Thursday, December 25, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
The Situation in Greece: Update
This article in today's Guardian provides some additional, useful background to, and clarification of, the events in Greece I have been following on this blog.
Some interesting points the article raises:
*The Greek police are running out of tear gas, and contacting Israel and Germany for fresh stocks, a testament to the scale and length of the clashes-or, depending on how you look at it, how unprepared the authorities were for a situation like this.
*The recent police shooting of a fifteen year-old youth was not a unique occurrence, but only unique in that the victim was an ethnic Greek, rather than an immigrant or Roma, whose deaths "do not make the media." Additionally, the scene of the shooting has long been "aggressively policed."
*While some have drawn attention to the strength of the "extreme left in the country," as the spokesman for the French Interior Ministry put it in a statement that much of the media has been quick to quote, it would be a mistake to overlook the strength of the extreme right. As the article notes, "the populist Orthodox Rally won 10 seats in parliament for the first time last year, and the neo-fascist Golden Dawn organisation is known to have supporters inside the police."
As the article also notes:
Some interesting points the article raises:
*The Greek police are running out of tear gas, and contacting Israel and Germany for fresh stocks, a testament to the scale and length of the clashes-or, depending on how you look at it, how unprepared the authorities were for a situation like this.
*The recent police shooting of a fifteen year-old youth was not a unique occurrence, but only unique in that the victim was an ethnic Greek, rather than an immigrant or Roma, whose deaths "do not make the media." Additionally, the scene of the shooting has long been "aggressively policed."
*While some have drawn attention to the strength of the "extreme left in the country," as the spokesman for the French Interior Ministry put it in a statement that much of the media has been quick to quote, it would be a mistake to overlook the strength of the extreme right. As the article notes, "the populist Orthodox Rally won 10 seats in parliament for the first time last year, and the neo-fascist Golden Dawn organisation is known to have supporters inside the police."
As the article also notes:
The teenagers and twenty-somethings who have come close to toppling the Greek government are not the marginalised: this is no replay of the riots that convulsed Paris in 2005. Many are sons and daughters of the middle classes, shocked at the killing of one of their own, disgusted with the government's incompetence and corruption, enraged by the broken promises of the education system, scared at the prospect of having to work still harder than their exhausted parents . . .That fact may not be comforting, but it would be a grave error to overlook it, especially because, as the sympathy for the protests has evoked in other countries demonstrates, Greece is far from being the only country in such a bind.
Anarchist groups dreaming of revolution played a key part in the first waves of destruction, but this week's protests were not orchestrated by the usual suspects, who relish a good bust-up and a whiff of teargas. There's been no siege of the American embassy, no blaming Bush, very few party slogans.
Though the spectacular violence has dominated the news, thousands have also set out to join in peaceful demonstrations, among them parents worried for their children's future. Linked by the internet, by twitter and text messages, many are trying to distance themselves from the destruction, which they attribute to "extremists, idiots and provocateurs."
Friday, December 12, 2008
The Return of the Russian Navy
While the plans for it got quite a bit of publicity a few months ago, it seems that the Russian-Venezuelan naval exercises (which included the participation of the Russian battle-cruiser Peter the Great) drew little attention when they actually took place at the start of the month.
Incidentally, the exercises were followed up by the Russian navy paying a visit to Nicaragua before heading east via the Panama Canal, the first time Russian warships have used the canal since 1944. Next up for the Peter the Great is a trip to the Indian Ocean, where it is to take part in exercises with the Indian navy and help in "maintaining a regular [Russian naval] presence" off the Horn of Africa. According to the Times of India this will be the fourth Indo-Russian exercise since 2003, which included one in the Sea of Japan last year.
And of course, there are all the more unlikely stories, like the idea of relocating the Black Sea fleet to a base in Syria (at which point, it would of course need to be renamed).
One has to wonder what to make of all this. Today's Russia is not the Soviet Union, nor can it seriously hope to be. Where the Soviet Union in the late 1980s had perhaps 6 perhaps of the world's population and accounted for 12 percent of global GDP (to say nothing of having its troops sitting on half of Europe), today's Russia has a little more than 2 percent of the world's population (and shrinking in absolute as well as relative terms), maybe 3 percent of global GDP-and that because of a rise in oil prices, which since July has gone into reverse. (Believe it or not, today's Russia is actually less industrialized than it was in the Soviet period.)
I expect oil prices to rebound, perhaps in the not too distant future, but even were they to do so, oil alone cannot sustain a superpower's ambitions (and anyway, the benefit Russia derives may be undercut by its peaking production, the worries of foreign investors and the country's own consumption growth), while at the same time, being likely to hobble the country's continued development with a well-known "resource curse." (I discussed the issue at some length in an analysis of the Russian economy for the Space Review back in November.)
In short, the power base isn't there. In fact, as the strain of defense spending on the Soviet economy showed, it wasn't really there even then. The result is that it looks more than anything else like grandstanding off of old military-industrial capital and new petrodollars to score some prestige points (and in cases, prop up a few friends and clients), while hoping that the limited positive signs seen to date will lead to a more substantial recovery enabling it to really fill that enlarged role.
Right now that looks like a long shot, and in any case, it would seem that the money (while admittedly limited next to what the Soviets spent on their military) would be much better spent on rebuilding infrastructure, restoring public health and making other desperately needed investments at home. For that matter, it might have been expended reforming the horrendous conditions faced by Russian conscripts during their national service (or better still, ending conscription, and moving to an all-professional force).
Incidentally, the exercises were followed up by the Russian navy paying a visit to Nicaragua before heading east via the Panama Canal, the first time Russian warships have used the canal since 1944. Next up for the Peter the Great is a trip to the Indian Ocean, where it is to take part in exercises with the Indian navy and help in "maintaining a regular [Russian naval] presence" off the Horn of Africa. According to the Times of India this will be the fourth Indo-Russian exercise since 2003, which included one in the Sea of Japan last year.
And of course, there are all the more unlikely stories, like the idea of relocating the Black Sea fleet to a base in Syria (at which point, it would of course need to be renamed).
One has to wonder what to make of all this. Today's Russia is not the Soviet Union, nor can it seriously hope to be. Where the Soviet Union in the late 1980s had perhaps 6 perhaps of the world's population and accounted for 12 percent of global GDP (to say nothing of having its troops sitting on half of Europe), today's Russia has a little more than 2 percent of the world's population (and shrinking in absolute as well as relative terms), maybe 3 percent of global GDP-and that because of a rise in oil prices, which since July has gone into reverse. (Believe it or not, today's Russia is actually less industrialized than it was in the Soviet period.)
I expect oil prices to rebound, perhaps in the not too distant future, but even were they to do so, oil alone cannot sustain a superpower's ambitions (and anyway, the benefit Russia derives may be undercut by its peaking production, the worries of foreign investors and the country's own consumption growth), while at the same time, being likely to hobble the country's continued development with a well-known "resource curse." (I discussed the issue at some length in an analysis of the Russian economy for the Space Review back in November.)
In short, the power base isn't there. In fact, as the strain of defense spending on the Soviet economy showed, it wasn't really there even then. The result is that it looks more than anything else like grandstanding off of old military-industrial capital and new petrodollars to score some prestige points (and in cases, prop up a few friends and clients), while hoping that the limited positive signs seen to date will lead to a more substantial recovery enabling it to really fill that enlarged role.
Right now that looks like a long shot, and in any case, it would seem that the money (while admittedly limited next to what the Soviets spent on their military) would be much better spent on rebuilding infrastructure, restoring public health and making other desperately needed investments at home. For that matter, it might have been expended reforming the horrendous conditions faced by Russian conscripts during their national service (or better still, ending conscription, and moving to an all-professional force).
The Situation in Greece
The unrest in Greece (which has included peaceful protests and strikes as well as the highly publicized street fights) is a week old now, and the event itself is increasingly internationalized. A new Reuters article, "Angry young Greeks give wake-up call to Europe"-incidentally, the most comprehensive piece on these events that I have seen so far-describes "sympathy protests from Moscow to Madrid, some quickly organised over the Internet or by SMS message, as many young people feel leaders are ignoring their frustrations." Some were violent, the article citing incidents in Spain, Italy, Denmark and even Russia, as well as the setting afire of two cars outside a Greek consulate in France.
While the Reuters article goes into the issue in somewhat more depth, the journalistic coverage in general increasingly acknowledges the economic factors in these events, echoing much of what I blogged about on Wednesday. These include high youth unemployment (Generation 700 Euros describes "Young Greeks, even those up to the age of 35, make up a silent majority of overworked, underpaid, debt-ridden and insecure citizens," 56 percent of Greeks under 30 earning less than that amount per month), high levels of poverty (20% of households living on less than $7,300 a year), an exceptionally ineffective (mismanaged?) welfare system (highlighted by the government's inadequate poor relief this winter), and inflation that has been worse than the "faked reported values" used by the country's leaders to meet the criteria for accession to the eurozone. The government's combo of a neoliberal hard line and generous corporate welfare (in particular a highly controversial financial bail-out (relative to the size of the Greek economy, equivalent to a $1.5 trillion package in the U.S.)) has not exactly increased the confidence of a public which already views the nation's leadership as corrupt and incompetent (its handling of last year's wildfires a particular sore point).
When I first looked at the situation, I thought of the anomalousness of Greek politics (its radicalization by the junta years of 1967-74, etc.), but given the economic context it occurred to me that if Greece is vulnerable, then a lot of other countries are too. It now seems others are saying the same thing, as the Reuters article shows. Check out this excerpt from it about Nicolas Sarkozy's reaction:
"Look what is going on in Greece!" French President Nicolas Sarkozy told members of his UMP party, rejecting budget proposals which would have cushioned the wealthy from losses.
With memories fresh of weeks of suburban rioting in 2005, Sarkozy expressed concern the anti-government backlash could spread to France: "The French love it when I'm in a carriage with Carla, but at the same time they've guillotined a king."
The man's pretensions to being a latter-day Sun King never cease to amaze me, emerging even in this attempt to sound conciliatory, but I am even more amazed at the imagery he evokes in this comment. Especially when one considers that much of Europe is in roughly the same position as Greece with regard to slowing growth, high unemployment (in general, but particularly among the young) and unpopular neoliberal reforms, it is clear that the potential for such outbursts has been underestimated in the media's preoccupation with immigration and culture wars.
Yet, there is also a danger of overreaction. This is not the French Revolution, and it would be highly regrettable if governments across the continent were to use this as an excuse to engage in repressive measures (hinted at in the anxiety expressed by the authorities in this Wall Street Journal article), rather than considering and addressing their pressing domestic problems.
While the Reuters article goes into the issue in somewhat more depth, the journalistic coverage in general increasingly acknowledges the economic factors in these events, echoing much of what I blogged about on Wednesday. These include high youth unemployment (Generation 700 Euros describes "Young Greeks, even those up to the age of 35, make up a silent majority of overworked, underpaid, debt-ridden and insecure citizens," 56 percent of Greeks under 30 earning less than that amount per month), high levels of poverty (20% of households living on less than $7,300 a year), an exceptionally ineffective (mismanaged?) welfare system (highlighted by the government's inadequate poor relief this winter), and inflation that has been worse than the "faked reported values" used by the country's leaders to meet the criteria for accession to the eurozone. The government's combo of a neoliberal hard line and generous corporate welfare (in particular a highly controversial financial bail-out (relative to the size of the Greek economy, equivalent to a $1.5 trillion package in the U.S.)) has not exactly increased the confidence of a public which already views the nation's leadership as corrupt and incompetent (its handling of last year's wildfires a particular sore point).
When I first looked at the situation, I thought of the anomalousness of Greek politics (its radicalization by the junta years of 1967-74, etc.), but given the economic context it occurred to me that if Greece is vulnerable, then a lot of other countries are too. It now seems others are saying the same thing, as the Reuters article shows. Check out this excerpt from it about Nicolas Sarkozy's reaction:
"Look what is going on in Greece!" French President Nicolas Sarkozy told members of his UMP party, rejecting budget proposals which would have cushioned the wealthy from losses.
