EXISTENTIAL THREATS

The Senate confirmation hearings for members of Donald Trump’s national security team have shone light on the thinking not only of the candidates for these high level and high impact jobs but also of the Senators serving on the committees in charge of the confirmations. Of course, there was the usual political grandstanding in the process, from both sides of the aisle. Softball pitches from Trump supporters like Ted Cruz and pointless narratives from liberal democrats like Kamala Harris. It strikes a casual observer like me as unreal that none of the interlocutors can resist to use a large part of the allocated microphone and TV camera time for the purpose of explaining at great length what their beliefs are in the arena of national security, rather than probing what the candidate’s views are and how they may translate into policy for the new administration. Either way, the process is valuable because it forces an in-depth evaluation of the nature and the risks of the threats to national security we commonly recognize.

The picture that emerges from this public national security review is unsettling in more than one way.

The voices for a larger investment in our military are strong and politically irresistible given the growing awareness of national security threats posed by terrorist organizations and animosity from the governments of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. But we are already $20 Trillion in debt and we are already spending more on our military than the next seven countries (including China and Russia) when ranked by military expenditure. Defense spending is, at 20% of federal expenditure, the third largest line item in the federal budget, after social security (23%) and healthcare (25%). So, the question needs to be asked: “are we spending our tax dollars on the right assets?”

Many voices, including Ike Eisenhower and Robert Gates, have alerted against the inertia inhibiting the required flexibility in adjusting military asset allocation according to the changes in security threats against our nation. The power of the military-industrial complex is well documented and Congress can be relied on to always wanting to spend more on the military without ever taking anything that is arguably obsolete off the table.

The Senate confirmation hearings have repeatedly, and from all corners of the committee table, asserted that we have the best and most powerful military in the world. And that is undoubtedly true in the conventional sense of warfare, but are we not already constantly and sufficiently confronted with the limited usefulness of our existing military assets in defense of the most serious threats to our national security? What use are our soldiers if we have already accepted that we can’t put ‘boots on the ground’ in the fight against ISIS, Al Qaida or Al-Shabaab? What use are our tanks and artillery when drones can do the necessary dirty work? How many nuclear strike instruments do we need when we can’t imagine a war in which nuclear weapons are used that will not inevitably lead to complete annihilation of humanity? Our helplessness in spite of our military might was most painfully exposed on September 11 of 2001 when we could not find a convenient target to retaliate against and ended up settling for a war with the Taliban and Saddam Hussein in which we are still embroiled today and which arguably has increased the threat of terrorism by Islamic jihadists.

We cannot determine with precision what kind of military we need, without first determining what threats we want/need to defend against. That is, assuming that we certainly should not build and maintain a military for offensive purposes.

There is one area in which we need clarity of intent. That is how far America will go in defending its allies against aggression from its neighbors. After the fall of communism, America and its allies have chosen to surround Russia with NATO member states, leaving only Belarus and the Ukraine as buffers between the West and the East. What if, to divert attention from domestic and economic failures, Putin decides to ‘liberate’ a corridor to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic? Much like he has done with Crimea on the Black Sea. What kind of military will NATO need to credibly defend against such adventurism and what does America need to contribute to this defense? How reasonable is it to design a US military first and foremost to deal with these types of aggression against our allies? Trump is right in openly questioning how much of the burden we should carry in the defense of territory far outside of our borders.

The hard question behind this is to what extent we can rely on the deterrent of an effective threat of nuclear retaliation against a conventional attack. The Russians are, logistically and in terms of conventional forces, much better positioned to prevail in clash around the Baltics than NATO is. Will they speculate that the USA will not risk a full out nuclear war if they force their way to the Baltic with conventional forces? And, if that is the hypothesis, does that justify the current composition of the American military forces and the further build-up that is now proposed by Trump and congressional hawks? Aren’t we much better off equipping our European allies to defend their own territory with weaponry and technology that would be strong enough to deter the Russians from any further expansionary adventures?

The same questions and answers apply to South-East Asia and China’s approach in the South China Sea.

Ultimately, our decision makers ought to go by the premise that our military might is of no use, a very expensive redundancy, unless it can be directed against the primary, existential, threats against our national security. And I would argue that in our world of today there are three such existential threats that loom far ahead of Russian or Chinese aggression. All three are hard to predict, hard to control and hard to defend against:

1.       Terrorist use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons

2.       Cyber-attacks against our communications systems and infrastructure

3.       Self-defeat of our democracy

If these are the most severe (and likely) threats against our national security, we have to come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the asset allocation in our military, as a core component of our national security infrastructure, is hopelessly out of alignment. At its core, it is built for intervention and retaliation rather than prevention. All the hardware in the world and all the ground troops do nothing to prevent any of these three existential threats from haunting us. And our defense fails if we fail−only once−to preempt or intercept an attack in either one of these three threat categories. The weapons we need most in the fight against existential threats are intelligence, technology and uncompromising value systems.

America is paying a price for its success in building the richest, most advanced and powerful nation of all ages. In the process, it has become the target of global envy, hatred and sabotage. And, paradoxically, the more advanced our infrastructure and systems have become, the more vulnerable we have become as a society. I call this the ‘wealth paradox’: the wealthier a nation becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes to destruction. Just think about the havoc that would be created if, as a result of a coordinated cyber-attack or the deployment of strategically placed 'dirty bombs', our communications systems would be rendered inoperative. Ever seen a lame duck? America without power, data access, internet access, account access, traffic control would not be a powerhouse for long.

There is also a ‘weaponry paradox’: the more destructive weapons become, the less deployable they will prove to be. Nuclear weapons provide no preventive or preemptive power against either of the three existential threats America is now faced with. Our existing military serves one primary purpose: to keep our adversaries from attacking the United States or its allies with military means (like Japan did at Pearl Harbor). Given our capacity to retaliate with exponential force, that scenario, an offensive strike by an adversarial nation, has become less and less plausible. But, if our communications systems go down, will we know who launched the cyber-attack and are we going to retaliate with our existing weaponry arsenal, including nuclear weapons?

The third existential threat may be the most serious of them all. Will we be looking in the mirror before too long and exclaim: ‘I have seen the enemy; it is us’? Half the nation seems to be thinking that way already. That is how divided we have become. The Trump ascendency to the throne, that gave us the confirmation hearings in the Senate, is likely to only exacerbate the division to the point that it could easily become a threat to democracy and our republican system. The weapons we need to deploy against this threat are not military at all. The best defense here is, as so often, offense. Offense against inequality and discrimination. Offense against abuse of power, crime, corruption, greed and avarice. The richer a society becomes the better equipped it is to become a ‘just society’. America has yet to live up to that potential and the longer it delays the more imperiled it becomes. America today is much like Mr. Scrooge from Dickens’ Christmas Carol, before he became chastened by the appearances of the ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come.

To fend off the existential threats against its national security, America would be well advised to rethink and reorganize the means of defense it needs to deploy and to fund that defense by a matching budget reallocation. Will the new administration and the Congress be up to the task?