Why more military spending is a bad idea | Christopher Preble | Big Think

Why more military spending is a bad idea

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Does the U.S. need such a large and expensive military? There are some limits we should have about the extent of our military power and how much our allies should depend on us, argues Christopher Preble, the Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. U.S. military might is to be used sparingly and its costs are worth considering against its usefulness.

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CHRISTOPHER PREBLE :

Christopher Preble is the vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free (Cornell University Press, 2009) and John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap (Northern Illinois University Press, 2004). He co-edited, with John Mueller, A Dangerous World? Threat Perception and U.S. National Security (Cato Institute, 2014); and, with Jim Harper and Benjamin Friedman, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It (Cato Institute, 2010).

Preble has also published articles in major publications, including the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, National Review, The National Interest, and Foreign Policy, and is a frequent guest on television and radio.

In addition to his work at Cato, Preble teaches the U.S. foreign policy elective at the University of California, Washington Center. Before joining Cato in February 2003, he taught history at St. Cloud State University and Temple University. Preble was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, and served aboard the USS Ticonderoga (CG-47) from 1990 to 1993.

Preble holds a PhD in history from Temple University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Christopher Preble:

It’s true the U.S. military is a costly enterprise. It cost us more as a share of our total output during the Cold War, but in absolute dollar terms we’re spending about as much now as we spent during the Cold War, so the cost to maintain primacy has remained relatively high.

And the question is, could we spend much more on the military to cover some of the gaps between what we ask our military to do and the resources they have to carry out those missions? I think the answer is: we could spend more, but it’s not in our interest to do so, just spending more on the military won’t ensure that the military, for example, will be able to succeed, and some of the conflicts that it hasn’t yet achieved decisive victory.

I think it actually speaks to the limits of military power, that you can spend a lot and you can have the most exquisite military in the world, which we absolutely do, and yet that same military struggles to defeat determined adversaries wielding crude weapons in places like Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan. And I think that really does speak that just spending more money on the problem is not likely to solve the problem, it is likely to encourage us to get more deeply involved in some conflicts that might genuinely be intractable and that ultimately aren’t vital to U.S. national security.

I think that for a country as powerful as the United States, and especially a country with global interests and with a large and capable military, it’s really important to define ahead of time when that military will be used. I use some basic criteria that are consistent with things like the Weinberger Powell Doctrine from the Cold War and early post-Cold War period. Things like: what’s the national security interest at stake? What are we asking our military to do? Will the public support the mission even if the mission gets difficult and costly? Related, how are we going to pay for it? Will the war be paid for by, for example, a war tax or will we pay for it through debt like we did in World War II?

Those sorts of questions are important to ask before we send our military into harms way.

And I think that’s, again, the nature of the U.S. military, because it exists and it is so large and strong and in many places simultaneously, it’s fairly easy for that military to become involved in conflicts before we ask any of those questions. And so I think it’s really important for the American people and for American policymakers to keep in mind some basic criteria for when we use force. The last point I’d make is that war is a perilous enterprise. It involves the threat of violence and the destruction of property and therefore we s...

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