The main reason we overestimated Russia was corruption: a lot of their defense spending wasn't actually buying useful equipment, but was being siphoned off. And a lot of the equipment they did buy wasn't properly maintained and is manned by troops who aren't sufficiently trained or organized to use it to its full potential. Spending doesn't create effectiveness by itself.
We should therefore assume that high-corruption regimes will always get less bang for the buck than low-corruption ones, and adjust our estimates accordingly.
"I’m open to Schake’s argument, but the article doesn’t address the skunk in the room: in 2020, the United States spent more than twice the combined defense budget of Russia and China. If we are nonetheless leaving critical holes in our capabilities, that strongly suggests either a profound failure to set appropriate priorities or else a badly broken contracting model."
I would take this in a quite different direction. First, the cross-nation comparisons are hard. In addition to the things you note, a) it's unclear how reliable the numbers for Russia & China are, b) a lot of US 'military' spending isn't really military. At any rate, I'm happy to acept that there are procurement issues, but basically, *if we'll need 50% more money to achieve our goals, that implies to me our goals are too ambitious*.
(That said, I don't have an issue with Biden's budget request.)
Like others here said, a complication in defense budgets is "optionality". We don't know when our next war will be, nor what kind of war. We can't afford to pay full price for all of the most potentially useful future militaries at once.
So instead we pay for the skeletons of several different future militaries, all at the same time; and we hope to order a bunch more of the actual ships/missiles/planes we need, once we realize we actually need them.
Sometimes this works! Ukraine can use our Switchblade drones, and so right now we're ordering a lot more from the manufacturer.
Other times, it means we just pay too much, for too little equipment, that's all too soon inefficient for the job.
Maybe policy doesn't properly incorporate this "optionality" mindset. If we could admit we just can't know which weapons we'll need or when, we could be more effective at setting up for "just a few right now, but a whole lot more if we need them."
It's the attitude of a venture capitalist: fund a bunch of early-stage companies, accept that most will be wasted money, but make it all up on the winner. Private enterprise can do "optionality" funding. Can elected government?
The US Army never wants to do occupation and counterinsurgency. We keep doing them anyway. "Hope someone else handles the occupations" isn't good enough. To avoid occupation quagmires, we need a better plan than hope.
When America patrols against insurgents, like in Vietnam, it's deadly to us. Yet when we leave the locals to do it, like in Afghanistan, it's deadly to their country.
Is there a third way?
In the age of empires, the British used "sepoys". These were local troops, but trained by the British, and kept under British command. Because the troops were locals, they knew the language and didn't run up the British body count. Because the British commanded, the troops could be kept out of corrupt local deals to serve feuds or surrender to rebels.
The sepoys weren't magic. (See the Indian Mutiny, or stupid British strategies in Afghanistan.) But the sepoys were a lot better, person for person, than either locally commanded forces (feuds and corruption) or all-British forces (politically expensive and culturally ignorant).
But historically, sepoys go with colonialism and empire. I'd like to think today's America wouldn't end up with de facto colonies. Still, you'd get nervous if America started enlisting foreigners, under American command, to control occupied foreign lands.
Whether it's sepoys or something else, "hope we can avoid another insurgency" is an answer that keeps failing. We need a better one.
I really agree with Matt on the big-think politics/strategy side of this: Europe needs to do more, no occupation forces, etc. But I think there are some serious problems with the lower-level analysis.
1. The whole "arsenal of democracy" won't work outside of wartime for the clear reason that *everyone else* is super-protectionist, too. Germany's military is so terrible in large part because even with its low procurement numbers, it would rather buy hardware from domestic industries than get it from us or spend on training. Ukraine claims to be about as happy with its domestically produced ATGMs as with ours. Even India is trying really hard to make all of its own stuff, which is why its procurement system is massively worse than the US at value for money!
2. To the extent that it does work, it's with programs like the F35 that nobody else can afford on their own and do everything, so everyone wants them. But of course those are exactly the same things that cause schedule slippage! Also, why do people think the F35 is a bad airplane? In wargames, it beats 4th-generation opponents by something like 30-1. The transition to the jet age had similar wild drops in the number of platforms procured, but if the new ones are that much better it's a no-brainer.
