US Defense Politics

The Origins of Security Policy

Harvey M. Sapolsky, Eugene Gholz, Caitlin Talmadge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000300109
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

This book provides an accessible overview of US defense politics for upper-level students. This new edition has been updated and revised, with new material on the Trump Administration and Space Force.

Analyzing the ways in which the United States prepares for war, the authors demonstrate how political and organizational interests determine US defense policy and warn against over-emphasis on planning, centralization, and technocracy. Focusing on the process of defense policy-making rather than just the outcomes of that process, US Defense Politics departs from the traditional style of many textbooks.

Designed to help students understand the practical side of American national security policy, the book examines the following key themes:

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• US grand strategy;

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• the roles of the president and the Congress in controlling the military;

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• organizational interests and civil-military relations;

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• who joins America's military;

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• what happens to veterans after wars;

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• how and why weapons are bought;

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• the management of defense and intra- and inter-service relations;

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• public attitudes toward the military;

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• homeland security and the intelligence community.

The fourth edition will be essential reading for students of US defense politics, national security policy, and homeland security, and highly recommended for students of US foreign policy, public policy, and public administration.

1Enduring questions, changing politics

This book is about how the United States prepares for war by raising, maintaining, and equipping military forces. It will describe how American political leaders decide upon a national security strategy and the specific size and kinds of military forces the nation fields. And it will explain how the United States finds its enemies, fights wars, and deals with their consequences, foreign and domestic. It will cover the organization, management, and politics of American national security policy.

The subject is at the forefront of citizens’ engagement with their government. After all, according to the Enlightenment theories of a “social contract” that so influenced America’s Founding Fathers, national defense is the reason to have a government to begin with. Although modern Americans debate the legitimacy of many other ways that government may also contribute to the commonweal, essentially everyone agrees that providing for the common defense is its first obligation. Americans look to their government to ensure their physical security, to prevent foreign powers and overseas chaos from disrupting their prosperity, and to recognize and encourage their various expressions of individual liberty. National security encompasses these three core aims – and from time to time, some others as well.

Defense policy issues account for many of the policy issues most prominently discussed among Americans. Presidential candidates are always asked about what they think are the gravest threats to US security and whether the existing defense budget and policy choices are the best way to address them. As you will learn in this book, though, neither their broad campaign statements about national security nor their seemingly detailed plans intended to show off their knowledge and expertise are directly implemented once candidates win their elections. For good reasons, presidents are only one important member of the complex cast that makes national security policy. They have to deal with Congress, the military, think tank experts, advocacy groups, the defense industry, and of course the ever-changing views of the public, informed, more or less, by the 24-hour news cycle and the never-silent Twitterverse.

The politics of national security extend well beyond decisions about how to respond to foreign policy crises. To be sure, defense policy debates sometimes focus on issues such as the complex question of whether it serves the national interest to send American ground troops to fight in Syria, whether against fundamentalist Islamist terrorists like ISIS or against nasty authoritarian leaders like Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. The substantive analysis of the ways and means of such an intervention is important, and experts claim that they can divine the objective truth about national interest. But in practice the national interest is a very slippery concept, and different people with different personal values define the national interest in different ways. Politics within the United States give us our national security decisions, and many other prior decisions about defense policy create conditions that strongly influence, if not determine, the choices about specific interventions such as Syria. It is the day-to-day arguments about defense investment, organization, and management that set the stage, and the day-to-day decisions about defense politics are themselves controversial and consequential on their own terms.

This book highlights those day-to-day decisions – how they get made, what they have been, and why they matter. Outside of crises, organizations rather than individual personalities have more influence on policy. Their default routines, known as standard operating procedures (SOPs), and their own political interests can influence important decisions, especially those that take place below the radar of public, presidential, or congressional attention. In the day-to-day functioning of government, including in military affairs, the president is powerful but not unchallengeable. Even wars have elements of choice, and presidents rely on expert advice furnished by military leaders and on congressional allies to help rally public support. Those advising senior officials through positions on the National Security Council (NSC), in the Intelligence Community, on Capitol Hill, or over at the Pentagon – that is, those parts of the security apparatus that have been built up in Washington, DC, over the decades since World War II – can be especially influential by framing arguments and assembling evidence. All of these organizations influence policy-making and need to be considered in any study of security policy.

The investment, organization, and management themselves matter. For example, President Obama’s secretaries of defense (Gates, Panetta, Hagel, and Carter) complained that the White House National Security Staff took on too much of the secretary of defense’s policy-making role, centralizing decision-making in the president’s bloated-but-still-easily-overwhelmed personal orbit, and reducing the opportunity for people with military experience and institutional memory to influence the decisions. Under President Trump, however, the criticism has been the opposite – that a dysfunctional White House has ceded too much authority to the Pentagon and to other current or retired general officers serving in various senior administration roles, resulting at times in the slow-rolling or undermining of the president’s defense decisions. Are these criticisms right? Are they fair?

