Richard Betts sums up his latest essay in Foreign Affairs with the slogan “Half a trillion dollars is more than enough.”

The United States has become strategically insolvent, he argues, due to an inability “to think clearly about defense policy.” Current defense spending reflects the desire to maintain traditional military service priorities, pursue the frontier of military technology for its own sake and further “hubristic ambitions of remaking the world.” Conspicously missing from this list, Betts argues, is a broad and coherent link to how our $505 billion base DoD budget for FY08 counters actual enemy threats.

One would be hard pressed to find anyone willing to disagree with the general call for a more rational relationship between military spending and national security strategy. Betts offers a compelling context for his iteration of the message, referring back to the “remainder method” used by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to calculate military spending.

Returning fiscal discipline to defense spending has proved to be a notoriously intractable problem. A significant element of the problem lies in the organization of the DoD itself, a topic Betts skirts. He discusses the size of the military budget throughout the 20th Century, yet he does not address the structure of the military establishment. In 1939, the US spent 1.4% of GDP on defense. Today, we are at 4.2%. Betts uses the comparison to set the illustrate the range of possible levels that the US has settled on for its defense budget. I raise the possibility that we may have gotten something vastly different for our 1.4% of GDP in 1939 than we would get for it in 2007 in large part because of the organization that spent the money. Can we honestly be surprised that an organization created to establish and maintain a standing army as a hedge against the USSR continues to focus its budgetary plans on strategic goals that look suspiciously like the Cold War?

Betts offers intriguing ideas on how to regain strategic solvency. “[O]ne could do worse than follow the old models,” he argues, referring back to the remainder method used by Truman and Eisenhower as a potential way to “tighten the system’s belt.” Missing from his discussion, however, is any discussion of Congress. He makes a single reference to Congress, recognizing that contractors have been exceptionally “adept at engineering political support by spreading subcontracts around to the maximu number of congressional districts.” (The planned distribution of F-22 production in 48 of the 50 states represents a classic example of this approach.) Therefore, I was surprised that Betts did not address the role Congress plays in pumping programs with questionable strategic alignment into the defense budget. For example, there was a strong Congressional lobbying campaign for the B-2 (I remember well some of the beautifully glossy viewbooks full of stirring illustrations of the B-2 slicing its way through air defenses). Congress represents one of the major hurdles in any reform of the strategic priorities in the American defense budget; after all, it exercises ultimate control over the budget. I’d have expected it to receive more treatment.

I also found it puzzling that Betts discounted the role of MacNamara’s reforms to the DoD budgeting process. Betts blames the reforms for turning “budget decisions into a test of civil-military relations.” This, he argues, crippled “a prime means of civilian control,” namely the “ability to divide and conquor the services and force military professionals to make tradeoffs between programs themselves.” This may ultimately be accurate, but the since the ultimate goal of MacNamara’s reforms aligns so closely with Betts’s thesis, a more complete accounting of why MacNamara failed would be in order. Any effort to implement Betts’s thesis would benefit from a close examination of the successes and failures of systems analysis. Betts even phrases the question as “how much is enough,” the same way Alain Enthoven articulated the problem (and titled his history of systems analysis in DoD).

Betts articulates the ultimate goal eloquently, stating that the armed forces “should be tailored to counter the threats and vulnerabilities the country actually faces,” necessitating “a net assessment of enemy threats.” He also points the way forward with the framework of an initial threat assessment (addressing, in passing: terrorism, WMD proliferation to DPRK and Iran, China and political/economic instability). This is a cry, however, that many other talented analysts have raised. As Thomas Barnett recounts when he’d tell DoD leaders that they were buying one military and operating another, they’d respond “Dr. Barnett, you are so right. Can you come back next year and remind us again?”

If we don’t move the debate forward to specific approaches for achieving strategic solvency, then we’ll find ourselves discussing this again in five years. So. How do we make it happen? The Congressional-military-industrial complex has proven to be a remarkably stable equilibrium. How much creative destruction will we need to kick us into a new equilibrium? Can we use the strain of OEF and OIF to speed the process? Is this already happening?

Regarding the need for radical transparency:

Instead of providing more information, State sticks to its 19th Century role of speaking privately and taking the corporate defense that less information is better (which is extendable to destroying data as soon the retention schedule permits it, or rather, when legally permissible to do so, which I’m sure will surface soon). State minimizes information so it can’t be held accountable — which is a false hope. Even if it shuts its eyes really, really hard, others saw the event and a vastly greater audience heard unchallenged reports of the event. Closing its eyes and pretending the world of information isn’t an adequate defense. For the criticisms of Blackwater, they knew the value of video recording.

Ubiquitous computing and widely available broadband access changed the game. Minimizing information to avoid accountability ceased to be a effective strategy when large organizations lost their ability to control the story.

If you can’t control the story (the old way of managing information and image), then maybe you ought to think about pre-empting the story in the first place. Radically opening the flow of information offers one way to do this.

Caught Mary Habeck’s talk on “Understanding Global Jihadism” last night at JHU/APL’s Rethinking seminar series.

