Aided by the allegedly liberal Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is selling a ridiculous scare story about potential defense cuts. It’s going to lead to more war — booga booga booga, be very afraid.
At a Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon has gone along with recent targeted cuts to limited targeted cuts, but argued that the the sweeping across-the-board cuts in the so-called sequestration would weaken the country’s ability to deter adversaries and therefore lead to more war.
“Sequestration is absolutely certain to upend this balance. It would lead to further end-strength reductions, the potential cancellation of major weapons systems and the disruption of global operations,” Dempsey said. “We can’t yet say precisely how bad the damage would be, but it is clear that sequestration would risk hollowing out our force and reducing its military options available to the nation. We would go from being unquestionably powerful everywhere to being less visible globally and presenting less of an overmatch to our adversaries, and that would translate into a different deterrent calculus, and potentially, therefore, increase the likelihood of conflict.”
Oh, nonsense. The sequestration cuts are so miniscule that they’d hardly be noticed except in the bank accounts of defense contractors. It would lower the amount we spend on “defense” — that is, on offense — from 47% of all the world’s military spending to maybe 46%. You know what causes wars? Governments selling war to a credulous public that busts out the flags and starts singing Lee Greenwood songs whenever they tell us who we should hate today.
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The Lorax
June 19, 2012 at 10:26 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could somehow cause a media riot about a “War on Corruption”? Every American citizen knows that politicians are corrupt, we just need a fiery media backdrop to supercharge the citizens. It’s war, it’s close to home, it’s easily understood… what else do you need?
Zinc Avenger
June 19, 2012 at 10:37 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ The Lorax, #1,
Good idea. We’re going to need a budget of $1.3b/year (expected to overrun budget by 3,000% for the first year), 400,000 administrative personnel, three volumes of new laws, a new offense “possession of money with intent to corrupt”, police stop-and-audit powers, tougher sentencing for the poor, and a cushy executive job for me.
eric
June 19, 2012 at 10:43 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
One: if it increases the likelihood of conflict, it does so between other countries. This is not a good thing, but he acts like policing the world is our job. It isn’t. Sure it might be a social good (or not – I’m sure many countries disagree). But its not vital to the nation’s welfare to prevent armed conflict between Randomstan and Itsneighborstan.
Two: overmatch seems to be doing a very poor job of deterrence in the first place. India-Pakistan, Congo, Somalia, the mid-east, Libya, etc… – pretty much everywhere people want to fight, they do so regardless of the US’ ability to obliterate them if we chose to do so. Our bluff has been called and shown for what it is, multiple times. Nobody’s going to believe it any more. We intervene when it is in our direct interests to do so, and when the country is not strong or influential enough to cause internatinoal trouble for us. Otherwise, we don’t really intervene. Everyone knows this. Overmatch is not a deterrent unless you’re willing to employ it. In most cases, we aren’t.
gregoryhilliard
June 19, 2012 at 10:58 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
People have little idea how much we have overmatched the rest of the world. We have 14 Ohio class boomers, each of which can carry 24 nuclear missiles. That’s far more than any other country. And our Air Force is the largest on the planet. You know who has the second largest? The U.S. Navy.
tmscott
June 19, 2012 at 11:02 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“There is no path to peace, peace is the path.” – Mohandus Ghandi
It seems to me, that we have strayed.
TMS
Modusoperandi
June 19, 2012 at 11:08 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
You won’t be so snarky after the devastating cuts kick in and the UN and the Netherlands invade, replacing our Freedom and Liberty with Agenda 21 and wooden shoes!
slc1
June 19, 2012 at 11:16 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And yet, there is a chorus forming which includes both left and right demanding intervention in Syria.
sinned34
June 19, 2012 at 11:34 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The United States military: too big to fail. Sort of.
Michael Heath
June 19, 2012 at 11:44 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ed writes:
While I support even bigger cuts to the Defense budget, not just what is being considered now by the more liberal members of Congress, I disagree with Ed’s conclusion that this is the predominate cause of war. Conflicts arise where some lead to war because of inadequate supply chains which aren’t supporting a particular nation’s populace or a cultural group of people.
