Venezia by PVII

Hard Choices for the Common Defense: Trade Equity and the Shared Political Burden

By David Oliver

Over the course of the last decade, I have experienced growing disquiet with the contradiction we Americans have between the stated goal for “common defense” within the alliance, and our apparent increasing attention to parochial – and ultimately self-defeating – economic self-interest within the United States.

It is not realistic, nor desirable, to attempt to decouple domestic political interests from U.S. defense decisions. Most Americans recognize there is either an implicit or explicit relationship. Peacetime political support is dependent upon the domestic support created when new jobs spring up and regional economic goals are achieved through defense programs. Americans are familiar with this process in the United States. Shouldn’t we recognize that this is a worldwide political truth? Other politicians in other countries need local jobs to help carry the burden of making tough decisions.

Our Defense goal is not to get rich at the expense of an ally. Defense is a tool to protect our people and our homeland. Defense also doesn’t have a goal of gaining a technical, warfighting or intellectual property advantage over an ally. Such goals don’t build power. Instead, such misguided efforts destroy the combined military power our complex world is going to need.

We and our traditional Allies should be focused on the tasks of cooperatively developing, maintaining and enhancing the domestic support – be it moral or budgetary – necessary for the maintenance of a quality warfighting capability.

One of the major obstacles to achieving this is not an unwillingness to acknowledge the needs of our neighbors, but rather an unwillingness to admit our own needs. It is much less a threat to our sense of nationhood to accept the reliance of our partner nations upon us than it is to admit we are less than self-reliant ourselves.

And yet our real power in the world depends on American acceptance of the fact that no individual nation has sufficient resources to sustain the hard and soft power necessary to adequately provide for its own defense. Personally, I base my conclusion on years of service as a military officer serving in many nations in Asia and Europe, as well as my service as a political appointee serving in Iraq with the Coalition forces. But modern history and current events provide ample enough evidence without benefit of direct observation. The power to change events today relies on more than just raw tonnage of military tanks, numbers of soldiers, or overwhelming technical sophistication. Our national and allied power is a complex system of concentric rings of influence – of hardware, software, knowledge, capital, influence, diplomacy, image, will, faith, and so forth – each connected to the other through complex gearing.

So what should be our cooperative focus?

I do not think our goal is to sell each other more weapons. Nor do I think that our goal is to convince each other that there is an immediate terrible threat to our combined survival. (It is instead a failure of our ability to manage our domestic political realities and communicate with our people if hyperbole is the only instrument by which we can rally support for what should be a legitimate campaign.)

This is particularly true since few in the mainstream would dispute that military power is one of the essential tools by which nations protect their citizens. Political and diplomatic leverage often derive from military might, the pen being mightiest when the sword is loosened in the sheath.

Among this readership in particular, there is no need to argue that countries should have adequate military capability. We understand that Clausewitz was merely describing life when he posed that war was politics by another means. It goes without saying that there are unanticipated problems that will appear in the future for which the political decision-maker will need to have military options. When discussing military power, those enlisted in the work of defense tend to treat disarmament with disdain; rather, arguments tend generally to coalesce around the question of, “How much is enough?”

And so too often discussions among our allies about the “common defense” are overly preoccupied with procurement of particular weapon systems and the level of support that individual nations have chosen last year or are in the process of choosing next year.

Much of that discussion often appears to be intended as a not-too-subtle encouragement to those nations who are not spending as much on defense as their neighbors, or who have not yet seen the wisdom of purchasing their own instruments of a particular capability.

I am not interested in such discussions. I have taken part in many such debates and think they are not only wasted effort, but also simply the wrong path to get to the goal of cooperatively fostering the domestic conditions we each need in order to maintain our individual and collective warfighting capability.

Today, we are members of a society that does not face the total destruction that Hitler, and subsequently Stalin, threatened. At the same time, there are still people in the world who would do us harm, often for no tangible benefit to themselves, even if the “us” is a group defined simply because we are different, be that difference a matter of ancestry or religion.

And there are still children who go hungry and adults without work. Poverty and economic crisis abroad create the fertile ground in which our enemies breed malice among the desperate or disenfranchised.
It is my belief, and I suspect that of most who will read this, that military power remains necessary for all nations to protect their citizens, even without the overweening threat of fascism or communism. Our problem is how to present these facts to our citizens in a credible manner, and how to raise the funds to pay for the weapons to support the common good.

During the last century, the threat of worldwide destruction was an easy way to get everyone’s attention. Without that evident threat we must think harder, not talk louder. The cheap way, the chauvinistic approach, is to magnify imaginary threats and emphasize differences. I do not believe that responsible leaders should postulate phantom threats to fill the threat void. Instead we must work harder to better explain the coupling of the interests of the common citizen taxpayer with the defense community’s.

