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