Of course diplomacy is far more optimal than war. Of course working with other countries to develop sustainable supply chains for all is even more optimal, where the big sea change now is China’s development of supply chains from Africa through the India Ocean and manuevers to increase their power in Pacific channels in southeast Asia.
An emergent supply chain with some threat of conflict will be trade and resource mining in the Arctic due to massive loss of ice sheets there; I’m not overly worried about that region since the countries involved are more sanely governed with the exception of the U.S. if conservatives are in charge. But there are places we need to increase our military foot-print and more energetically engage in diplomacy and trade negotiations. Especially as food and water resources become disrupted due to global warming.
Where we really fail is to eradicate our presence in areas we no longer need to be so the transformation to new areas doesn’t require increased spending.
raven
June 19, 2012 at 11:59 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I don’t have a problem with a strong military. But we are there and have been for all my life.
There is an obvious danger of too much military and too many wars.
Empires always get overextended and then collapse. We’ve seen it in my lifetime twice.
1. The British empire is no more.
2. The Soviet empire is no more either. They just couldn’t keep all their vassals and conquered peoples in line without constant wars.
3. Same thing happened to the Roman empire.
raven
June 19, 2012 at 12:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If people need or want a stronger military, they have to be willing to pay for it.
Raise taxes.
You don’t become stronger by borrowing money and bankrupting yourself to pay for a stronger military machine that you can’t afford to support or use.
That is what happened to the old Soviet Union.
Raging Bee
June 19, 2012 at 12:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I can’t speak for the specific cuts being considered here, but in general, the argument is valid: less credible military presence means less credible deterrent to aggression (or threats of aggression) by others, which means at least a little more likelihood that we’d have to actually go to war to counter a threat, rather than just send a carrier group to support a diplomatic response.
“We would go from being unquestionably powerful everywhere to being less visible globally and presenting less of an overmatch to our adversaries, and that would translate into a different deterrent calculus, and potentially, therefore, increase the likelihood of conflict.”
We started down that road when Bush Jr. invaded Iraq. All of the sacrifices we curently have to contemplate are a direct result of that bloody wasteful pseudo-crusade.
d cwilson
June 19, 2012 at 12:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
We could cut our defense budget in half and still be the biggest spender on the planet.
I’ll flip Penetta’s argument around: What makes us more likely to go to war is spending trillions on more and more military toys. The more emphasis you put on buying toys, the more the toys look like the solution to every problem, which means you’re more likely to use the toys. Which of course, means you’ll have to buy more toys to replace the ones you used up/broke. Which makes the contractors happy, so they build even bigger toys. Which then leads to the thinking that these toys will solve the problems the older toys couldn’t.
And so on.
Raging Bee
June 19, 2012 at 12:20 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What makes us more likely to go to war is spending trillions on more and more military toys.
Bullshit. What makes us more likely to go to war is electing morons to make our foreign policy.
Defunding parts of our government, just to prevent the majority from doing what the minority don’t like, is what the Republicans have been doing to the civilian side since 1981. We don’t need the same attitude crippling our military.
Modusoperandi
June 19, 2012 at 12:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
d wilson “The more emphasis you put on buying toys, the more the toys look like the solution to every problem, which means you’re more likely to use the toys.”
Sure, when all you’ve got is a hammer everything looks like a nail, but have you seen our hammer? Have you? It’s pretty sweet.
d cwilson
June 19, 2012 at 12:44 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And bullshit right back at you. We spend more on the military than the next ten countries combined. What big menace are we preparing to fight? Russia is still bankrupt. China? Are you kidding? The last thing the Chinese want to do is get into a shooting war with the largest importer of their manufactured goods. The areas where China is a real threat to us (energy production, space exploration, R&D) aren’t solvable with military force.
