by CKR
A couple of things have been bothering me lately, and, although it goes against my nature, wise people in my life have urged me to ask the dumb questions. So here goes. There are people out there (like the Armchair Generalist) who know much more about military matters than I do, and people (like nadezhda) who are probably better strategists, along with the many, many people who know more about the Middle East than I do. So please chime in if you can enlighten me.
Dumb Question 1. Why wasn’t more said before the Iraq war about how Iraq’s power in the region balanced Iran’s?
It’s possible I missed hearing the many people who were saying this. But I don’t recall it, and I think its obviousness would have struck me. It was the basis of that famous Rumsfeld-Hussein handshake during the war between Iraq and Iran for dominance in the region. The photo showed up, but I don’t recall this particular commentary.
Now it seems to me that if two nations are duking it out for dominance in the region, and you take one of them out, the other one wins. But I just don’t recall hearing this as a possible consequence of war against Iraq.
Dumb Question 2. The United States spends more than all other nations in the world on “defense.” The fiscal 2005 “base budget” was $401.5 billion dollars, and that doesn’t include the supplemental appropriation for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Department of Defense employs 2.3 million military and almost 700,000 civilians. Why is the military currently “overstretched”?
You might think that someone dumb enough to ask these questions would also be dumb enough to try to figure out the DoD budget, but I’ve tried that before, so I won’t do it now.
Today’s Los Angeles Times gives the cost of cleaning dioxins from the Hudson River as more than $700 million. This is an area I know a bit more about, and that number sounds about right. An environmental cleanup is not unlike a military operation: it requires big machines and the people to operate them, along with moving a lot of stuff around. It’s different in that nobody is shooting at anybody else, and not much of the equipment is particularly high-tech.
For the Defense Department’s budget (not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), you could clean up the Hudson River 573 times. There are other calculations of what you could do with the war money.
There are 130,000 or so military in Iraq, probably another 100,000 contractors carrying guns (some might call them mercenaries in our pay), and the “surge” will consist of an additional 21,500 military.
I don’t know whether the 2.3 million military includes the Guard and the Reserves, but I’m sure it doesn’t include the mercenaries. If we subtract, say, 150,000 military in Iraq from that 2.3 million, we get 2.15 million. So the people we have in Iraq are a drop in the military bucket, even if you count mercenaries, which the DoD doesn’t. There are more in Afghanistan, but I can’t easily find how many. Certainly the number must be less than in Iraq.
Dumb Sub-question. Where are those other two million military?
I know that some are in Djbouti and may have been bombing Somalia. (OT dumb question: Are they authorized to do that?) Some are in Europe, some in South Korea, some in Kazakhstan, and some floating around the globe in navy ships and nuclear submarines.
Moving along to money, however. If we divide that $401.7 billion by the three million employees, we get $134,000 per employee. This is a much smaller number than I expected. It doesn’t mean anything, because that isn’t the way it’s divided, but I wanted to get a number closer to magnitudes I have some feeling for. It’s significantly less than the cost of an employee in a national laboratory or the research parts of the oil industry, about the salaries (not including benefits) that have been reported for the mercenaries that the DoD contracts. And it includes the cost of tanks, humvees, night vision goggles, B-2 bombers, and vastly overpriced toilet seats along with salaries and benefits.
Some of the big-ticket items are off-budget or are included in other places than the DoD budget. I think that missile defense ($10 billion a year or so) is accounted separately, and I know that the nuclear weapons budget is under the Department of Energy. So they don’t show up in that $134,000 per employee.
But perhaps this skinny per-employee number is an indicator of why the military seems overstretched and why it’s taken so long to armor the humvees. That, along with bombing Somalia, riding horses in Mongolia (article in the Atlantic about a year ago on that), and the population of the Pentagon.
I’m leading up to what’s really bothering me today. Richard Perle is upping the neocon roar about bombing Iran. Joshua Muravchik was remarkably forthcoming about those ambitions in a November LA Times op-ed.
WE MUST bomb Iran.The MSM are paralyzed in the face of what seems an absurdity. Sy Hersh is the only reporter in that distinguished company who believes it might happen. (My reactions to his articles here and here.)
I think the paralysis comes from the sheer craziness of an attack on Iran: rationality says that the military is overstretched, the troops in Iraq are vulnerable to action by Iran, Iran has Hizbollah to wreak damage elsewhere, and, if the strike is nuclear, the US (or Israel) would be the first in history to escalate the dicey doctrine of preventive warfare to that level. So no rational person would do such a thing. It’s unthinkable.
We can also consider the recent elections in Iran and statements of the mullahs that seem to indicate that President Ahmadinejad is in trouble at home. It could make sense to exploit that split or at least to see what happens. And, just as a reminder, although there are aspects to Iran’s nuclear program that seem to point in the direction of nuclear weapons, it’s likely three years or more before they could have one. The motivation for an attack seems slight.
Herman Kahn responded creatively to nuclear war by Thinking the Unthinkable. It’s what creative thinkers do. President Bush fancies himself a creative thinker rearranging the Middle East. He and Vice President Cheney have escalated the crazy-Nixon strategy to a point where many of us find it easy to imagine that they would indeed order a strike on Iran, nuclear or not.
I recall thinking in 2002 that war with Iraq was so crazy as to be unthinkable. Fighting house-to-house in Baghdad would be the military’s worst nightmare, remember? Now exactly that is being proposed as the solution to Iraq’s problems.
Two US aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, six minesweepers both US and British. Continuing threats from President Bush and actions against Iranians in Iraq. At some point, sword-rattling can produce a provocation, and that provocation can turn into war.
Echoes of Iraq in 2003. Echoes of Tonkin Gulf and Cambodia.
There are many ways to deal with Iran short of war, even if it is guilty of everything the neocons charge. The president says he’s not interested in war in Iran, although, as with his claim that the United States doesn't torture, we might ask for some definitions.
The “Dr. Strangelove” scenario we worried about in the 1960s, when we feared that renegade military commanders would provoke a war with the Soviet Union, is now reversed: we must hope that our military commanders will convince the president that war with Iran would be a disaster for the United States. Or are demonstrations in the streets the answer? (Christian Science Monitor, WaPo)
Views from
Gary Sick, Council on Foreign Relations