Meanwhile, the military itself is in the process of rapid social change, in particular opening opportunities to women and gays. Have those reforms been implemented as rapidly and effectively as they could have been? The military also faces social challenges, including sexual assault and suicide. Are its policies to handle those problems responsive and effective? The answers tell us something important about the military’s role in American society.

Separately, Americans worry that their government is getting away from them – that it spends too much and achieves too little. Defense spending is one of the biggest components of the federal budget, vigorously supported by Americans’ patriotism and lasting trust in the military as one of the few effective institutions in American government. As Americans seek to cut government spending, they clash over how (or whether) to allocate a share of the cuts to defense. The automatic mechanism that Congress imposed to actually enforce budget cuts, “sequestration,” has become an epithet in the defense policy world, where many view it as non-strategic and dangerous at a time that they see mounting threats to US security. Is sequestration really as bad as people say, or are the complaints just the normal pushback of bureaucrats and pork-barrel interests who have grown accustomed to the cushy life in a profligate national security state?

This book explains these and other recent important American defense policy issues, not just because the issues are themselves important but also because they help us to learn about the broader framework and processes of US defense politics. This approach provides some balance to the study of security policy as it is currently taught in most colleges and universities. The common method is to focus on international relations, without much consideration of the domestic politics that influence them. This perspective frequently considers states’ “regime type” – that is, whether they are democracies or not – but often does not delve further into democracies’ processes and concerns in choosing their national security policies. It worries about the international balance of power much more than the domestic one.

This limitation would not matter much if the students of domestic politics and policies paid serious attention to national security issues. But they usually do not. For them, the politics that hold interest, especially in the United States, are those affecting social welfare, racial inequality, the causes and consequences of globalization, elections, and other internal issues. When they look for comparison to the politics or policy in their areas of interest, they look abroad for the contrasts and similarities, not to the national politics of defense, and they tend to overlook the role of defense in Americans’ consideration of those issues. They compare US and European health policies or US and Asian trade policies but never US business–government relations in defense and non-defense industries.

The topic of civil–military relations is central to this book – defined in the American context as the relationship between elected civilian leaders (the president and Congress) and professional military leaders (generals and admirals). Much of the scholarship on civil–military relations has focused on explaining coups in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. It has had relatively little to say about stable societies such as the United States, where no one fears that the military will take power. A general rebelling against the government occasionally makes for a good movie plot (Dr. Strangelove features just such a story) but finds no reality within the actual American officer corps. And the fear that military leaders are uniformly hardliners, who no matter the situation will advise an aggressive military solution to the nation’s problems, is also a Hollywood exaggeration. As generals and admirals know, wars destroy organizations and give reason for civilian leaders to interfere in military affairs. Better just the threat of war, as far as they are concerned.

Ultimately, the literature on civil–military relations downplays the most important question for the American context: how can the president get useful strategic advice from the professional military – preferably a menu of options from which the president, elected by the people for this very purpose, can choose, but not so broad a range of options as to produce cacophony and incoherence? Military officers need to engage constructively in advising civilians and the public about security threats and appropriate national strategies to counter them. They also need to be responsive to civilian direction even when policies work against their service’s interest or that of the military as a whole – indeed, we hope that they will advise the political leadership to cut back military expenditure in American society when international conditions warrant those policies. That responsibility throws the military into the political mix with other sources of advice, and it also emphasizes the military’s multiple other political interactions beyond those with the president, not the least of which is the armed services’ own rivalry among themselves for prestige and relevance. The services (traditionally the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, but with the Coast Guard and Space Force more recently added to the official list), the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), and other units of the government, including the Office of the President, are political institutions with organizational interests and pathologies of their own. We will help you understand them in this book.

The literature on business–government relations is also relevant to this book. Strangely, the defense industry is hardly ever considered in academic discussions of business–government relations, although the “military–industrial complex” is often the bogeyman of journalistic investigations and conspiracy theories. The lack of systematic analysis is surprising, because no industry is more heavily regulated than the defense industry, and the government is, through the armed services and related agencies, the only buyer of many tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, equipment, and related services that this industry sells each year. Much of the federal government’s support of research and development efforts is channeled through defense firms, whose work has been at the cutting edge in several fields such as aeronautics, satellites, remote sensing, robotics, simulations, and data processing. The military buys more, hires more, and uses the private sector more than any other part of government. We will explain why the military favors the use of contractors for many of its support functions and with what consequences. Do contractors gain undue influence on national security policy? Who else has a say in how America spends defense dollars and fights its wars? You will find out.

