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Measuring Military Power: You're Doing It Wrong
True net assessment is a lost art these days, at least in popular military budget discussions. Let's take this Bloomberg piece, for example. First, the headline: "Obama's 'Paper Tiger' Pentagon Budget Spends Five Times China." I understand and respect that the piece is mostly about rebutting an election year claim that reductions of the defense budget will make the US militarily weak. I have no desire to wade into those muddy waters since they have been well-covered by others. But, as the article title implies, the piece supposedly rebuts the claim by looking at the data:
U.S. spending accounted for 41 percent of global military expenditures in 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. China accounted for 8.2 percent and Russia 4.1 percent, the Stockholm-based policy group said in an April report.
And this is where the problem begins. It means nothing to state that the US outspends China by five times because flat aggregate comparisons of defense spending tells us little about operational and strategic outcomes. Let's start with the strictly material: The US is a global power with global responsibilities. China, on the other hand, regionally concentrates its forces. The US is operating at the periphery whereas China, an power rooted in the hard crust of the Asian landmass, has no such logistical problems. Such a figure also tells us nothing about the correlation of forces in the theater in question, or whether each power has managed to translate spending into usable military resources. Given that there have been a lot of news stories about whether or not the US has been getting value out of its latest aerial platforms and problems associated with aging Cold War-era systems as well as the way that personnel and per-unit major platform costs may be causing a "defense death spiral," such an omission has analytical consequences.
Doctrine and force employment matter too. During the late 70s, Phillip Karber ran a simulation of May 1940 for an overly quantitative theater balance methodology called WEI-WUV and found that it didn't account for French and British defeat. The Allies may have enjoyed quantitative and qualitative platform advantages but did not master the "modern system" of military operations that had evolved out of World War I. The Germans, on the other hand, were farther along in the path towards combined arms mobile warfare even if they had some serious material and doctrinal flaws of their own. Andrew Marshall also reminds us that the socio-bureaucratic set of relationships within a military hierarchy also have an impact on effectiveness.
Finally, let's go to the most important factor: the human. WJ Rue at Gunpowder and Lead explains:
Let’s assume that the U.S. and Russia spend the same amount of money on their respective militaries. Let’s further assume that the U.S. allocates a sizeable portion of its resources to training – we’ll say the average fighter pilot gets roughly 150 hours per year in the cockpit. Russia, meanwhile, elects to spend its resources on slightly more capable jets, but its pilots only get 20 hours per year flight time, and they ran out of money before they could build a simulator. If we assume that similar circumstances exist throughout the Russian armed forces, who has the more capable military? The well-trained one or the one with the expensive equipment that the troops don’t know how to use effectively?
Is it too much to expect this in a short piece ostensibly about US budget debates and election politics? Probably. But defense budget debates are also never served well by using total military spending as a good metric of comparison of military power. As Rue argues, military power has aspects that are easy to quantify and other facets that are difficult to express on a balance sheet. Hence, the utility of net assessment.
Let's also assume you were
Let's also assume you were told you would deploy on a PRT to Afghanistan and then 30 days into the deployment the PRT was shutdown. Who's to blame? The people who didn't budget properly? Or the individuals who say the cost / threat, for effective security to operate is too expensive, so they shut it down?
The later of the two is what some were told this past week, who work within PRT's and are being directed back to Kabul and are being shut down. One can only assume the military and civilians on these PRT's will be sent home and out of theater in the next 30 days.
One can only assume that withdrawal operations have begun with the shutting down of these seven PRT's and the decision to cease construction of USG facilities outside of Kabul.
What's next Exum? DoD will stop funding Think Tanks to think for them?
Visitor on May 22, 2012 -
Visitor on May 22, 2012 - 10:07am
Exum has moved on to better things. Need to talk to the Great and Powerful "aelkus" or the other Dan behind the curtain. PRTs cancelled? Sounds like it is vogue in this political season to be getting the heck out of a WAR only if it is the beginning of a sustained $30B+ nation building role ( I am getting so confused not sure if I am moving backward or forward anymore everything is so changed and redefined ).
Aelkus, your dog treed the wrong critter, you're all hat and no cow.