If we took 1/10th of what we spend on the military and gave it to NASA, we could have Newt Gingrich’s moonbase and with a better return to the economy. Put another tenth into energy research and we could phase out petroleum as our primary transportation fuel. We can easily slice the defense budget in half without “crippling” our ability to defend our shores.
Aw gee, maybe we wouldn’t have the capability to bomb the shit out of some 3rd world country every times some brown people looked at our oil suppliers cross-eyed.
Wouldn’t that be a shame?
eric
June 19, 2012 at 12:54 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Raven – the British empire makes for an interesting comparison. Their 1889 Naval Defense Act called for keeping their navy as large as the next two navies combined, so they could fight both at once. It was argued that this would serve as a deterrent and prevent other nations from building large navies or engaging in naval warfare. It failed to deter anyone. WWI occurred about 25 years later (for unrelated reasons and I’m not trying to say there was a causal relationship – but the point is, such a policy did not prevent naval growth or warfare at all).
The U.S. currently has a policy of maintaining enough force to fight in two different campaigns at once. The idea is that this overforce will serve as a deterrent.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
maethor
June 19, 2012 at 1:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I feel like you are misrepresenting the SECDEF and Chairman both. I read this story last week and immediately noticed how absurd the media line has been. GEN Dempsey does not seem to be selling a “booga booga story” whenever they quote him. He’s hedging and explaining the repercussions of the sequestration. It should also be noted that both he and SECDEF Panetta did call for much larger budget cuts in different parts of the defense budget, but were overturned by Congress. The F-22 is made with parts from 48 states, which makes it practically impossible to cancel since it is a selling point for the vast majority of Congressional members.
The language of the sequestration is especially dangerous because it requires a percentage cut of 8.5-10% cuts across government projects. For the Navy, this means that if there are 10 new ship contracts, they all have to be cut by 10%, which delays the production of all ten. The Navy is prohibited from canceling one of the contracts and going forward with the other 9. Panetta and Dempsey have been trying to explain this and appear to be coaxing Congress along in this regard.
It seems like a more serious argument than what Ed makes it out to be. Don’t buy into the media sensationalism on the story.
abb3w
June 19, 2012 at 1:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@15, Modusoperandi:
Well it should be at the price the DoD pays for hammers. =)
zippythepinhead
June 19, 2012 at 1:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Won’t someone please think of the children … and the best way to blow them up?
slc1
June 19, 2012 at 2:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re eric @ #17
Their 1889 Naval Defense Act called for keeping their navy as large as the next two navies combined, so they could fight both at once. It was argued that this would serve as a deterrent and prevent other nations from building large navies or engaging in naval warfare. It failed to deter anyone. WWI occurred about 25 years later (for unrelated reasons and I’m not trying to say there was a causal relationship – but the point is, such a policy did not prevent naval growth or warfare at all).
I would have to disagree to some extent with Mr. eric’s analysis here. The great Dreadnaught race between Britain and Germany directly led to WW1 because it forced Britain into an alliance with France. Without the alliance with Britain, it is doubtful that France would have involved itself in the Serbian affair. Absent a French mobilization, it is quite likely that Germany would not have mobilized either.
dingojack
June 19, 2012 at 2:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I have no difficulty imagining the SECDEF saying:
“Gentlemen, gentlemen you can’t fight here – this is the War Room!”
Dingo
Modusoperandi
June 19, 2012 at 3:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
slc1 “The great Dreadnaught race between Britain and Germany directly led to WW1 because it forced Britain into an alliance with France. Without the alliance with Britain, it is doubtful that France would have involved itself in the Serbian affair. Absent a French mobilization, it is quite likely that Germany would not have mobilized either.”
I read that as a passage from a romance novel. “Colonial Powers in Love”.
leper
June 19, 2012 at 9:07 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ maethor #18
F-22 production ended in 2011 and was spread across 46 states. Presumably you mean the F-35, which has also begun shipping some of the pork overseas to the program’s partner nations. In any case, both aircraft programs represent the typical Pentagon procurement idiocy in all its corrupt splendour.