The American Warfare State

The Domestic Politics of Military Spending

Rebecca U. Thorpe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226124100
• Thema: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Thema: Politica

How is it that the United States—a country founded on a distrust of standing armies and strong centralized power—came to have the most powerful military in history? Long after World War II and the end of the Cold War, in times of rising national debt and reduced need for high levels of military readiness, why does Congress still continue to support massive defense budgets?
In The American Warfare State, Rebecca U. Thorpe argues that there are profound relationships among the size and persistence of the American military complex, the growth in presidential power to launch military actions, and the decline of congressional willingness to check this power. The public costs of military mobilization and war, including the need for conscription and higher tax rates, served as political constraints on warfare for most of American history. But the vast defense industry that emerged from World War II also created new political interests that the framers of the Constitution did not anticipate. Many rural and semirural areas became economically reliant on defense-sector jobs and capital, which gave the legislators representing them powerful incentives to press for ongoing defense spending regardless of national security circumstances or goals. At the same time, the costs of war are now borne overwhelmingly by a minority of soldiers who volunteer to fight, future generations of taxpayers, and foreign populations in whose lands wars often take place.
Drawing on an impressive cache of data, Thorpe reveals how this new incentive structure has profoundly reshaped the balance of wartime powers between Congress and the president, resulting in a defense industry perennially poised for war and an executive branch that enjoys unprecedented discretion to take military action.

I

THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

1

INTRODUCTION: PERPETUATING THE US MILITARY ECONOMY

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

—James Madison, “Political Observations,” April 20, 1795

[Our country] will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

—George Washington, 1796 Farewell Address

One hundred fifty years after George Washington and James Madison warned of overgrown military establishments and perpetual warfare, the United States faced the ascent of Nazi Germany and Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor, followed by the rise of the Soviet empire. To confront these perils, the nation embraced full-scale military mobilization. Yet, after each specific threat ebbed and receded, policymakers advanced new rationales to maintain military readiness. For the first time in the nation’s history, congresses consistently supported large defense budgets, despite US withdrawal from specific wars, growing national debt obligations, and periods of severe fiscal crisis. While a “sequestration” was designed to reduce defense spending by about $1 trillion over a decade (compared to what was expected), the proposed cuts would preserve more than $500 billion in annual military funding even if they are fully implemented—roughly the same amount that Congress spent on the military after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and at the height of the Cold War. Despite pervasive concerns about deficits and unnecessary wars, Congress continued to provide as much as $700 billion for the military each year (with a pending $500-billion floor)—more, in adjusted dollars, than any time since World War II and as much as the rest of the world combined.

These patterns of defense spending are not only historically unparalleled; they are also historical accidents. At the time of the constitutional founding, James Madison and his Federalist allies designed political institutions to guard against a permanent military establishment. The founders feared that large, peacetime armies would burden the citizenry with excessive taxation, military service requirements, and lost productivity while empowering the president to commit the nation to war for arbitrary or self-serving reasons. The Constitution’s opponents feared worse, given the familiar tendency of British kings to use armies as a means of political oppression. To prevent these outcomes, the framers created a regime of limited powers that divides military authority among separate governing departments. Most critically, the framers gave the power to raise armies, fund them, and declare war with Congress. Since members of Congress would be responsive to local voters, who would serve in the armed forces and pay a heavier tax burden, they assumed that the legislature could check any expansionist inclinations a president might hold. For most of the nation’s history, Congress heeded these expectations by mobilizing the military in preparation for specific wars and withdrawing military spending after the war was over. However, the rise of a permanent military industry during and after World War II disrupted these historical patterns.