3. Matt seems to be treating contracting from the Pentagon rather than the Congressional perspective. Congress creates bad contracting by insisting on jobs programs and killing programs that aren't (a) transformational AND (b) trouble-free unless they're (c) unkillably large.
4. What a huge amount of procurement writing in the military space misses is option-value. You have to keep new procurement running if you want to be able to buy anything at all when you need it, whereas stuff that's prematurely retired or not that well maintained or upgraded can easily be brought up to spec quickly if need be. Part of the motivation for LCS was to build hulls that could be made war-capable if necessary.
As someone who's spent half his career working for defense contractors in various roles I think we have a generally good process that's been improving over time. It seems to me that most contracts these days are firm fixed price. That said, political involvement by appointment has opened the door for some very bad projects. If anyone here is curious how it looks, the government posts contracts for bid on sam.gov unless its classified.
In my opinion, if you really want to know where the real waste is I'd say it's in classified work, as the oversight there is much more limited. One of the easiest ways for a contractor to get a large pay raise is to get a clearance and work on classified work, which should tell you all you need to know.
An aside, I really wonder how China and Russia handle their military inventories. I've worked on military inventory management software and thus have gotten familiar with how America tracks and manages its large amounts of goods. The amount of maintenance, expiration and movement is non-trivial and really needs attentive people to manage it. The potential for bad actors to completely screw a supply depot's utility seems obvious to me. If a military has endemic corruption in its supply chain, where will that manifest when a conflict arises? Russia has had some supply woes, how much did inventory management play into that. Do we spend too many resources making sure our equipment is good? I'm probably the only person in the world interested in this :P
Another dirty secret of the contracting world. Adding chair fillers to a contract so you can afford to hire higher performing workers and/or boost profits. For example, one time (this was a while ago) the company negotiated for 3 security auditors to be placed on the contract since they knew they could pay below the contract allotment and use the difference to hire a good engineering manager.
Mr. Yglesias is too polite to call corruption by its name, but that is what is weakening the US military and robbing the taxpayers. When ex-Raytheon employees run the Defense Department and one procurement disaster follows another, there is no other explanation. One cannot fix a problem until it is acknowledged, so timid commentary like this article is a waste of time. The reason the defense budget keeps going up is that the arms makers own the Congress. We have a coin-operated government, and the arms makers are reaping an excellent return on their political investments.
“ For example, I don’t think the United States should be in the business of defending Europe from a Russian attack”
Call me crazy but somehow I don’t think the far-and-away most powerful member of NATO shirking its article V obligation to collective defense is very safe, idk what do y’all think?
The defense budget definitely seems busted in a lot of ways that make it hard to state how sensible it's size is or isn't. We seem to have a substantial "boots on the ground" capability that is largely a waste. We don't need to be able to invade Europe on a few weeks notice.
However, the general capability gap and ability to project force globally of the US military seems to have very real and important consequences for global stability. If the modern Carrier Battle Group is in fact, no longer capable of establishing air superiority where Chinese anti-ship missiles are available that's a real problem that we should consider spending to fix. There's reasonable things to shit on the F-35 program about but the idea that it's a waste to maintain an advanced capability gap vs what the Chinese air force can field is not one of them.
Some interesting ideas here but I think a lot of this misses the fundamental problems and issues. Let's start from big picture to small:
1. Strategy - Fundamentally the primary roles of peacetime military forces are deterrence and preparing to fight future wars. The US, given our massive and global treaty commitments, needs a force structure that can accomplish this. There is obviously a lot of debate about how best to do that and each of those will come with a different price tag. So it's a mistake to talk about budget first. When any country is paying for a military, they are paying for specific military capabilities - and so the first order problem is determining what capabilities you want and/or need.
2. Budgeting and Procurement and reform - I think everyone realizes we get lower value per dollar spent than we should. This isn't just confined to military spending, but is a characteristic of most federal (and even state) spending. It costs us more to pave a mile of road, to teach a child, to provide healthcare and to provide military capability than most every other country.
So my view is that we should focus on getting more value instead of obsessing about topline budget numbers. And one way to get more value is by reforming our sclerotic federal bureaucracies. When basically every major project by any federal agency ends up mired in cost and time overruns and products that don't work, then that is a systemic problem. Even a signature high-profile program like Obamacare could not avoid sclerotic mismanagement. Addressing that problem, IMO, is critical to getting the military capabilities we need without throwing more money down the toilet.
