Photo: Department of Defense
The notion of asymmetric power–referring generally to the danger of lesser powers resorting to unconventional weaponry and tactics as an answer to the United States’ immense conventional military superiority–has been in vogue among American defense analysts since the first Gulf War; Gulf War II and its aftermath, with the devastating appearance of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), gave the idea more credence than ever. So it’s important to be clear about the root of that asymmetry. It’s a result not primarily of other countries’ weakness but of the wildly over-built U.S. military and the country’s stubborn belief that it’s still its job to be the world’s policeman.
Despite the end of the Cold War, the irrelevance of a global conflict between capitalism and communism, and the unthinkability of armed conflict between what once were called the world’s two superpowers, U.S. defense spending has increased more than 50 percent since 2000. Although the United States is arguably only the world’s second largest economic power (strictly speaking the European Union is the biggest), the United States spends more on its bloated military complex that the next 10 countries combined.
President Obama made just that point in yesterday’s slightly peculiar Pentagon press briefing, which appears to have been staged to get the top brass used to the idea that defense spending cuts are ahead–and to send a message that team players will be expected to act the part of team players. But the president was not suggesting that U.S. defense spending should now be cut 50 percent and then some, which would be the logical thing to do now that the neo-imperialist fantasies of former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney have been discredited and repudiated. No, what the president was evidently doing was positioning the military to accept the $450 billion in defense cuts already mandated by the budget supercommittee, and the additional cuts of $500 billion that will have to be made if congressional Republicans and Democrats are unable to agree on alternative spending cuts. Together, those cuts would equate to about 15 percent of the U.S. military budget, as the highly respected defense analyst Lawrence Korb pointed out in an interesting exchange published in the Sunday New York Times’s Review section on Nov. 13 last year.
Korb argued that the United States could easily go further than that, for example by reducing the number of its nuclear warheads from 5,000 to 311, “as recommended by some Air Force strategists” (as he said); reducing the number of aircraft careers and Air Force fighters by 25 percent; and cutting ground forces by 100,000 to pre-9/11 levels.
Readers reacting to Korb pointed out that the United States could in fact go even further than that, for example by ending its quixotic attempt to develop a leak-proof missile defense system, retiring 50 naval ships and scrapping plans to build up to a fleet of 300 ships, dumping plans to replace the current fleet of nuclear missile submarines, and sharply curtailing the “modernization” of U.S. nuclear weapons. (In that connection, here’s another idea not mentioned by those readers: Shutter one of the country’s two nuclear weapons laboratories, either Lawrence Livermore or Los Alamos, and reduce the other’s budget by 75 percent.)
Responding to those readers, Korb said, interestingly, that he basically agreed with them. So what are the prospects of cuts going even further than those resulting from the supercommittee’s mandate? Regrettably, not good.
On the positive side of the ledger, there now seems to be a bipartisan consensus, as The New York Times has pointed out, that defense spending needs to be cut; indeed, the supercommitte’s mandate was an implicit acknowledgement of that consensus. In a poll of its readers the Times published earlier last year, when they were asked where they would most prefer to see U.S. spending reduced, defense spending ranked at the very top. Though some of the Republican presidential candidates have made intemperate remarks about taking military action against Iran, Ron Paul appears to have got considerable traction with his neo-isolationist argument that the U.S. president should first and foremost keep the country out of unnecessary armed conflicts. Whoever the Republican presidential candidate turns out to be, Obama will surely be able to prevail with a position that avoiding new military entanglements will have equal place with preparedness in his second administration.
But on the negative side, there’s no indication that the president is ready or ever will be to confront head-on the country’s military and intelligence establishments, by far the country’s biggest and more fearsome vested interest. It’s hard to imagine that any president will ever have the guts and skill to face that challenge. But until one does, American military asymmetry will continue to provoke other countries to seek an equalizer, whether it’s an old-fashioned nuke or some much more fearsome biological or chemical device.
