AEI would print money for the Pentagon if it could

The American Enterprise Institute has officially entered the competition for which establishment DC think tank can come up with the most tortured argument for increasing America’s already enormous Pentagon budget.

Its angle — presented in a new report written by Elaine McCusker and Fred "Iraq Surge" Kagan — is that a Russian victory in Ukraine will require over $800 billion in additional dollars over five years for the Defense Department, whose budget is already poised to push past $1 trillion per year.

Before addressing the Ukraine conflict directly, it’s worth looking at the security outcomes of high Pentagon spending during this century. As the Costs of War Project at Brown University has found, the full costs of America’s post-9/11 wars exceed $8 trillion. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people have died, millions have been driven from their homes, thousands of U.S. personnel have died in combat, and hundreds of thousands of vets have suffered physical or psychological injuries. And this huge cost in blood and treasure came in conflicts that not only failed to achieve their original objectives but actually left the target nations less stable and helped create conditions that made it easier for terrorist groups like ISIS to form.

Any call for ratcheting up Pentagon spending needs to reckon with this record of abject failure for a military first, “peace through strength” foreign policy. The new AEI report fails to do so.

As for its central thesis — that a Russian victory in Ukraine will require a sharp upsurge in Pentagon spending — neither part of the argument holds up to scrutiny.

Russia’s performance in Ukraine makes it abundantly clear that Moscow’s armed forces are deeply flawed. They are in a stalemate with a much smaller neighboring country that has parlayed superior morale and an infusion of U.S. and European weaponry into a fighting force that can hold its own against Russia’s much larger military. The only prospect for a Russian victory would be a long war of attrition in which Moscow’s advantages in population and arms production “win” the day.

But even a prolonged war is unlikely to result in total military victory for a Russia, and governing whatever portions of Ukraine it might control will be extremely costly, both economically and in terms of personnel. As a result, even if Moscow were to eventually win a Pyrrhic victory in Ukraine, it would be in no position to take on the 31 member NATO alliance. And it is long past time for our European allies to finally build a coherent military force that can defend its territory without a major U.S. supporting role.

The AEI report is wildly out of touch with current realities, which are tilting towards an approach that would pair continued support for Ukraine’s defensive capabilities with the beginnings of diplomatic track, an approach my colleagues at the Quincy Institute have been advocating since early in the conflict.

We are confronted with an almost mystical belief in official Washington that the first answer to any tough security problem is to increase Pentagon spending and spin out scenarios for addressing a potential war, rather than crafting a strategy in which preventing or ending wars takes precedence.

A cold, hard look at the wars of this century definitively shows that a military first foreign policy is a fool’s errand that does far more harm than good. How long will the American public sit still for this misguided, immensely costly conventional wisdom?

It’s long past time to take a fresh look at America’s military spending and strategy. Unfortunately, the new AEI report does little to reckon with the actual challenges we face.