Additionally, as I think Rabb and others mentions, we are overly-focused on technological superiority which has driven up costs and forced us to buy fewer platforms than we need. I think we ought to strip R&D from procurement - trying to invent new technologies in an acquisition contract is just bad.
3. Kill the myths - There are many myths that are frequently repeated as wisdom. The notion that aircraft carriers are no longer relevant is one highlighted in this post. Another is magical thinking about COTS solutions which has been around since I joined the military way back in the early 1990's.
On aircarft carriers, there are many significant capabilities that they provide that are simply not available anywhere else. The idea that their inability to safely operate next to the Chinese coast in a shooting war makes them obsolete is just ignorance. Nothing is invulnerable, war is not like the movies, and employment, tactics and supporting capabilities matter more than the strengths or weaknesses of any given platform. There is always going to be utility in having a mobile airfield - particularly in the Pacific where our fixed air bases would likely be destroyed or heavily damaged within the first minutes of a conflict with China. In other parts of the globe where the US doesn't have access to land-based airfields, carriers are the only game in town except for long-range bombers. Carriers are and will continue to be essential for maintain sea and air control and projecting power globally in ways no other platform can.
For COTS we've already wrung out most of the savings there. And one important factor for military hardware is ensuring the safety and reliability of components. That means you can't rely on foreign-based components for many critical systems. And since we've offshored many things to unreliable (from a national security standpoint) countries like China, you have to consider tradeoffs. Are you willing to source key components for our weapon's systems to China? Most are not because of the obvious risks.
So, as others have said, an adequate domestic industrial base that can support US military needs is important. Other countries understand this - we, apparently, do not.
The main reason we overestimated Russia was corruption: a lot of their defense spending wasn't actually buying useful equipment, but was being siphoned off. And a lot of the equipment they did buy wasn't properly maintained and is manned by troops who aren't sufficiently trained or organized to use it to its full potential. Spending doesn't create effectiveness by itself.
We should therefore assume that high-corruption regimes will always get less bang for the buck than low-corruption ones, and adjust our estimates accordingly.
I worry lots about defending against nuclear missile attacks. We have given up our nuclear attack advantages, I believe. So lots to be done.
"I’m open to Schake’s argument, but the article doesn’t address the skunk in the room: in 2020, the United States spent more than twice the combined defense budget of Russia and China. If we are nonetheless leaving critical holes in our capabilities, that strongly suggests either a profound failure to set appropriate priorities or else a badly broken contracting model."
I would take this in a quite different direction. First, the cross-nation comparisons are hard. In addition to the things you note, a) it's unclear how reliable the numbers for Russia & China are, b) a lot of US 'military' spending isn't really military. At any rate, I'm happy to acept that there are procurement issues, but basically, *if we'll need 50% more money to achieve our goals, that implies to me our goals are too ambitious*.
(That said, I don't have an issue with Biden's budget request.)
Big "military-hardware-dad" energy in this comment section
"... in 2020, the United States spent more than twice the combined defense budget of Russia and China."
Russia doesn't have a defense budget; it has an offense budget.
Like others here said, a complication in defense budgets is "optionality". We don't know when our next war will be, nor what kind of war. We can't afford to pay full price for all of the most potentially useful future militaries at once.
So instead we pay for the skeletons of several different future militaries, all at the same time; and we hope to order a bunch more of the actual ships/missiles/planes we need, once we realize we actually need them.
Sometimes this works! Ukraine can use our Switchblade drones, and so right now we're ordering a lot more from the manufacturer.
Other times, it means we just pay too much, for too little equipment, that's all too soon inefficient for the job.
Maybe policy doesn't properly incorporate this "optionality" mindset. If we could admit we just can't know which weapons we'll need or when, we could be more effective at setting up for "just a few right now, but a whole lot more if we need them."
It's the attitude of a venture capitalist: fund a bunch of early-stage companies, accept that most will be wasted money, but make it all up on the winner. Private enterprise can do "optionality" funding. Can elected government?
The US Army never wants to do occupation and counterinsurgency. We keep doing them anyway. "Hope someone else handles the occupations" isn't good enough. To avoid occupation quagmires, we need a better plan than hope.
