Sustainability of military power

People often arrive at similar scenarios when they think about the geo-strategic situation in a couple of decades.
This cluster of scenarios includes an economically strong China that challenges U.S. power in an attempt to regain regional supremacy, the province that we call today "Taiwan" and to turn some neighbours into puppet states.

These scenarios assume that - in 10, 20, 30 years - Europe and the U.S. still stagnate in military power and Russia has recovered somewhat - but not enough to re-establish full dominance over Eastern Europe.

Is it reasonable that the NATO - and especially its biggest defence spender, the U.S. - can sustain their military power? Is it reasonable to expect that the ratio of military power inside the NATO will still be so one-sided US-heavy?

In fact, it can be disputed with good reason that our societies can sustain the present levels of defence spending. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War largely because its inferior industrial base was forced to sustain a similar level of defence spending as did the west. This excessive burden eroded the economy and society. It was an astonishing accomplishment that they held out that long. Imagine our societies being permanently in near-total war mobilization for 40 years ... we would have completely ruined ourselves as well, probably much earlier.

But even the moderate levels of defence spending today are stretching the capabilities of some NATO nations beyond the sustainable maximum. Our old nations have accumulated lots of suboptimal features over time that limit their ability to focus resources on unproductive activities such as military preparations.

Let's have a look at the USA. That nation prides itself with having the most powerful (and expensive) forces in the world and being the most powerful economic power. Well, it's doubtful whether their forces are truly a result of their own economic power and sustainable. I'll use the "CIA World Factbook" here to avoid doubts whether these values might be manipulated against the USA.

GDP: $13.21 trillion (2006 est.)

Public debt: 64.7% of GDP (2005 est.)

Current account balance (2006 est.): -$862.3 billion (2006 est.)

Debt - external: $10.03 trillion (30 June 2006 est.)

Military expenditures of GDP: 4.06% (2005 est.)

Source: CIA World Factbook

For FY 2008, the Bush administration has requested $647.3 billion to cover the costs of national defense and war. This includes the Defense Department budget ($483 billion), some smaller defense-related accounts ($22.6 billion), and the projected FY 2008 cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and counter-terror operations ($141.7 billion). However, it does not include non-DOD expenditures for homeland security ($36.4 billion) or the Veterans' Affairs budget ($84.4 billion).
Nor does it include the request for supplemental funds for outstanding FY 2007 war costs ($93.4 billion).
The $647.3 billion request represents a 75 percent real increase over the post-Cold War low point in national defense spending, which occurred in 1996. Today's expenditures are higher in inflation-adjusted terms than peak spending during the Vietnam and Korean wars -- as well as higher than during the Reagan buildup.

quote from "America Speaks Out: Is the United States spending too much on defense?" Carl Conetta, Project on Defense Alternatives (The overall projected sum for 2008 is $861.5 billion.)

Another source gives the figure of $728.2 billion for 2006, calculated in a similar manner.

So basically the account balance deficit of the USA (about $850 billion) is quite close in size to its defence spending (about $700-850 billion).

The USA as a whole is significantly living beyond its own economic capabilities as there's a huge external debt at the same time. No matter whether it lives beyond its own means due to defence spending or other spending (there isn't much other spending in the federal budget at least), this situation is not sustainable. The USA as a whole can only spend to date what it spends because other nations lend it their economic outputs (including the PR China).

An end of the Iraq war would not fundamentally change this situation - it would probably cause a drop of the defence spending by 15-30%, but not eliminate the long-time account balance deficit.

The NATO nations with positive account balances have little inclination to increase defence spending to levels like 4% of their GDP as they have internal economic problems such as retirement provisions, state debts and small economic growth. European nations don't feel threatened by the PR China.
It's also difficult to argue in Europe that the USA would be threatened by China due to the Pacific Ocean - and the US allies in East Asia are notorious for seeing less threats for themselves than the USA do.
European defence spending would likely react to a Russian threat, but not to Chinese ambitions. An arms race with Russia wouldn't help in a conflict with China as the first requires rather power at land and the second rather power at sea.