With memories fresh of weeks of suburban rioting in 2005, Sarkozy expressed concern the anti-government backlash could spread to France: "The French love it when I'm in a carriage with Carla, but at the same time they've guillotined a king."
The man's pretensions to being a latter-day Sun King never cease to amaze me, emerging even in this attempt to sound conciliatory, but I am even more amazed at the imagery he evokes in this comment. Especially when one considers that much of Europe is in roughly the same position as Greece with regard to slowing growth, high unemployment (in general, but particularly among the young) and unpopular neoliberal reforms, it is clear that the potential for such outbursts has been underestimated in the media's preoccupation with immigration and culture wars.
Yet, there is also a danger of overreaction. This is not the French Revolution, and it would be highly regrettable if governments across the continent were to use this as an excuse to engage in repressive measures (hinted at in the anxiety expressed by the authorities in this Wall Street Journal article), rather than considering and addressing their pressing domestic problems.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Nanotechnology Culture War?
An interesting new study of public opinion regarding nanotechnology finds that broad political attitudes make a great deal of difference in how the tech is perceived. Put simply, those who are pro-business see opportunity, while those concerned about economic inequality are more apt to see it as dangerous.
I see little mystery here, or much reason for surprise in the findings. We are long past the point where people imagine technology is likely to fix the world or correct its injustices all by itself. Certainly there are technologies about which the left is more enthusiastic than the right (like renewable energy production from wind, solar and other such sources), but all other things being equal, those who lean left, given the experience of the last few decades (if not longer), have plenty of reason to doubt the likely outcome of such developments-not only in their implications for social justice, but ecology as well. Those who lean right (at least, on matters of commerce and science), being rather more sanguine about the social order, are more optimistic.
I see little mystery here, or much reason for surprise in the findings. We are long past the point where people imagine technology is likely to fix the world or correct its injustices all by itself. Certainly there are technologies about which the left is more enthusiastic than the right (like renewable energy production from wind, solar and other such sources), but all other things being equal, those who lean left, given the experience of the last few decades (if not longer), have plenty of reason to doubt the likely outcome of such developments-not only in their implications for social justice, but ecology as well. Those who lean right (at least, on matters of commerce and science), being rather more sanguine about the social order, are more optimistic.
The Rising Cost of Military Force
By Nader Elhefnawy
An examination of the defense picture in the advanced states instantly presents the onlooker with a host of contradictions. The military establishments of the major countries appear both massive and strained, important grand initiatives coming to naught, their efforts to rein in costs continually frustrated. The technological Revolution in Military Affairs appears to promise leaps in capability-but perhaps at such leaps in cost that virtually no one can actually afford them, perhaps not even the collective members of the European Union, commonly criticized by American observers as a laggard in this regard.
Such developments make it plausible that Joseph Tainter's observation that modern societies are seeing diminishing marginal returns for investment in complexity also applies to their militaries.1 Indeed, if one accepts Tainter's theory as basically valid, the odd thing would be if militaries did not parallel society at large in suffering from that trend.
Military establishments are certainly not exempt from the increases in the costs of key goods and services that affect other sectors of the economy. A rise in the price of energy will necessarily mean that militaries pay more for their own energy consumption. Additionally, even specifically military purchases and programs are broadly susceptible to broader trends affecting the civilian economy (even if more problematic for military establishments because of certain considerations). A number of these are listed below:
* A tendency toward diminishing returns on technological investment in recent decades, particularly in areas like aerodynamics, hydrodynamics and propulsion.2 For instance, the same technological issues which kept the size, speed, capacity, operating altitude and range of civil aircraft roughly constant since the 1960s also apply to military aircraft, which have not significantly changed in these respects either. While information technology is supposed to be an exception, and its centrality to the "Revolution in Military Affairs" may suggest this translates to the defense sphere, its impact may well have been overrated, not least because of IT's limitations with respect to tasks requiring eye-hand coordination.3 It is also worth noting that avionics have long comprised the area of greatest cost increase in the prices of fighter aircraft.4
* The divorce between designers and users of technology, which diminishes the efficiency of design processes, one reflection of which is the pursuit of features of limited utility by engineers (a process which has been referred to as "gold-plating" in military context).5 Exaggerating the problem is the tendency of customers of high technology to pursue the newest for fear of falling behind, rather than carefully weighing costs and benefits.
* The tendency of the unreliability of systems to rise along with their complexity, encouraging redundancy as a compensating approach, driving up costs further.6
* The increased need for collaboration on the part of multiple buyers, whether branches of one nation's armed forces, or several governments, which may have different goals and priorities, as a result of the price of developing and producing a major system. Historically this has resulted in expensive design compromises.7
* Just as there are fewer customers, there are also fewer suppliers, given the size and specialized nature of the industrial entities which alone can produce many of the needed services and systems; and the political sensitivity of military supply chains. The consolidation of the defense industry, not just in the U.S. but Europe as well, has slashed the number of participants in the market still further.8 This leaves customers with fewer practical option, diminishing the room for market forces to operate, and exacerbates a problem raised in a recent study of the fighter aircraft market by Defense-Aerospace.com, namely that "aircraft prices . . . like those of other manufactured goods, are determined as much by how much the market can bear as by their actual development and production costs."9
* The problem of amortizing the costs of system development, given shortening production runs. As a result the bill for research and development (an increasingly large part of the total) has to be recouped from a smaller number of sales, driving up unit cost.10 At the same time, the short runs make it more difficult to exploit economies of scale.11 It does not help that the weapons procurement process is subject to major, politically-driven work stoppages and restructurings, which lengthen the program and add to its costs.12
* Political corruption. This is difficult to quantify, especially over time, but the widely perceived "privatization of politics," dramatically described in books like Thomas Frank's recent The Wrecking Crew, makes a strong case that the situation has worsened.13 Additionally, the fact that governments are the sole buyers for major weapons systems makes this more of a factor in setting the price than other, dual-use goods with large non-governmental markets.
* The graying of populations, particularly in the industrial world. While the full consequences of this on economic performance have yet to be determined, given the possibility of extending healthy working life; changes in the nature of work; and the present looseness of the labor markets; the particular reliance of militaries on the young makes them more vulnerable to such a trend than other sectors. Put simply, smaller youth cohorts mean more difficulty filling a given number of billets.
However, it is also arguable that a number of problems unique to militaries are contributing to this trend.
System Senility and Technological Uncertainty
For decades now it has been argued that the weapons systems predominating in modern arsenals (aircraft, armored vehicles, warships) are increasingly "senile."14 That is to say, the weapon continues to perform its core, offensive function, but only with the aid of continual incremental modifications, simply to insure their survival in a more dangerous environment, or enable them to retain their effectiveness in the face of similarly upgraded opponents, which drive up their cost.
Tanks and battleships alike progressively moved through a cycle of thicker armor, more powerful engines to accommodate the extra weight and bigger guns for penetrating that thicker armor, without becoming dramatically more effective on the battlefield-and indeed, less so given that their function increasingly becomes their fighting other tanks.15 In recent decades, tanks have also become larger and heavier, complicating their mobility and ease of deployment (such as the M1A2 Abrams), so much so that in the case of the U.S., there has been great interest in pursuing lighter armored fighting vehicles (like the Stryker) specifically to compensate for this problem (without notable success). There is also more emphasis on their integration with other systems to this end, diminishing their effectiveness in the offensive (as with the surrounding of carriers with escorts, and the devotion of an increased proportion of their air wings to group protection).16 In the process, they also impose a greater strain on the logistical systems supporting them.17
However, this is not to imply that investment in "revolutionary" systems is an unproblematic matter. Senility is not obsolescence, and a convenient replacement does not necessarily exist for the major systems discussed above. It was fashionable in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to imagine aerospace power and light infantry working in concert to defeat any conceivable enemy.18 Yet, the "thunder runs" of the Iraq war a year and a half later were widely regarded as affirming the traditional value of armor. Similarly, despite the publicity given Predator drones, there was also no real sense that unmanned aerial vehicles and cruise missiles were on the verge of fully replacing air forces consisting of expensive manned aircraft (even if there was room for doubt about the necessity of F-22s), or "street fighter" warships doing away with carrier groups.
Meanwhile, the overselling of new technologies and tactics of even more limited kinds has led to costly disappointments, as with Harlan Ullman's "shock and awe" theory.19 Of course, it may be pointed out that shock and awe was simply a repeat of the claims theorists have made for air power since Giulio Douhet.20 Nonetheless, given the ambiguity of the post-Cold War strategic situation, and the emergence of "capabilities-based planning" (which shifts the focus from the need to respond to tangible threats, to the pursuit of whatever capacities modern technology might offer as almost an end in itself), there may be a greater susceptibility to this kind of thinking, with the effects on budgets and priorities all too obvious.21
At the same time, the advanced capabilities purchased so expensively have, in many real-world military situations, appear superfluous, raising the issue of whether or not older systems would have performed the task just as well, if not more cheaply. In the air defense environment of Afghanistan, for instance, it was not clear that the B-2 justified its high selling price.22
"War Amongst The People"
Additionally, whatever the costs and benefits of advanced weapons systems, it may be that contemporary political reality means they can only achieve so much. Conventional warfare, while still the technological and budgetary focus of the major defense establishments, has been increasingly rare since the end of World War II.
Many arguments have been offered for why this is the case (the dangers of armed conflict in the nuclear age, the diminished profitability of territorial conquest, the world's growing economic interdependence, etc.), and consistent with this disagreement about the causes, there has been disagreement about how long this pattern will continue into the future. A great many observers continue to anticipate large-scale conventional warfare among major powers, for instance, a Sino-American conflict over Taiwan.
Nonetheless, the decreasing frequency and duration of conventional, interstate conflict in the last half century has not been in doubt, or the trends observed in the fighting that did take place irrelevant to the thinking on the issue. And increasingly, when conventional fighting does take place, as in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the battlefield victories appear to count for less since these wars are, in the phrasing offered by General Rupert Smith, fought "amongst the people."23 What this means is that rather than actors achieving political ends by destroying the forces of an enemy state and seizing its territory, doing those things (while still necessary) is only a way of creating conditions in which other "means and levers of power" are brought to bear on individuals and societies to achieve those ends-often, over the very long term.
In other words, the conventional phase, instead of essentially settling the conflict, is merely the opening portion of a longer, often costlier "mission other than war." Complicating matters further, it may be more rather than less difficult for the most advanced military forces to execute those tasks today.24
As a result, the value advanced conventional systems bring for the money spent on them is increasingly in question. Indeed, where counterterrorism is concerned, many experts hold military force should support police and intelligence efforts, rather than be the principal instrument. The result is that conventional forces may be seen as competing with them for priority in policy and budgeting (just as they are demanding more money themselves). In cases, an ill-judged use of military force may even worsen the problem by producing a political backlash-a charge repeatedly made against the conduct of the War on Terror, particularly by observers outside of the United States.25
The emphasis on missions other than conventional warfare has also meant that when the major states exercise military force, they tend to do so for vaguer objects and more ambiguous interests. Especially given the absence of old-fashioned territorial threats (certainly, to the homelands of most of the advanced industrial countries), this may have helped to depress traditional tendencies to identify patriotism with military service. Martin Van Creveld has also gone so far as to offer the argument that it is the irrelevance of conventional warfare that has permitted major weapons programs to become as politicized, protracted and costly as they have.26
The Pursuit of "Strength Against Madness"
Finally, there is the pursuit of an unprecedentedly high level of security in a key respect, namely the making of defense policy around the presumption of actors unconstrained by rational deterrence, an object sociologist Zaki Laidi describes as "strength against madness."27 The existence of weapons of mass destruction, and the risk of certain destruction in the event of their use, has enlarged the danger that such actors are seen to present, as with the scenario of a "rogue" state willing to launch a devastating nuclear attack in spite of the certainty of its annihilation in a retaliatory strike.28
Assuming an undeterrable opponent, and the devastating consequences of the attack, the sole approach becomes either to deny them access to the weapon entirely, or to fully neutralize that capability, with all the challenges involved. Permanently denying other actors the possession of whole classes of weapon requires an extraordinary degree of political (and sometimes, military) commitment that may ultimately be unsupportable-especially when one considers the demands of preventive war. Neutralizing those weapons once they do have them may be even less feasible, as the demands of ballistic missile defense and, even more ambitious, space dominance, make clear.29
However, it should be noted that this kind of threat is viewed as chimerical by many observers. Martin Van Creveld in particular has made a strong case against such thinking in The Future of Nuclear Proliferation, where he showed that, where at least states are concerned, such claims of irrationality (regarding the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China under the "mad" Stalin and Mao, or the supposed irrationality of Pakistan and India) ultimately did not hold water.30
Conclusions
It appears that modern militaries are seeing diminishing marginal returns on investment in complexity. This is partly due to broad technological, economic, political and demographic trends affecting advanced societies in general ways, from which militaries simply are not exempt. However, changes in the security environment-particularly the "senility" of the major weapons systems and the diminution of the conventional war-fighting around which militaries are organized (and the emphasis placed on the prospect of irrational actors presenting existential threat) also play an important role.