The fundamental puzzle that this research will address is why a nation founded on a severe distrust of standing armies and centralized power developed and maintained the most powerful military in history. I argue that the shift occurred not only as a response to national security concerns, but also because World War II military mobilization extended benefits widely, while federal policies systematically shifted the immediate costs of war and war spending onto discrete political minorities and foreign populations. New evidence suggests that the economic importance of the military industry for core geographic constituencies encourages members of Congress to press for ongoing defense spending regardless of their national security goals. These members enjoy strong political support and encounter little sustained opposition, because US power projection promotes widely shared political and economic interests without directly imposing on most Americans’ lives or livelihoods. As a consequence, legislators’ heightened interests in defense spending furnish presidents with the resources necessary to exercise military force independently. A permanent military industry and an increasingly independent executive developed and persist less by coordinated design, executive fiat, or legislative withdrawal than as a byproduct of various institutional actors seeking their own independent goals.

Taking stock of the nation’s economic transformations, in 1961 President Eisenhower warned of a military-industrial complex. He acknowledged the need for a weapons industry for victory in World War II and to counter Soviet influence, but feared that the allure of economic profit and military supremacy would promote excessive defense spending, which could threaten American democracy and mortgage the assets of future generations. Scholars widely disagree about whether Eisenhower’s message was extraordinarily prescient or ultimately overstated. However, while debates about the motivations driving defense budgets rage, they eclipse related questions about how a permanent defense establishment deviates from the designs of the constitutional framers, alters congressional incentives, and expands the scope of executive military powers. In this book, I attempt to reconcile earlier disputes and address these omissions.

While the military-industrial complex promotes the excessive levels of military spending that Eisenhower feared, his reasoning was not sufficiently nuanced to explain congressional defense spending systematically. Although many case studies have documented legislators’ aggressive support for weapons programs built in their states and districts, most quantitative research suggests that the economic benefits that flow from defense activity do not influence members’ support for military spending systematically, or in more than a handful of cases. However, by accounting for local economic reliance on the military industry, I show powerful interests in continued defense spending among a critical subset of Congress members that previous scholars have missed.

Earlier studies may have understated political influences in defense spending for several reasons. Previous studies generally assume that defense funds are equally important across states and districts with the infrastructure to receive them. Unlike previous work, I argue that districts with less diverse economies are disproportionately reliant on the defense dollars they receive. More economically homogenous areas depend on existing defense infrastructure more than industrially diverse areas with an equal defense-sector presence. Representatives’ political motivations are not shaped merely by the presence of defense facilities, but are also influenced by the centrality of the defense industry to the overall local economy.

Previous research is also limited by a lack of available information on the industries that bid for weapons contracts, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or Raytheon. The weapons industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue annually and employs millions of Americans.¹ Accounting for privately owned companies engaged in weapons development paints a more complete picture of the overall defense economy than military bases, airfields, and naval yards alone. Political scientists have largely neglected defense industries because data on private corporations are not readily available, and most employment information related to defense contracting is classified. I compiled an original dataset identifying the locations of leading defense industries across states and congressional districts to overcome this obstacle.

Earlier researchers also lacked access to reliable data on subcontracting. While prime contracts typically go to areas with defense industry headquarters, defense contractors enjoy wide discretion in distributing assignments and selecting suppliers for parts or technical services for weapons programs. In fact, researchers have speculated that subcontracts are deliberately dispersed as widely as possible in order to attract political support for weapons programs.² To examine this theory systematically, I used the Federal Procurement Data System and Geographic Information System software to track defense contracts to the secondary level of distribution, where most defense funds eventually go.

The data suggest that the military industry is at least as integral to the economic landscape in the early twenty-first century as when Eisenhower delivered his warning. Military spending is higher than it was at the height of the Cold War, despite the absence of any comparable enemy investment. While the geographic scope of the national military mobilization in World War II was already extensive, defense dollars are also more widely dispersed. Defense contracts and subcontracts not only flow to every state and a preponderance of congressional districts, but also have systematically spread into more rural and semirural areas where defense jobs account for disproportionate levels of local jobs and revenue. Excessive economic vulnerabilities in areas with a large proportion of defense facilities relative to other industries encourage legislators to press for continued military spending and prioritize defense-sector growth.

