While I'm on the subject of Obama v. Romney, the latest issue of Foreign Affairs has essays penned by each of the candidates. Obama's essay can and should be read here, but for now I want to focus on Romney.
Like virtually everything this man says, this essay is an enormous mess of contradictions. Take a look at one small part:
They use indiscriminate terror rather than tanks. Their soldiers -- as well as their victims -- include children. They count radical clergy among their generals. They communicate via the Internet. They recruit in schools, houses of worship, and prisons. They pursue nuclear weapons not as a strategic deterrent but as an offensive tool of terror....We need an honest debate about what policies and what sacrifices will ensure a strong America and a safe world. As President Ronald Reagan once observed, "There have been four wars in my lifetime. None of them came about because the United States was too strong." A strong America requires a strong military and a strong economy. And we need to take further action if we are to remain strong and if we are to build a safe world, with peace, prosperity, freedom, and dignity. Doing so will be controversial, and it will be strongly resisted because it will require dramatic changes to Cold War institutions and approaches. The Cold War is over, and the world that too many of our current capabilities and alliances were created to address no longer exists. We cannot remain mired in the past.
Change will require sacrifice from the American people. But I believe America is ready for the challenge. To meet it, we need to focus on four key pillars of action.
First, we need to increase our investment in national defense. This means adding at least 100,000 troops and making a long-overdue investment in equipment, armament, weapons systems, and strategic defense. The need to support our troops is repeated like a mantra in Washington. Yet little has been said about the commitment of resources needed to make this more than an empty phrase.
After President George H. W. Bush left office, in 1993, the Clinton administration began to dismantle the military, taking advantage of what has been called a "peace dividend" from the end of the Cold War. It took a dividend, but we did not get the peace. It seems that our leaders had come to believe that war and security threats were gone forever; as Charles Krauthammer observed, we took a holiday from history. Meanwhile, we lost about 500,000 military personnel and about $50 billion a year in military spending. The U.S. Army lost four active divisions and two reserve divisions. The U.S. Navy lost almost 80 ships. The U.S. Air Force saw its active personnel decrease by 30 percent. The Marines' personnel dropped by 22,000.
And we purchased only a small fraction of the equipment needed to maintain our strength, living off the assets that had been purchased in prior decades. The equipment and armament gap continues to this day. Even as we have increased defense spending to meet the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan, our budgets for procurement and modernization have lagged behind. This is a troubling scenario for the future, and it puts our country and our troops -- present and future -- at risk, as we wring the life out of old and inadequate equipment.
On the one hand, Romney is claiming that we have allowed ourselves to become weak by remaining mired in our own past. The Cold War ended, but we failed to change, and that inaction led to a weakness that was exposed when the terrorists attacked. On the other hand, we changed when the Cold War ended, and those changes led to a weakness that was exposed when the terrorists attacked. Erm... OK.
Later in the essay, Romney uses a measure of military spending as a percentage of GDP to attack Clinton for "dangerously" reducing the size of our armed services. During WWII it was over 30%. Under Reagan it was 6%. And under Clinton - horror of horrors! - it had fallen further still, only now recovering to a still too low 4%. Leaving aside the fact that I have a very strong suspicion that his numbers are very, very wrong (my guess is that he is not including the "emergency appropriations" that are funding this war), I'd love to know precisely why defense spending as a % of GDP is a relevant number for us to consider. If as he says the threats we face are so vastly different than those in our past, and if drastic changes are necessary, shouldn't we consider perhaps changing the way we measure military strength?
Call me crazy, but rather than measuring military preparedness by comparing spending to the size of our own economy, shouldn't we instead measure it by comparing our capabilities to the threats we face? What does spending as a percentage of GDP tell us about readiness?
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