While much of the cause for the rising cost of defense is not neatly separable from the problem facing modern societies at large, some amelioration might be found in more cautious decision-making regarding both the level of security sought, and particular decisions regarding the mission orientation and technological acquisition of military forces.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article was originally part of an early draft of my article, "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security," which appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of International Security. It has since been heavily revised and updated.
NOTES
1 For a discussion of Tainter's theory, see Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Also see T.F.H. Allen, Joseph Tainter, and Thomas W. Hoekstra, Supply-Side Sustainability (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
2 Michael O'Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), p. 194.
3 Robert J. Gordon, "Does the 'New Economy' Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 14.4 (Fall 2000), pp. 49-74.
4 Dr. Richard P. Hallion, "A Troubling Past: Air Force Fighter Acquisition Since 1945," Airpower Journal 9.4 (Winter 1990), pp. 4-23.
5 Gene I. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unintended Consequences of Computerization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 29-34.
6 Chris C. Demchak and Patrick D. Allen, "Technology and Complexity: the Modern Military's Capacity for Change," in Conrad C. Crane, ed., Transforming Defense (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2001), p. 110.
7 Mary Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 20-26.
8 For an examination of the less-discussed situation in Europe, see Rachel Epstein, "Divided Continent: Globalization and Europe's Fragmented Security Response," in Jonathan Kirshner, ed., Globalization and National Security (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 231-257.
9 Defense-Aerospace.com, "Sticker Shock: Estimating the Real Cost of Modern Fighter Aircraft," occasional report, Jul. 12 2006, p. 2. Accessed at http://www.defense-aerospace.com/dae/articles/communiques/FighterCostFinalJuly06.pdf.
10 According to one study, the ratio of R & D costs to production costs went from 5 percent in 1945 to 47 percent in 1989. Thomas L. McNaugher, New Weapons, Old Politics (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1989), pp. 98-99.
11 McNaugher, pp. 179-80. To give one recent example, it was calculated that whereas three to four Los Angeles-class submarines could be manufactured annually for $6-800 million each, each submarine would cost $1.5 to $2 billion each if produced at the rate of one a year. David Lewis, "Is the DD-21 Another Seawolf?" Proceedings 127.8 (Aug. 2001), pp. 54-57.
12 Indeed, the Defense-Aerospace report cited above emphasized the role of discontinuous development in cost overruns. Defense-Aerospace.com, "Sticker Shock," p. 4.
13 According to the work of Mancur Olson, long political stability tends to permit the growth of special interests which undermine economic performance. The postwar situation, particularly with respect to the defense establishment, may be a case in point. See Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
14 George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Crown, 1996). You can find my review of that book here.
15 Additionally, senile systems increasingly reply on collaboration with other systems to preserve their effectiveness, diminishing the flexibility and autonomy that make them effective in the offensive. Also see Martin Van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 280-282.
16 Van Creveld, Technology, pp. 280-282.
17 More expensive weapons systems mean higher costs for training, spare parts and other support functions all too likely to be short-changed, with a negative impact on readiness. McNaugher, pp. 98-99.
18 Edward Luttwak, "Power Relations in the New Economy," Survival 44.2 (Summer 2002), pp. 16-17.
19 This also extends to the overselling of other kinds of policies, like the privatization of military services, and the savings and other benefits that were supposed to accrue from it. See Peter Singer, Corporate Warriors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
20 See Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (New York: Coward-McCann, 1942).
21 For a trenchant critique of capabilities-based planning, see Frederick Kagan, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (New York: Encounter, 2006). It is worth noting, however, that it had an antecedent in the "follow-on" system of the Cold War era. See Kaldor, pp. 65-74.
22 According to one estimate, a B-2 cost over $2 billion, compared with $42.9 million for the B-52 bombers which also saw service in the conflict. Stephen I. Schwartz, "Stealth Bomber is Latest in a String of Failures," New York Times, Sep. 26, 1997.
23 You can read the theory of "war amongst the people" in Smith's The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). I also offer a summary of his idea in my review of the book for Strategic Insights, accessible here.
24 Territorial occupations in the developing world, for instance, increasingly mean policing a larger, more urbanized and more socially mobilized population, while advanced militaries increasingly substitute technology for manpower both for advantage and necessity. See Nader Elhefnawy, "Are Territorial Military Occupations Becoming More Difficult?" The Rambling Man, Nov. 13, 2008. Accessed at http://naderelhefnawy.blogspot.com/2008/11/round-up-of-news-items.html.
25 Michael Howard, "'9/11' and After: A British View," Naval War College Review 55.4 (Autumn 2002), pp. 11-22; International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance 2003-2004 (London: IISS, 2003).
26 Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 209.
27 Zaki Laidi, A World Without Meaning, trans. June Burnham and Jenny Coulon (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 105-122. For a discussion of such thinking, see Keith Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
28 A related concern is the worry that such strikes may be staged in such a way that their culpability is not immediately obvious (as with a state which chooses to smuggle a bomb into a target city rather than using military means in the attack), or, particularly where non-state actors like terrorist groups are concerned, retaliation is impossible for lack of an appropriate target.
29 Robert S. Litwak, "The New Calculus of Pre-emption," Survival 44.4 (Winter 2002-03), pp. 53-80. For an overview of the relevant discussion of space policy, see Nancy Gallagher and John D. Steinbruner, Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008). Also see Nader Elhefnawy, "Four Myths About Space Power," Parameters 33.1 (Spring 2003), pp. 124-132.
30 Martin van Creveld, The Future of Nuclear Proliferation (New York: Macmillan, 1991). For the response to the arguments of this sort made prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "An Unnecessary War," Foreign Policy 134 (January/February 2003), pp. 50-59.
An examination of the defense picture in the advanced states instantly presents the onlooker with a host of contradictions. The military establishments of the major countries appear both massive and strained, important grand initiatives coming to naught, their efforts to rein in costs continually frustrated. The technological Revolution in Military Affairs appears to promise leaps in capability-but perhaps at such leaps in cost that virtually no one can actually afford them, perhaps not even the collective members of the European Union, commonly criticized by American observers as a laggard in this regard.
Such developments make it plausible that Joseph Tainter's observation that modern societies are seeing diminishing marginal returns for investment in complexity also applies to their militaries.1 Indeed, if one accepts Tainter's theory as basically valid, the odd thing would be if militaries did not parallel society at large in suffering from that trend.
Military establishments are certainly not exempt from the increases in the costs of key goods and services that affect other sectors of the economy. A rise in the price of energy will necessarily mean that militaries pay more for their own energy consumption. Additionally, even specifically military purchases and programs are broadly susceptible to broader trends affecting the civilian economy (even if more problematic for military establishments because of certain considerations). A number of these are listed below:
* A tendency toward diminishing returns on technological investment in recent decades, particularly in areas like aerodynamics, hydrodynamics and propulsion.2 For instance, the same technological issues which kept the size, speed, capacity, operating altitude and range of civil aircraft roughly constant since the 1960s also apply to military aircraft, which have not significantly changed in these respects either. While information technology is supposed to be an exception, and its centrality to the "Revolution in Military Affairs" may suggest this translates to the defense sphere, its impact may well have been overrated, not least because of IT's limitations with respect to tasks requiring eye-hand coordination.3 It is also worth noting that avionics have long comprised the area of greatest cost increase in the prices of fighter aircraft.4
* The divorce between designers and users of technology, which diminishes the efficiency of design processes, one reflection of which is the pursuit of features of limited utility by engineers (a process which has been referred to as "gold-plating" in military context).5 Exaggerating the problem is the tendency of customers of high technology to pursue the newest for fear of falling behind, rather than carefully weighing costs and benefits.
* The tendency of the unreliability of systems to rise along with their complexity, encouraging redundancy as a compensating approach, driving up costs further.6
* The increased need for collaboration on the part of multiple buyers, whether branches of one nation's armed forces, or several governments, which may have different goals and priorities, as a result of the price of developing and producing a major system. Historically this has resulted in expensive design compromises.7
* Just as there are fewer customers, there are also fewer suppliers, given the size and specialized nature of the industrial entities which alone can produce many of the needed services and systems; and the political sensitivity of military supply chains. The consolidation of the defense industry, not just in the U.S. but Europe as well, has slashed the number of participants in the market still further.8 This leaves customers with fewer practical option, diminishing the room for market forces to operate, and exacerbates a problem raised in a recent study of the fighter aircraft market by Defense-Aerospace.com, namely that "aircraft prices . . . like those of other manufactured goods, are determined as much by how much the market can bear as by their actual development and production costs."9
* The problem of amortizing the costs of system development, given shortening production runs. As a result the bill for research and development (an increasingly large part of the total) has to be recouped from a smaller number of sales, driving up unit cost.10 At the same time, the short runs make it more difficult to exploit economies of scale.11 It does not help that the weapons procurement process is subject to major, politically-driven work stoppages and restructurings, which lengthen the program and add to its costs.12
* Political corruption. This is difficult to quantify, especially over time, but the widely perceived "privatization of politics," dramatically described in books like Thomas Frank's recent The Wrecking Crew, makes a strong case that the situation has worsened.13 Additionally, the fact that governments are the sole buyers for major weapons systems makes this more of a factor in setting the price than other, dual-use goods with large non-governmental markets.
* The graying of populations, particularly in the industrial world. While the full consequences of this on economic performance have yet to be determined, given the possibility of extending healthy working life; changes in the nature of work; and the present looseness of the labor markets; the particular reliance of militaries on the young makes them more vulnerable to such a trend than other sectors. Put simply, smaller youth cohorts mean more difficulty filling a given number of billets.
However, it is also arguable that a number of problems unique to militaries are contributing to this trend.
System Senility and Technological Uncertainty
For decades now it has been argued that the weapons systems predominating in modern arsenals (aircraft, armored vehicles, warships) are increasingly "senile."14 That is to say, the weapon continues to perform its core, offensive function, but only with the aid of continual incremental modifications, simply to insure their survival in a more dangerous environment, or enable them to retain their effectiveness in the face of similarly upgraded opponents, which drive up their cost.
Tanks and battleships alike progressively moved through a cycle of thicker armor, more powerful engines to accommodate the extra weight and bigger guns for penetrating that thicker armor, without becoming dramatically more effective on the battlefield-and indeed, less so given that their function increasingly becomes their fighting other tanks.15 In recent decades, tanks have also become larger and heavier, complicating their mobility and ease of deployment (such as the M1A2 Abrams), so much so that in the case of the U.S., there has been great interest in pursuing lighter armored fighting vehicles (like the Stryker) specifically to compensate for this problem (without notable success). There is also more emphasis on their integration with other systems to this end, diminishing their effectiveness in the offensive (as with the surrounding of carriers with escorts, and the devotion of an increased proportion of their air wings to group protection).16 In the process, they also impose a greater strain on the logistical systems supporting them.17
However, this is not to imply that investment in "revolutionary" systems is an unproblematic matter. Senility is not obsolescence, and a convenient replacement does not necessarily exist for the major systems discussed above. It was fashionable in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to imagine aerospace power and light infantry working in concert to defeat any conceivable enemy.18 Yet, the "thunder runs" of the Iraq war a year and a half later were widely regarded as affirming the traditional value of armor. Similarly, despite the publicity given Predator drones, there was also no real sense that unmanned aerial vehicles and cruise missiles were on the verge of fully replacing air forces consisting of expensive manned aircraft (even if there was room for doubt about the necessity of F-22s), or "street fighter" warships doing away with carrier groups.
