In the seat of American power, power spends most of its time on its seat. That is because, as Henry Kissinger had once observed, the greatest force at work in America’s capital is inertia.
It handily trumps partisanship and also leaves the more positive drivers of action that one may hope for in a government — such as leadership, creativity, or moral courage — coughing and wheezing in the dust.
One clear, compelling illustration of this is on display in this issue of Foreign Policy. Shawn Brimley and Paul Scharre’s thoughtful and thought-provoking visual feature, Ctrl+Alt+Delete: Resetting the US Military, asks the sensible question: What would the military look like if we were to design it today from scratch? Certainly, the piece observes, the military would not include the breathtaking redundancies, efficiency-killing bureaucracy and obsolete systems of today’s bloated defence apparatus. You might disagree with the feature’s conclusions about what a right-sized, technologically up-to-date, doctrinally sound military, conceived and prepared to ensure America’s safety and worldwide interests, might look like. However, it is impossible not to conclude that the feature’s call to debate what the military should look like and then implement the agreed-upon changes makes sense.
It makes economic sense because the US spends more on defence than all other major powers combined — even though very nearly, all of them are America’s allies. It makes national security sense because the threats America faces are changing and because emerging powers are not the slaves to legacy systems that the US is. It makes political sense because such a reform process is the very essence of good governance and will free up resources for endeavours that can help broader cross-sections of the American population.
Yet, the one thing that we know about this idea is that it is never going to happen.
That is because it will require the kind of far-reaching change that the government is terrible at achieving. It will involve confronting moneyed, entrenched interests in the private sector as well as the Pentagon, which kills ideas that threaten its core programmes more efficiently than it does any foreign enemy. This is the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about as he prepared to leave office — except today it is bigger and more powerful than it has ever been.
This does not mean, of course, that there are no hugely creative military leaders who have contemplated just the kind of changes that are needed. In Washington, however, strength lies with the opponents rather than the proponents of change. And the opponents possess the ultimate political weapon of mass destruction: They can accuse leaders who want to challenge the status quo of making America weak. So America is left with all the systems the country has accumulated to counter every post-Second World War defence challenge: Multiple air forces, multiple expeditionary forces, multiple cyber commands.
America cannot afford what it has. It does not need much of what it has. America is misallocating resources in precisely the same way as other nations that have historically made themselves vulnerable, both militarily and economically. Yet, any positive, proactive change will exist only on the margins until some crisis demands otherwise, while other supposed “innovations” will in fact just maintain things as they are and have always been.
Washington’s debilitating strain of sleeping sickness affects other parts of the government too. Indeed, the political system hates action more than nature abhors a vacuum. Both political parties will no doubt agree that the country cannot afford the retirement health-care system it has, even if they have different answers for how to fix the problem. Both parties also have to agree that it is in America’s interest to invest in highways and bridges in a meaningful way, which has not been done since the Dwight Eisenhower era. And both must acknowledge that having half the minority students in inner cities not graduating from high school is a formula for social catastrophe. Yet, all these issues remain largely unaddressed.
Even outside government, we have built massive apparatuses designed to assert that some issues are not issues at all, in order to protect the interests of a few. Climate change is one such issue: Enormous and indisputable, yet disregarded — thanks to political pressure from a well-funded alliance with an affinity for profit and an allergy to science. Inequality rivalling that of the Gilded Age is another issue, as is the country’s inability to create jobs for the middle class, because the rich use their influence to prioritise their interests above those of the rest. The US financial system, meanwhile, is corrupt to its core, but its leaders act with impunity — sometimes with the assistance of members of the government.
With each of these issues, the common sense that keeps a child from touching an open flame or playing in traffic will suggest that actions are urgently needed. But they are not and will not be forthcoming. In no small part, this is because America has given a handful of people disproportionate influence over elections. The Supreme Court’s recent McCutcheon decision, like Citizens United before it, enshrines the idea that money is speech — therefore, those with more money now have more say in the country’s national affairs. Americans have also institutionalised the right-left, no-compromise polarisation of the political system via gerrymandering and Capitol Hill customs. This has undercut reasoned debate and votes that could produce progress.
However, America’s inertia is caused by something else too. Call it superpower smugness. Or just call it complacency. It does not create, or even really demand, genuine change in America because things seem to be working well enough. America is the world’s richest and most powerful nation. When it has crises, it recovers from them. The country can make catastrophic errors of judgement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and absorb the costs and collateral damage to its national image. Furthermore, the private sector, for all its self-interested political behaviour, is infused with genius and a stunning capacity to reinvent itself. It has compensated time and again for Washington’s sloth and wilful ignorance.
So Americans have been numbed into believing that black is white, that a failing system is functioning, that they, alone among nations, are invulnerable to their own stupidity. If there were ever a flaw in a strategy for national security, this is surely the most pernicious. The only antidote is a healthy dose of courage to act first with good sense and second with a spirit for reform — not just within the military, but among average civilians as well.
— Washington Post
David Rothkopf is CEO and editor of the FP Group. His most recent book is Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.
