After criticizing President Obama sharply here and here for being far more warlike than the liberal candidate I thought I was voting for, I’d like to (tentatively) express praise for some actions he’s taking to reduce the defense budget, with the caveats that (a) his hand was forced by Congress, (b) this spending should be, but won’t be, replaced by infrastructure and other job-creating and investment-multiplying spending, and (c) this different strategy won’t solve our country’s addiction to war, and could in fact make it harder for Congress to hold the executive branch to heel.
First, the praise. Faced with across-the-board cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act (passed last year as part of the compromise to raise the debt ceiling), President Obama on Thursday unveiled a new national security plan that, in the words of Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, focuses on “drones, spec ops and cyber war.” Also, Asia.
In a rare visit to the Pentagon, President Obama declared that the U.S. will be “strengthening our presence in the Asia-Pacific,” while “turning the page on a decade of war.” In practice, that means cutting the Army and Marine Corps and unspecified “outdated Cold War systems,” part of a broad effort to cut what the Pentagon now calculates as $487 billion over 10 years from its budget.
But it also means that the U.S. is going to lean hard on other military specialties between now and 2020. Obama identified those as “intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, counterterrorism, countering weapons of mass destruction, and the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access.”
Translated from the defense wonk: lots of spy tools including drones; lethal special operations forces; offensive cyber weapons; jammers; and a presence to deter and confront Iran — and maybe China, which seeks to keep the Navy and Air Force off its shores.
I think this is, broadly, the right approach. The U.S. has an enormous technical advantage over the rest of the world, and it should leverage that advantage to head off conflicts before they start. That means better (not necessarily more) intelligence collection and the ability to act quickly and decisively, catching potential enemies flat-footed. And this is a far, far smarter plan for counterterrorism than invading random Middle Eastern nations where Al-Qaida isn’t. Last year, you may remember, President Obama, the intelligence community, and Seal Team Six pulled a Munich on Osama bin Laden, assassinating him nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks. Whatever the principled arguments against celebrating his death (or that of any man), tactically and morally this kind of targeted hit against our actual enemies is light-years ahead of invading and remaining in Afghanistan and Iraq for a decade.
And as for expanding our cyber-warfare capabilities: this cuts both ways, of course — more effective cyber-warfare gives the government vastly increased power to conduct (deniable) malicious attacks against dissenters at home and unfriendly voices abroad. It’s impossible to believe Anonymous and Wikileaks and other whistle-blowers and critics of the U.S. government won’t face covert retaliation once the CIA has its hands on efficient cyber-attack technology. But given that everybody else is doing it, we’re going to have to stay current on these tools as a purely defensive matter. Whether our offensive use of such technology ends up creating horrific blowback remains to be seen.
Okay, so, now for the caveats. First, the President is making cuts and realigning our strategy, not out of principle, but because he’s being forced to by congressional deficit hawks. (That won’t keep those same hawks from slamming him for the cuts when it’s politically expedient, of course; Buck McKeon (R, Ca.), who voted for the Budget Control Act, declared the new strategy a “retreat from the world.”) That means this money won’t be re-invested where it could still do some good. There’s some argument over whether serious cuts to the defense budget will hamper our country’s ability to conduct advanced research and development at a time when private companies no longer engage in ambitious projects like Bell Labs. Ezra Klein points out that
[F]unding military R&D is probably an inefficient way to fund nonmilitary innovations. If what we want is R&D focused on innovations with broad applications, we should fund that R&D directly rather than hoping that some of the military’s innovations turn out to also be of use to consumers.
Perhaps the best argument for funding military R&D is that it’s economically inefficient but politically efficient. It would be better to fund R&D directly, but the only politically sustainable form of innovation funding is military spending. That is depressing, but it might be true.
I think that about sums up the problem, and it points to a larger problem in general. If we’re so (erroneously) committed to deficit hawkery that we’re cutting defense spending (i.e., if we’re actually trying to cut the deficit instead of using it as a political football), then there’s no chance in hell that this spending will be made up for with spending on infrastructure or non-military R&D or any other kind of spending that would create new jobs and act as a force-multiplier for our economy. So what this means is that thousands of people in the defense industry will lose their jobs — becoming, at least temporarily, a drag on the economy — and we will not have used that unpleasant situation to our advantage to try to create more jobs and growth overall. This is just government downsizing during a period of severe unemployment, with no upside. I don’t blame the President for this, but it’s a stupid thing to do, nonetheless.
Finally, these changes in both the size of the military and its strategic role may limit the number of large, costly land wars we get into in the near future (“The attitude is no more Iraqs,” says one commentator), but they also refocus our defense strategy toward tools that require more secrecy and ensure less oversight by Congress and the people.
In a friendly argument with me this past week about the degree to which liberals should embrace Ron Paul as a credible anti-war candidate, Eric VanNewkirk pointed out that
The problem there, actually, is that the Constitution is fundamentally broken…. Giving Congress the power to declare war and the President the power to fight war is an excellent principle in theory and on paper; in practice, it means that Presidents are practically forced by exigency to use ridiculous euphemisms like “police action” while Congress either abrogates their authority by letting the President fight undeclared wars (until its politically expedient to complain) or exceed their authority by passing legislation that effectively trods on the President’s Commander-In-Chief boots. I don’t have a good answer, frankly.
Neither do I, but somebody needs to do something, because the direction we’re headed is having a monstrously powerful executive in control of top-secret, practically oversight-free organs of intelligence-gathering and covert violence (including, as mentioned above, the kind of utterly deniable economic violence made possible by cyber-warfare) while the People’s representatives become a mere rubber-stamp on its activities rather than calling it to account.
One possible solution would be to push Congress or the Supreme Court to clarify the constitutionality and force of the War Powers Resolution, about which statute I’ve written more here and here in the context of our action in Libya.
The language of the statute is a good first pass at clarifying the relationship between Congress and the President (it attempts to give the President flexibility to act in “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces” while still requiring Congressional authorization within 60 days), but it’s not a slam-dunk. Akhil Reed Amar notes here that the WPR “obscures as much as it clarifies” and some of its terminology, like “troops introduced into hostilities,” is “hardly self-defining.” And there’s the question of whether it’s constitutional.
I don’t have a lot of good answers, though it might be time for another constitutional convention to straighten all this out. Or, failing that, Congress could clarify the language and someone could take the WPR to the Supreme Court for some enlightenment on its constitutionality. This latter would have the benefit of forcing the Court to enlighten us on the division of power between Congress and the President more generally. But it would also likely have the downside of making the Court play referee in a zero-sum game between the other two branches, which seems to violate the spirit, somewhat, of a scheme of independent and co-equal branches of government.