We should not consider the present strength as sustainable when we look 10, 20, 30 years into the future of NATO's security and position in the world. It's almost guaranteed that the upcoming nations China and India will rise in military, political, cultural and economic power - but it's almost guaranteed as well that the NATO countries will have trouble to keep their present military power level. Their old military equipment inventories might even become older in average as is typical when forces become less well-funded.

The insight into the unsustainability of NATO's present military power should influence our behaviour towards other relevant powers and our grand strategy. (If we had a common grand strategy in the NATO.)

S.O.

War or not war? Victory or defeat?

One of the most important reasons to wage war is that people expect to win.
Well, history tells us that losing a war is statistically at least as likely as to win it, but statistics cannot reveal the true horror.

Even many victories are questionable.

So, how shall we decide whether a conflict was won or lost?
The most basic condition that needs to be fulfilled is that a won war actually improved the situation for the country that "won" it in comparison to a "defeat" or no war at all.

Well, this is remarkably difficult to fulfill. Philosophy still doesn't provide us the tools to weight variables like killed citizens, wounded citizens, money, resources other than money, influence, fame and prestige. As every war that's claimed to be "won" included both losses and gains, it's probably impossible to claim victory at all based on math. But perceptions alone as measure for victory or defeat don't help either as everyone is thoroughly manipulated in his perceptions at the end of a war.

Anyway, it cannot hold up to serious thinking that some people claim that victory or not is simply decided by mission accomplishment. To accomplish a mission doesn't tell much, as missions almost never include comprehensive cost limits.

It's certainly no victory to accomplish a small mission that benefits the own country only marginally at costs of several thousand own KIA and several ten thousand own WIA as well as some hundred billion dollars expenditure.

It seems as if the choice of war and peace isn't usually done based on hard facts in the west, but rather on the limits of public opinion (with incorporated fading memories of past bad experiences) and not really understandable decision finding mechanics inside of the governments. There's no reason to trust that civilian politicians were more often than not competent enough to anticipate how a military mission would look like or to anticipate the costs both for individuals and for the national budget.

It's about time to develop a better system to determine whether possible missions are worth the losses and whether wars should be waged although they're often avoidable. The Powell-Weinberger doctrine for example doesn't include the costs - it merely attempts to avoid them by allowing only short wars with such overwhelming power that a military defeat seems impossible. It's a doctrine that wouldn't have allowed to stop Hitler - and that alone suffices to disqualify it.

We also need doctrines that help us to determine when a war is unlikely to end in a victory and the war should be ended. Delaying defeat has never served any country in history.

We truly need to improve our political culture concerning the decision of "War or not (any more)?". It's too important, we cannot be satisfied with the performance of our politicians so far.

S O

The great ABM deception

ABM (Anti Ballistic Missile) technology was one of the R&D favorites in the 90's, triggered by the Scud experience in the 1991 Gulf War.

It seemed as if besides light infantry guerrilla tactics and terrorism only ballistic missiles enabled grossly inferior forces to hurt the west despite its superiority. That, of course, was something that our western military communities could not bear.

The tactical, operational and strategic value of ballistic missiles is very mixed. If we ignore those with nuclear warheads for a minute, it becomes visible that except non-physical effects only the really short-ranged models (MRL weapons up to ATACMS size) have enough effect to justify the effort as the cost/payload ratio worsens with greater ranges.

It may be that high-value targets like ships, bridges and airfields are vulnerable enough against BMs that ABM defense is almost necessary. But that does certainly only apply against those BMs that have precision guidance.
It's understandable that air defense assets need upgrades with new missiles to enable them to intercept short-ranged ballistic missiles such as Scud, Frog and converted long-range SAMs. It's relatively easy to adapt systems like Standard, Patriot and Aster like that.

