Restraint

A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy

Barry R. Posen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780801470868
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The United States, Barry R. Posen argues in Restraint, has grown incapable of moderating its ambitions in international politics. Since the collapse of Soviet power, it has pursued a grand strategy that he calls "liberal hegemony," one that Posen sees as unnecessary, counterproductive, costly, and wasteful. Written for policymakers and observers alike, Restraint explains precisely why this grand strategy works poorly and then provides a carefully designed alternative grand strategy and an associated military strategy and force structure. In contrast to the failures and unexpected problems that have stemmed from America's consistent overreaching, Posen makes an urgent argument for restraint in the future use of U.S. military strength.

After setting out the political implications of restraint as a guiding principle, Posen sketches the appropriate military forces and posture that would support such a strategy. He works with a deliberately constrained notion of grand strategy and, even more important, of national security (which he defines as including sovereignty, territorial integrity, power position, and safety). His alternative for military strategy, which Posen calls "command of the commons," focuses on protecting U.S. global access through naval, air, and space power, while freeing the United States from most of the relationships that require the permanent stationing of U.S. forces overseas.

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The Perils of Liberal Hegemony

Liberal Hegemony has performed poorly in securing the United States over the last two decades, and given ongoing changes in the world it will perform less and less well. The strategy has been costly, wasteful, and counterproductive. The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on unnecessary military preparations and unnecessary wars, billions that it can no longer afford. The wars have needlessly taken the lives of thousands of U.S. military personnel and hurt many thousands more. The strategy molds the U.S. military in a way that will leave it simultaneously large, expensive, and fundamentally misshapen. The strategy makes enemies almost as quickly as it dispatches them. The strategy encourages less-friendly states to compete with the United States more intensively, while encouraging friendly states to do less than they should in their own defense, or to be more adventurous than is wise. This in turn creates additional defense burdens for the American people. Below I discuss these errors in greater detail and explain why our policies are misdirected and self-defeating.

DIRECT COSTS

The United States has waged four wars since the election of William Jefferson Clinton in 1992: the 1999 war with Serbia over Kosovo, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent counterinsurgency, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent counterinsurgency, and the 2011 war to oust the Gaddafi regime in Libya. Only the invasion of Afghanistan can be defended as a necessary response to a clear national security threat: those responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States could not be allowed to continue their relatively comfortable existence in that country. The war in Kosovo was initiated to achieve humanitarian and ideological goals. The war in Iraq was launched for a variety of reasons. Charitably, it arose from a series of intelligence failures; poor information was rendered frightening due to the September 11 attacks. Less charitably, it was a grand ideological project that aimed to transform Arab society in a way that would produce governments favorable to the United States. The Libya war was publicly motivated by the expectation of imminent massacre of civilians, but Western leaders seem also to have wanted to play a role in the “Arab Spring” for ideological reasons and may have hoped that siding with the rebels against a leader widely despised across the Arab world would recover a better opinion there of the United States. The United States also fought limited military engagements in Somalia and Bosnia for humanitarian purposes. Somalia began as a mission of humanitarian assistance and ended in a bloody fight as U.S. leaders succumbed to the temptations of nation and state building. Bosnia had a similar evolution. In Bosnia and Kosovo, the United States followed its “kinetic” operations with lengthy peace enforcement and nation- and state-building efforts involving tens of thousands of U.S. (and allied) troops for many years. The same evolution occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq, at much greater cost. United States troops are still present in Kosovo, despite the great stresses on U.S. forces arising from other military operations. In Haiti the United States threatened military force to overthrow a military junta and followed that group’s exit with a deployment of tens of thousands of peacekeeping troops. The United States avoided putting troops into Libya to affect the shape of the postwar government, but immediate developments pointed to the emergence of a weak state beset by factional violence. The United States also used force many times against Iraq between the 1991 war, Operation Desert Storm, and the 2003 war, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The United States has incurred large direct costs in money and casualties from its post–Cold War activism, because the U.S. military is an expensive tool, and even poor enemies can prove dangerous. By 2010, the United States had spent $784 billion on the Iraq war, and another $321 billion on Afghanistan and other worldwide activities associated with the “Global War on Terror.”1 Even the entire series of relatively limited operations in the 1990s cost the United States roughly $40 billion (all dollar figures in this paragraph given in 2011 dollars).2 Relative to past wars, these costs are very high. The United States spent more on the Iraq war in real terms than it did on the Vietnam War, in which it faced an enemy backed by the Soviet Union and China. It spent almost twice as much as it spent in the Korean War. In its peak year, Iraq war spending amounted to 1 percent of U.S. GDP.

