Yesterday I got a little exercised about this bit of foolishness from Glenn Greenwald. A couple more points to add. First, Ramesh Ponnuru responded with this:
The analogy isn’t perfect, but: We’d expect the police department to have a budget many times that of all the criminals combined, wouldn’t we? Fire departments spend a lot more fighting arson than arsonists spend. It’s a lot cheaper to break a window than to fix it.
I think it’s a darn good analogy. And I think it’s precisely what John Pike was driving at in our discussion yesterday. Spending too little will have the effect of encouraging competition, and confrontation. If half a trillion dollars is the annual cost of deterring the Chinese (and doing all the other wonderful things that a powerful military allows), that may be a bargain compared with the costs of a direct confrontation. Second, a blogger at Cato takes issue with…the fact that I’ve tried to peg the Chinese military budget in the past?
Thankfully for all of us, Goldfarb called Globalsecurity.org’s John Pike, who was able to inform him that attempting to ascertain the exact level of Chinese military spending is a “fiendishly complex problem…[that] approaches not even being a meaningful question.” I say thankfully, because Goldfarb must have come to his senses since he last took a crack at Chinese military spending. That time he consulted with the Heritage Foundation’s John Tkacik, who has been touting his argument that China’s military spending is roughly equivalent to U.S. defense spending. For reasons I’ve laid out in detail before here, this is not a serious argument. It’s not clear why Goldfarb has chosen to jettison Tkacik’s figure in favor of Mr. Pike’s caution, but it’s a welcome development. Still, it would be good to know whether Mr. Goldfarb now thinks he was mistaken to tout the absurd figure last March.
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but no. You can read that post here. What I wrote was that Tkacik’s number “looks like a pretty solid guess.” But a guess none the less, and when you’re taking a guess about the defense spending of your rivals, it’s better to err on the side of caution. Either way, the point is that China’s defense spending is difficult to ascertain, and no serious person is proposing that we reduce our defense budget so that it is less that what the rest of the world spends combined–which is what Greenwald seems to be proposing. Our friend at Cato points to this piece in Foreign Policy by Richard Betts, but Betts writes:
Even the Institute for Policy Studies, usually considered to be far to the left of the mainstream, offers a recommendation that would bring the baseline defense budget down by only about $56 billion, or 11 percent, and total military spending down by less than nine percent…The institute’s suggested defense budget for 2008 includes trimming or canceling the procurement of F-22, F-35, C-130J, and V-22 aircraft; Virginia-class submarines; and Zumwalt-class destroyers and the funding for the army’s Future Combat Systems program, national missile defense, space-based weapons, nuclear systems, research and development, and deployed air force and naval forces. Some of these suggestions may be ill advised (for example, cuts in research and development would not be compatible with shifting toward a mobilization strategy). But implementing even half of the suggestions would cut the baseline budget (not current war spending) by almost six percent. Marshaling the political will for restraint will be an uphill battle. A starting point might be the slogan “Half a trillion dollars is more than enough.”…
So even at the extreme, Betts would not have the United States reduce its budget to less than half a trillion dollars (if I understand correctly, he’s only proposing a 6 percent cut, to about $580 billion)–and even then it would be an uphill battle. Because common sense leads most Americans to believe that massive cuts to the defense budget would be penny wise, pound foolish.