It's about the economy stupid. Part of the measure of a strong military is the industrial capacity of a nation. Right now the American industrial capacity is greatly off-shored. Other than the British Empire, America has done more to equip and piss-off his enemy than any other nation on earth. Boeing, GE, and Honeywell (CEO's all part of Obama's economic council) are teaching the Chinese to make avionics and jets. What the Chinese cannot get from America due to laws is coming from NATO partners like France (advanced aircraft composite design). If the Chinese cannot get the intellectual property they want, they steal or pay for it. It is as simple as negotiation, need to have a Main Land Partner in China First to have access to the Chinese market. Aelkus, you are measuring the size of your dick while China is measuring the thickness of their wallet, silly you.
It is about priorities and DEBT (China owns America's future !. They can kill America's ability to fund our debt. )
Let's start with the strictly material: The US is a global power with global responsibilities.
That statement is going to get America in a lot of trouble. America can not to offshore jobs to developing countries and still pay for the global protection agenda. Asking the rich to pay is wrong just because they were wise enough to earn their money. Borrowing the money from China is just stupid. After all the rich used US laws to make their loot.
America has a structural problem and until that is fixed we are weak. Too much welfare, warfare, CEO-care, and not enough jobs on American soil to pay the taxes for it all. It has nothing to do with Congress, it has everything to do with how we run our multimillion dollar election campaigns, we buy votes.
Our priorities are way f*cked-up.
Who is going to pay for Obamacare? Subsidies on school loan interest? Birth control for all women? Foreign AID? More war boats? Bail-outs for education ( Christ, the profs make six-figures salaries already with benefits out the KAZOO does education really need more)? Social Security?
If there is a structural problem in America, it includes the military. DOD is a main pillar of Federal Spending and it is hard to offshore the funding for it.
Is there any reason, at all,
Is there any reason, at all, to think that China and Russia have better training than us? That they've better mastered the modern art of war? That China's focus on regional strategic goals means our military will be over-matched in Asia and unable to accomplish our strategic goals there?
You've listed factors that can upset a quantitative analysis, but for quantitative analysis to be a bad heuristic, you need to show that those factors are either common or particularly relevant here. Especially since you'd expect quantitative analysis to be a better and better tool the more lopsided the results are, and here they are *quite* lopsided.
You also aren't thinking at the margin. In a debate about whether we should cut or keep the marginal dollar (or marginal billions of dollars) in spending, the question is what extra capabilities that money will buy. It's unrealistic to assume that, but for a few billion dollars, the US military would have vastly better training, be better able to cope with a regionally focused China, etc.. When you are discussing marginal additions and subtractions to the military budget, it makes sense to hold all those factors as constant and say "Ok, whatever deficiencies we have in training, operational art, and strategic focus, we are spending five times more than our nearest competitors. Is it likely there will be a vastly different outcome if we spent 4.8 times more than our nearest competitors?"
Obviously it is best to do a line-by-line analysis of what is being cut and what strategic capabilities the cut items would buy, but most people don't have the time to do that. And given that they don't have the time, comparing total military spending is a good heuristic, at least in the context of judging budget cuts. Frankly, when total military spending is very lopsided it can be a pretty good heuristic for judging relative military might, though you have to account for the fact that some goals are harder than others (fighting an insurgency thousands of miles away vs. sustaining a domestic insurgency, say).
China can walk to war. The
China can walk to war. The United States has to commute.
The U.S. as a global power
The U.S. as a global power has costly military obligations that the Chinese as a mostly regional power do not have. The U.S. must protect the flow of oil from the Middle East to China and the flow of industrial minerals from Africa to China plus keep the sea lanes open so I phones can move from China to the U.S.
Bobby, See Dan's latest,
Bobby,
See Dan's latest, which essentially is the gist of what I was trying to get across here. www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2012/05/ordnance-survey-more-slippery-met...
More broadly, I am not necessarily in disagreement about spending on the margin. This argument also would suggest that, say, spending more money would result in better capabilities or strategic outcomes. What I am against is the assumption in many of these analyses, e.g. that "we spend X amount and this will buy us X outcome in this theater." Consider that the US faced the PRC in the 1950s when the gap between the respective sides was VASTLY larger. The US was a nuclear-armed first-world state and China was a peasant state. That kind of analysis would predict an overwhelming US victory. But that combat power was tied up elsewhere (particularly in Europe). The Korean War was always an economy of force mission. Hence the PRC achieved its strategic objectives, albeit at a frightful cost.