Beyond money, these wars have more tragic costs for American and Allied soldiers killed and wounded, and their families. The U.S. military is highly skilled and extraordinarily well equipped, so the human cost of these wars to the United States has thankfully been lower than one might have expected from past experience. According to the Pentagon, 4,422 Americans died during the Iraq War, and nearly 32,000 were wounded.3 Enduring Freedom, and other associated counterterror operations accounted for 2,229 deaths, and 18,675 wounded.4 One hundred thousand U.S. service members who deployed to the Iraq and Afghan wars have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Over 200,000 suffered mild to severe traumatic brain injury occasioned by proximity to explosive blasts, which at the time did not produce an obvious exterior wound.5 Many of the wounded, and many others who fought in these wars, will require significant medical care for the remainder of their lives. Aside from the personal price they have paid, the country is honor bound to look after them for years to come, so the dollar costs of these wars have not yet been fully realized. These wars also have significant effects on the people of the countries in which they take place, including deaths, wounds, and displacement. Well over 100,000 Iraqis died violently during the U.S. operation.6

The direct costs of these wars tell only part of the story. The size of the annual U.S. defense effort necessary to sustain the grand strategy, now roughly 4 percent of GDP, is excessive. The sheer extent of the global military effort is one driver of costs, but there are also less obvious drivers. Though both patriotism and the challenges of military life motivate many to serve, the United States has high personnel costs because it has a largely professional military: pay, retirement, and health benefits must compete with the private sector.7 Because military personnel are expensive, the United States cannot afford many of them, so it buys them the most sophisticated and lethal technology man can devise, in order to sustain global capabilities with a relatively small force. This creates a demand for even more skilled and more costly personnel.

For ethical reasons, cold economic reasons, and political reasons defense planners, senior military leaders, and politicians have an interest in spending vast amounts of money to prevent even a single casualty. Americans properly honor military service persons and wish to subject service members to the least risk possible. The professionals are expensive to train and hard to replace. Rising casualties are also the surest way to elicit skeptical public attention to a war, so commanders and particularly politicians have a political interest in “force protection.” Thus a marginal dollar spent on force protection always seems cost effective.

Because it is the U.S. ambition not only to deter attack but to deter any peacetime military competition, an open-ended quest for clear, decisive, and somehow, enduring technological superiority is the result. The United States thus has very high military research and development costs. Once research and development efforts yield a producible design, it turns out that the quest for technological superiority has resulted in an enormously costly weapon. For the reasons outlined above, Republican and Democratic politicians agree that the U.S. military should have the best weapons money can buy, and are not competent in any case to judge when the law of diminishing returns sets in for military acquisition.

In its quest for Liberal Hegemony the United States consistently accounted for a little more than a third of all the military spending in the world during the 1990s. All potential adversaries and competitors combined spent a bit less than 20 percent. Allies of the United States accounted for a bit less than a third of all spending, and the rest of the world perhaps 15 percent.8 The figures are even more lopsided today, with the United States accounting for 41 percent of all global military spending. This level of effort would seem to buy more insurance than the U.S. needs. At best, this amounts to a subsidy to other prosperous nations that could defend themselves if they spent a little more on defense; at worst this is pure waste; perhaps the others spend less because threats are less than we think.

The opportunity cost of overinvestment in military power is illustrated by comparisons to the effort of other nation-states. If, prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, during the 1990s, the United States had consistently only spent as large a share of GDP on defense as its most militarily committed, globally activist, and prosperous allies, Britain and France, we could have diverted approximately 0.75 percent of GDP—roughly $75 billion annually—to nondefense activities. France then averaged 3.1 percent, the UK 3.2 percent, and the US 3.95 percent.9 Today the disparity is roughly double. Including expenditures on the wars, the United States was spending 4.8 percent of GDP on defense in 2011, while these allies were averaging 2.25 percent10 Others spend an even lower share of GDP. On a sustained basis these differences translate into hundreds of billions of dollars in foregone U.S. domestic investments in everything from debt reduction to infrastructure.

The U.S. military effort, both in peacetime, and in wartime, has been costly and is destined to become even more difficult and expensive if Liberal Hegemony remains the grand strategy. Although the U.S. military may easily defeat “rogue” states or occupy “failed states,” the subsequent work of reconstruction and counterinsurgency will probably get even more difficult. And it is improbable that major states, growing in wealth, can be cowed into permitting the United States an open-ended military superiority.