Meanwhile, the overselling of new technologies and tactics of even more limited kinds has led to costly disappointments, as with Harlan Ullman's "shock and awe" theory.19 Of course, it may be pointed out that shock and awe was simply a repeat of the claims theorists have made for air power since Giulio Douhet.20 Nonetheless, given the ambiguity of the post-Cold War strategic situation, and the emergence of "capabilities-based planning" (which shifts the focus from the need to respond to tangible threats, to the pursuit of whatever capacities modern technology might offer as almost an end in itself), there may be a greater susceptibility to this kind of thinking, with the effects on budgets and priorities all too obvious.21
At the same time, the advanced capabilities purchased so expensively have, in many real-world military situations, appear superfluous, raising the issue of whether or not older systems would have performed the task just as well, if not more cheaply. In the air defense environment of Afghanistan, for instance, it was not clear that the B-2 justified its high selling price.22
"War Amongst The People"
Additionally, whatever the costs and benefits of advanced weapons systems, it may be that contemporary political reality means they can only achieve so much. Conventional warfare, while still the technological and budgetary focus of the major defense establishments, has been increasingly rare since the end of World War II.
Many arguments have been offered for why this is the case (the dangers of armed conflict in the nuclear age, the diminished profitability of territorial conquest, the world's growing economic interdependence, etc.), and consistent with this disagreement about the causes, there has been disagreement about how long this pattern will continue into the future. A great many observers continue to anticipate large-scale conventional warfare among major powers, for instance, a Sino-American conflict over Taiwan.
Nonetheless, the decreasing frequency and duration of conventional, interstate conflict in the last half century has not been in doubt, or the trends observed in the fighting that did take place irrelevant to the thinking on the issue. And increasingly, when conventional fighting does take place, as in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the battlefield victories appear to count for less since these wars are, in the phrasing offered by General Rupert Smith, fought "amongst the people."23 What this means is that rather than actors achieving political ends by destroying the forces of an enemy state and seizing its territory, doing those things (while still necessary) is only a way of creating conditions in which other "means and levers of power" are brought to bear on individuals and societies to achieve those ends-often, over the very long term.
In other words, the conventional phase, instead of essentially settling the conflict, is merely the opening portion of a longer, often costlier "mission other than war." Complicating matters further, it may be more rather than less difficult for the most advanced military forces to execute those tasks today.24
As a result, the value advanced conventional systems bring for the money spent on them is increasingly in question. Indeed, where counterterrorism is concerned, many experts hold military force should support police and intelligence efforts, rather than be the principal instrument. The result is that conventional forces may be seen as competing with them for priority in policy and budgeting (just as they are demanding more money themselves). In cases, an ill-judged use of military force may even worsen the problem by producing a political backlash-a charge repeatedly made against the conduct of the War on Terror, particularly by observers outside of the United States.25
The emphasis on missions other than conventional warfare has also meant that when the major states exercise military force, they tend to do so for vaguer objects and more ambiguous interests. Especially given the absence of old-fashioned territorial threats (certainly, to the homelands of most of the advanced industrial countries), this may have helped to depress traditional tendencies to identify patriotism with military service. Martin Van Creveld has also gone so far as to offer the argument that it is the irrelevance of conventional warfare that has permitted major weapons programs to become as politicized, protracted and costly as they have.26
The Pursuit of "Strength Against Madness"
Finally, there is the pursuit of an unprecedentedly high level of security in a key respect, namely the making of defense policy around the presumption of actors unconstrained by rational deterrence, an object sociologist Zaki Laidi describes as "strength against madness."27 The existence of weapons of mass destruction, and the risk of certain destruction in the event of their use, has enlarged the danger that such actors are seen to present, as with the scenario of a "rogue" state willing to launch a devastating nuclear attack in spite of the certainty of its annihilation in a retaliatory strike.28
Assuming an undeterrable opponent, and the devastating consequences of the attack, the sole approach becomes either to deny them access to the weapon entirely, or to fully neutralize that capability, with all the challenges involved. Permanently denying other actors the possession of whole classes of weapon requires an extraordinary degree of political (and sometimes, military) commitment that may ultimately be unsupportable-especially when one considers the demands of preventive war. Neutralizing those weapons once they do have them may be even less feasible, as the demands of ballistic missile defense and, even more ambitious, space dominance, make clear.29
However, it should be noted that this kind of threat is viewed as chimerical by many observers. Martin Van Creveld in particular has made a strong case against such thinking in The Future of Nuclear Proliferation, where he showed that, where at least states are concerned, such claims of irrationality (regarding the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China under the "mad" Stalin and Mao, or the supposed irrationality of Pakistan and India) ultimately did not hold water.30
Conclusions
It appears that modern militaries are seeing diminishing marginal returns on investment in complexity. This is partly due to broad technological, economic, political and demographic trends affecting advanced societies in general ways, from which militaries simply are not exempt. However, changes in the security environment-particularly the "senility" of the major weapons systems and the diminution of the conventional war-fighting around which militaries are organized (and the emphasis placed on the prospect of irrational actors presenting existential threat) also play an important role.
While much of the cause for the rising cost of defense is not neatly separable from the problem facing modern societies at large, some amelioration might be found in more cautious decision-making regarding both the level of security sought, and particular decisions regarding the mission orientation and technological acquisition of military forces.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article was originally part of an early draft of my article, "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security," which appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of International Security. It has since been heavily revised and updated.
NOTES
1 For a discussion of Tainter's theory, see Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Also see T.F.H. Allen, Joseph Tainter, and Thomas W. Hoekstra, Supply-Side Sustainability (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
2 Michael O'Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), p. 194.
3 Robert J. Gordon, "Does the 'New Economy' Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 14.4 (Fall 2000), pp. 49-74.
4 Dr. Richard P. Hallion, "A Troubling Past: Air Force Fighter Acquisition Since 1945," Airpower Journal 9.4 (Winter 1990), pp. 4-23.
5 Gene I. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unintended Consequences of Computerization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 29-34.
6 Chris C. Demchak and Patrick D. Allen, "Technology and Complexity: the Modern Military's Capacity for Change," in Conrad C. Crane, ed., Transforming Defense (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2001), p. 110.
7 Mary Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 20-26.
8 For an examination of the less-discussed situation in Europe, see Rachel Epstein, "Divided Continent: Globalization and Europe's Fragmented Security Response," in Jonathan Kirshner, ed., Globalization and National Security (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 231-257.
9 Defense-Aerospace.com, "Sticker Shock: Estimating the Real Cost of Modern Fighter Aircraft," occasional report, Jul. 12 2006, p. 2. Accessed at http://www.defense-aerospace.com/dae/articles/communiques/FighterCostFinalJuly06.pdf.
10 According to one study, the ratio of R & D costs to production costs went from 5 percent in 1945 to 47 percent in 1989. Thomas L. McNaugher, New Weapons, Old Politics (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1989), pp. 98-99.
11 McNaugher, pp. 179-80. To give one recent example, it was calculated that whereas three to four Los Angeles-class submarines could be manufactured annually for $6-800 million each, each submarine would cost $1.5 to $2 billion each if produced at the rate of one a year. David Lewis, "Is the DD-21 Another Seawolf?" Proceedings 127.8 (Aug. 2001), pp. 54-57.
12 Indeed, the Defense-Aerospace report cited above emphasized the role of discontinuous development in cost overruns. Defense-Aerospace.com, "Sticker Shock," p. 4.
13 According to the work of Mancur Olson, long political stability tends to permit the growth of special interests which undermine economic performance. The postwar situation, particularly with respect to the defense establishment, may be a case in point. See Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
14 George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Crown, 1996). You can find my review of that book here.
15 Additionally, senile systems increasingly reply on collaboration with other systems to preserve their effectiveness, diminishing the flexibility and autonomy that make them effective in the offensive. Also see Martin Van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 280-282.
16 Van Creveld, Technology, pp. 280-282.
17 More expensive weapons systems mean higher costs for training, spare parts and other support functions all too likely to be short-changed, with a negative impact on readiness. McNaugher, pp. 98-99.
18 Edward Luttwak, "Power Relations in the New Economy," Survival 44.2 (Summer 2002), pp. 16-17.
19 This also extends to the overselling of other kinds of policies, like the privatization of military services, and the savings and other benefits that were supposed to accrue from it. See Peter Singer, Corporate Warriors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
20 See Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (New York: Coward-McCann, 1942).
21 For a trenchant critique of capabilities-based planning, see Frederick Kagan, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (New York: Encounter, 2006). It is worth noting, however, that it had an antecedent in the "follow-on" system of the Cold War era. See Kaldor, pp. 65-74.
22 According to one estimate, a B-2 cost over $2 billion, compared with $42.9 million for the B-52 bombers which also saw service in the conflict. Stephen I. Schwartz, "Stealth Bomber is Latest in a String of Failures," New York Times, Sep. 26, 1997.
23 You can read the theory of "war amongst the people" in Smith's The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). I also offer a summary of his idea in my review of the book for Strategic Insights, accessible here.
24 Territorial occupations in the developing world, for instance, increasingly mean policing a larger, more urbanized and more socially mobilized population, while advanced militaries increasingly substitute technology for manpower both for advantage and necessity. See Nader Elhefnawy, "Are Territorial Military Occupations Becoming More Difficult?" The Rambling Man, Nov. 13, 2008. Accessed at http://naderelhefnawy.blogspot.com/2008/11/round-up-of-news-items.html.
25 Michael Howard, "'9/11' and After: A British View," Naval War College Review 55.4 (Autumn 2002), pp. 11-22; International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance 2003-2004 (London: IISS, 2003).
26 Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 209.
27 Zaki Laidi, A World Without Meaning, trans. June Burnham and Jenny Coulon (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 105-122. For a discussion of such thinking, see Keith Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
28 A related concern is the worry that such strikes may be staged in such a way that their culpability is not immediately obvious (as with a state which chooses to smuggle a bomb into a target city rather than using military means in the attack), or, particularly where non-state actors like terrorist groups are concerned, retaliation is impossible for lack of an appropriate target.
29 Robert S. Litwak, "The New Calculus of Pre-emption," Survival 44.4 (Winter 2002-03), pp. 53-80. For an overview of the relevant discussion of space policy, see Nancy Gallagher and John D. Steinbruner, Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008). Also see Nader Elhefnawy, "Four Myths About Space Power," Parameters 33.1 (Spring 2003), pp. 124-132.
30 Martin van Creveld, The Future of Nuclear Proliferation (New York: Macmillan, 1991). For the response to the arguments of this sort made prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "An Unnecessary War," Foreign Policy 134 (January/February 2003), pp. 50-59.
Reconsidering the IT Revolution's Place in History
By Nader Elhefnawy
Contrary to the common claims that we live in a time of accelerating technological progress, many observers have pointed to slow and often disappointing progress in fields ranging from commercial air travel, to energy production, to medicine and longevity. Several plausible explanations have been offered for this:
* An intellectual property regime that has got out of control, so that it is now stifling innovation.1
* Falling R & D spending in an age of "financialization" and "short-termism."2
* Diminishing returns on investment in established areas of technology.3
* Slow economic growth since 1973 since, according to many long wave theorists, slow growth historically favors the continued use of "sustaining" technologies over the exploitation and proliferation of "disruptive" ones.4
The great exception to this stagnation is usually held to be information technology, which is widely credited with driving recent increases in productivity.