Her broad conclusions fit with those that have been summarized by George Packer [1] [2] [3]. These include the tiny size of the militant jihadist community within the larger Muslim community (0.04% was the estimate Dr. Habeck quoted).

Most of Dr. Habeck’s talk focused on discussing four Islamic concepts and explaining how the mainstream Islam interprets them and how militant global jihadists interpret them. These four terms were: tawhid, jihad, Caliphate or the more general concept of an Islamic state, and da’wa. These differences lead to the conclusion that this is primarily a struggle over authenticity within Islam. It has both ideological components (as members attempt to convert others to their vision), political components (as militant global jihadists attempt to create their version of an Islamic state) and military components (as they kill those they judge to be false Muslims).

Dr. Habeck concluded by exploring how this struggle within Islam turns into war on the West in general and the United States in particular. In this exploration, she focused on the role of three of the major thinkers who have significantly influenced the modern global jihadi movement: Muhommad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb.

A great nugget I collected was to read The Management of Savagery, which is a militant jihadist strategy for realizing their goals.

The past few weeks have brought some wonderfully stimulating email exchanges regarding Albert Wohlstetter, which reminded me of an article from the June 5 issue of The American Prospect that I’d been meaning to blog.

Anthony David asks the question “how do you make sense of a man [I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby] getting drawn to the Dark Side without being dark himself?” His answer: Albert Wohlstetter. David concludes that Libby’s path to perjury and a federal courtroom began “with discoveries made by an obscure mathematician.”

David’s narrative traces Libby’s corruption to Wohlstetter by way of Paul Wolfowitz, who taught Libby in at least one class at Yale and whose dissertation adviser at the University of Chicago was Wohlstetter. From this scaffolding of fact, David creates an edifice that bears only the most tenuous relationship to Wohlstetter’s actual body of work.

David offers this summary of “The Delicate Balance of Terror:”

“The Delicate Balance of Terror,” which he published with the RAND Corporation in 1958, was a groundbreaking tract that took on the heavyweights of American foreign policy. In it, Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and others appear as hapless characters intellectually marooned in a pre-nuclear age.

Wohlstetter singled out the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) as proof of the national-security elite’s dangerous anachronism. The “realists” believed that nuclear weapons had made war obsolete. Only an “insane adventurer” would launch an attack, and professional diplomats assumed that the totalitarian beast in Moscow would probably behave rationally. But, argued Wohlstetter, the Soviet Union was not necessarily a rational actor: The Russians had lost 20 million people during World War II; there was no reason to assume they wouldn’t risk losing many more to become the premier global power.

Wohlstetter did critique the conventional wisdom, but not because it was out of date. In “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” he focused his criticisms very specifically on a set of unexamined assumptions about the robustness of America’s nuclear deterrent. Kennan and Acheson (along with Richard Rovere, Sir Winston Churchill, P. M. S. Blackett, Sir John Slessor, Admiral Buzzard, Raymond Aron, General Gallois, General Gazin and Henry Kissinger) were cited because their assumptions about nuclear war were mistaken, not because they were pre-nuclear or out-dated. The flawed assumptions held that deterrence automatically flowed from possession of nuclear weapons and an effective deterrent could be maintained with little effort. Wohlstetter countered that the “requirements for deterrence are stringent.”

Wohlstetter brought up the issue of Russian losses during WWII, for example, to illustrate the difficulty of defining what degree of threat would deter the Soviet regime. He was not arguing that the Russians might be irrational; he was pointing out situations within which it could be rational to risk the death of 20 million people. The key question was always ‘compared to what?’ If the Soviet Union, for example, feared losing a key satellite with revolt spreading or feared an American attack, attacking first and accepting 20 million casualties could be the sensible choice for them. In Wohlstetter’s own words,

Would not a general thermonuclear war mean “extinction” for the aggressor as well as the defender? “Extinction” is a state that badly needs analysis. Russian fatalities in World War II were more than 20,000,000. Yet Russia recovered extremely well from this catastrophe. There are several quite plausible circumstances in the future when the Russians might be confident of being able to limit damage to considerably less than this number — if they make sensible strategic choices and we do not. On the other hand, the risks of not striking might at some juncture appear very great to the Soviets, involving, for example, disastrous defeat in peripheral war, loss of key satellites with danger of revolt spreading — possibly to Russia itself — or fear of an attack by ourselves. Then, striking first, by surprise, would be the sensible choice for them, and from their point of view the smaller risk.

Note that Wohlstetter never claims that “the Soviet Union was not necessarily a rational actor.” Rather, he cites Russian history to illustrate the difficulty of determining an adequate deterrent.

One needs to remember that “The Delicate Balance of Terror” represented the unclassified culmination of seven years of analysis on the dynamics of basing, employing and defending the Strategic Air Command’s bomber fleet. Wohlstetter’s conclusions, such as the superiority of a deep defensive warning net over hardened shelters for protecting bombers, were based on extensive study of relative vulnerabilities and capabilities. Ignoring this foundation of research and misrepresenting its results turns David’s article into a caricature of Wohlstetter’s actual historical significance.

