The International Interest

Cheaper guns and better butter?

Table of relative defense allocationsThis 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 ,

Another Downside to Military Rule

There have been several good takes on the crisis in Honduras. The Obama administration’s condemnation of the military take-over, and its deference to the OAS are a welcome change to the days of the Bush administration.

Process is everything in this case. As Brookings’s Casas-Zamora points out, President Zelaya was playing fast and loose with the constitution, under which the office of the president cannot be changed by plebiscite. If Zelaya were returned to office and was subsequently removed by trial, it would further institutionalize the norm of civilian rule and provide the relatively young democracy with some fruitful constitutional stress testing. (Interestingly, the Honduran constitution doesn’t include a mechanism for impeachment. The National Assembly/Congress has the right to “approve or disapprove” of the administrative conduct of the executive and other offices, but whether this extends to remove from office I’m not sure (Article 205.20).)

What’s going on in Honduras reveals the persistence of the view in Latin America that the military is (or should be) a fundamentally constabulary institution, one which in practice is geared overwhelmingly toward keeping the peace at home while remaining ostensibly concerned with fighting and winning interstate wars. The threat this conception poses to the consolidation of democracy is, by now, clear. Less obvious are the downsides this poses for military organizations themselves.

When militaries are conceived around a constabulary role, they become very skilled at staging coups, breaking riots, and running police states. In turn, they end up sacrificing effectiveness in conventional war. Of course, there are probably organizational pressures to, ahem, expand the military’s scope of operations since the threats to most countries in Latin America are minimal at worst and imaginary at best. But as Stephen Biddle points out, there is pretty good evidence to suggest that doctrine and tactics are at least as important on the battlefield as technology. In other words, maybe if the Argentinean military wasn’t also concerned with running the country in 1982, the Falklands/Malvinas War might have turned out somewhat differently.

–Brian

Filed under: Military, War ,

About TII

ADAM MOUNT (web, c.v.) is a doctoral candidate in Government at Georgetown University for international relations and philosophy. His writing has appeared in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and Security Dialogue.()


BRIAN RADZINSKY is a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.()


Their views and analyses are their own.

 

November 2009
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The Personal Interest

° The Dirty Projectors & Björk at Housing Works earlier this year.

° Wes Anderson's beautiful trailer for Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox.

° Happy of the day: kitty ♥ blow-dryer.

° Jason Kottke is right. Put this on full screen and spend two minutes watching them swim.

° Iron + Wine's lovely acoustic takes of the production-drowned tracks on The Shepherd's Dog.

° Clay Sharkey on The Cognitive Surplus

° Dean Ornish on the World's Killer Diet

Previously.

P.P. goes to the vet.

- "No, no. His name is in all caps, like on the card we gave you."

- "What? Why?"

- "It's convention. And it's half acronym."

- "Oh. What does P.A.V.E. stand for?"

- "Nothing. PAVE is an Air Force Program name."

- "..."

- "PAWS is Phased Array Warning System."

- "Well, um. Like I say, he's such a sweet cat."