There is, of course, little question as to the significant impact technologies like the personal computer and Internet access have had on our way of life. Yet, it may be the case that they have had far less impact at the macroeconomic level. During the 1980s and early 1990s, a "productivity paradox" (known as the Solow paradox) in which the investment in information technology failed to produce improvements in productivity was widely noted. While the situation appeared to improve by the mid-1990s (when the rate of productivity growth increased from 1.3 to 2.5 percent a year or more), one study indicates that the gains were all in the information technology sector, failing to materialize in other areas.5
One economist, Robert J. Gordon, has offered three arguments as to why the computer's impact may have been underwhelming.6 These are
* The weak impact of information technology on activities requiring eye-hand coordination thus far.
* The "rapid decline in the marginal utility of computing power," improvements early on ceasing to be meaningful and becoming instead a pursuit of features largely for fear of falling behind rather than any practical gain they offer. A good example is the features on word processing programs.7
* The likelihood that computers have been less helpful in letting businesses do new things than offering new ways to do old ones. In most cases it has merely substituted for or duplicated ongoing commercial activities, and in doing so often raised the cost to a company of defending its market share. A good example of this is brick-and-mortar bookstore chains which have been forced to open web sites to keep up with the market after the appearance of Amazon.com.
Of course, one could argue that Gross Domestic Product has its limitations as a unit of measure, and that it may simply have failed to count in many real gains these technologies afford their users. However, it can be pointed out that GDP is at least equally inadequate at taking stock of the full costs of information technology at the macroeconomic level. These include
* The rapid depreciation of IT capital (i.e., software and computers).
* The costs of computer crime, which the OECD recently estimated to be in the range of $100 billion a year; and the cost of the computer security services purchased to help check such crime.8
* Certain one-time problems, like the Y2K bug, which is estimated to have cost as much as $600 billion during the late 1990s ($780 billion in 2008 dollars, or roughly 1.5 percent of global GDP at the time).9
According to economist Roland Spant, the failure to include such depreciation in Gross Domestic Product may mean growth rates have been overstated by as much as 0.5 percent a year in the 1995-2000 period in some advanced economies.10 Similarly, Gross Domestic Product registers the services purchased to deal with problems like crime and Y2K as gains rather than costs.
This warrants a reconsideration of much of what is taken for granted about recent economic history. It certainly throws into doubt a common explanation given for the fall of the Soviet Union, namely that it was simply unable to keep up with "New Economies" turbo-charged by the microchip. (After all, computerization only generated meaningful productivity increases after the Soviet collapse, and even then may have been comparatively minor.11) It also throws into doubt the sources of U.S. growth in the late 1990s, and contributes to suspicions about the reality of that growth in the years since, much of it centered on a suspected understatement of inflation.
Of course, none of this necessarily rules out greater future impact. One notable study indicates that such modest contributions have been the historical norm in comparably early phases of other technological revolutions, like steam and electricity.12 The advent of "strong" artificial intelligence, especially in combination with robotics, would explode the constraints that have hitherto existed on applying computing power to economic productivity. Consequently, it may be that the ultimate significance of the computer revolution depends on the success or failure of technologists to realize those possibilities.
1 Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (New York: Random House, 2008), pp. 122-144.
2 See James Crotty, "The Neoliberal Paradox: The Impact of Destructive Product Market Competition and Impatient Finance on Nonfinancial Corporations in the Neoliberal Era," Policy Economic Research Institute, Research Brief (Jul. 2003); John R. Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, and Shivaram Rajgopal, "The Economic Implications of Corporate Financial Reporting," Journal of Accounting and Economics 40 (2005), pp. 3–73.
3 W. Brian Arthur, "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business," Harvard Business Review 74.4 (Jul.-Aug. 1996), pp. 100-109. Also see Michael O'Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), p. 194.
4 While Joseph Schumpeter viewed upswings in the cycle as driven by the innovation of "leading sectors," other theorists, like Nikolai Kondratiev, or Ernest Mandel, argued that other economic stimuli led to the capitalization on technology. For a discussion of technological innovation and growth in long wave theory, see Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 21-98. For a discussion of disruptive and sustaining technologies, see Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). The energy sector in particular seems to reflect such patterns. See Marshall Goldberg, "Federal Energy Subsidies: Not All Technologies Are Created Equal," Renewable Energy Policy Project, Research Report, Jul. 2000, p. 2; Robert M. Margolis and Daniel M. Kammen, "Underinvestment: The Energy Technology and R & D Policy Challenge," Science 285 (Jul. 1999), pp. 690-692; Margolis and Kammen, "Energy R & D Innovation: Challenges and Opportunities for Technology and Climate Policy," in Stephen Schneider, Armin Rosencranz, and John-O Niles, eds., A Reader in Climate Change Policy (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2001).
5 Christine Cooper, "The Persistence of the Productivity Paradox," Jul. 2001. Accessed at http://www-scf.usc.edu/~ccooper/Productivity_Paradox.pdf.
6 Robert J. Gordon, "Does the 'New Economy' Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 14.4 (Fall 2000), pp. 49-74.
7 The problem may be exacerbated by poor decision-making on the part of consumers in this area, often characterized a drive to acquire the newest (and "best") rather than cost-benefit calculations. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unintended Consequences of Computerization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 29-34.
8 "Cybercrime toll threatens new financial crisis," New Scientist, Nov. 20 2008. Accessed at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16092-cybercrime-toll-threatens-new-financial-crisis.html .
9 For a discussion of Y2K, see William M. Evan and Mark Manion, Minding the Machines: Preventing Technological Disasters (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), pp. 58-79.
10 However, it may also understate the rate of growth in some other countries. See Roland Spant, "Why Net Domestic Product should replace Gross Domestic Product as a Measure of Economic Growth," International Productivity Monitor 7 (Fall 2003), pp. 39-43. Accessed at http://www.csls.ca/ipm/7/spant-e.pdf.
11 This claim was recently reiterated in Max Boot's War Made New. A far more likely explanation would seem to be the Soviet government's slashing economic investment in the 1970s in an attempt to maintain consumption while continuing to run its arms race with the West. The economic weakness that resulted (exacerbated when the price of oil dropped after the mid-1980s), and Mikhail Gorbachev's particular strategy for redressing that weakness, created an opening for dissenters (particularly among Soviet elites) which ultimately led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union. See David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution From Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1997).
12 Nicholas Crafts, "The Solow Productivity Paradox in Historical Perspective," Nov. 2001. Accessed at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/articles_of_the_month/pdf/Newsolow.pdf.
Contrary to the common claims that we live in a time of accelerating technological progress, many observers have pointed to slow and often disappointing progress in fields ranging from commercial air travel, to energy production, to medicine and longevity. Several plausible explanations have been offered for this:
* An intellectual property regime that has got out of control, so that it is now stifling innovation.1
* Falling R & D spending in an age of "financialization" and "short-termism."2
* Diminishing returns on investment in established areas of technology.3
* Slow economic growth since 1973 since, according to many long wave theorists, slow growth historically favors the continued use of "sustaining" technologies over the exploitation and proliferation of "disruptive" ones.4
The great exception to this stagnation is usually held to be information technology, which is widely credited with driving recent increases in productivity.
There is, of course, little question as to the significant impact technologies like the personal computer and Internet access have had on our way of life. Yet, it may be the case that they have had far less impact at the macroeconomic level. During the 1980s and early 1990s, a "productivity paradox" (known as the Solow paradox) in which the investment in information technology failed to produce improvements in productivity was widely noted. While the situation appeared to improve by the mid-1990s (when the rate of productivity growth increased from 1.3 to 2.5 percent a year or more), one study indicates that the gains were all in the information technology sector, failing to materialize in other areas.5
One economist, Robert J. Gordon, has offered three arguments as to why the computer's impact may have been underwhelming.6 These are
* The weak impact of information technology on activities requiring eye-hand coordination thus far.
* The "rapid decline in the marginal utility of computing power," improvements early on ceasing to be meaningful and becoming instead a pursuit of features largely for fear of falling behind rather than any practical gain they offer. A good example is the features on word processing programs.7
* The likelihood that computers have been less helpful in letting businesses do new things than offering new ways to do old ones. In most cases it has merely substituted for or duplicated ongoing commercial activities, and in doing so often raised the cost to a company of defending its market share. A good example of this is brick-and-mortar bookstore chains which have been forced to open web sites to keep up with the market after the appearance of Amazon.com.
Of course, one could argue that Gross Domestic Product has its limitations as a unit of measure, and that it may simply have failed to count in many real gains these technologies afford their users. However, it can be pointed out that GDP is at least equally inadequate at taking stock of the full costs of information technology at the macroeconomic level. These include
* The rapid depreciation of IT capital (i.e., software and computers).
* The costs of computer crime, which the OECD recently estimated to be in the range of $100 billion a year; and the cost of the computer security services purchased to help check such crime.8
* Certain one-time problems, like the Y2K bug, which is estimated to have cost as much as $600 billion during the late 1990s ($780 billion in 2008 dollars, or roughly 1.5 percent of global GDP at the time).9
According to economist Roland Spant, the failure to include such depreciation in Gross Domestic Product may mean growth rates have been overstated by as much as 0.5 percent a year in the 1995-2000 period in some advanced economies.10 Similarly, Gross Domestic Product registers the services purchased to deal with problems like crime and Y2K as gains rather than costs.
This warrants a reconsideration of much of what is taken for granted about recent economic history. It certainly throws into doubt a common explanation given for the fall of the Soviet Union, namely that it was simply unable to keep up with "New Economies" turbo-charged by the microchip. (After all, computerization only generated meaningful productivity increases after the Soviet collapse, and even then may have been comparatively minor.11) It also throws into doubt the sources of U.S. growth in the late 1990s, and contributes to suspicions about the reality of that growth in the years since, much of it centered on a suspected understatement of inflation.
Of course, none of this necessarily rules out greater future impact. One notable study indicates that such modest contributions have been the historical norm in comparably early phases of other technological revolutions, like steam and electricity.12 The advent of "strong" artificial intelligence, especially in combination with robotics, would explode the constraints that have hitherto existed on applying computing power to economic productivity. Consequently, it may be that the ultimate significance of the computer revolution depends on the success or failure of technologists to realize those possibilities.
1 Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (New York: Random House, 2008), pp. 122-144.
2 See James Crotty, "The Neoliberal Paradox: The Impact of Destructive Product Market Competition and Impatient Finance on Nonfinancial Corporations in the Neoliberal Era," Policy Economic Research Institute, Research Brief (Jul. 2003); John R. Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, and Shivaram Rajgopal, "The Economic Implications of Corporate Financial Reporting," Journal of Accounting and Economics 40 (2005), pp. 3–73.
3 W. Brian Arthur, "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business," Harvard Business Review 74.4 (Jul.-Aug. 1996), pp. 100-109. Also see Michael O'Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), p. 194.
4 While Joseph Schumpeter viewed upswings in the cycle as driven by the innovation of "leading sectors," other theorists, like Nikolai Kondratiev, or Ernest Mandel, argued that other economic stimuli led to the capitalization on technology. For a discussion of technological innovation and growth in long wave theory, see Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 21-98. For a discussion of disruptive and sustaining technologies, see Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). The energy sector in particular seems to reflect such patterns. See Marshall Goldberg, "Federal Energy Subsidies: Not All Technologies Are Created Equal," Renewable Energy Policy Project, Research Report, Jul. 2000, p. 2; Robert M. Margolis and Daniel M. Kammen, "Underinvestment: The Energy Technology and R & D Policy Challenge," Science 285 (Jul. 1999), pp. 690-692; Margolis and Kammen, "Energy R & D Innovation: Challenges and Opportunities for Technology and Climate Policy," in Stephen Schneider, Armin Rosencranz, and John-O Niles, eds., A Reader in Climate Change Policy (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2001).
5 Christine Cooper, "The Persistence of the Productivity Paradox," Jul. 2001. Accessed at http://www-scf.usc.edu/~ccooper/Productivity_Paradox.pdf.
