The nation’s dismal economy has cost millions of Americans their jobs, homes and life savings. Barring a miraculous recovery, the economy’s next target could be America’s military superiority.
Before anyone panics, the U.S. military will continue to be the world’s most powerful for years to come. But the extended forecast does not look good. The government’s own defense gurus are warning that it is not a question of if, but when the United States will lose its military superpower status.
These ominous predictions, by all accounts, are hard to fathom. The Pentagon’s budget this year is the highest since World War II — and accounts for almost half of what the world’s militaries spend.
But with the nation drowning in debt, it isn’t difficult to see how the financial burdens of superpowerdom may be too much to bear. The United States, some experts warn, would be wise to restrain military spending in order to regain its financial strength.
Congressional Research Service analyst Stephen Daggett best articulated the dilemma facing the United States.
“We’re in the midst of a shift away from American military predominance toward something different,” Daggett told members of Congress last fall. “The big change that’s going on in the international security environment doesn’t have to do with military forces, it has to do with financial power, and the financial shifts are all away from the United States and toward Asia,” he said. “We’re still, for several years, clearly going to be technologically predominant in military capabilities. How long we’ll have the ability to do all of the above — to project power of every kind, both in ground forces, maritime forces, air forces, I don’t know, but it’s eroding slowly over time.”
Even defense hawks are recognizing that the immense spending of the past decade while the U.S. military has been fighting two wars at a cost of more than a trillion dollars means it will soon be time to pay the piper.
“The fact that U.S. defense spending has doubled during the same period that its economy has shrunk from 32 to 23 percent of global output tells you a day of reckoning lies ahead for U.S. defense spending,” wrote industry analyst Loren Thompson, CEO of the Lexington Institute. “Five percent of the world’s population can’t keep sustaining nearly half of global military outlays while generating only a quarter of global output. … We have reached a point in our history where our resources are so constrained that the only way we can maintain our current military posture is to borrow money from the future military adversary we should fear the most — China. Obviously, this is not a tenable arrangement over the long run.”
A private-sector advisor to Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently warned about a “gathering storm” that threatens to sink future defense budgets. The biggest menace is a “growing mountain of debt that is going to trigger the government to act,” said Michael J. Bayer, who chairs the influential Defense Business Board.
He laid out numbers that should scare everyone. The United States today pays about $340 billion a year in interest on its national debt of $12 trillion. That would seem manageable, except that the interest rates are low (about 3 percent) because the global economic downturn has steered investors to the safety of U.S. Treasury bills. By 2017, with conservative estimates of a $21.9 trillion debt and a 5.8 percent rate, interest payments would reach a trillion dollars a year — more than the entire defense budget, Bayer said at a conference last month. Even more bad news: If the economy recovers, interest rates will go up, which would create an ever bleaker financial picture for the United States.
Considering the dire fiscal outlook, Americans may wonder what all this means for national security. Will the U.S. military lose its edge? Will China replace the United States as the world’s military superpower?
Not likely, in the foreseeable future. But eventually we will have to get used to the idea that the world will become more “multipolar” and that the United States may not be able to afford its current military might.
Daggett put it bluntly. “The days of the American century were really the last 50 years of the 20th century,” he said. “The 21st century is turning slowly into something different … much more balanced in the international security environment.”
The projection is that China will have a larger economy than the United States in 30 years or so, Daggett said. “That has to affect the dynamic of U.S. planning. In the past, we could assume that we could build up military capabilities to such a degree that it would dissuade potential future foes from trying to challenge us in building up military capabilities. I’m not sure how long that’s doable, given the shift of financial resources toward the East.”
Amid these grim prophecies, it’s worth remembering that predictions of defense budget train wrecks have become an inside joke in Washington. “Each year we hear the defense budget is about to collapse, and every year they’re wrong,” said David J. Berteau, former principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for production and logistics. He does not foresee the United States giving up its military dominance any time soon. But cuts to the defense budget would force the Pentagon to learn how to spend money more wisely, which is not a bad thing.