The longer range ballistic missiles are something entirely different. Even with precision guidance they could not really do enough harm without a nuclear warhead to justify the expenses of an ABM coverage unless the ABM costs are much lower than we're used to. Even biological and chemical weapons (both ill-suited for BM delivery) haven't got much effect. An exception might be accurate hits on nuclear power plants and skyscrapers with special SAP warheads (semi armour piercing - warheads that detonate after penetration), but it's actually much simpler to strike such targets with other, covert means.

And that's the huge problem for strategic ABM justification in general.

Let's assume a nuclear-equipped ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) is in enemy hands. Let's further assume that we built an ABM system that would actually intercept that ICBM if it's fired.
What would our enemy do in that case?
He'd simply use a much cheaper, much simpler form of delivery. Ballistic missiles are after all a very complex, costly technology.

A nuclear warhead light and small enough to fit into an ICBM can easily be sent in a container by ship, in a private or airline aircraft, by truck, by submarine, by train hidden among iron ore and by thousands of other delivery methods. It takes just one person with less than 50,000 US-$ to arrange the delivery - no intelligence service or police/border patrol can protect against that with any reasonable chance.

Strategic ABMs are no defense. They're something that deceives us, wastes financial capital, wastes political capital and they are a proof of incompetence.

S O

edit May 31st, 2008:
I have recently read (again) about the guidance of the Russian Iskander missile (50 to 400+ km), and it's impressive. A battery commander could select the most vulnerable spots of a bridge for the missile and destroy it if no ATBM system (or Murphy's law) intervenes (5-7 m CEP normal, 20 m CEP monkey model). The same guidance (comparison of area around ballistic impact point with target information) might also be used to guide on a ship, which justifies naval ATBM efforts. Ships are very high-value targets, which would even justify the more difficult ATBM capability against medium-range missiles (although NATO and Russia don't use this due to a 80's disarmament agreement).
Air forces and Navies should emphasize this and replace the public image of inaccurate Scuds as typical BMs with accurate HE-loaded BMs like Iskander.

I am still rock solid on the same position as in 2007 about strategic missile defence, though.

National defense industries

The national defence industry is often considered as a strategic asset, as something essential to national self-preservation. Well, it's like that in larger nations. Smaller ones survive easily without.

Such national defence industries have a surprising, somewhat funny and weird characteristic: They always seem to be the only ones who meet the demands of their nation's forces. Well, sometimes only in partnership with defence industries of allied nations, but that's the exception from the rule.

Of course, they don't always offer the best stuff. It's a matter of lobbying and even rational behaviour. About 40-60% of defence spending on indigenous equipment flows back as taxes and so on. Indigenous weapons might be more expensive to buy, but in the end they're usually cheaper over time.

Arms exporters stumbled on this problem and found a nice solution; offset agreements. Nation A buys for x bucks in nation B and nation B buys for y bucks in nation A.

In theory, this system could even include an exchange to trade these obligations among countries. Trading the obligation to buy in nation C a with the obligation to buy in nation D would eliminate some inefficiencies of the system.

Overall this seems to be a nice system that would make it as expensive to buy domestically as to buy overseas.

But there's another, probably outdated, reason for buying indigenous products; the needs of mobilization. There might be a crisis/war that needs a build-up, fast. Now this is usually considered as a remote possibility and certainly no problem as long as you buy inside of your alliance.

So why do our forces then prefer so strongly indigenous products while experts can most often identify superior alternative offers within the same alliance?

Procurement should be freed of irrational national egoisms, our troops should get the best stuff, not the cheapest or strictly indigenous products.

S O

Diminishing technological advantages

Much has been written about technological advantages based on digital radio communication and satellite navigation. C4ISR and guided weapons give us the feeling that our technological edge over non-NATO forces is much larger than at the end of the Cold War.

But bandwidth requirements, electronic warfare challenges and especially some defensive technologies are probably effective counters to this superiority. As Edward Luttwak already pointed out in "Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace", the greater the advantage of one party, the quicker and more thorough will be the counter reaction to it.