Six years after 9/11, where is our Kennan?

I’d push the question back further - sixteen years after the end of the Cold War, where is our Kennan?

While Barnett’s faith in globalization’s continuing march may mirror Kennan’s faith in the relative strength of the Western system over the Soviets, the role of military force in his theory causes the analogy to break. Using Biddle’s dichotomy between containment and rollback, the active role of the Core’s SysAdmin effort to shrink the gap makes Barnett’s strategy one of rollback.

Robb, by contrast, doesn’t offer a grand strategy at all. His recommendations are operational and tactical, reflecting the scope of his analysis. He forecasts the rise of microstates as a prediction, not as a goal. Besides, as I’ve said before, Robb’s work complements Barnett’s (and vice versa). [1] [2]

For a truly alternative grand strategy, one would have to look to something like William Lind’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Lind advocates distancing the United States from sources of disorder to protect and grow its strength, making his strategy one of containment.

[1] Ought vs Is
[2] DoD 3000 and Global Guerilla Thinking

For any who have been enjoying the war gaming discussions, there is a treat for you over at Argghh! John brought his extensive professional experience to bear in an excellent post discussing the role of Lanchester in military modeling.

…Lanchester can be useful, at it’s most macro and most micro levels, when you are comparing forces which can be generally assumed to be at parity on the issues in contention. Oddly enough, that’s pretty much all that Lanchester was proposing.

Such as modeling force-on-force from a hardware perspective, to examine the effects of the hardware. It can also be useful for examining organizational structure and doctrine - again, essentially positing a peer opponent. If your hardware wins, and your doctrine wins, and your hardware *and* doctrine wins in a Lanchester world, you are going to probably fare well, within the confines of entropic events and effects.

Of course, that’s a very narrow set of bounds. And the consequences of bad assumptions about parity (and *your* basic competence and morale) are huge.

Read the whole thing.

Argghhh! was kind enough to link me a few days ago with some comments and I left the following on their thread.
—
Thanks much for the link.

I was being a bit harsh, so let me clarify myself.

Mathematical laws of chemistry describe immutable dynamics of the physical world. I question whether combat has any similar immutable dynamics that are waiting to be mathematically modeled. The difference lies in the thinking adversary inherent in war, as opposed to the stable relationships of chemistry.

Maybe the mathematics of dynamical systems offers a way to account for this - I think this is why chaos and complexity theory get folks so excited - but I haven’t encountered it yet.

My second post didn’t claim Lanchester wasn’t useful; it argued that it was being used in situations where it wasn’t appropriate. The question wasn’t ‘is Lanchester useful,’ it was how often is it useful and in what cases? I was voicing my concern that Lanchester is rarely useful and sometimes used inappropriately. Not because it helps, but because it’s something concrete we can work with.

… of course it would have helped my argument if I had, I dunno, had an actual example to back that up…

To refine my earlier critique of Lanchester, his model applies to combat situations where the limiting factors to one’s destructive firepower are mass and weapon efficiency. Such situations do arise in war, and therefore Lanchester’s model is an appropriate tool for this narrow subset of military engagements.

Iwo Jima offers a classic example of a battle that fit the assumptions of Lanchester’s model. The small size of the island led to concentrated, firepower-based combat. J.H. Engel studied the recorded casualty rates to demonstrate that attrition during the battle for Iwo Jima closely followed the rates predicted by a Lanchester-style model [1].

Other historical studies show varying results, some demonstrating support of Lanchester’s linear law, others finding inconclusive results.

While the coefficients of attrition rates can be modified to account for training, terrain, moral and the host of other factors Lanchester does not explicitly consider, these modifications do not change the fact that Lanchester chose to make these factors exogenous to his model. This says a great deal about his assumptions regarding what dynamics would be interesting to study, and the implicit assumptions accepted by subsequent analyses using his models. My concern is that while it accurately describes a relatively rare type of military engagement, Lanchester’s model became the de facto standard for all combat.

[1] Engel, J. H. “A Verification of Lanchester’s Law,” Operations Research, 2, 163-171 (1954).

Came upon this very impressive open source IMINT blog this morning.

Perhaps I’m the last one to the party on this, but Penny Arcade of all places clued me into a subculture of flight sim enthusiasts who’ve built their own online air traffic control net to manage a virtual airspace of fight sim pilots.

I hope that the FAA already has people looking at SquawkBox; I doubt they could build a better test environment for candidate airspace modernization ideas, and here is one already sitting out there.

During the 20th Century, cryptographers repeatedly found the precise mathematical tools they needed already perfectly formed (having been developed by number theorists for completely different reasons). It was like the guys building the Saturn V rocket wandering into a hardware store and finding precisely the part they need already sitting on a shelf in the corner. “How’d this thing get here? Why’d somebody build it?” “That? Oh, some guy just made it because he thought it was interesting. Wrote a paper about it, you know.” The 21st Century may witness a similar phenomenon in the realm of hyper-realistic online environments for scenario gaming and analysis of alternatives.