Charles Kenny

“You don’t have to be a peacenik or a lefty to be persuaded by this trenchant and witty book that the 21st-century American war machine is stupefyingly wasteful, protecting us against threats that no longer exist and failing to protect us against those that do.”

–Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature.

“An agile and effective study concluding that the US military is not only wildly inefficient, but mostly designed to deal with problems that scarcely exist and inadequate or even irrelevant for dealing with problems that actually do exist.”

–John Mueller, Ohio State University and Cato Institute

The Pentagon, famed as the world’s largest office building, recently underwent a renovation. It took ten times as long and four times the cost of constructing the building in the first place.  That history leaves the Pentagon as a potent symbol of America’s foreign policy infrastructure: dominated by a massive, increasingly inefficient military machine better suited to the challenges of the mid-Twentieth Century than the early Twenty-First.

My new book Close the Pentagon describes the changing threats to America’s national security: the decline of war and the rise of global challenges that can only be tackled with collective action.  It outlines the awesome inefficiency of the Department of Defense at its traditional role of war fighting and its limited capacity to adapt to new tasks.  It concludes that America’s foreign policy apparatus should be overhauled –US military spending reduced to the global average with savings used to support economic assistance, global collective action and domestic priorities.

Close the Pentagon is available as a paperback ($7.99) and e-book ($3.99) and the first chapter is available for free here.   I wrote about it on the CGD blog in The Hill at Responsible Statecraft, Politico and for Barrons, and talked about it to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.  There’s a pretty negative review by David Swanson here: beyond the fact he doesn’t like my writing style and disagrees on the importance of resource dependency as a cause of conflict, I think perhaps he was looking for a book about the many moral failings of US foreign policy and I wrote one about the ineffectiveness of the Pentagon in responding to national security threats.

Below a brief overview of the book’s argument.

Prophecies of peace have gone awry before and it is too early to declare we are in a totally new era.  But the decline of violence means that –currently at least– we are left with the remnants of war.  Violent threats to the US and its allies are from small groups not big armies, and are a serious but exaggerated policing issue.

There are arguments over the causes of the relative peace of the post-1945 era: nuclear weapons, deterrence, hegemony, new institutions, new values, new connections.  But while many factors may play a role, there are reasons to doubt the importance of a large US military to peace and reasons to highlight economic and social factors including new norms of behavior.

The changing nature of state power and economic wealth from people and land through resources and manufacturing to institutions, ideas and interconnection means that war is no longer a route to power.  Resource reliance is now the curse of poor countries, and fighting for those resources a strategy that only makes sense in broken economies.  That suggests the death of zero sum international relations and the importance of integration to global prosperity and peace.

Interconnection is a factor in some of the new threats to national security. New global challenges include the warming atmosphere, polluted seas, disease, financial instability and international crime.  These threats require collective response to shore up the global commons and preserve and extend our positive sum gains.

The US military is obscenely, inefficiently, over-fit for the purpose of deterring aggression against America and its allies.  At the same time, the Pentagon’s effectiveness in foreign entanglements is demonstrated by its mostly-not-winning-streak over the past seven decades: Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.  US military presence doesn’t prevent civil wars and the US Navy is over-equipped for duty against pirates.  A massive Pentagon bureaucracy, including a huge army of contractors, runs a dysfunctional military management and procurement system.

That inefficiency is one reason the Pentagon should not lead on new national security threats. It is ill designed to tackle cyber-‘war’ or support research and development programs, let alone lead on global pandemic response.  Other tools including aid agencies have a far better track record in delivering results.

How to respond? The Defense Department still has vital roles: sea lanes protection; logistics for the responsibility to protect; training; defending the homeland and allies.  But new national security threats take global cooperation best managed outside of the Pentagon. Set a short term goal of cutting military spending to one and a half times our nearest competitor’s as part of a realignment of international relations budgets.  The longer term goal should be to reduce defense spending to the global median of 1.5 percent of GDP.

A portion of those savings should be redirected so that the US reaches the United Nations goal of 0.7 percent of GDP going towards aid flows to developing countries.  It should also provide finance for reinvigorated engagement in trade and investment agreements as well as international organizations and treaty making.

What could go wrong? Even if it is a significant cause of peace, US primacy won’t last.  It is inevitable that America will lose relative power to countries like China, India and Nigeria as they grow richer.  The question is, how do we sustain peace in a multipolar world? The answer: bind the new global powers into a peaceful, rules-bound world system.  And the problem: Washington DC is busy heading in the other direction.  This is the biggest risk to continued global peace and American prosperity that we face.

[I should note two embarrassing errors in the text. First, my mother’s father fought in France and Germany in World War Two, not Italy. Second, I described the Thucydides trap example the wrong way around: Athens was the rising power, Sparta the old hegemon.]