A reader emailed be the following question:
If the ultimate end-product of the military is death/destruction, is it a good thing to try to make the DoD more efficient? It seems like if the DoD was able to procure more for less, that that would result in a greater capacity for intervention and more death/destruction. It doesn’t have to be that way, but the practice of Presidents, Congresses, and Bureaucrats have favored interventionism for quite some time. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
That’s a really excellent question. Here’s my response (I’ll forego the indentation).
I think two things:
(1) The first and most important objective of government is the provision of defense against aggression. Only then can you have an environment of free and equal dignity, with laws and courts and police, where no one person is subjected to the will of another.
(2) Such liberal societies based on law, property, and consent create a dynamic and competitive environment required for technological and cultural growth. Over the long run, I am skeptical of the central planner’s abilities to generate innovation and adaptability.
There’s a kind of “virtuous cycle” that once you have a liberal society: it creates dynamic change, which generates economic growth, which provides for better defense technologies, which makes the society more secure from outside aggression, which provides an example for other nations to follow.
I do not necessarily see the strength and efficiency of US defense as causing increased aggressiveness in foreign policy. In fact, I think the opposite. I think that aggressiveness is perhaps a reflection of illiberalism seeping into our state, of closed cultures of decision makers that are not personally accountable to the public.
The DOD itself has adopted very illiberal methods of planning and production, particularly since Robert McNamara. That is largely reflected in the PPBE process which acts as a tool for monopsony. I think illiberalism is the primary source of so-called cost disease in defense.
Now, how liberal institutions translates into effective defense acquisition is an open question, but I think it hasn’t been achieved until we see a diversity of projects and outcomes rather than a bureaucratic consensus. I have something akin to “faith” that the cultures that support technology growth best are built on freedom and equality of dignity, and therefore are those least likely to tolerate naked aggression or injustice.
Hope that got to your problem. Overall, this talk is very far removed from the “real” environment we find ourselves, with authoritarian peers like Russia and China, who appear to be at the military frontier in several cases. But their processes often exhibit a kind of freedom to experiment stamped out of the US, which, if true, is ironic.
As to interventionism in, say, Yemen, we can’t make ourselves so weak as to be at a clear disadvantage to authoritarian peers, so we will always have the military power to intervene in some backwater. Whether we do so is a political-economy question separate from the effectiveness of defense budgets, which are merely a means to a political end.
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