When America patrols against insurgents, like in Vietnam, it's deadly to us. Yet when we leave the locals to do it, like in Afghanistan, it's deadly to their country.
Is there a third way?
In the age of empires, the British used "sepoys". These were local troops, but trained by the British, and kept under British command. Because the troops were locals, they knew the language and didn't run up the British body count. Because the British commanded, the troops could be kept out of corrupt local deals to serve feuds or surrender to rebels.
The sepoys weren't magic. (See the Indian Mutiny, or stupid British strategies in Afghanistan.) But the sepoys were a lot better, person for person, than either locally commanded forces (feuds and corruption) or all-British forces (politically expensive and culturally ignorant).
But historically, sepoys go with colonialism and empire. I'd like to think today's America wouldn't end up with de facto colonies. Still, you'd get nervous if America started enlisting foreigners, under American command, to control occupied foreign lands.
Whether it's sepoys or something else, "hope we can avoid another insurgency" is an answer that keeps failing. We need a better one.
Here's where an American Foreign Legion (modeled on the French Foreign Legion) could play a role! :) (I am mostly joking. Like 60% joking)
I really agree with Matt on the big-think politics/strategy side of this: Europe needs to do more, no occupation forces, etc. But I think there are some serious problems with the lower-level analysis.
1. The whole "arsenal of democracy" won't work outside of wartime for the clear reason that *everyone else* is super-protectionist, too. Germany's military is so terrible in large part because even with its low procurement numbers, it would rather buy hardware from domestic industries than get it from us or spend on training. Ukraine claims to be about as happy with its domestically produced ATGMs as with ours. Even India is trying really hard to make all of its own stuff, which is why its procurement system is massively worse than the US at value for money!
2. To the extent that it does work, it's with programs like the F35 that nobody else can afford on their own and do everything, so everyone wants them. But of course those are exactly the same things that cause schedule slippage! Also, why do people think the F35 is a bad airplane? In wargames, it beats 4th-generation opponents by something like 30-1. The transition to the jet age had similar wild drops in the number of platforms procured, but if the new ones are that much better it's a no-brainer.
3. Matt seems to be treating contracting from the Pentagon rather than the Congressional perspective. Congress creates bad contracting by insisting on jobs programs and killing programs that aren't (a) transformational AND (b) trouble-free unless they're (c) unkillably large.
4. What a huge amount of procurement writing in the military space misses is option-value. You have to keep new procurement running if you want to be able to buy anything at all when you need it, whereas stuff that's prematurely retired or not that well maintained or upgraded can easily be brought up to spec quickly if need be. Part of the motivation for LCS was to build hulls that could be made war-capable if necessary.
As someone who's spent half his career working for defense contractors in various roles I think we have a generally good process that's been improving over time. It seems to me that most contracts these days are firm fixed price. That said, political involvement by appointment has opened the door for some very bad projects. If anyone here is curious how it looks, the government posts contracts for bid on sam.gov unless its classified.
In my opinion, if you really want to know where the real waste is I'd say it's in classified work, as the oversight there is much more limited. One of the easiest ways for a contractor to get a large pay raise is to get a clearance and work on classified work, which should tell you all you need to know.
An aside, I really wonder how China and Russia handle their military inventories. I've worked on military inventory management software and thus have gotten familiar with how America tracks and manages its large amounts of goods. The amount of maintenance, expiration and movement is non-trivial and really needs attentive people to manage it. The potential for bad actors to completely screw a supply depot's utility seems obvious to me. If a military has endemic corruption in its supply chain, where will that manifest when a conflict arises? Russia has had some supply woes, how much did inventory management play into that. Do we spend too many resources making sure our equipment is good? I'm probably the only person in the world interested in this :P
Another dirty secret of the contracting world. Adding chair fillers to a contract so you can afford to hire higher performing workers and/or boost profits. For example, one time (this was a while ago) the company negotiated for 3 security auditors to be placed on the contract since they knew they could pay below the contract allotment and use the difference to hire a good engineering manager.
Mr. Yglesias is too polite to call corruption by its name, but that is what is weakening the US military and robbing the taxpayers. When ex-Raytheon employees run the Defense Department and one procurement disaster follows another, there is no other explanation. One cannot fix a problem until it is acknowledged, so timid commentary like this article is a waste of time. The reason the defense budget keeps going up is that the arms makers own the Congress. We have a coin-operated government, and the arms makers are reaping an excellent return on their political investments.