THE BALANCE OF POWER

Statesmen and strategists have long believed that states tend to join together to “balance” the power of capable states and coalitions. The United States has thus far faced only limited balancing but will likely face a lot more in coming years. As mentioned in the Introduction, international politics is an anarchy, a system without a sovereign. If actors within that system value their autonomy, they have an incentive to keep a wary eye on the most capable among them, lest the unrestrained powerful choose to attack. There is no central authority to call on for help. When one state grows too strong and threatens the sovereignty of the others, there is a tendency for the others to concert action and accumulate military power in order to defend themselves. This process is not a law, it is a tendency.

“Balancers” face many obstacles to success. Cooperation is difficult, and the more capable the target the greater the risk to those in opposition. If it takes too many independent actors to balance the power of one, the process becomes difficult indeed. Modern Europe has been the cockpit of balance of power politics, and a series of aspiring hegemons have tried and failed to establish their dominance. That said, these failures implicated others in one or more hugely destructive wars. Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Adolf Hitler all had good runs before being brought down. And it took a half-century of containment and nuclear deterrence to exhaust the energies of the Soviet Union. Balancing is difficult and dangerous work, but there are incentives to attempt it for states that value their independence.

The United States is perhaps the most capable power in history. This incentivizes others to balance but also makes balancing against the United States costly and difficult. The factors that make it possible for the United States to “go it alone” also make it possible for the United States to have great global ambitions. In the last two decades the United States has pursued these ambitions. The United States has sought very high levels of influence in most parts of the world, and often intrusive management of the internal affairs of other states large and small. The United States has been profligate in the use of military force to achieve these objectives. On the basis of U.S. capabilities, and demonstrated U.S. intentions, we should see other states balancing against the United States. Do we?

External Balancing

Most observers agree that the United States has faced little balancing.11 Why might this have been the case? Because the United States is at a great distance from other states, true conquest of others is a costly matter, which both mutes U.S. ambitions and increases its costs, so its power may appear less threatening. Other factors, such as the nuclear weapon, also defend weaker powers against the risk that the United States could turn highly aggressive. The U.S. strategy has not aimed for formal empire or territorial conquest and annexation. Finally, the distribution of capabilities among other states has made the formation of balancing coalitions difficult. At present, the aggregate capabilities of three disparate states would be required to arithmetically exceed U.S. capabilities (see table 2). In the real world of alliance management, this is problematical. It is also the case that the rest of the consequential powers in the world are concentrated in Eurasia, which tends to make them more fearful of one another than they are of the powerful, but distant United States.12

Balancing efforts have occurred, however, and more are to be expected. The level of U.S. power, as well as the activist strategy that it enables, are likely to be perceived as a problem by other independent actors. At the same time, a “diffusion of power” is underway, as China and India ascend to the top ranks of world powers, and a handful of states such as Russia, Japan, and perhaps Brazil remain sufficiently capable to matter as allies. Thus some states will be more able to tilt with the United States on their own, or more able to form smaller and more manageable balancing coalitions.

Scholars following the trajectory of the “unipolar moment” have debated whether or not balancing is present. A new, somewhat useful distinction has been drawn between “soft” and “hard” balancing. “Soft balancing” captures concerted behavior by other states to increase the costs of the activist hegemon, short of the use or threat of violence, or the mobilization of material capabilities.13 Many scholars have observed that hegemons typically attempt to legitimate their power position.14 They would like others to believe that their might is also right. This helps the hegemon control costs. Soft balancing aims to deprive the hegemon of that legitimacy. Thus it consists mainly of diplomacy, particularly in venues that the hegemon hopes to employ to legitimate its action. The United States, as a liberal hegemon, is particularly vulnerable to this kind of action. Students of soft balancing point to action by Russia and France to deprive the United States of a U.N. security council resolution to authorize Operation Iraqi Freedom as an example. One could argue that China is engaged in soft balancing in its effort to protec...

Table of contents

• List of Tables and Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Evolution of Post–Cold War U.S. Grand Strategy
• 1. The Perils of Liberal Hegemony
• 2. The Case for Restraint
• 3. Command of the Commons: The Military Strategy, Force Structure, and Force Posture of Restraint
• Conclusion: A Sustained Debate
• Notes