With respect to China, I
With respect to China, I think it's worth pointing out that advanced equipment is only part of the game for them. While innovative procurement methods may be enabling them to close the gap on us from a purely technical, qualitative point of view, the Chinese high command are constantly reminding each other, the world and us [when they feel like talking to us] that they remain far behind in terms of being able to arm their front-line units with gear that would be considered de rigueur in an American unit. The antidote to our superior technology appears to be a potent mixture of strength in numbers, and national political will. By which I mean the Chinese would probably be willing to sacrifice extraordinary amounts of men and material in order to gain the valuable symbolic victory of, say, sinking an aircraft carrier. I can see no good reason why China would seek to spend much more than it already does on fancy new weapons--technology that's "good enough" for them is good enough to beat us.
What China should, and very likely *does* fear is an advantage that no amount of technical prowess, human bravery and national unity can make up for: combat experience. If we pick an arbitrary time-frame, say, 1979-present, let's compare the Chinese versus the US. China has fought exactly one war in that 33 year period, and didn't exactly cover itself in glory in the conflict: the People's Liberation Army got a very serious bloody nose during the 1979 war against Viet Nam.
In that same span of time, meanwhile, elements of the US Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps have been more or less continuously at war: in Latin American countries like Panama, Grenada and Haiti; in East Africa, both recently and in the early 1990's; in the Philippines; in the Balkans both in Bosnia and Kosovo; and of course, Gulf War I, OEF and OIF. And this hasn't been limited to pure fighting, either. All of this globe-spanning fighting has made the US military a superbly organized and efficient logistics machine.
And apart from the raw combat experience and the development of good supply chain practices, the constant testing of American military forces has given it another invaluable advantage: a brain-trust of commissioned and non-commissioned officers whose lessons to the fighting units cannot be quantified very easily. Chinese marines may have very good drill instructors. But none of those drill instructors have served in combat, whereas US Marines are from day 0 exposed to NCOs who have sometimes spent nearly a decade in or around combat zones. And while I would be the last guy to doubt the quality of Chinese officer candidate academies, senior US officers, both active and retired, are beavering away at a vast opus of military thought and tactical and operational innovation built upon years of leading men and units in battle. (Exum, stand and take your bows) That battle plans and doctrines invariably fall apart upon first contact with an enemy is besides the point, insofar as the people who came up with them and are required to modify them have had to adapt new tactics in real-time before.
It is all of *this* that China must truly work to negate, and the only place they can do that for the time being is in completely new, unexplored regions of the battlefield. Space, for instance, or the internet. In the 1990s, when China's military doctrines may well have relied on human wave infantry attacks and lacked a place for stuff like super-quiet subs or phase-array radar or special forces, China was busily developing its cyber-warfare capabilities--concurrently with us. It is really only in these new realms of warfare where we have as little combat experience as the Chinese.
And, not surprisingly, it is in these realms where our vulnerabilities are largest. Assume, for illustrative purposes, that a conflict erupts somewhere on a god-forsaken island chain in the Western Pacific, out of reach from most of the PRC's air and naval bases. Assume, too, that to deal with the threat, the US decides to send in an amphibious warship packing a squadron of the newest, most expensive (!) F-35 fighter jets, and carrying a US Marine unit full of the most battle-tested, lethal, experienced fighting men on the face of the planet. From a technical point of view and a combat experience point of view, this should be check-mate. Our fighters could wipe theirs out, eradicate their tanks without being seen and the Marines could chew up their Chinese counterparts for breakfast. Well, yes but.... What if they figure out a way to mess with our navigation systems, throwing the whole operation into chaos? What if they are able to intercept or distort our communications, and put a lone sub in the path of the vulnerable carrier? What if they just shoot down the whole damn satellite constellation in the Pacific? What if, what if, what if, ad nauseam. What they manage to pull off is irrelevant in the context of two important facts here: (1) Lots of good ships and airplanes, and the lives of many brave and combat-experienced men, are lost without being put to good effect; and (2) They win the battle, and maybe the war, by scoring a victory [however close] in an area in which their experience matches ours or nearly so.
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