# The Public Trough: Five Percent for What? **URL:** **By** Bruce Bartlett **Published:** December 1, 1979 --- “The five percent figure, moreover, has been endorsed by the full Senate in the second concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 1980.” Since August, when Henry Kissinger testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that his “price” for supporting the SALT II treaty is a real five percent increase in the defense budget (adjusted for inflation) between now and 1985, the debate over SALT has increasingly become simply a question of budget numbers. Hardline senators, led by Senators Sam Nunn of Georgia and Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, have, in effect, endorsed the Kissinger view and made the five percent defense increase figure the focal point of debate over strategic arms limitation. The five percent figure, moreover, has been endorsed by the full Senate in the second concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 1980. The SALT II treaty offers a unique opportunity for opening debate on critical questions of national defense. It is unfortunate that it has been turned into a mere debate about budget numbers. Critical questions about the direction and quality of American defense policy have been totally glossed over in the debate over numbers. The fact is that a real five percent increase in defense spending no more guarantees our nation an adequate defense than France’s expenditures for the Maginot Line during the 1930s ensured it an adequate defense from the Germans. Given the direction of American defense policy, furthermore, ratification of the five percent view may unfortunately delay debate over the truly critical issues facing the U.S. today. Both the Congress and the American people, in other words, may be led to believe that simply giving more money to the Defense Department will solve all our problems, when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Our defense problems are much more fundamental than that and require far deeper analysis and more basic solutions. The basic debate over U.S. defense capabilities generally relates to the “fact” that the Soviet Union is, and has been for several years, outspending the U.S. on defense. There are two basic problems with basing our defense policy on this view. First is that the figures are virtually meaningless. Second is that even if the figures are accepted at face value they do not necessarily show that the U.S. is being outspent. In a recent article, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell D. Taylor made a crucial point regarding the comparison of Soviet and American forces on a numerical basis: > “A mere count of strategic weapons is wholly inadequate to measure the relative effectiveness of opposing forces. The only military capability possessed by such weapons is the ability to destroy hostile targets on order, and hence, the only meaningful measure of the value is their target destruction potential. The latter derives not only from numbers of weapons but also from such things as the accuracy, reliability and throwweight of weapons, their survivability under attack and the number and nature of the targets they must destroy.... Only if we insist on basing our weapons requirements on the need to perform tasks of unchallenged importance to our security—in most cases the destruction of certain designated targets—can we know with reasonable certainty what and how many weapons we really need either for deterrence or for retaliation.” (“SALT II: The _Numbers Fallacy_,” _The Washington Post_, August 17, 1979). The five percenters, however, have not designated specific weapons systems for increased spending. In fact, they have generally not made any effort whatsoever to explain exactly what the additional money will be used for. Presumably, it will just be handed over to the Pentagon to decide how it should be spent. This lack of focus and specificity regarding the link between SALT and the defense budget has even led strongly pro-defense spokesmen to question the usefulness of the present debate. As _Fortune Magazine_ recently put it: > “Thus far, at least, the ‘great debate’ that was expected to emerge from the SALT II deliberations hasn’t really taken place. In its stead, we have recently been listening to a somewhat sterile discussion about which percentage changes in the defense budget are appropriate to our present situation. To some extent, the doves participating in that discussion are justified in their complaints about the lack of specificity that has accompanied the rhetoric about percentages. ... Some such debate might well lead us to conclude that a hefty percentage increase in the U.S. defense budget is called for. But a debate that starts out with arbitrary-seeming percentages isn’t very helpful.” (“Defense and the 5-Percenters,” _Fortune_, October 8, 1979). Even if it were clear that comparing the relative percentages of Soviet defense expenditures to our own were a valid means of comparing our relative defense postures, there are still serious questions that need to be addressed. One of the first problems is that the data for Soviet defense expenditures is virtually meaningless. The fact is that we calculate the cost of Soviet forces by our pay scales. Thus when the U.S. increases the pay for its soldiers Soviet defense spending automatically goes up. We also