Why we don’t (shouldn’t) begrudge the Pentagon money
Bookworm on Sep 06 2010 at 11:17 pm | Filed under: Military
I was thinking about the Pentagon’s constant desire for money so that it can have bigger and better weapons. Anti-War people tend to write this off as institutional greed, sublimated violence, and an indecent expression of “big boys and their bigger toys.” I tend to have a very different view of military spending.
To begin with, our military is soooo huge, there’s necessarily going to be inefficiency, and we’re just going to have to recognize that as the premium we pay for having the largest military in the world.
More importantly, the military’s desire for bigger and better weapon’s systems has nothing to do with sublimated violence and everything to do with a desire to minimize war deaths. First, if you’re big enough and scary enough, the other guy will leave you alone, which definitely reduces the number of casualties. Second, if the other guy is stupid enough to pick a fight with you, the military’s job is to stop caring about the other side’s battlefield casualties, and to focus long and hard on preventing its own casualties. And that’s where a heck of lot of money does and should go.
Here’s a case in point: The Pentagon has just announced the following good news:
The U.S. military’s new armored trucks in Afghanistan are significantly reducing troop deaths in roadside attacks at a time when insurgent bombings are at record levels, according to statistics provided to USA TODAY.
Read the rest here.
Those armored trucks, obviously, didn’t magically appear on the battlefield without any money spent. Someone had to design them and someone had to build them. The money spent will go a long way to keeping our guys safe and, by decreasing incentives for the bad guys (since every American death is an incentive), also works towards bringing hostilities to an end, thereby decreasing their casualties too.
I’m not arguing a blank check for the military. Oversight is extremely important, especially to prevent the institution from becoming slack and corrupt. I do believe, however, that the institutional desire for enhanced weaponry is surprisingly benign in its intent, insofar as it means to decrease incentives for the bad guys to make war and to protect our guys along the way.
With that in mind, the next time you hear the execrable Bawny Fwank discuss his desire to slash the military budget, think about whether peaceful coexistence and diminished American deaths are more likely with an emaciated, emasculated, de-weaponized military, or with an institution strong enough to frighten our foes and protect its own.
Related posts:
- Pentagon ceremony
- Finding money to fund the war
- Renee Ellmers explains where the money is and, sadly, where it isn’t
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3 Responses to “Why we don’t (shouldn’t) begrudge the Pentagon money”
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Our national historical memory is short enough and selective enough that we forget that our normal pattern is to get absolutlely pasted in the first battle of each war, due to unreadiness. Although written prior to our two most recent wars, here is quite a good book on the subject which covers all the previous ones.
Obama and Democrats prefer more Americans dead. It’s good for their campaigns.
Re: Central government focus, perhaps only job should be Defense (which is (by necessity) a good offense demonstrated frequently and used overwhelmingly (if not brutally) when needed.. the only “defense” we have is the 5-10% we invest in intelligence, collecting others’ secrets). i.e. No better friend, no worse enemy will insure we don’t have to fight wars.
I’d like to see the Federal government start to return power to the states, perhaps with an incentive for each states to in-turn return power to 50 geographically-drawn jurisdictions. Most of these jurisdictions will be larger than most of the States in the Founder’s time. And now we have computers and networks to make it easy to replicate whatever it is we can locally find of value of what those millions of non-defense related Federal employees do. No reason why a jurisdiction of 300,000 citizens taxes can’t be completely managed by a few of today’s laptops (and open-source application software shared between jurisdictions), etc.
We don’t need to change the Constitution, just have Congress defund organizations (and return the savings to the states, saying “you’re welcome to do this job or not, it’s up to you” – as well as tell the federal employees “there may be a job with the state and local jurisdictions if they value your skills for needs they have.”
Just like big business in the 70s and 80s that found they could get by with 1/10th the headquarters staff giving good IT and networks – and they incented the CxOs by sharing the savings with them of downsizing their empire – who then were well motivated to disassemble their empire (largely obsolescent due to automation) and say to their own HQ employees “maybe the divisions can use you, which would be wonderful since you’ll move from being a below-the-line burden to generating an above-the-line return for our company!”).
I’ll vote for whatever party delivers a schedule and a plan for getting the Federal government out of all domestic affairs – basically a distributed, reliable, redundant, inventive, competitive, governance infrastructure for the 21st Century (why worry about continuity of government when you have 1,000 mostly autonomous jurisdictions, disciplined by the ability of the citizens to vote not only at the ballot box, but with their feet?).
Perhaps we need to do the same thing boards did in the 80s for the Fortune 1000 companies. Split the savings with the agency owners – even if it means 100 million dollar salaries for the few staff remaining in each agency it’d be cheap at twice the price, given what we’re spending today and getting little in return. Wrt DoD, perhaps we need to do the same.. rather than reward “number of sailors per carrier battle fleet” (because number of admirals is determined by headcount – which creates an incentive to grow staffs), we offer half the savings to those admirals willing to drive from WW2 structures to something closer to today (where cruise ships are “run” by 1/10th – 1/100th a carrier’s TOE, and have a duty cycle exceeding 90% – including restocking and refitting. compared to < 50% for today’s Navy).