Let us think about how two basic facts affect the manner in which our governments do business in the armament field. Recognizing the political and cultural differences that exist among and between countries, I maintain elements of these two basic considerations are inherent in the process by which every democratic country raises and maintains armies.

First, there has to be the will for the political powers to decide or agree to spend tax money on training and equipment, rather than on economic infrastructure, or the next bid for the Olympics, or improving education in the cities. For politicians to agree to spend the money on military necessities, they often balance the threat the public feels against the other priorities the public believes should be fulfilled. The fact that a particular weapon system employs local constituents can greatly affect this balance, even in those allied nations whose political systems differ significantly from our own.

Secondly, once the military unit is raised, it must be trained and equipped and, when it is used, it can not be clearly deficient to either its foe or its allies. In other words, no leader spends tax dollars merely to send his or her citizens out to die, nor can any nation have great success in maintaining armies that cannot execute equally competent and effective tactics as its allies on the battlefield.

When a nation’s forces cannot act comparably because they do not have the depth of training or equally capable equipment, then we end up with operational discontinuities that are embarrassing to governments and deadly to soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen.

Those in positions of leadership, therefore, must ensure that we and all of our allies have access to the full range of equipment capabilities. That is, we need to work harder to facilitate more flexible export and import control arrangements between allies. We also need to ensure that each country that is spending tax dollars on defense is also maximizing the national jobs which result from that sacrifice – in other words, give the national politicians who support defense a fighting chance.

Since it simply is too expensive and ineffective to ensure that each participating nation has proportionate workshare – much less “noble-work-share” – in each system that it purchases, it is important that our national leaders deliberately commit to purchase equipments to maintain a rough balance in defense export and import. These are truly the hard choices, but that is why men and women seek to become leaders rather than to remain as followers.

Many countries, the United States certainly included, can often build the best products in the world within their own borders. The problem is that such action is simply inconsistent with the goal of maximizing individual and collective security.
Building everything within a nation is a blind and foolish action that reduces, not enhances, national power. It is to the United States’ strategic advantage to seek opportunities for our allies to sell to us, just as we should welcome opportunities to sell to them. Only by developing and enabling jobs in other countries – thus providing support for local politicians to make the hard resource decisions that support building military capabilities – do we make it politically feasible for our allies to meet their obligations toward our shared strategic objectives.

In the United States, such openness to foreign defense investment is often portrayed as a threat, both to our national security and to our industrial base. Both viewpoints are shortsighted. The first reflects a Cold War-era fear of Kilroy infecting our defensive systems, when there is ample precedence for import of military hardware from allies without the U.S. losing its technological independence or exposing our warfighters to risk. The second reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what made our defense industrial base strong in the first place. At a time when our defense industrial base has excessively consolidated such that the Defense Department reportedly has based requirements on the capabilities of the contractors rather than the needs of the warfighters, protectionism is the enemy of better security, not competition from our traditional allies.

Competition, both domestic and international, is critical to both the management and the production of good defense.  Competition in ideas, technology and processes not only is the cauldron of innovation that made the U.S. the world’s dominant military-industrial power, but also is the most effective business tool for achieving performance and cost savings. In short, competition is the not-so “secret sauce” in the defense acquisition process which provides the natural hedge against mediocrity and its country cousin, fraud.

By letting our allies sell to us, and being willing to sell to our allies in a manner that fosters both military and political equity, we can build a common defense strategy that is sustainable. If we continue, on the other hand, to vie for economic leverage in defense sales over our allies, we will continue to encourage fragmentation at a time when our common threats demand strategic unity more than ever. We will find allies that are ineffectual or unwilling to come to our aid, because we have unwittingly undermined the domestic power base on which their military projection capability depended.

We are all challenged to make this understandable within our citizens, to convey the self-interest that is inherent in being more equitable with our allies. But we can’t afford to wait for popular consensus to begin to make these hard choices.

Dave Oliver is Chief Operating Officer of EADS North America. He has served as a flag officer in the military, a CEO in industry, and a Senate-confirmed political appointee. Prior to joining EADS North America, Oliver was Director of Management and Budget for Coalition Forces in Iraq. Previously, he served the second Clinton Administration and the first few months of the Bush Administration as Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, a position he assumed after having worked as an executive at Northrop Grumman Corporation. Oliver retired from the Navy in 1995 as a Rear Admiral (Upper Half), having served at sea aboard both diesel-electric and nuclear submarines, and commanded a nuclear submarine as well as two submarine groups. His final military tour was as Principal Deputy to the Navy Acquisition Executive.