Editor’s note: Big Tent Ideas always aims to provide a balanced perspective on the hottest issues of the day. The following is part one of a series of columns presenting Chuck DeVore’s analysis of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy. You can find the rebuttal here. This was originally published in IM—1776, Erik Prince will present his analysis of US foreign policy at that time.
On May 2, Erik Prince published a lengthy 4,600-word op-ed in the Daily Caller titled “Neocons Nearly Killed America. How Patriots Can Fix It,” which leaves a lot to be interpreted. I’ll address Prince’s three points in two parts. I’ll start with what there is some agreement on: that US foreign policy since the Cold War has been a disaster and that US military spending is wildly inefficient.
As for Prince’s third point, that failures in U.S. foreign policy have driven Russia into China’s bosom, I will save my response for the second. (Related: Morgan Murphy: Double America’s Navy)
Prince’s initiative is ambitious and has much to recommend it, and looking more closely one could reasonably credit Prince for posting a .400 batting average, .400 better than the Washington defense and foreign policy elite he is criticizing.
But before we can recommend a solution, we first need to correctly identify the cause of the problem, and this is where Prince’s analysis falls short.
Prince cites the failure of American military interventions since the end of the Cold War in 1991. He correctly points out that the main cause of failure was the emphasis on nation-building.
Instead, he says that military intervention, to the extent it should be used, should take the form of a punitive expedition — in other words, go in, kill whoever needs to be killed, and leave smoking rubble behind as a warning to other countries to stay away from America. I agree.
If we had done this in Afghanistan after 9/11, and in Iraq, where we violated UN resolutions that put the lives of American service members at risk, America could have saved thousands of service members’ lives and limbs, and about $3 trillion, perhaps half of which could have been used to modernize our military to more effectively deter the People’s Republic of China.
However, in his criticism of American intervention after the Cold War, Prince mistakenly blames a series of failures on the “neocons” – a group of foreign policy practitioners and theorists who were once successful but have since largely disappeared from the scene.
In the late Cold War, the term neoconservative referred to Democratic Party staffers who were anti-Soviet but liberal on domestic policy. As the Democratic Party shifted leftward in the 1970s, the neocons lost most of their political base, but several joined the Reagan administration. Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle were two of the more prominent neocons, and I had the privilege of working with Perle when I was a young appointee to the Pentagon in the Reagan administration.
But the impulse to build a nation, to see the world in moral terms rather than in accordance with the hard truths of its cultural, historical and geographical realities, is a temptation that America has resisted since long before the post-Cold War era.
That is why in 1821, President John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State, spoke before the U.S. House of Representatives, warning that America should not “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” but rather be “the champion and defender of our own country alone,” and “the desirer of liberty and independence for all.” Adams knew full well that a nation founded on the principles of liberty would face a strong moral impulse to intervene abroad to destroy monsters.
Woodrow Wilson’s creation of the League of Nations and his efforts to enshrine it in the Treaty of Versailles is a clear example of what has become known as a “Wilsonian” approach to foreign policy. Understanding that America is a country founded on the principle that government exists to protect rights, not simply on blood and soil, it will naturally tend to view world affairs through this moral lens is an important factor for policymakers to consider.
Nearly 80 years after Wilson’s utopian mistake sparked World War II, President Bill Clinton steered the United States toward the hyper-interventionism that has characterized U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War. Rather than viewing the military as the best insurance against war, the Clinton administration saw it as just another, and expensive, part of government from which some tangible value should be derived.
Symbolic of this was the exchange between then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell in 1993 over whether to authorize US air strikes during the Balkan crisis, in which General Powell opposed air strikes and suggested that the US should not use military force until a clear political objective was articulated.
Albright responded:What’s the point of having this great military you always talk about if you can’t use it?“I thought I was going to have an aneurysm,” Powell later wrote.
It was during China’s intervention in the Balkans that the United States mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. During a visit to Serbia in May, Xi Jinping, China’s top Communist Party leader, said:Never Forget“Since that mistaken bombing, the Chinese embassy has been occupying the building that was once the military logistics headquarters of the former Yugoslavia.”
Some analysts have argued that the bombing served as a wake-up call for China, sparking military modernization and a more assertive foreign policy.