Only small innovations and advantages - those barely visible to outsiders - are likely to persist and not be countered by the opponent. The huge effects of our electronics-based innovations are visible to anyone, it doesn't need more than TV news to know about them.

One such reaction might be physical interception. When sea-skimming missiles threatened modern surface warships to become obsolete in the 1970's, the navies reacted with some delay with CIWS (Close-in Weapon System) such as the Vulcan Phalanx, Goalkeeper, RAM, AK-630 and Type 730. The same approach is now applied to base defense against mortars, as well. Laser-based systems that intercept incoming projectiles and missiles have been applied to intercept surface-to-air missiles (SAM) and on experimental scale against unguided rockets and howitzer rounds. Small torpedoes can already intercept large torpedoes.

Some producers of SAMs like the RBS-23 BAMSE claim that their missiles can intercept enemy missiles, even anti-radiation missiles that emit no treacherous signals and travel at up to Mach 4. Present-day active defense suites (ADS) of tanks are much more capable than those of the 90's - it's actually possible to intercept and severely affect incoming long rod penetrators, a hard and dense metal dart flying at almost Mach 6. Future tank battalions might be protected by umbrellas of air defense firepower that does not only endanger aircrafts, but intercepts artillery, mortar, drones and missiles as well.

Russia equips some of its newest, Su-27-based, fighters with a small rear radar. A rear sensor is necessary not only to fire missiles to the back (as demonstrated already with R-73 missiles) and of questionable usefulness in warning against fighter threats - it could also be considered as essential sensor component in hard kill defenses against incoming missiles.

Technology often origins in the navies as their ships are important and few enough to justify expensive equipment and at the same time large enough to support equipment that has great volume, weight and energy demands ... as new technologies often have in the beginning. Such technology does then often spread to air forces once only cost is limiting the use. Active defences are an example of such "navy-first".

It's been a miracle for decades why fighters should still depend on prevention and soft kills to protect themselves against missiles. Hard kill technologies should be applicable. The whole approach of the F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters to air combat would become obsolete if their missiles could be intercepted - they themselves are so stealth-orientated that they could hardly implement the necessary sensors and weapons necessary for such technology without losing their strengths.

Overall, the reaction to our technological advantages are predictable - not the precise "how?" and "when?", but the "if" and "how seriously?". It would be wise to orient the national security policies of the NATO nations according to this fact.
It would be foolish to expect that our present technological edge won't be countered sometime.

Sven Ortmann

Western double standards

Some Non-Western people accuse us of double standards. I believe they are right.

I won't touch the double standard debate centering on the west's attitude to the conflict around Israel. It's already summer and too hot without burning myself on this topic.

A much more recent and probably more harmful double standard centers on Iran/Iraq.
We have seen in the past months several accusations that Iran is involved in the Iraqi insurgency (at least the Shi'ite part). Well, some of them were not true as the obviously untrue claims about Austrian heavy sniper rifles. Overall, I have absolutely no doubts about Iranian involvement, but such an involvement does not threaten our national security even remotely as much as the west's reaction to it threatens Iran's national security.

So where's the double standard?
Well, obviously we wouldn't tolerate if Iran invaded a Christian country close to us, installing a puppet theocracy and having over 100,000 troops in the country. We would certainly not support an insurgency against that for the simple reason that we would have stepped in with much more violent means than that, and much earlier.

Claims that Iran supports insurgents are OK if they are based on good information, but it's problematic if it's done as accusation. Any Iranian involvement is absolutely predictable, understandable, justified and natural by western policy standards.

If a nation decides to invade another one voluntarily, then it's simply in its own responsibility if shit surrounding that action happens.
You cannot knock someone down and expect that all others around treat you as if nothing happens. If some bystander pushes you a bit back afterwards it would be plain stupid to accuse him of a violation ... all neutral observers would have a good reason to believe you were nuts and blind towards your own behavior.

The really dangerous thing about this double standard is that it might be exploited to build up extremely questionable justifications for a war of aggression against Iran.

