Arms and the Budget

March 14, 1960

What is the truth about national defense? Are we spending enough on it? Are we spending it on the right things? When the experts contradict each other, whom are we to believe? Shall we dismiss all the criticisms of our defense program as inspired merely by partisan politics? Shall we put our faith implicitly in the President’s judgment?

It is hard to find confident answers to all these questions. Few people can seriously believe that the President would deliberately mislead the American people on a question crucial to our very survival. But the question remains whether he himself correctly estimates all the military possibilities, or whether he has not been misled into unwarranted optimism or placidity. Certainly, even when we have made allowance for the criticism inspired by partisanship or a drive for bigger appropriations for someone’s pet project, we cannot dismiss all the criticism as either interested or uninformed. Too much of it has come from sources that compel respect, both for their motives and for their knowledge.

ERRORS INEVITABLE

Part of the problem arises because no one mind has all the answers. Because of military secrecy, few of us are in a position to know even our own war capabilities; yet military secrecy is indispensable. Even the experts often do not know precisely where they stand. Will their next test missile firing, for example, be a success? And if the difficulties of estimating even our own capabilities are so enormous, what is to be said about our ability to estimate correctly the capabilities of the Russians? As errors are inevitable, they should be on the side of overestimating Russia’s capabilities and underestimating our own.

The testimony of some of the experts is not reassuring. Oskar Morgenstern, in his recent book, The Question of National Defense, comes to the grim conclusion that “the probability of a large thermonuclear war occurring appears to be significantly larger than the probability of its not occurring.” More than a year ago Albert Wohlstetter, in a sobering article in Foreign Affairs (January 1959) on “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” underlined the crucial difference between the capability of striking by surprise and the capability of retaliating after being attacked between a “strike-first” and a “strike-second” capability. Deterrence is extremely difficult. It is not enough, but it is indispensable. “Almost everybody,” Wohlstetter added, “seems concerned with the need to relax tension. However, relaxation of tension, which everyone thinks is good, is not easily distinguished from relaxing one’s guard, which almost everyone thinks is bad. . . . To be tense where there is danger is only rational.”

NONDEFENSE WASTE

None of this means that we must simply surrender to the spenders and the inflationists. Defense is not measured by dollars spent but by weapons and safeguards provided. Suppose we find we ought to spend as much as $3 billion more on certain weapons in 1961. It by no means follows that we must add this to present total spending, or even to total military spending. New weapons nearly always make old weapons obsolete. Obsolete weapons and ways of spending can be discontinued. In any case, tremendous slashes are possible in nondefense spending, which is $13 billion higher for 1961 than it was in 1954.

It is an easy patriotism that demands higher defense spending financed by budget deficits. This is merely to advocate that defense should be paid for by the invisible but no less real tax known as inflation. It is almost as easy to demand higher total spending financed by higher taxes, and to say with seeming courage that “we” must make greater sacrifices. This glosses over the question of who is to make the sacrifices. Our present tax system rests on the principle that it is precisely the most productive persons in the community who must be penalized the most. This principle obviously slows down economic growth. How about asking those who receive heavy subsidies for not planting crops, say, or others with vested interests in government handouts, to make the sacrifices? Are some of those who loudly demand more spending on armaments courageous enough to slash nondefense waste?