6 Robert J. Gordon, "Does the 'New Economy' Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 14.4 (Fall 2000), pp. 49-74.
7 The problem may be exacerbated by poor decision-making on the part of consumers in this area, often characterized a drive to acquire the newest (and "best") rather than cost-benefit calculations. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unintended Consequences of Computerization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 29-34.
8 "Cybercrime toll threatens new financial crisis," New Scientist, Nov. 20 2008. Accessed at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16092-cybercrime-toll-threatens-new-financial-crisis.html .
9 For a discussion of Y2K, see William M. Evan and Mark Manion, Minding the Machines: Preventing Technological Disasters (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), pp. 58-79.
10 However, it may also understate the rate of growth in some other countries. See Roland Spant, "Why Net Domestic Product should replace Gross Domestic Product as a Measure of Economic Growth," International Productivity Monitor 7 (Fall 2003), pp. 39-43. Accessed at http://www.csls.ca/ipm/7/spant-e.pdf.
11 This claim was recently reiterated in Max Boot's War Made New. A far more likely explanation would seem to be the Soviet government's slashing economic investment in the 1970s in an attempt to maintain consumption while continuing to run its arms race with the West. The economic weakness that resulted (exacerbated when the price of oil dropped after the mid-1980s), and Mikhail Gorbachev's particular strategy for redressing that weakness, created an opening for dissenters (particularly among Soviet elites) which ultimately led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union. See David Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution From Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1997).
12 Nicholas Crafts, "The Solow Productivity Paradox in Historical Perspective," Nov. 2001. Accessed at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/articles_of_the_month/pdf/Newsolow.pdf.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Thoughts on a Book Sale
Over the weekend the local Friends of the Library had their annual book sale. While the books on sale were fairly diverse (including many hard-to-find, out-of-print titles), surplus bestsellers were very prominent in the stock, making it a good representative of the market of recent years, and seeing it reminded me of two things:
1. How much of the section of books devoted to "Business and Economics" consisted of self-help nonsense.
2. How many of the "big" books on public affairs, politics and the like have appallingly short lives before they cease to be of significance to anyone but historians wondering "What were they thinking back then?" In my mind, the prize for this sort of ephemeral writing goes to Dick Morris for his anticipation of the 2008 presidential election, Condi vs. Hillary, but Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm (about which I'd forgotten until my eye fell on a copy there) certainly fits the bill.
Despite all its flaws, the publishing industry gets out a fair number of good books. Unfortunately, the trash-to-gold ratio is very high, and probably worsening, especially in this area. But what else could you expect given the direction of the business, and the dominance of public intellectual life by the lobotomized punditry of television and radio?
1. How much of the section of books devoted to "Business and Economics" consisted of self-help nonsense.
2. How many of the "big" books on public affairs, politics and the like have appallingly short lives before they cease to be of significance to anyone but historians wondering "What were they thinking back then?" In my mind, the prize for this sort of ephemeral writing goes to Dick Morris for his anticipation of the 2008 presidential election, Condi vs. Hillary, but Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm (about which I'd forgotten until my eye fell on a copy there) certainly fits the bill.
Despite all its flaws, the publishing industry gets out a fair number of good books. Unfortunately, the trash-to-gold ratio is very high, and probably worsening, especially in this area. But what else could you expect given the direction of the business, and the dominance of public intellectual life by the lobotomized punditry of television and radio?
Friday, December 5, 2008
On the Use of the "D" Word
I noted in an earlier comment that the word "Depression" is rearing its head in the mainstream commentary on business and economics.
When people use it, however, most listeners assume the word to simply mean a Very Bad Thing, with little concept as to the magnitude of the event-let alone how our situation since has compared with it.
According to the National Income and Product Accounts Tables of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. economy shrank by roughly a third between 1929 and 1933. It recovered afterward, to its 1929 level, by 1936. From 1936 to 1940 the economy then grew at an average rate of 4.7 percent a year above its 1929 level.
In other words, for the decade thought of as the Depression as a whole, U.S. GDP expanded at an average of 1.7 percent a year during the 1929-1940 period-or 0.93 per cent per capita.
That is only very slightly less than the 1 per cent per capita growth the U.S. saw during the 1973-1995 period as a whole, which virtually no one in the mainstream refers to as a Depression. Growth improved after that (1995-2006 seeing 1.6 per cent per capita growth), but the figures for the 2000s have been frequently criticized for understating inflation, with some suggesting little or no real GDP gain in the years since the '90s boom had run its course; and even the official data now has the U.S. in a recession from December 2007 on.
Put plainly, the period since 1973 has, when taken as a whole, seen a rate of economic growth roughly comparable to that of the 1929-1940 period.1
Now, the idea that we have been in something like a Depression for so many decades may seem ridiculous, and it would be a mistake to overlook some important differences. One is that nothing like the sharpness of the shock of 1929-1933 has been evident since 1973. Rather than a sharp, deep drop in output, followed by a period of rapid growth later, these years have seen prolonged, very slow growth.
Another reason is the severity of the blow to private investment as a share of GDP during these years. It fell from 16 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 1929 to a mere 2.2 percent of it in 1932. By the end of the decade, it still hadn't returned to its earlier level, returning to just 13.4 percent by 1940.
Instead, the growth of the late 1930s reflected the massive expansion of the U.S. government. Government expenditures went from $9.4 to $15 billion between 1929 and 1940, nearly doubling in real terms (from $119 to $232 billion in today's dollars). In particular it was a matter of the growth of Federal spending and investment, which nearly quintupled from $22 to $100 billion, after adjustment for inflation-expenditures paid for by borrowing that raised the ratio of national debt to GDP from 16 percent in 1929 to 52 percent by 1940 (which, of course, enlarged the demand that enabled and propped up the recovery of private investment, unsteady and incomplete as it was).
Private investment has never fallen as low in the post-1973 period as it did then, the worst moment perhaps 1991, which roughly matched the level of 1940, at the Depression's tail end. Nonetheless, government has been about twice as big a part of the economy as it was in 1940, the Federal government three times as big, a factor that should not be underestimated in any attempt to draw a parallel between the two situations. Some observers argue that the only reason things have not been worse is because of these large public shares, and particularly the stabilizing effects of the transfer payments they facilitate (an idea Paul Bairoch mentions in his book Economics and World History). And both the public and private investment of recent decades have entailed a massive, Depression-scale accumulation of debt.
One might also point to the employment picture. The figures provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 24.9 percent of the labor force was out of work in 1933, and still 14.6 percent in 1940-figures with no recent parallel. Official postwar unemployment only ran in the double digits between September 1982 and June 1983, peaking at 10.8 percent in November and December 1982. In October this year, it was a mere 6.5 percent.
However, "unofficial" estimates of American unemployment since the 1970s commonly produce much higher figures than that. Simply including BLS statistics on marginally attached workers (who recently had a job and want another one but are not looking), discouraged workers (who are not seeking work because of the state of the market), and part-timers ("who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule") raises the October 2008 figure to 11.8 percent. Much more expansive definitions are possible, and these commonly result in Depression-level numbers.
In short, the idea that we are in a quasi-Depression is not totally groundless-or unprecedented. Such a view is a commonplace among long wave theorists, whose work frequently recognizes an analogy between the post-1973 period and the 1920s and '30s.
It also suggests strongly that we have been on the wrong track economically these past several decades, in the U.S., and around the world (where the picture has not been much better, and similarly evocative of the '30s in many commentaries). One theory, espoused by many (though by no means all) of the aforementioned long wave economists, is that the revival of growth commonly requires active state intervention, perhaps of a Keynesian type-exactly the opposite direction to the "courtesan state" practices pioneered by Augusto Pinochet's Chile, Margaret Thatcher's Britain and plain old Reaganomics.2
Given the changed rhetoric of recent weeks, it may be possible that the sorts of policies which, in this reading of economic history, get growth going again, will be enacted by governments. However, it would be a real mistake to jump the gun on that score. Following the fad for neo-mercantilism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, the bursting of the tech bubble and associated corporate scandals, the end would be declared-and yet, the TINA ("There Is No Alternative") mentality soldiered on.
So it might again after the sense of crisis has passed.
1 It is worth noting that measures other than GDP, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), report poorer performance than that. According to the 2006 report by Redefining Progress, U.S. GPI stagnated in the area of $15,000 per capita in 1978, the U.S. economy as a whole making no meaningful progress in three decades. It is also worth noting that according to Alan Freeman's analysis in 2003's "Globalisation: economic stagnation and divergence," even going by GDP the world economy was static between 1980 and 2002, and actually shrank between 1988 and 2002.
2 I explore that idea in a somewhat more academic manner here, in my article, "A Long-Term Trend Toward the Depletion of Fiscal-Macroeconomic Slack in the World Economy?", where I argue for the wage-productivity gaps, financialization, short-termism and resource misuse fostered by neoliberal policies as the causes of the stagnant growth and mounting debt seen since the 1970s.
When people use it, however, most listeners assume the word to simply mean a Very Bad Thing, with little concept as to the magnitude of the event-let alone how our situation since has compared with it.
According to the National Income and Product Accounts Tables of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. economy shrank by roughly a third between 1929 and 1933. It recovered afterward, to its 1929 level, by 1936. From 1936 to 1940 the economy then grew at an average rate of 4.7 percent a year above its 1929 level.
In other words, for the decade thought of as the Depression as a whole, U.S. GDP expanded at an average of 1.7 percent a year during the 1929-1940 period-or 0.93 per cent per capita.
That is only very slightly less than the 1 per cent per capita growth the U.S. saw during the 1973-1995 period as a whole, which virtually no one in the mainstream refers to as a Depression. Growth improved after that (1995-2006 seeing 1.6 per cent per capita growth), but the figures for the 2000s have been frequently criticized for understating inflation, with some suggesting little or no real GDP gain in the years since the '90s boom had run its course; and even the official data now has the U.S. in a recession from December 2007 on.
Put plainly, the period since 1973 has, when taken as a whole, seen a rate of economic growth roughly comparable to that of the 1929-1940 period.1
Now, the idea that we have been in something like a Depression for so many decades may seem ridiculous, and it would be a mistake to overlook some important differences. One is that nothing like the sharpness of the shock of 1929-1933 has been evident since 1973. Rather than a sharp, deep drop in output, followed by a period of rapid growth later, these years have seen prolonged, very slow growth.
Another reason is the severity of the blow to private investment as a share of GDP during these years. It fell from 16 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 1929 to a mere 2.2 percent of it in 1932. By the end of the decade, it still hadn't returned to its earlier level, returning to just 13.4 percent by 1940.
Instead, the growth of the late 1930s reflected the massive expansion of the U.S. government. Government expenditures went from $9.4 to $15 billion between 1929 and 1940, nearly doubling in real terms (from $119 to $232 billion in today's dollars). In particular it was a matter of the growth of Federal spending and investment, which nearly quintupled from $22 to $100 billion, after adjustment for inflation-expenditures paid for by borrowing that raised the ratio of national debt to GDP from 16 percent in 1929 to 52 percent by 1940 (which, of course, enlarged the demand that enabled and propped up the recovery of private investment, unsteady and incomplete as it was).
Private investment has never fallen as low in the post-1973 period as it did then, the worst moment perhaps 1991, which roughly matched the level of 1940, at the Depression's tail end. Nonetheless, government has been about twice as big a part of the economy as it was in 1940, the Federal government three times as big, a factor that should not be underestimated in any attempt to draw a parallel between the two situations. Some observers argue that the only reason things have not been worse is because of these large public shares, and particularly the stabilizing effects of the transfer payments they facilitate (an idea Paul Bairoch mentions in his book Economics and World History). And both the public and private investment of recent decades have entailed a massive, Depression-scale accumulation of debt.
One might also point to the employment picture. The figures provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 24.9 percent of the labor force was out of work in 1933, and still 14.6 percent in 1940-figures with no recent parallel. Official postwar unemployment only ran in the double digits between September 1982 and June 1983, peaking at 10.8 percent in November and December 1982. In October this year, it was a mere 6.5 percent.