Sven Ortmann

Learning from the past

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In Germany, it's popular to say "we need to learn from the past, remember the past".
Well, this is certainly true.

The problem with this is that the people who say this usually seem to mean only specific 12 years of the history of one (our) nation and with "we" they mean only Germans.

Well, that's silly. We have about seven thousand years of (partially) documented history, covering the whole world for at least a couple of hundred years.
There's no reason why we should focus on a small part of history - especially if we already live in a country that spent decades to study this part of history, draw lessons and do precautions. Many other nations are today in much more dire need of drawing lessons from that particular time than Germany (I better don't mention which, for that would distract).

Isn't it much more important to learn of other nation's experiences? Those experiences are much less likely to have resulted in lessons learned for your country. Those experiences are very relevant once your country changes its activities, enters new grounds and therefore acts without own experiences (as Germany with its engagement in peacekeeping).

Military history is in a poor shape in universities almost everywhere. It's less present in Germany than peace research. Peace research is fine - I wouldn't want to miss it. But I miss military history competence.

Military history helps to prevent old mistakes in military affairs. If military history was in good shape, there would probably have been more people in our parliament informed about Afghanistan's insurgency tradition against foreign forces. (Same for anthropology - someone should have told the parliament how different the Afghan society is in 2004 and that building democracy there was quite fallacious).
The European nations marched into Afghanistan although military history tells many stories about failures of such enterprises.

Now if we really want to remember and learn from history - shouldn't we fund the academics for it, adopt a full approach (international, all history) and listen to it when it's appropriate?

Sven Ortmann

Reserves

The French introduced the "Levée en masse", the creation of many huge armies with conscripts, quickly after the French Revolution 1789. This enabled France to field the huge and quick armies that Napoleon used impressively.

The Prussians - after being defeated by such armies - created their own conscription system, but that system wasn't only about huge armies of conscripts trusted more than the professional soldiers since the Thirty Years War. They used the conscription to train many men as infantrymen and send them back to civil life. This way, they had a huge and quickly mobilized reserve of infantrymen while not violating the maximum troop strength limit imposed by the peace with Napoleon. The Prussian system was copied almost everywhere in the world ... and it seems about to descend into history books in Europe.

Many European countries do not practice this system anymore (although some keep the laws to enable a return to conscription) because they don't expect to need large armies in the past. Other countries keep the conscription system but it's often under heavy attack there and conscription might end in additional countries soon.

I'm no proponent of conscription if it isn't essential for national sovereignty. Today, conscription is merely a cost-saving measure that in fact reduces overall force deployability and capabilities. In my opinion, conscription is a kind of forced labour at low wages today and should indeed be suspended.

But it's not as obvious that large reserves are unnecessary. It might even be that large reserves are necessary to have serious land combat power at all.
The conflict in Chechnya among others demonstrates how a modern, heavy army still needs several divisions to capture and hold a small town and a relatively small landscape around it against determined light infantry.
The so-called force multipliers simply don't seem to be very effective against light infantry - not as much as against mechanized divisions. The tiny European armies of today probably lack the quantity to really dominate large areas. They're fine for destruction of military formations, but even a battle in one of the many million-people cities of Europe against a couple ten thousand light infantrymen would stretch the European armies to their limits.
Europe is quite urbanized in many regions and has large woods elsewhere. With one distant war after another exposing the limitations of our armies, one could argue that we should better prepare against enemies that might exploit these weaknesses.
The dwindling quantity of NATO infantry forces is a problem, as is the dwindling of the infantry reserves.

We need a post-conscription system that provides sufficient quantities of reservists with basic infantry training.
A system based on freedom instead of coercion, suitable to attract enough young men. It would help us to keep the understanding of military affairs at an acceptable level and the link between people and their army intact.