calculate the cost of military equipment by comparing how much it would cost us to build the same equipment the Soviet Union has. This method ignores differences in the cost of labor, raw materials and other factors of production between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. As one researcher has put it, “You can bet that it doesn’t cost the Soviets $1 million to build a tank like it does here.” Another consequence of this method for comparing U.S. and Soviet defense capabilities is that the higher inflation is in the U.S. the more Soviet defense spending goes up in dollar terms. And lastly, those who compare U.S. and Soviet defense expenditures ignore the fact that much of the Soviet military capability is directed toward the Chinese, not the U.S. or Western Europe. The five percenters also use a convenient double-standard when it comes to comparing defense expenditures. U.S. expenditures are compared to the Soviets and NATO expenditures are compared to the Soviets, but since the U.S. and NATO are essentially linked together, just as the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries are, it is really more legitimate to compare total U.S. and NATO expenditures to total Soviet and Warsaw Pact expenditures. Unfortunately for the five percenters, when you do this it turns out that the U.S. and NATO are significantly outspending the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact, since the Warsaw Pact contributes very little to Soviet defenses while NATO contributes significantly to ours. In 1979 combined NATO-U.S. military spending amounts to about $218-billion compared to Soviet-Warsaw Pact spending of an estimated $188-billion. (See the _Congressional Record_, September 18, 1979 12848.) During debate on the budget resolution Senator Edmund Muskie, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, attempted to confront the five percenters with these facts. He also made the point that “the enemy in fiscal year 1979 and in fiscal year 1980, the enemy who has the capacity to devastate this economy—the defense budget, the Government’s overall budget—is not the Soviet Union or any other enemy I can foresee. It is the enemy called inflation.” An increase in the defense budget amounting to tens of billions of dollars, Muskie said, cannot be considered outside the context of overall economic policy and the war against inflation, or it may prove to be self-defeating. In this respect, Muskie was echoing George Kennan, who wrote in _The Cloud of Danger_: > “If the protagonists of heavy military spending really wished to find the shortest path to the correction of what they see as a growing disbalance to our disfavor in the relative strength of Soviet and American forces, they would do well to give more attention to our own inflation, and especially to the effects of that inflation on the military budget, and less to the effort to convince the rest of us of the menacing intentions and fearful strength of our Soviet opponents.” Needless to say, most defense hardliners do not perceive a link between inflation and our growing strategic “inferfority,” or the necessity for making trade-offs between defense spending and social spending, which has skyrocketed in recent years. They want an increase in defense spending on top of all the other spending. Where will the money come from? Part of it will be borrowed from the public, thus forcing up interest rates, part will come from increased taxation, resulting from inflation which pushes people up into higher tax brackets, and part will come from the printing press, which is the fundamental source of inflation. Only a very few of the hardliners seem to understand that if our economy falls to pieces from inflation, excessive taxation and big government then our defense capability will fall apart too. As I have often pointed out in previous articles, dollars alone do not buy national defense. It is perfectly possible to spend much less on defense than we do today and have a better quality defense at the same time. What it requires, however, is a fundamental restructuring of our defense establishment and a reconsideration of some of the premises which underly our defense posture. James Fallows, former chief speechwriter for President Carter, recently made this point brilliantly in an article for the October issue of _Atlantic Monthly_. In his article Fallows attempts to make clear that unless Congress pays more attention to how our defense dollars should be spent then we may get nothing more than larger versions of our strengths and weaknesses. He pinpoints three fallacious notions which underly our defense posture which must be changed before any increase in spending can hope to do any good. First is the notion that the Defense department can be run on the same management principles applicable to business or that superior management techniques will win wars. Robert McNamara is responsible for introducing this view to the Defense Department and the failure to successfully prosecute the Vietnam War is just one result. The effect of his management-oriented view was to create a preoccupation with computer printouts while forgetting the realities of the battlefield. Traditional approaches to strategy and tactics have been thrown out in favor of superior logistics alone. The enemy isn’t to be outmaneuvered or out-fought, merely crushed by our production lines. As Fallows