Defense Cuts and an Empire Stretched Thin

Dov Zakheim repeats Bob Kagan’s incorrect assertion that Obama is about to cut the DoD budget. As I pointed out yesterday, Congressional Quarterly is claiming (via Wired, I don’t have a CQ subscription) that the Obama administration is in fact increasing the Pentagon’s budget by 8%, just not by as much as the Pentagon requested.

I’m not reposting this just to give my correction more prominent placement—outside of the comments of another post—but rather to criticize another position of Mr. Zakheim:

Will our adversaries be emboldened? They will certainly recognize that we are stretched thin militarily. And they may well recall that the Carter budget cuts of the late 1970s correlated with some of our most difficult challenges in post-war foreign relations, as we stood by helplessly while Iran took American hostages and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Color me unconvinced that meeting the Pentagon’s budgetary requests would do much to disabuse the rest of the world as to our overstretch. We’re badly floundering in Afghanistan, and we can’t even project a credible threat of force in the Caucasus—all due to our massive commitment in Iraq. $40 billion here or there won’t change that optic, because that optic has nothing to do with our actual military might as measured in planes and bombs and tanks.

We’re not fighting the Cold War any more. There are no Soviet bean-counters carefully analyzing our expenditures to figure out what the true balance of power is. In conventional terms, we can overpower pretty much any comers, again with ±$40 billion not making an appreciable difference. The nasty crux of the matter is that conventional power dominance matters a whole lot less than it used to, and that two low-intensity conflicts have effectively stretched us thin for everyone with eyes to see.

This is not to say that I’m on board with Obama’s decision. As I mentioned before, I think Martin Feldstein’s proposal to spend more on the military as stimulus is in many ways sound. I just wish we could have these discussions without recourse to misleading rhetoric.