Quoted in Time magazine article on US defense budget
Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 11:10AM 
Very sharp article by Mark Thompson.
The opening:
On a damp, gray morning in late February, Navy admirals, U.S. Congress members and top officials of the nation's biggest shipyard gathered in Norfolk, Va., to watch a computerized torch carve bevels into a slab of steel as thick as your fist.
The occasion: the ceremonial cutting of the first piece of a $15 billion aircraft carrier slated to weigh anchor in 2020. That ship — still unnamed — will follow the just-as-costly Gerald R. Ford, now 20% built and due to set sail in 2015.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China is putting the final touches on a new class of DF-21 missiles expressly designed to sink the Ford and its sister ship as well as their 5,000-person crews. China's missiles, which will likely cost about $10 million each, could keep the Navy's carriers so far away from Taiwan that the short-range aircraft they bear would be useless in any conflict over the tiny island's fate.
Aircraft carriers, born in the years before World War II, are increasingly obsolete platforms of war. They feature expensive manned aircraft in an age when budgets are being squeezed and less expensive drones are taking over. While the U.S. and its allies flew hundreds of attack missions against targets in coastal Libya last month, cruise missiles delivered much of the punch, and U.S. carriers were notable only for their absence. Yet the Navy, backed by the Pentagon and Congress, continues to churn them out as if it were still 1942.
"It's just tradition, the industrial base and some other old and musty arguments" that keep the shipyards building them, says Thomas Barnett, a former Pentagon deep thinker and now chief strategist at Wikistrat, a geopolitical-analysis firm. "We should scale back our carrier design to something much cheaper and simpler. Think of mother ships launching waves of cheap drones — that would actually be more frightening and intimidating." Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned last year of "the growing antiship capabilities of adversaries" before asking what in Navy circles had long been the unaskable question. "Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?"
Across Washington, all sorts of people are starting to ask the unthinkable questions about long-sacred military budgets . . .
Our conversation was mostly about carriers. I'm not the great hardware man, but I know enough that we're continuing to buy in the very-few-and-ridiculously-expensive mode rather than the many-and-the-cheap mode that's clearly emerging in cutting-edge technologies. I know also that we're deeply impressed with China's efforts to catch-up on that same track, which, of course, is truly meaningful if you believe major conventional war with China is in the offing. I do not, and so I find that spending on both sides to be largely a waste, less so for us because we seek to keep high the threshold to great-power war and that's a good thing. Problem is, we teach China the same path and now we're increasingly locked into this idiotic arms race that serves neither of our actual national security interests and actually denies us the cooperation that would enable both to accomplish more in the global security arena at less cost.
But why save money - and the world, when we can waste it in large amounts? We're stuck in our QWERTY pathway because it's what we know and love, and it's what our Congress loves to buy. And so China follows us stupidly down that rabbit hole, and we both dream of future missile wars over no-man's lands, while the reality of globalization's rapid expansion stares us in the face in Africa and the Middle East and we're largely irrelevant to the process because we continue to buy billion-dollar platforms to tackle $100 enemies.
This is my favorite part of the piece, worth getting into the blog for later use:
We are spending more on the military than we did during the Cold War, when U.S. and NATO troops stared across Germany's Fulda Gap at a real super-power foe with real tanks and thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at U.S. cities. In fact, the U.S. spends about as much on its military as the rest of the world combined.
And yet we feel less secure. We've waged war nonstop for nearly a decade in Afghanistan — at a cost of nearly a half-trillion dollars — against a foe with no army, no navy and no air force. Back home, we are more hunkered down and buttoned up than ever as political figures (and eager defense contractors) have sounded a theme of constant vigilance against terrorists who have successfully struck only once. Partly as a consequence, we are an increasingly muscle-bound nation: we send $1 billion destroyers, with crews of 300 each, to handle five Somali pirates in a fiberglass skiff.