Matt Pottinger, a former Marine who served as President Donald Trump’s vice national security adviser, Observed“Most Americans don’t realize it, but leaders who have not served in the military tend to be more hawkish than leaders who have.”
It is easy to understand how those trained in the Ivy League to be the foreign policy clergy would come to almost unanimously view the military and those who serve in it not as a theoretical deterrent but as an unsavory tool useful in reshaping the world to fit their vision.
So while Prince is right about America’s failed interventions, he is wrong to blame that costly mistake on the oft-accused “neocons.” Rather, a foreign policy driven by moralism is written into our national DNA, creating a bias toward intervention that must be curbed. Thus, the best and most easily sustained foreign policy — one that is supported by the American people — is one that blends a clear understanding of the national interest with a moral foundation.
The second major point Prince made in his essay was his call for a more competitive and efficient military procurement process and his advocacy for private sector solutions, some of which Prince himself could benefit from as a leader in private military services contractors.
Once again, Prince is half right.
Prince accuses the defense industry of selling expensive weapons and profiting from war — a charge as old as the military itself — but the U.S. defense industry is not particularly profitable.
In the first quarter of 2024, SCI MarketThe defense industry ranks 67th with an average trailing 12-month pretax net profit margin of 4.37%.Number Competition between the sectors is intensifying. Even at the peak of defense spending during the Reagan administration in 1986-87, aerospace companies Lower than average return on equity Among all industry groups.
The defense industry underwent a painful wave of consolidation and downsizing with the end of the Cold War, accelerating a process that began in 1987 when Democrats assumed a majority in the U.S. after the 1986 midterm elections. By 1998, the defense sector was downsizing. 2 million workers, 1,000 jobs lost per day for a certain period.
In 1993, President Clinton’s new Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, gathered the nation’s major defense contractors at a dinner that came to be known as “The Last Supper” and told them that defense spending was going to continue to decline, the pace was accelerating, and that industry would have to consolidate more aggressively to survive.
The industry has taken this advice to heart, and today the U.S. is mired in a duopoly, or monopoly purchasing, serving a single buyer for most major weapons projects, leading to an inefficient system.
Adding to the challenge are layers of rules and regulations designed to prevent fraud and protect taxpayers, rules that have accumulated like barnacles since the Civil War. Still, Defense Department procurements are not among the most prone government projects to delays and cost overruns.
Have you heard of Boston’s Big Dig? California’s high-speed rail? How about the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center?
Most agree that the Defense Department’s procurement system is plagued by a massive bureaucracy that’s more adept at paperwork than it is at weapons, but the bulk of the cost overruns are the result of adding new requirements to the systems being procured.
Sometimes this happens after more information is available as the new technology matures, but sometimes program proponents collude with contractors to offer a bare-bones program at a low cost in order to gain initial approval. This often results in a significant reduction in the quantity of systems ordered, making the systems appear to cost much more than they actually do, when amortized to R&D expenses.
It is unlikely that non-defense contractors would be treated better under the current system, and if brilliant innovators like Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey were allowed to operate outside the Pentagon’s elaborate system of reporting and regulations, you can be sure that lobbyists, members of Congress, and the corporate media would quickly accuse them of fraud, corruption, and war profiteering.
What the Department of Defense needs is a major overhaul of its procurement processes that will welcome new entrants into the field while also benefiting agile incumbents that can understand the new rules. Thus, private sector solutions are needed within the Department of Defense, one of the largest procurement agencies in the world.
Moreover, the Pentagon’s inertia needs to be completely reversed. Weapons, training, doctrine, and force structure are not instruments in themselves. America’s massive debt and hollowed-out military-industrial complex mean that every dollar, every weapon, and every service member must be optimized to meet a threat, and that threat must be properly identified and defined. Nothing else matters.
There are too many generals leading a shrinking military. Raise their salaries and get rid of the hierarchical system. America needs warriors in uniform, not bureaucrats and social justice types.
Erik Prince’s ideas on military and foreign policy reform are a welcome and long-overdue addition to a debate. At a time when the People’s Republic of China and its allies and proxies — Russia, North Korea, and Iran — seek to undermine U.S. national security, we need a vigorous and serious debate about how to best protect our interests while maintaining peace and prosperity.
Chuck DeVore is Chief of State Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He served in the California State Assembly and currently serves as a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. He is the author of “Crisis of the House Never United.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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