However, "unofficial" estimates of American unemployment since the 1970s commonly produce much higher figures than that. Simply including BLS statistics on marginally attached workers (who recently had a job and want another one but are not looking), discouraged workers (who are not seeking work because of the state of the market), and part-timers ("who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule") raises the October 2008 figure to 11.8 percent. Much more expansive definitions are possible, and these commonly result in Depression-level numbers.
In short, the idea that we are in a quasi-Depression is not totally groundless-or unprecedented. Such a view is a commonplace among long wave theorists, whose work frequently recognizes an analogy between the post-1973 period and the 1920s and '30s.
It also suggests strongly that we have been on the wrong track economically these past several decades, in the U.S., and around the world (where the picture has not been much better, and similarly evocative of the '30s in many commentaries). One theory, espoused by many (though by no means all) of the aforementioned long wave economists, is that the revival of growth commonly requires active state intervention, perhaps of a Keynesian type-exactly the opposite direction to the "courtesan state" practices pioneered by Augusto Pinochet's Chile, Margaret Thatcher's Britain and plain old Reaganomics.2
Given the changed rhetoric of recent weeks, it may be possible that the sorts of policies which, in this reading of economic history, get growth going again, will be enacted by governments. However, it would be a real mistake to jump the gun on that score. Following the fad for neo-mercantilism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, the bursting of the tech bubble and associated corporate scandals, the end would be declared-and yet, the TINA ("There Is No Alternative") mentality soldiered on.
So it might again after the sense of crisis has passed.
1 It is worth noting that measures other than GDP, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), report poorer performance than that. According to the 2006 report by Redefining Progress, U.S. GPI stagnated in the area of $15,000 per capita in 1978, the U.S. economy as a whole making no meaningful progress in three decades. It is also worth noting that according to Alan Freeman's analysis in 2003's "Globalisation: economic stagnation and divergence," even going by GDP the world economy was static between 1980 and 2002, and actually shrank between 1988 and 2002.
2 I explore that idea in a somewhat more academic manner here, in my article, "A Long-Term Trend Toward the Depletion of Fiscal-Macroeconomic Slack in the World Economy?", where I argue for the wage-productivity gaps, financialization, short-termism and resource misuse fostered by neoliberal policies as the causes of the stagnant growth and mounting debt seen since the 1970s.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
The Future of War: Power, Technology, and American World Dominance in the 21st Century, by George and Meredith Friedman
New York: Crown Publishers, 1996, pp. 464.
The grandiosely if uncreatively titled The Future of War does not concern itself with insurgency and terrorism; with state failure, peacekeeping or nation-building; with rogue states and organized crime; with resource conflict and environmental security; with biological weapons and computer warfare; with the growth of the private military sector.
Rather this book's focus is squarely on conventional, interstate warfare, and even then its focus is not on making predictions about the balance of power in the international system, or laying out specific conflict scenarios (for instance, there is little on the rise of China), but on the theoretical and historical (their single geopolitical prediction, that the future will be an "American epoch," aside).
Simply put, the Friedmans posit that the modern (post-1500) era was the age of firearms, centered on the massing of explosive power. This culminated in the dominance of the battlespace by "hydrocarbon-driven, gunned weapon platforms" like battleships, tanks and planes. These systems, however, are increasingly "senile," meaning that the measures taken to insure their survival on the battlefield are overwhelming their offensive value.
The reason: the precision-guided munitions which will dominate the coming epoch as surely as the gun dominated the one preceding it. The ultimate expression of these will be hypersonic, intercontinental-range cruise missiles with the versatility of manned bombers (their discussion of missiles shading into what we today commonly term drones).
Meanwhile, the world's military center of gravity is shifting skyward, to space, global dominance meaning space dominance, to be won by manned command platforms in space, and fleets of space vehicles that can see and attack anything on the surface.
There will be little place for tanks, warships and traditional combat aircraft in this new military order, or even for massed infantry because while "boots on the ground" will still be necessary for close-in combat and holding territory, they will more and more resemble the "starship troopers" of Robert Heinlein-small, elite units whose individual members have been made far more deadly by advanced armor, sensors, communication systems and weapons.1
In short, the book is an explanation of the then-fashionable thinking about what is commonly called the "Revolution in Military Affairs," albeit a very thorough, comprehensive and accessible one. Indeed, it made quite a strong impression on my own thinking about these subjects when I first read it back in 2000, and much of my early writing and publication cites its ideas.
I find myself looking rather more skeptically at the book now, however. While we have perhaps gone overboard in the degree to which we have overlooked great power politics in the last decade or so, this book's focus is too narrow, not only in its considering just one level of warfare while ignoring all the others, but in its particular technological focus. It was not the gun which gave Europe its ascendancy, but industrialization, and that ascendancy was also briefer and more precarious than the half millennium suggested here.2 Their vision of a "European epoch" based on the mastery of a particular weapons technology therefore seems a poor basis for arguing for a similarly founded American epoch extending far into the future (even without considering today's much more rapid technological diffusion).
Additionally, where the key technologies themselves are considered, this is at best a long-range vision, rather than a guide to practical policymaking. The day when militaries serious about fighting conventional wars can finally dispense with their tanks and warships is still a long way off. The space dominance visions described here remain technically and economically infeasible, and can be expected to remain so for decades.
Even precision-guided munitions seem likely to make much slower progress than they imagined. There has been surprisingly little progress toward really fast, really long-range cruise missiles in the decade since they wrote their book, and it is not really that surprising. Many of the areas of technology relevant to realizing the idea (like propulsion systems) have been seeing fairly slow progress for quite some time. Besides, the PGM itself might become senile sooner than imagined, if directed-energy weapons become ubiquitous, an outcome that may be in real doubt, but still seems more likely than the realization of the space capabilities envisioned here.
The authors are also too dismissive of the importance of mass in future warfare, erroneously predicted so many times before-not least, by Basil Liddell Hart after World War I. Even if armies get smaller because of the cost of their equipment, numbers will still count, and the political units able to raise the resources to support those numbers will count for a great deal. Indeed, the size of the space forces necessary to achieve really workable, continuous coverage of the whole planet will be staggering.3
While this is said with all the advantage of hindsight, the book remains more interesting as an expression of the thinking on these topics in its day, and for the thoroughness of its extrapolation from a (flawed) theory, than as a comment on contemporary concerns, or a fully-rounded vision of things to come.
1 As for nuclear weapons, these will remain, but as a factor of declining significance-simply guarantees of state survival, and as checks on the nuclear weapons held by other actors-enabling the conduct of limited wars. (Notably, the authors count both the world wars as having been limited conflicts.)
2 After all, Asia had its own gunpowder empires, which did much to limit (and at points, even reverse) European expansion at the expense of India, China and the Ottoman Empire until late in the eighteenth century and often after; while Russia and Japan successfully resisted colonization.
3 One study indicates that as many as 1600 interceptors may be needed to stop a single ICBM. See American Physical Society, Boost-Phase Intercept Systems for National Missile Defense: Scientific and Technical Issues (College Park, MD: APS, 2003). Cited in Nancy Gallagher and John D. Steinbruner, Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008), pp. 66-67. It has also been estimated that as many as 1200 satellites would be needed simply to image every point on the planet once an hour. Gallagher, p. 69.
The grandiosely if uncreatively titled The Future of War does not concern itself with insurgency and terrorism; with state failure, peacekeeping or nation-building; with rogue states and organized crime; with resource conflict and environmental security; with biological weapons and computer warfare; with the growth of the private military sector.
Rather this book's focus is squarely on conventional, interstate warfare, and even then its focus is not on making predictions about the balance of power in the international system, or laying out specific conflict scenarios (for instance, there is little on the rise of China), but on the theoretical and historical (their single geopolitical prediction, that the future will be an "American epoch," aside).
Simply put, the Friedmans posit that the modern (post-1500) era was the age of firearms, centered on the massing of explosive power. This culminated in the dominance of the battlespace by "hydrocarbon-driven, gunned weapon platforms" like battleships, tanks and planes. These systems, however, are increasingly "senile," meaning that the measures taken to insure their survival on the battlefield are overwhelming their offensive value.
The reason: the precision-guided munitions which will dominate the coming epoch as surely as the gun dominated the one preceding it. The ultimate expression of these will be hypersonic, intercontinental-range cruise missiles with the versatility of manned bombers (their discussion of missiles shading into what we today commonly term drones).
Meanwhile, the world's military center of gravity is shifting skyward, to space, global dominance meaning space dominance, to be won by manned command platforms in space, and fleets of space vehicles that can see and attack anything on the surface.
There will be little place for tanks, warships and traditional combat aircraft in this new military order, or even for massed infantry because while "boots on the ground" will still be necessary for close-in combat and holding territory, they will more and more resemble the "starship troopers" of Robert Heinlein-small, elite units whose individual members have been made far more deadly by advanced armor, sensors, communication systems and weapons.1
In short, the book is an explanation of the then-fashionable thinking about what is commonly called the "Revolution in Military Affairs," albeit a very thorough, comprehensive and accessible one. Indeed, it made quite a strong impression on my own thinking about these subjects when I first read it back in 2000, and much of my early writing and publication cites its ideas.
I find myself looking rather more skeptically at the book now, however. While we have perhaps gone overboard in the degree to which we have overlooked great power politics in the last decade or so, this book's focus is too narrow, not only in its considering just one level of warfare while ignoring all the others, but in its particular technological focus. It was not the gun which gave Europe its ascendancy, but industrialization, and that ascendancy was also briefer and more precarious than the half millennium suggested here.2 Their vision of a "European epoch" based on the mastery of a particular weapons technology therefore seems a poor basis for arguing for a similarly founded American epoch extending far into the future (even without considering today's much more rapid technological diffusion).
Additionally, where the key technologies themselves are considered, this is at best a long-range vision, rather than a guide to practical policymaking. The day when militaries serious about fighting conventional wars can finally dispense with their tanks and warships is still a long way off. The space dominance visions described here remain technically and economically infeasible, and can be expected to remain so for decades.
Even precision-guided munitions seem likely to make much slower progress than they imagined. There has been surprisingly little progress toward really fast, really long-range cruise missiles in the decade since they wrote their book, and it is not really that surprising. Many of the areas of technology relevant to realizing the idea (like propulsion systems) have been seeing fairly slow progress for quite some time. Besides, the PGM itself might become senile sooner than imagined, if directed-energy weapons become ubiquitous, an outcome that may be in real doubt, but still seems more likely than the realization of the space capabilities envisioned here.
The authors are also too dismissive of the importance of mass in future warfare, erroneously predicted so many times before-not least, by Basil Liddell Hart after World War I. Even if armies get smaller because of the cost of their equipment, numbers will still count, and the political units able to raise the resources to support those numbers will count for a great deal. Indeed, the size of the space forces necessary to achieve really workable, continuous coverage of the whole planet will be staggering.3
While this is said with all the advantage of hindsight, the book remains more interesting as an expression of the thinking on these topics in its day, and for the thoroughness of its extrapolation from a (flawed) theory, than as a comment on contemporary concerns, or a fully-rounded vision of things to come.
1 As for nuclear weapons, these will remain, but as a factor of declining significance-simply guarantees of state survival, and as checks on the nuclear weapons held by other actors-enabling the conduct of limited wars. (Notably, the authors count both the world wars as having been limited conflicts.)
2 After all, Asia had its own gunpowder empires, which did much to limit (and at points, even reverse) European expansion at the expense of India, China and the Ottoman Empire until late in the eighteenth century and often after; while Russia and Japan successfully resisted colonization.
3 One study indicates that as many as 1600 interceptors may be needed to stop a single ICBM. See American Physical Society, Boost-Phase Intercept Systems for National Missile Defense: Scientific and Technical Issues (College Park, MD: APS, 2003). Cited in Nancy Gallagher and John D. Steinbruner, Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008), pp. 66-67. It has also been estimated that as many as 1200 satellites would be needed simply to image every point on the planet once an hour. Gallagher, p. 69.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
On The Prospects for a "New" New Deal
Check out this article by Ralph Nader in the Christian Science Monitor outlining a "new" New Deal for America.
