviors for this purpose is conceptually incoherent. We cannot expect people to take steps to reduce their rate of time discounting, because to want to be motivated by a long-term concern ipso facto is to be motivated by that long-term concern, just as to expect something to happen is to expect that it will happen or to want to become immoral is to be immoral. If people do not have the motivation in the first place, they cannot be motivated to acquire it.”

Of course, for Elster things are not hopeless; the rest of the book is concerned with strategies by which people can bind themselves to future actions. But the implications for those of us concerned with how governments evaluate questions of intertemporal distribution and justice are bleak: we cannot expect governments to solve the problem by basically changing their incentives, only to have the foresight to take palliative action in this case or that.

I’m not sure that this is all there is to be said; I’m sure the point will crop up again, in time.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Theory , †ime

Restart peace, not process.

The past weeks have seen a swell of support for a harder line against Israel. President Obama’s utter failure to restart the peace process from scratch has brought old ideas to the fore again: temporarily disengagement from the peace process, or making American aid contingent upon good behavior. Andrew Sullivan noticed the same thing recently, and added his name to a pile that included Tom Friedman’s Times column, Glenn Greenwald, and now Joe Klein.

The specter of the President of the United States begging his allies, the leaders of a small Middle Eastern country, to take actions that all know must be taken someday—it’s enough to make an American feel ashamed. While the commentators above may not boast political clout, they certainly do exert pressure on the body of ideas that American strategic culture draws upon, and they agree on this much: the United States cannot gain leverage on the peace talks without leverage; that we cannot serve as a fair arbiter and maintain unconditional commitment to Israel; that for all the effort expended, recent American attempts felt entirely impotent; and that the status quo serves only Israeli interests. The Israelis demonstrated as much this past week by starting work on 900 new homes in East Jerusalem in defiance of international law, in direct contradiction of the actions the U.S. President and Secretary of State had been pushing in the region.

Meanwhile, it is easy to be skeptical of this Times memo on Abbas’ threat not to run for the PA Presidency again, but it surely does contain some shred of truth.

The Israeli security establishment is in a state of alarm over the possible departure of Mr. Abbas, whom it considers a genuine moderate. Some of its top members are urging their government to make far-reaching offers — “not just lifting a few roadblocks,” in the words of one — that would persuade him to stay in power and resume negotiations with Israel on a solution that involves creating an independent Palestinian state.

The Israelis understand how things work as well as anybody. The United States should follow Abbas’ lead and dangle its aid in front of the Israeli leadership. The resulting predicament would be irresistible, and would certainly compel at least some promising first steps. Even if the peace process is restarted, the United States cannot maneuver with its hands tied. Critics in the Israel lobby will claim that walking away from the peace process is a dereliction of a moral obligation to peace in the region—but failing to exert what leverage the U.S. has accrued is far more damaging to peace than a little tough negotiation. Maintaining the process at the expense of peace is the real disgrace.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Middle East , abbas, Israel, Palestine

TEEB, sustainability, and time.

This little AFP article on this week’s TEEB report for policymakers was more than enough to pique my interest. TEEB is The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, a group hosted by the U.N. Environment Programme, and supported by the EC, Germany, the U.K., and others. The group’s insights are many and quite rare, but the general strategy is to argue that because the benefits of environmental conservation are often widely diffused and difficult to codify, the market does not properly account for them. The TEEB program aims to rectify this deficiency by helping to assess the costs of environmental degradation and propose market-based steps that can properly weigh these costs against those costs that would be incurred by preventive measures.

An unusually broad effort to assess the benefits of environmental assets yields unusually progressive recommendations. Coming to appreciate the huge, varied, and irreplaceable benefits of biodiversity, for example, recommends halting deforestation, protecting coral reefs, and fisheries management. In each case, the benefits of existing environmental assets outweigh the gains from exploitation; likewise, the cost of conservation is far lower than the cost of repair. Even the latter can be substantial, however: raising the percentage of oceans covered by marine protected areas from 0.5% to 20-30% “could create a million jobs, and sustain a marine fish catch worth $70-80 billion/year,” effectively doubling the output of the global fishing industry. Converting mangroves to shrimp farms in Southern Thailand could return $1,220 per hectare per year on an unsustainable basis; the benefits of maintaining those same mangroves, from firewood, as nurseries for offshore fisherman, and coastal protection against storms totals $12,392/ha/yr—an order of magnitude larger. In a particularly narrow cost/benefit calculation, pollinators from nearby forests can increase crop yields at coffee farms some 20% over less proximate farms. In each case, an investment in conservation now doesn’t just save money later (which it does—a lot); it produces benefits now, from water purification, erosion control, carbon sequestration, protection against catastrophic events, tourism, a basis for scientific research, and so on and so forth.

Take two of the most astounding figures. The estimated costs of halving deforestation globally are somewhere between $17.2 and $33 billion/year; failing to do so means incurring costs from climate change of $3.7 trillion!  (Which is why we need REDD.) It can be difficult to wrap your head around a large number, so notice that that’s 100-200 times as much, or about a quarter of U.S. GDP. Here’s another huge number: economic subsidies globally (to agriculture, fisheries, mining, and energy, “represent about 1% of global GDP yet many of these contribute directly to biodiversity and ecosystem damage. Coincidentally, the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change found that 1% of global GDP should suffice to prevent future climate change damage expected to cost 5% to 20% of global GDP.” (32)

To be clear, the TEEB approach is not a perfect solution. Even with an adequate assessment of the costs of environmental decline, markets may still prove too acceptant of the risks and costs of environmental exploitation. As in other fields—most notably, public health, and development—markets are likely to be unable to meet robust standards for human welfare. Put simply, we owe more to the environment and to ourselves than economic markets will allow for. But that is not to say that TEEB isn’t an excellent first step: the first battles in the fight back to sustainability must be fought over interest, in the hopes that more substantial norms can be inculcated in the process. Besides, sustainability is the necessary step; what we owe to the environment beyond stability is a debatable matter for ethicists, politicians, and humans. We owe sustainability first and foremost to ourselves.

This is the strongest point (among many) in the TEEB report. This, and the numbers given above, are astonishing given that we expect governments to be fairly rational in terms of cost-benefit calculation. Instead, governments seem not to be capable of weighing the costs of environmental degradation across time, even when they really are the simplest of calculations: $1 million replanting mangroves in Vietnam now, or $7 million in dyke repairs later (plus god only knows what else). And of course governments are all we can look to in such cases: diffuse benefits, and future costs, are rarely lobbied for; especially given that it is the poor who derive the greatest benefits from biodiversity and pristine habitats, it is governments that must speak for the long-term prosperity of nations as a whole. At present, no form of government seems to be capable of adequate rational calculation over the medium term, nor of grasping intricate and diffuse benefits spread throughout society.

I’ve argued before that something will have to be done about accommodating democracies to their existence in time. Perhaps something can be learned from the fact that the EU is on track to meet and exceed its Kyoto obligations? Though there is no reason this should be so in the case of TEEB’s positive sum dynamics, in general it stands to reason that large forms of political organization should be more sensitive to more diffuse benefits. With all the emphasis that international theory places on the importance of defending sovereignty, perhaps state governments can understand this calculation: demonstrate a capability to address the environment, or someone else will.

a.j.m.

Filed under: sustainability , †ime, positive sum, teeb