Sven Ortmann

Translations and News

In 1870 when Chancellor Bismarck wanted a war with France for his very complicated grand strategy (that succeeded), he needed a provocation. He manipulated a letter with slight changes in the text - no really strong changes for a modern reader - and the subsequent publication of the letter helped a lot to incite the war of 1870/1871. Nowadays, we'd like to protect our nations against warmongers among our own ranks. In a democracy, manipulation and wrong information undermine the legitimacy and functioning of the political system and need to be avoided even at high costs. The people are the sovereign, and they can only keep their sovereignty in a democracy that functions well. That's why I'm quite furious about a problem that apparently few people even recognize: Our news lie systematically because of poor translations. Wrong news is a broader problem, but wrong translations are easily avoided. The problem is most likely more relevant in nations with not so widespread language and least relevant in countries with very widespread language (in the NATO; USA and UK). One example; on publicly financed TV channels (private TV channels aren't better) I can very often observe how simultaneous translation is used. This is prone to mistakes because of the lack of time for the interpreter. But for the sake of timeliness, this can probably be tolerated in most cases. What cannot be tolerated is that a definitely wrong simultaneous translation appears in the news even hours after the taping. Many journalists are obviously not aware how serious their job is, otherwise they'd care more for exact translations. And I don't mean just small mistakes or wrong emphasis in simultaneous translations. The freedom of interpretation that interpreters seem to claim is huge. Sometimes, there's little resemblance to the original text. I believe this is one of many problems that grew over time and are adding sand into the mechanism of democracy. Democracy doesn't function because people believe it's good - it functions only when many requirements are met and we need to have a keen eye on things like these. (Maybe the next time we observe this in the news it's about time for a letter to the editor. Unless many people do this, it would probably not work - but we're in a democracy, so we're free to steer some journalists in search for a scandal on the topic ... they might make it into print with the story in the summer slump. The system has what it needs to repair itself - but a recognition of a shortcoming and a stimulus to resolve it is usually necessary.) 

 

S O

Foreign languages

According to my experience, it only requires the knowledge of about 2,000 words and basic understanding of grammar of a foreign language for basic communication with foreign people. They'll need to slow down and speak clearly to be understood, but once they learn that you have trouble understanding, most will do so.

Well, 2,000 words isn't very much. It takes about seven months to learn them with an average of only 10 new words daily. That shouldn't take more than an average 15 to 30 minutes of daily study including learning grammar, numbers, possibly different alphabet and tests.

It's therefore difficult to understand why so many army officers in the NATO don't even understand Russian and Arab. Russian is well understood at NATO's eastern frontier and Arab is spoken on the southern frontier. As NATO is primarily about collective defense, it should be obvious that these forces should prepare for action in the NATO frontier areas.

Maybe the deficiency is a result of the Cold War. Interaction with civilian population was assumed not to be very relevant in Third World War scenarios (as if they stayed at home and didn't plug all roads in such a case...).

Learning foreign languages should be mandatory for senior NCOs and officers.

NCOs should at least learn basic Russian and basic Arab.
Officers should in addition be required to learn at least one more language, preferably one of these:
- Spanish (spoken in almost all of Latin America and in Spain, of course)
- French (spoken in some parts of Africa and in France, of course)

Besides that, all NATO ground forces soldiers should speak English fluently. It does not only help in civilian life afterwards, but it's after all the NATO-internal language. US and UK forces have a natural advantage here, so their soldiers could easily learn one more language than others, like Spanish in the case of the US forces.

Learning foreign languages helps to reduce friction.
Navigation, interaction with civilians, interaction with allies, understanding different cultures, reading military publications of other countries, first interrogation of prisoners - there are many cases in which foreign language knowledge helps.

Attempts have been made to issue technology to solve the problem of lack of language skills. This is quite usual - an army is incapable of something, the first response is often "What can we buy to solve that?". But that's no solution to the problem, just an embarrassing anecdote. Our soldiers of an alliance should not need technological devices to express very basic messages to people who speak one of the two major languages found next to this alliance. Training is much better than gadgets are.

It's about time for mandatory foreign language skills.

Sven Ortmann