says, Clausewitz wouldn’t last two weeks at West Point today; military theoreticians are anachronistic; managers make up the new army. Along these same lines is Fallows’ second point, that we have made ourselves overly dependent on high technology weapons without realizing that these weapons may be overwhelmed by actual battlefield conditions. High technology weapons like the 18 Trident submarine, nuclear aircraft carriers, and the XM-1 tank may surely be superior to any comparable weapons on a one-to-one basis, but they also cost vastly more and may not necessarily function very well in a war situation. Fallows notes that a recent Air Force test matched a relatively cheap and simple plane against a fancier and more complex model which cost more than five times as much. In one-on-one fights the more expensive plane clearly dominated, but when the situation was changed to four-on-four—a more likely situation to develop in actual battle — confusion played a much larger role and exotic weaponry a much smaller one. Most of the “kills” came from visual sighting, as they had in the dogfights of World War I (and Vietnam), rather than from elegant, computerized “fire-control” systems. The point is that higher performance capabilities which look great on paper may be severely blunted by the disorderly circumstances of war, and the high cost of such weapons denies us the opportunity to have greater numbers of simpler, less costly weapons which could also do the job. In addition, Fallows argues that some of the assumptions made about a Soviet-U.S. nuclear confrontation may not be valid. One assumption is our missiles can actually be fired and hit their target. Fallows points out that the vulnerability of our Minuteman missiles is based on an assumed theoretical accuracy of Soviet missiles (just as our ability to retaliate is based on an assumed theoretical accuracy and reliability for our missiles). Unfortunately, we don’t really know if a Soviet missile could possibly come close enough to one of ours to knock it out or if one of our missiles could destroy one of theirs, or even get out of the silo during a war emergency (a virtual direct hit is necessary for one missile to knock out another inside a hardened silo). The technical problems are enormous and would be greatly increased during an actual shootout. Just look at how difficult it is for NASA to fire its rockets without problems during perfect conditions. One possibility is that since many missiles must be fired toward the same general area during an attack that when one explodes it will destroy or deflect other missiles coming in behind it. Lastly, Fallows makes six points about how our defense capability could be easily increased without the expenditure of any additional money: 1. Forget about the MX missile and stop worrying about the vulnerability of the Minuteman. Our submarine-launched missiles are the critical deterrent force and land-based missiles of any kind only make the continental U.S. an unnecessary target. (This argument has also been made by Earl Ravenal in the September, 1977 _Atlantic_, a revised version of which has been included in a pamphlet published by the CATO Institute—“_Strategic Disengagement and World Peace_”). 2. Forget about the Trident submarine (cost: $1.6-billion each) and build smaller subs. The Trident holds 24 missiles, but for deterrent effect it would be better to divide these missiles among several sub-reduce the cost greatly while improving our deterrent capability. 3. Make our allies pay more of the cost of defense. While the U.S. spends six percent of its GNP on defense France spends 3.6 percent, Germany and Belgium 3.4 percent, and Japan only one percent. 4. Cut back on conventional forces while developing smaller, more flexible strike forces more suitable for the kinds of actions which are likely to be necessary (such as a threat in the Middle East). 5. Cut back on weapons which don’t measurably add to our defense capability. Worry less about building more high cost, high technology weapons systems and make better use of existing systems. 6. Train leaders and soldiers for combat, not management. The Army is no longer made up of or led by men who can fight. Its incentives, performances and internal values are like those of the Civil Service. Within such a system it is not reasonable to sacrifice or to risk death in pursuit of promotion. I think Fallows is right. These would be major reforms of our existing defense policy. Each one can be debated on its merits, revised or dismissed. The important thing is that they focus directly upon our defense capability, rather than mere numbers. The defense budget really cannot be discussed rationally outside the context of overall military strategy, economic conditions, and foreign policy. Those who wish to justify an increase in the defense budget just by comparing U.S. expenditures to Soviet expenditures, or by comparing the defense budget to GNP or total government expenditures, ought to recognize how weak and meaningless such arguments are. There are extremely important questions that need to be asked about the quality and direction of our existing expenditures before any consideration can be given to a significant increase. The hardliners would do well to make sure they can justify all existing defense expenditures as genuinely necessary before they press forward with demands for more spending.