While the U.S.'s military spending has jumped from $1,500 per capita in 1998 to $2,700 in 2008, its NATO allies have been spending $500 per person over the same span. As long as the U.S. is overspending on its defense, it lets its allies skimp on theirs and instead pour the savings into infrastructure, education and health care. So even as U.S. taxpayers fret about their health care costs, their tax dollars are paying for a military that is subsidizing the health care of their European allies.
Not only is our government becoming an insurance company with an army (some DC wag's great line), but we're enabling others to do the same while they cut down their own army.
And yes, China is headed on the same path. It dreams of a moment in the sun, but it will be cruelly brief and then the realities of accelerated aging and global security vulnerabilities sets in, and then all this arms build-up over Taiwan and the island chains will seem like so much nonsense. But, most definitely, the PLA has a few good years of stupid, uncontrolled spending ahead of them, and it will act like any bureaucracy in that mode: it will waste money catching up somewhat to America's Leviathan force, and when it gets close enough to matter, Beijing will realize it was all a colossal waste of time and money that bought them nothing, because they will never pull that trigger, and even giving the impression that they will triggers a counter-balancing across the region that America is only too happy to provide in terms of arms sales.
Pointless, pointless, pointless.
Meanwhile, globalization moves on, creating the real global security landscape out there.
I say, thank God our budget mess arrived earlier than theirs, because it will force the logical change earlier than theirs. We will be renewed; they will drop off a demographic cliff - and globalization will move on.
Mentioned in the piece one more time:
But $1 trillion in cuts wouldn't really be as drastic as it sounds — or as the military's no-surrender defenders insist. Such a trim would still leave the Pentagon fatter than it was before 9/11. Besides, there are vast depots of weapons that are ready for the surplus pile. The number of aircraft carriers could be cut from 11 to eight, and perhaps all could be scuttled in favor of Barnett's drone carriers. The annual purchase of two $3 billion attack submarines to maintain a 48-sub fleet as far as the periscope can see also could be scaled back. The $383 billion F-35 program really isn't required when U.S. warplanes remain the world's best and can be retooled with new engines and electronics to keep them that way. Reagan-era missile defenses and the nuclear arsenal are largely Cold War relics with little relevance today. Altogether, Congress could save close to $500 billion by smartly scaling back procurement over the next decade.
It's a bold and intelligent argument from Thompson, and I really think this is one of the best pieces of his that I've ever read. It comes very close to opinion journalism - but at its best. These are fair questions, and he poses them well.
Plus, I just like the phrase, "Barnett's drone carriers."
Reader Comments (10)
Good stuff. Needs to be said. Can we find elected officials with the courage to address military spending?
We will be sailing in San Diego Harbor today and I will count the aircraft carriers. We even have one that is just a museum. They are majestic in their might. However, I just saw a photo of HMS Victory at her dock. Just as fearsome in her day.
Britain, France, Spain, Russia. Great powers in their day. We have to start cutting back. It's crazy for us and the Chinese to get into this weapons race. Just crazy.
One action I liked that Obama did was simply drop the leader position on the rest of NATO, and apparently, they do not have the equipment or expertise we do. But talking out of both side of their mouth is normal....sure, Arab league approves....then complains about the strikes....use your own Arab League coalition then! "Put up or shut up" I say to the regional powers there. But as the budget goes, "put up" should become more of an imperative for that region, I hope.
This article is interesting, but some of his claims are a little wild. For instance:
"Reagan-era missile defenses and the nuclear arsenal are largely Cold War relics with little relevance today."
If we're serious about cutting defense dollars then the relevance of nuclear weapons actually INCREASES, since we need some means of deterring others who have nukes.
V/R,
Cliff
Wait till Donald becomes president and starts waging economic war on Chinese. It will be a march made in heaven for "big war" crowd on both sides.
Tom,
I read your work each day. I notice repeatedly that you are a proponent of U.S/China "get along" (my words); and, I have no quarrel with most of what you suggest.
