Star Spangled Security: Applying Lessons Learned over Six Decades Safeguarding America

7. That Banner Yet Waves: Preparing for What Lies Ahead

183 7 ThatBannerYetWaves preparing for what lies ahead In January 1981, at the end of the Carter presidency, White House counsel Lloyd Cutler hosted a dinner at the F Street Club for the president , cabinet, and a few other senior members of the administration. Each person got up and said something about his or her experience. When it was my turn, I made two comments. One was that I had tried to do my best but realized I had sometimes made the president uncomfortable . In particular, I’d pushed for a higher defense budget, as he notes in his book White House Diary, when that was politically difficult. My other comment was that when I came into office I understood in my head that the military capability of the country depended explicitly on its economic strength. After four years as defense secretary, I knew it in my gut. I feel it even more strongly now. Our ability to defend or intervene in conflicts depends on funding and efficiently providing for the specific needs of the various parts of the military, including their equipment , training, and readiness and force structure. Our fiscal constraints ensure that the future push-pull over funding will be harder than in previous decades. Participants in that ongoing tug-of-war will be the military services, current or competing contractors, technology advocates, local interests connected with bases or contractors, and all of their political representatives or supporters. Our domestic budget and its priorities are one overarching concern. The other, whose resolution should shape the outcome of those debates, is the concept of America’s place in the world and the role we want to play. 184  |  That Banner Yet Waves Too seldom do we ask ourselves how much of a commitment we are willing to make to the internal affairs of other countries or to their defense, how much it will cost, and the probability of various outcomes. The sudden changes in the arc from North Africa to Afghanistan and Pakistan surprised policymakers. This suggests that our state of knowledge is insufficient to inspire confidence about most prospective interventions there. A cautious and light hand is the logical inference. Recent history provides a lesson: Iraq didn’t come out as the George W. Bush administration intended. Whatever problems the U.S. military had in nation building, contractors now under State Department management will have them, too. In fact, contractors have less discipline and fewer skills than the military , or in the case of ex-military contractors, the same skills. And State has less experience dealing with contractors than Defense does. important considerations concerning nation building As a nation, we vacillate in our attitude toward nation building. George W. Bush came into office saying “no more nation building.” Yet he justified intervention in Iraq partly on the notion that we were going to help build a democratic society there. Nation building has poor prospects of success in a recalcitrant society. Even in Haiti, a nation eager to be tutored by the United States, we’re finding it difficult to build a society as a humanitarian gesture. Of course, trying to support local governments and shore up weak ones depends on America having a domestic economy healthy enough to use economic instruments, including foreign aid. How much money can we afford to spend as a humanitarian peacemaker and nation builder as our own nation climbs out of its current slow growth and long-term fiscal austerity? How many of the world’s problems are we going to aspire to solve? How likely are we to succeed? How many American soldiers will we put in harm’s way trying to solve the world’s problems? Sometimes we should act, but we need to weigh each case carefully. The United States recently committed to a dozen more years of nation building in Afghanistan. My view is that we’re unlikely to succeed, and we need to limit that effort there, partly because its economic cost inflicts pain on the United States and partly because neither our military nor the That Banner Yet Waves  |  185 rest of the U.S. government has that capability. By contrast, after World War II the army was full of people who had been municipal officers and engineers in civilian life. I don’t recommend training any substantial segment of our regular military force personnel for nation building. Rather, we could consider using some of...