Most people don’t think of the U.S. armed forces safeguarding shipping lanes and routes of commerce while they’re shopping at Target. But the Heritage Foundation’s Mackenzie Eaglen says full shelves at the store means the U.S. is securing air, land, and sea around the world.
“You build up a military not just to win the war but to secure the peace,” Eaglen said Oct. 14 at an event in which she, along with Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, marked the release of the national security brief Defending Defense, a joint project of Heritage, AEI, and the Foreign Policy Initiative. FPI’s Rachel Hoff moderated.
Schmitt said that the country must confront the fact that a military spending increase may be necessary to ensure the armed forces and Defense Department have what they need to fulfill the American military’s requirements. First, however, we must know what those requirements are.
Donnelly served on a bipartisan panel to assess American security needs, and said the panel was able to unanimously define the military’s essential roles: defend the homeland, retain strategic access to the commons (places where commerce is conducted in air, space, sea, and cyberspace), retain access and monitor the balance of power in Europe and the balance of power in East Asia and the Pacific, and be engaged in the Middle East.
“These 20 people of varied backgrounds came to unanimous agreement,” Donnelly said, adding that this provides a solid benchmark to being assessing the cost of that plan. The question, then, is “Can we afford the military we think we need?”
Schmitt said the 1990s, generally under the leadership of Bill Clinton, were known to the military as a “procurement holiday.” Clinton inherited a defense budget for procurement that was less than what the Joint Chiefs felt was needed, and cut that budget even more over his time in office, only raising it back to 1992 levels near the end of his term.
“It’s a hole we still haven’t escaped from,” Schmitt said, adding that a cut of about $300 billion in research and development is expected. Schmitt compared that to the nearly $800 billion stimulus package passed by the Obama administration in 2009. “A stimulus package, by the way, which doesn’t seem to have stimulated.”
Donnelly said we have to take a look at the “opportunity cost” of defending the country. As military spending is set to decline as a percentage of GDP, he said, “Total expenditure is less than a nickel on the American dollar.”
What’s changed, Donnelly said, is the rise in entitlement costs–to more than half of federal spending.
“That’s what they want to protect and they want to defend,” Donnelly said about those who attack any increase in military spending.
But if the federal government has any mandated role, according to Eaglen, it is national defense. In fact, Eaglen said, that responsibility is spelled out in the Constitution, which states three things about national defense: it is the government’s primary responsibility; it is the government’s only mandated power–the others are permissive powers; and national defense is the exclusive requirement of the federal government, as opposed to the states.
Eaglen said the American people lived through a period of general peace and security, “but that shield is cracking.” The sacrifice to sustain that security is modest compared to the risks of ignoring the military’s needs, she said.
Furthermore, Eaglen said, those who seek cuts in military spending are attempting to change our foreign policy without making a public case for it.
The panel was asked whether they had yet arrived at what they believed to be an appropriate dollar figure for defense spending. Eaglen said the Heritage Foundation supports a spending floor of 4 percent of GDP, but that more has to be taken into consideration–such as the reset and recapitalization after Iraq and Afghanistan, modernization upgrades, expanding the Navy, and increased cyber-defense outlays–to arrive at a more precise figure.
When asked by Big Peace what the three organizations had explored in terms of public support for increased military spending, Donnelly said as they roll out the plans they’ll be tracking public reaction–which so far has been strongly positive–very closely.
Donnelly also said they have spoken with Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, author of the now-famous budgetary “road map,” and other members of Congress who concentrate on fiscal matters.
“So I think by our own expectations we’re well beyond them already and we’re looking forward to an opportunity to carry this forward after the election and for the next couple of years following,” Donnelly said.