Though not a frequent consumer of the National Review, I’m always on the prowl for new reading materials and happened upon the recent cover story by former Senator Jim Talent calling for a much larger defense budget—boosting the FY2007 budget by $34 billion and increasing the defense budget from 3.8% to 4% of GDP indefinitely—for modernizing and replacing equipment, new procurements, and expanding the armed forces. Possessing little knowledge of the procurement and readiness process, I found Talent’s case, steeped in budget figures and historical comparisons, to be somewhat compelling. Coincidently, on the date Talent’s piece was published, the Washington Post highlighted a paper studying how well the U.S. military is suited to modern warfare, also termed fourth-generation or asymmetrical warfare, which was recently presented to the American Political Science Association and soon to be presented at West Point.

It seems to me that Talent is arguing for more military spending to procure hardware and manpower but the findings of this recent paper, authored by Jason Lyall at Princeton University and Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson III at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, call into question this conventional assertion that more money means more military strength. Their recent paper actually finds an inverse relationship between the power of a nation and its ability to win asymmetrical wars. The Washington Post writes:

Essentially, what Lyall and Wilson are saying is that if you want to catch a mouse, you need a cat. If you hire a lion to do the job because it is bigger and stronger, the very strength and size of the lion can get in the way of getting the job done.
"A lion is built for different prey," Lyall said. "A lion is built to take down an antelope, and a cat is designed to take down a mouse. Now [in Iraq] we are a lion trying to take down a mouse.
"Mechanized armies are very poor at acquiring the kind of information you need to win against an insurgency. Mechanized armies need long supply trails. Soldiers go into their barracks and play Xbox. They patrol in armored vehicles. In the 19th century, armies lived off the land."
…
While the findings are of immediate interest because of the situation in Iraq, the social scientists are really trying to address a systemic issue: America has gotten stuck in the Hollywood notion that a military with ever more powerful armaments is a more effective military.
Reversing that view will be difficult because it calls into question the utility of giant defense projects, Lyall said. Also, the findings lend credence to the politically unpopular notion that successfully prosecuting an asymmetrical war, such as the one in Iraq, requires a large fighting force and, possibly, high casualties as troops asked to blend in with local populations become vulnerable targets for insurgents.

I think at this point an apt question to examine what will yield more security deliverables and restructure our defense spending process around the answers. If the ultimate purpose is providing national security and the conventional approach is not working, before we raise the defense budget to 4% of GDP, it’s worth exploring how the money could be better spent both inside and outside the DOD.

If we’re entering a period where we’re more likely to encounter 4th generation/ asymmetrical warfare then it may require a litheness of force deployments that may not be well served by heavy armored vehicles. There also seems to be a serious concern over our intelligence gathering capacities which might be a sounder investment.

For example, The McKinsey Quarterly published a piece (password required) in late 2003 on the changing nature of defense and how it might threaten and encounter resistance within the traditional defense industry because necessary future procurements adapted to modern warfare reduces demand for their large-scale high-profit hardware products and opens the door to competition from nimbler specialist contractors threatens.

The challenge that less expensive technologies pose to more expensive ones clearly parallels earlier developments in enterprise computing, where distributed networks of lower-cost servers and storage devices replaced mainframe-based systems…

…Defense transformation requires a dramatic shift in priorities from military hardware to software and systems. It also places a premium on joint weapons development and on their deployment across branches of the armed forces. While both of these shifts are possible, the unique economic and organizational models that define collaboration between the industry and the Department of Defense are working against them…

…Large-scale contracts for platform and parts production have traditionally generated the greatest profits. As a result, the major players have built their businesses on hardware — aircraft, ground vehicles, ships, weapons such as bombs and missiles, and sensors such as radar and electro-optical systems — and the most attractive R&D investments are those tied to a production "tail."

Transformational change threatens to disrupt this economic ecosystem.

Increased intelligence will reduce the mass of the force structure by an order of magnitude, slashing demand for many legacy products that have been the backbone of the industry. As hardware declines in importance, the software and communications systems needed to enhance platforms and knit together networks will take on ever-greater importance. New competitive dynamics will emerge in response. But unless the return economics between the military and the contractors adjust to compensate for the new mix of investment, it will be difficult for the industry to fully deliver what the military needs.

Certainly the U.S. will need to step up spending to rebuild the military both in terms of forces and equipment after the Iraq war, but this affords the US military an opportunity to reconstitute itself differently adapting to the needs of modern warfare.

My limited knowledge of this field precludes me from making these broader judgments but it seems that calls for a vast expansion in defense spending, like Senator Talent’s, without accounting for these new contingencies that reshape our security landscape are simply inadequate.