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Old 10-28-2021, 01:46 PM
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Arrow The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Military Distortions

The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Military Distortions
By: William Hartung - Aerospace & Defense - Forbes News - 10-28-21
Re: https://www.forbes.com/sites/william...h=58845a719c10

Last week the Heritage Foundation released its annual “Index of Military Strength,” an exercise in threat inflation that argues for increases in the Pentagon’s already massive budget. The document, which could more accurately be called the “Index of Military Distortions,” gives low grades to the majority of the U.S. armed services. According to Heritage analysts, the Air Force is assessed to be “weak”; the Army is graded “marginal”; and the Navy is believed to be “marginal, trending towards weak.” If this is true at a time when the United States is spending over $750 billion on the Pentagon and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy – far more than the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or the Reagan buildup of the 1980s — the problem is not money. It is mismanagement and misguided strategy.

But even given the Pentagon’s many problems, the Heritage “grades” are misleading in the extreme. The question is, grading against what? Heritage chooses a benchmark that exceeds even the exaggerated threat matrix elaborated in the current U.S. national security strategy, noting that “our assessment of the adequacy of today’s U.S. military is based on the ability of America’s armed forces to engage and defeat two major competitors at roughly the same time.” Herein lies the rub. No level of expenditures is enough to guarantee that the United States could “defeat” two nuclear-armed adversaries – China and Russia – simultaneously. Luckily, neither scenario is either necessary or advisable, and neither should serve as a guide to U.S. defense strategy. A war between the United States and China, for example, could quickly escalate to the nuclear level, an outcome that could precipitate an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. The goal of U.S. strategy should be to deter and prevent aggressive behavior that threatens the U.S. homeland or close U.S. allies, and the means for doing so need not be primarily military.

Staying on the question of China for a moment, the principal challenges posed by China are political and economic, not military. And the U.S. needs to cooperate with China in addressing urgent threats like climate change and preventing future pandemics if the planet is to remain habitable for future generations. Launching a new Cold War or accelerated arms race with China directly conflicts with these more important concerns. As Anatol Lieven has noted in a recent Quincy Institute issue brief on climate change and national security, “Climate change presents threats to the United State and the wellbeing of its citizens that dwarf those from Russia, China, or Iran. U.S. government policies and priorities should be reoriented accordingly.” The assumptions underlying the Heritage Foundation’s index run exactly counter to this reality.

The other risks high on the Pentagon’s list – and firmly embraced in the Heritage analysis – include regional powers like Iran and North Korea and terrorist organizations. But the costly, deadly, and counterproductive U.S. wars of this century – totaling over $8 trillion in expenditures in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University – should inspire caution towards large-scale military approaches to counterterrorism. Concerns about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons or North Korea expanding its arsenal are not amenable to military solutions. Diplomacy is the best option in both cases. In any case, neither nation is anywhere near posing an existential threat to the United States, or a threat to the U.S. homeland for that matter.


Then there’s the Pentagon’s plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles and submarines, plus new warheads to go with them, which could cost up to $2 trillion over the next three decades. As demonstrated by the organization Global Zero in its alternative nuclear posture, the United States could maintain an adequate deterrent at far lower levels of weaponry, obviating the need for a major nuclear modernization program. Of particular note in the Global Zero analysis is its recommendation that the U.S. eliminate its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which former Secretary of Defense William Perry has called “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them in a crisis, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war based on a false alarm. Needless to say, the Heritage analysis doubles down on the current plans for a new generation of nuclear weapons rather than considering the kind of “deterrence-only” strategy proposed by Global Zero.

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If one’s threat assessment is exaggerated and unrealistic enough, it’s possible to justify virtually any level of Pentagon spending. But a closer look at which things actually pose the greatest threats to our lives and livelihoods suggests that increasing Pentagon spending at the expense of investments in addressing more pressing problems like climate change, pandemics, and racial and economic injustice will actually make the world a more dangerous place. What is really needed is an “Index of Security” that looks at progress on the full range of risks we face, not just a narrow focus on outmoded military methods of solving global problems.

About this writer: William Hartung
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I am the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. I am the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008). My previous books include And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995), a critique of U.S. arms sales policies from the Nixon through Clinton administrations.
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