Legislators’ interests in perpetuating the military economy not only promote inefficient and unnecessary spending, but also undermine Congress’s budgetary control over the military. Just as congresses have provided ongoing defense resources available for mobilization at any time, the use of military force abroad has also become more frequent and less controversial. Since President Truman sold the 1950 Korean War as a “police action,” using a semantic maneuver to explain the absence of a congressional declaration of war, presidents have directed hundreds of bombings, air strikes, and troop commitments and overseen scores of covert operations without congressional authorization or public debate. Although legislators periodically voice opposition when a war becomes unpopular, Congress provides an uninterrupted source of funding.

Most contemporary observers agree that the balance of war power has shifted decisively in favor of the executive branch.³ Yet, existing accounts do not fully appreciate why the Constitution’s structural safeguards failed to prevent the consolidation of power or minimize war. While scholars offer different interpretations conveying varying degrees of alarm, they often focus on a brief time period—typically looking no further back than fifty or sixty years—as they seek to identify key changes that disrupted the once-stable system of institutional checks and balances governing US military affairs and facilitated the rise of an “imperial” president.⁴ The various explanations—a heightened security environment, legislative atrophy, executive initiative, changes in political culture, expansive constitutional interpretations of executive power—either fail to apply consistently throughout the post–World War II era or fail to account for historical variations during earlier periods of development.

While crises and threats to national security certainly motivate heightened defense spending and contribute to the growth of executive power, these explanations paint only a partial picture. Of course, the Soviet threat that fueled the Cold War and the attacks of September 11, 2001, that gave rise to a “war on terrorism” each dramatically altered the course of US foreign policy and military readiness. However, these national security threats cannot explain why Congress failed to eliminate a single weapon-production line after the fall of the Soviet Union, despite testimony from secretaries of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and presidents that many of these weapons programs were no longer necessary.⁵ Nor can they explain why the State Department’s entire budget includes only 7 percent of the level of funding in the Department of Defense (DoD) budget, regardless of the ongoing need for international diplomacy and for reconstruction and stabilization assistance after periods of military conflict.⁶

At the same time, a heightened security environment alone cannot fully account for the growth of executive military powers. For example, national security crises fail to explain the leeway granted to presidents during periods of reduced threat, such as when President George H. W. Bush deployed troops in Somalia and President Clinton directed air strikes and committed ground troops in Haiti, Bosnia, and KOSOVO without permission from Congress. Furthermore, while scholars and popular media have documented patterns of legislative weakness in military affairs in recent years, they cannot explain why eighteenth- and nineteenth-century congresses were so much less compliant and presidents so much more deferential. Although the United States was never a pacifist nation, presidents routinely sought congressional cooperation for major military operations throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The rise of a permanent military industry helps explain the earlier pattern and the subsequent shift. For most of the nation’s history, Congress exercised tight budgetary control over the defense resources at the president’s disposal, which limited the president’s ability to act independently in military affairs. However, by maintaining large defense budgets and refusing to restrict funding in order to limit ongoing military operations, Congress equips the president with ample resources to carry out his military policies. To gauge the level of budgetary discretion that Congress has historically provided for the military, figure 1.1 displays annual military appropriations from 1789 to 2010, with total federal spending included for a baseline comparison. These amounts are adjusted for inflation and are expressed in constant 2006 dollars.

Clearly, the unprecedented size and upward trajectory of the military budget since World War II reveals a striking contrast from previous eras. In fact, the increase in scale is so dramatic that the figure eclipses variations in military spending in earlier periods of development. To uncover some of this historical variation, figures 1.2–1.3 exhibit military and federal spending from 1789 to 1899 and from 1900 to 2010, respectively (in constant 2006 dollars).

Reduced to scale, it is immediately evident that for most of American history Congress mobilized forces during preparations for specific wars but sharply cut military spending following the termination of hostilities. Military spending exhibits relative peaks followed by prolonged troughs in the nineteenth century, even though the Civil War contributed to m...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part I. Theoretical and Historical Overview
• Part II. World War II and the Politics of Defense Spending
• Part III. You and Whose Army? Expansive Presidential War Powers
• Appendixes
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Series List