“ For example, I don’t think the United States should be in the business of defending Europe from a Russian attack”
Call me crazy but somehow I don’t think the far-and-away most powerful member of NATO shirking its article V obligation to collective defense is very safe, idk what do y’all think?
The defense budget definitely seems busted in a lot of ways that make it hard to state how sensible it's size is or isn't. We seem to have a substantial "boots on the ground" capability that is largely a waste. We don't need to be able to invade Europe on a few weeks notice.
However, the general capability gap and ability to project force globally of the US military seems to have very real and important consequences for global stability. If the modern Carrier Battle Group is in fact, no longer capable of establishing air superiority where Chinese anti-ship missiles are available that's a real problem that we should consider spending to fix. There's reasonable things to shit on the F-35 program about but the idea that it's a waste to maintain an advanced capability gap vs what the Chinese air force can field is not one of them.
Doesn’t this contradict yesterday’s post? ISTM, the best way to prevent the Terminator is to defund the military industrial complex.
Some interesting ideas here but I think a lot of this misses the fundamental problems and issues. Let's start from big picture to small:
1. Strategy - Fundamentally the primary roles of peacetime military forces are deterrence and preparing to fight future wars. The US, given our massive and global treaty commitments, needs a force structure that can accomplish this. There is obviously a lot of debate about how best to do that and each of those will come with a different price tag. So it's a mistake to talk about budget first. When any country is paying for a military, they are paying for specific military capabilities - and so the first order problem is determining what capabilities you want and/or need.
2. Budgeting and Procurement and reform - I think everyone realizes we get lower value per dollar spent than we should. This isn't just confined to military spending, but is a characteristic of most federal (and even state) spending. It costs us more to pave a mile of road, to teach a child, to provide healthcare and to provide military capability than most every other country.
So my view is that we should focus on getting more value instead of obsessing about topline budget numbers. And one way to get more value is by reforming our sclerotic federal bureaucracies. When basically every major project by any federal agency ends up mired in cost and time overruns and products that don't work, then that is a systemic problem. Even a signature high-profile program like Obamacare could not avoid sclerotic mismanagement. Addressing that problem, IMO, is critical to getting the military capabilities we need without throwing more money down the toilet.
Additionally, as I think Rabb and others mentions, we are overly-focused on technological superiority which has driven up costs and forced us to buy fewer platforms than we need. I think we ought to strip R&D from procurement - trying to invent new technologies in an acquisition contract is just bad.
3. Kill the myths - There are many myths that are frequently repeated as wisdom. The notion that aircraft carriers are no longer relevant is one highlighted in this post. Another is magical thinking about COTS solutions which has been around since I joined the military way back in the early 1990's.
On aircarft carriers, there are many significant capabilities that they provide that are simply not available anywhere else. The idea that their inability to safely operate next to the Chinese coast in a shooting war makes them obsolete is just ignorance. Nothing is invulnerable, war is not like the movies, and employment, tactics and supporting capabilities matter more than the strengths or weaknesses of any given platform. There is always going to be utility in having a mobile airfield - particularly in the Pacific where our fixed air bases would likely be destroyed or heavily damaged within the first minutes of a conflict with China. In other parts of the globe where the US doesn't have access to land-based airfields, carriers are the only game in town except for long-range bombers. Carriers are and will continue to be essential for maintain sea and air control and projecting power globally in ways no other platform can.
For COTS we've already wrung out most of the savings there. And one important factor for military hardware is ensuring the safety and reliability of components. That means you can't rely on foreign-based components for many critical systems. And since we've offshored many things to unreliable (from a national security standpoint) countries like China, you have to consider tradeoffs. Are you willing to source key components for our weapon's systems to China? Most are not because of the obvious risks.
So, as others have said, an adequate domestic industrial base that can support US military needs is important. Other countries understand this - we, apparently, do not.
Excellent post. This really feels deserving of wider circulation!
Thank you!
Definitely agree!
Thank you!
" Freedom must be armed better than tyranny." Volodymyr Zelenskyy 13.04.22
<i>Focus on the fact that most countries would rather ally with the United States</i>
Don’t worry, I’m sure that by 2028 the second Trump administration will have convinced them all of the need to quickly make other plans.