Though their work is complex and sometimes classified, militaries, especially the US military, take pride in their histories, seek to create and follow traditions, commission and attract many studies, keep good records, and are central to major security policy decisions. In contrast, business firms usually ignore their histories, limit access to records, shun probing outsiders, and prefer to claim limited or no roles in public policy decisions. Understanding the information militaries provide requires a trained eye, but the material is there for examination.

There are myths to explode. We will be surprised and disheartened if when you have finished reading this book you still believe that the F-35 fighter aircraft or the AH-64 attack helicopter were bought only because they are made in 49 of the 50 states or 367 of the 435 congressional districts. And, yes, Congress has met a weapon system that it did not like – more than one, in fact – despite the obvious political incentives to preserve defense industry jobs and to grandstand by voting “for” national security. Politics play a central role in weapons acquisition decisions, but a much more complicated and subtle politics than the handy – but wrong – state or district count implies.

Weapons’ quality and efforts to reform the acquisition process are another source of myths about national security. In the past, critics often complained that the defense industry overcharged for “gold-plated” equipment with unnecessary, deluxe features; today, the complaint has changed to allege that defense firms peddle old technologies long left behind by the commercial marketplace. In truth, there are reasons why the armed forces buy the weapons that they buy and why they follow Kafkaesque acquisition regulations. We will learn why the result of that process, expensive as it is, is worthy not only of our scorn but also of our admiration.

Our goal, though, is to do more than get rid of the easy answers. We want to equip readers with analytical concepts that will allow them to have a very good understanding of not only past defense decisions but also future ones. We seek to provide a framework for analysis, not a description of historical actions and the leaders associated with them. Certainly, parts of the book will relate historical events, both to familiarize readers with key events and changes in American defense policy – the “coin of the realm” – and to present examples and evidence to support our interpretations. But the book’s goal is broader than offering a historical account: we will help you discern the recurring patterns behind events and give you tools so that you can recognize those patterns in the future. Politics – the way that politicians, government employees, and regular citizens adjudicate their differences about values and priorities – confront an ever-changing array of specific issues, but most of the debates actually reflect underlying questions that endure.

The framework is what makes the book most useful for the future, because the details change frequently. It is, as the cliché says, “a very uncertain world” in which we live. Who would have predicted in 1981 that the Cold War would end within the decade, and peacefully as well? Who would have predicted in 1991 that a decade later the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, including nations that once were members of the rival Warsaw Pact, would be fighting side by side in Afghanistan? And who in early 2001 would have predicted that the American defense budget would soon reach the heights achieved in the Cold War, but without America facing a rival that could be truthfully labeled its military peer? We do not expect our readers to become fortune-tellers. Rather, such concepts as the defense budget cycle, the temptations of empire, the desire to free-ride, and the congressional fear of responsibility – all to be explained later – will give our readers a good and useful set of tools with which to understand recurring themes in US defense politics and policy. Readers will even be able to make broad predictions about the future based on the framework, and they will better understand the consequences of reforms that change the balance of power among the individuals and organizations that influence US defense policy.

Thoughts about comparison

The United States has long been a global power, but it was not until World War II that it became committed to using its power to shape the international system. World War II finished what World War I started: the demotion of European nations from the status of global powers. Then the Cold War pitted the United States against the Soviet Union. The eventual collapse of that overextended, decaying dictatorship left the United States standing alone.

The scale of US power dwarfs other countries’, and it differs dramatically in both how it is generated and how it is used. The United States now spends more on defense than the next 11 other spenders combined (see Figure 1.1). It invests several times more in defense research and development activities than the rest of the world (e.g., designing military aircraft, testing new weapons, and seeking better military communications gear and sensors), and it has sustained its high research and development (R&D) spending for more than six decades. The US Navy is about ten times the size of the once-vaunted Royal Navy, which is a close ally. Other navies like China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy and the Russian Navy are large if you just count the number of ships, but they have few ships that can sail the open oceans; only the US Navy is truly a global, blue-water, power-projection force. Meanwhile, the United States has four air forces (one each for the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Army), and all are very capable. Its military power draws on a vast resource base: a gross domestic product (GDP) of over $20 trillion that accounts for nearly a quarter of the world’s economic activity. And America has no peer in terms of its global cultural influence. The American way of life – an apparently enticing mix of unapologetic materialism, the continuous quest for celebrity status and wealth, disdain for government, braggadocio optimism, sincerely expressed but...