However, I read with somewhat more pragmatic outlook; in that, for most persons within your audience or likely audience, only the next 40 years really matter. Globalization may be an inevitable trend; but, who cares? No one who cannot fathom past that 40 year mark.
China has only two sources for the power (OIL) she needs to grow; ( and grow she will! ) One lies to the southwest in the South China Sea environs; the other lies to the west in Siberia and the southern tier of former Soviet states.
She is gearing up to aquire them, most likely both; and, rather than direct confrontation with the U.S......is moving towards that point where she can say "just try to stop us".
I'm sorry, but the Rodney King school of international relations is a bit shy of reality.
Darrell,
China gets the bulk of its overseas oil now from the PG and will in the future, because that's where the spare capacity is. The amount it can get from Russia and Central Asia will help somewhat, but China hardly needs to acquire those reserves by force, anymore than it does anywhere else in the world. Cash works nicely. Russia and the CA republics are happy to sell, so I'm not sure what the "just try to stop us" stuff is. Russia will sell its Siberian oil to China and the US-and already does.
The South China reserves are miniscule by comparison to just about everywhere.
All snarky references to naivete aside. I would brush up on my knowledge of international oil markets before leapfrogging to resource wars.
I would also check out China's complete lack of power projection assets in its military, because talk is cheap and those are extremely expensive. I'll get more interested when China actually buys a replenishment ship or builds an overseas base.
I'm not arguing for -more- carriers, but it seems to me that big carriers are pretty effective in a power projection model for 'small wars'. One carrier provides not only a lot of air firepower, but also a substantial medical capability, right? Haven't we seen carriers be effective in Japan and Indonesia?
I don't think the US military is getting all of the credit it deserves for its ability to help in disaster and SysAdmin functions. Granted, it's probably over-priced for a lot of those functions, but reducing the military investment without providing another capability strikes me as a trade we should clearly understand.
As far as I can tell, we have, currently 20 Carriers that remain "Commissioned". Of those, 8 are conventional powered and in "Mothballs" at either Bremerton or Newport. The Kennedy (CV-66) is at the Philadelphia Yards undergoing some sort of maintenance or refit. I'm not sure where the Enterprise (CV-65, first nuke carrier) is but I think it's in storage also. The John Stennis (CV-74) is undergoing Refit at Bremerton currently. So by that tally, we (The United States navy) have 10 carriers in the water, although, probably, several are at their ports being prepared to go back to "Station" . . Last time I checked, The Reagan(CVN-76) was in Honolulu, The George Washington (CVN-73) was in Tokyo and the rest on Stations assigned or in transit . .
But as has been noted, that's a lot of expensive hardware, either underway or just sitting, in a lot of cases . . Although I'm nowhere the expert most of the correspondents who post here are, I can only agree partially with my esteemed host, because unmanned aircraft aren't the total end answer . . Sometimes a real eyeball is needed . . However, while one might be dazzled by the Gee Whiz stuff the Carriers and their accompanying Aircraft are capable of, a lot of it is severe overkill . . at the expense of simpler systems . . After all, you don't really need a $1 million dollar missile to kill a guy on a bicycle . . whether it comes from a ship or an aircraft . . Manned or drone . .
Not to mention, currently, NATO, The UN, with the assistance of the US, can't seem to whup up on a Half Baked dictator with a hand me down Army and no Air Force . . The whole thing needs to be looked at closely and honestly, something Washington, DC is seemingly incapable of . .
It should be noted that one of the major issues affecting the current action is Libya is the inability of the US to provide close air support with AC-130s, A-10s etc, for fear of one being taken out by short range MANPAD weapons. UAV provide an option that is not only ecomomically more attactive, but also present a more politically palatable risk profile in which a shoot down does not result in a body count.
Terence,
And beyond that is implied will: If it's just "stuff," then you're threats carry more meaning, possibly buying faster compliance and less overall death to boot.
Point being: very moral on many grounds.