I don't think it will happen. The last election was no referendum on neoliberalism, and the Democratic Party certainly has not abandoned Clintonomics, which were really not much different from Reagonomics, except in their comparative fiscal discipline. (After all, the Clinton administration's most significant economic legacies were free trade-NAFTA and GATT, welfare reform-the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, and business deregulation-the 1996 Telecom Act and the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. He reappointed Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan to another term at the Fed. There was never a shortage of corporate welfare, not the least of it big bailouts like the peso rescue of 1994-5. I could go on, but you get the picture, the results of which we're all living with now.)
Even were things different, despite all the hoopla, the election of 2008 was not some profound realignment of the kind Kevin Phillips describes in his books. The popular vote went 52-47, and for the most part the red states stayed red, the blue states blue, the main difference the tipping left of "swing states" like Florida (which went for Obama by less than 3 percent) and Ohio (which did the same by less than four). The Democrats have a majority in Congress, but not an overwhelming one, and anyway they don't exactly have an impressive track record of uniting behind liberal initiatives-something certainly not changed by their conduct in the last two years. And Obama's recent appointments (yet more Clintonomics, including an actual Clinton!) don't exactly point to the "change" endlessly promised.
On balance, the evidence says that those who hoped the 1992 election would reverse the legacy of Reagan-Bush I should expect another four years of disappointment-while hoping dearly that I'm wrong.
I don't think it will happen. The last election was no referendum on neoliberalism, and the Democratic Party certainly has not abandoned Clintonomics, which were really not much different from Reagonomics, except in their comparative fiscal discipline. (After all, the Clinton administration's most significant economic legacies were free trade-NAFTA and GATT, welfare reform-the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, and business deregulation-the 1996 Telecom Act and the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. He reappointed Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan to another term at the Fed. There was never a shortage of corporate welfare, not the least of it big bailouts like the peso rescue of 1994-5. I could go on, but you get the picture, the results of which we're all living with now.)
Even were things different, despite all the hoopla, the election of 2008 was not some profound realignment of the kind Kevin Phillips describes in his books. The popular vote went 52-47, and for the most part the red states stayed red, the blue states blue, the main difference the tipping left of "swing states" like Florida (which went for Obama by less than 3 percent) and Ohio (which did the same by less than four). The Democrats have a majority in Congress, but not an overwhelming one, and anyway they don't exactly have an impressive track record of uniting behind liberal initiatives-something certainly not changed by their conduct in the last two years. And Obama's recent appointments (yet more Clintonomics, including an actual Clinton!) don't exactly point to the "change" endlessly promised.
On balance, the evidence says that those who hoped the 1992 election would reverse the legacy of Reagan-Bush I should expect another four years of disappointment-while hoping dearly that I'm wrong.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The Falling Price of Oil
The price of oil right now is sixty percent off its July record price. Speculation certainly played its role in the rising prices of the last few years, as Amy Myers Jaffe (with whom I had an exchange in the journal Survival last August) pointed out-and I agree that the abandonment of oil by the speculators played its role in the recent drop. So did the smothering of the earlier, strong demand growth by the stiff $150 a barrel price tag (and a global economic crisis).
Nonetheless, while providing some much-needed relief, these developments do not change the essential picture. Even if demand is slightly down in 2008-9 from earlier years, this will not last forever. Indeed, the lowered prices are setting the stage for new consumption growth-just as world demand grew again in the 1980s (though, as the current economic crisis demonstrates, there are plenty of reasons to think the road ahead is going to be a rocky one, the availability of energy supplies only a part of that). And barring unlikely regulatory measures, the speculators will be back.
More importantly, the old causes for concern that got another, long overdue hearing during the price rises of 2003-08 remain. Known oil supplies continue to be used up much more quickly than new supplies are being discovered, and the process of getting production up and running at new fields (a decade or more) remain as long as before. No new reason has appeared to think that the reserves of the OPEC countries have not been significantly overstated. The theory of peak oil is no less (or more) valid than it was back in July. And the potential for unconventional oil to fill the gap between supply and demand that peak theorists have long expected to emerge in the next decade is unchanged from what it was not too long ago (10 or 11 million barrels a day, no more).
This makes the question, as I put it in August, not whether the price of oil will drop (as it already has), but how far, and for how long? And when it starts going up again, as it almost certainly will, how far and how long will that go on too? The end of the oil age was never going to be a linear thing, and the worst mistake we can make at this moment is to pretend that things were really fine all along, that the calls for sounder energy policy in the last few years were nothing but hysteria, and abandon conservation efforts and the development of alternative energy sources-the way we did in the 1980s, when R & D and other efforts in this area fell off, resulting in a pattern of underinvestment that set us back decades, particularly in the U.S., but internationally as well.
Those mistakes, which set us up for later difficulties, must not be forgotten by anyone purporting to guess at the future. I only hope they will not be repeated.
Nonetheless, while providing some much-needed relief, these developments do not change the essential picture. Even if demand is slightly down in 2008-9 from earlier years, this will not last forever. Indeed, the lowered prices are setting the stage for new consumption growth-just as world demand grew again in the 1980s (though, as the current economic crisis demonstrates, there are plenty of reasons to think the road ahead is going to be a rocky one, the availability of energy supplies only a part of that). And barring unlikely regulatory measures, the speculators will be back.
More importantly, the old causes for concern that got another, long overdue hearing during the price rises of 2003-08 remain. Known oil supplies continue to be used up much more quickly than new supplies are being discovered, and the process of getting production up and running at new fields (a decade or more) remain as long as before. No new reason has appeared to think that the reserves of the OPEC countries have not been significantly overstated. The theory of peak oil is no less (or more) valid than it was back in July. And the potential for unconventional oil to fill the gap between supply and demand that peak theorists have long expected to emerge in the next decade is unchanged from what it was not too long ago (10 or 11 million barrels a day, no more).
This makes the question, as I put it in August, not whether the price of oil will drop (as it already has), but how far, and for how long? And when it starts going up again, as it almost certainly will, how far and how long will that go on too? The end of the oil age was never going to be a linear thing, and the worst mistake we can make at this moment is to pretend that things were really fine all along, that the calls for sounder energy policy in the last few years were nothing but hysteria, and abandon conservation efforts and the development of alternative energy sources-the way we did in the 1980s, when R & D and other efforts in this area fell off, resulting in a pattern of underinvestment that set us back decades, particularly in the U.S., but internationally as well.
Those mistakes, which set us up for later difficulties, must not be forgotten by anyone purporting to guess at the future. I only hope they will not be repeated.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, by William R. Polk
New York: HarperCollins, 2007, pp. 304.
As readers of the recent literature on guerrilla warfare, this is a highly contentious subject. It may be a mistake to overlook the role of non-material factors like politics and morale in any type of warfare, but in interstate conflicts, wealth, technology and numbers make themselves felt in a way that is not the case with guerrilla warfare, which frequently sees the weak defeat the strong. Additionally, what constitutes "victory" tends to be more ambiguous, so that there is profound disagreement over what to make of particular campaigns. For instance, is one to chalk up Britain's counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya as a victory or a defeat? (The Communists were prevented from taking over the country--but the British also departed.)
Accordingly some writers present the guerrilla as virtually invincible, others as inherently futile. Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace, a self-described history of America's "small wars," for instance, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again, with the implication that counterinsurgency is a relatively simple matter, and success historically routine. By contrast, when Martin Van Creveld's books address the subject, they tend to read like listings of great power humiliations. His latest, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq, is no exception.
William R. Polk's recent study, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, leans strongly toward the latter view, albeit with important qualifications having to do with the fundamental assessment of the problem. Polk's book characterizes guerrilla warfare as a nationalistic response to the presence of a foreign occupier.
Unchecked, this response proceeds through three phases. In the first phase the insurgency, tending to begin with what may seem like a preposterously small number of active combatants "fight as terrorists" because they are "too few to fight as guerrillas." The actions they take may attract others alienated by the situation to them, and certainly generate government repression, reinforcing the process as embittered citizens also sign up. A successful outcome of this phase (for the insurgents) is their attaining a "critical mass for extended operations and achiev[ing] recognition as a national champion."
The conventional wisdom is that this "political" phase is eighty percent of the conflict, and Polk does not differ on that point. However, Polk offers a more nuanced view of the remaining twenty percent, which other authors often characterize as simply a military component, in his characterization of the next two phases.
In phase two-which accounts for another fifteen percent of the conflict-the guerrillas act to disrupt the functioning of the state as such, and substitute their own "counter-state" for it. They keep the government from being able to maintain order, collect taxes or operate basic services while the guerrillas may attempt to do some or all of these things. This is not a matter of holding ground for the guerrillas, the objective rather to "take control and win over the people."
The third phase-a mere five percent, though also entailing the bulk of the fighting-involves a turn to larger-scale military operations on the part of the guerrillas. This means an end to "small-scale, hit-and-run" and a shift toward regular warfare.
Polk's analysis is much stronger in its consideration of the first two phases than the third, and in particular what makes for a successful phase three. The selected historical examples do not clarify that part of the issue. Where many of these insurgencies met with success, as in the Spanish struggle against Napoleon, or the Yugoslav and Greek resistance during World War II, the guerrillas were often players inside of a much larger context of interstate conflict. (The same might also be said of the American Revolution, or the insurgency in South Vietnam.) In other cases, an exhausted and collapsing empire was fighting a rear-guard battle to hold on to its colonies (as with the Spanish in the Philippines, the French in Algeria and post-World War II Vietnam, or the British in Kenya). Little explanation is offered as to why post-World War I Ireland and Afghanistan-where in the 1980s, massive foreign support was certainly a factor-constitute exceptions to that pattern. (In the case of Ireland, a brief word about public opinion is presented as the decisive difference.)
Additionally, while this book's emphasis is on long-standing historical patterns, some more consideration would have been due the changes that have occurred during the two centuries of history this book surveys. There is virtually no discussion of the impact of urbanization, which has been strongly correlated with the prospects for rebellion and revolution occurring (as in Jack Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World), but which in the analysis of some observers, makes it almost impossible for guerrillas to win (as Anthony James Joes contends in his recent study, Urban Guerrilla Warfare).
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to linger on these shortcomings, because of the importance of what the book does get right, in particular its recognition that combat operations constitute a relatively small part of the conflict. In this, Polk's study echoes the assessment of contemporary conflict advanced by General Rupert Smith in his book, The Utility of Force (my review of which for Strategic Insights you can read here). Phase One is ultimately where the war is won or lost, the rest just a matter of putting off defeat-and so to be avoided barring a readiness to fight such a war indefinitely.
As readers of the recent literature on guerrilla warfare, this is a highly contentious subject. It may be a mistake to overlook the role of non-material factors like politics and morale in any type of warfare, but in interstate conflicts, wealth, technology and numbers make themselves felt in a way that is not the case with guerrilla warfare, which frequently sees the weak defeat the strong. Additionally, what constitutes "victory" tends to be more ambiguous, so that there is profound disagreement over what to make of particular campaigns. For instance, is one to chalk up Britain's counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya as a victory or a defeat? (The Communists were prevented from taking over the country--but the British also departed.)
Accordingly some writers present the guerrilla as virtually invincible, others as inherently futile. Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace, a self-described history of America's "small wars," for instance, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again, with the implication that counterinsurgency is a relatively simple matter, and success historically routine. By contrast, when Martin Van Creveld's books address the subject, they tend to read like listings of great power humiliations. His latest, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq, is no exception.
William R. Polk's recent study, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, leans strongly toward the latter view, albeit with important qualifications having to do with the fundamental assessment of the problem. Polk's book characterizes guerrilla warfare as a nationalistic response to the presence of a foreign occupier.
Unchecked, this response proceeds through three phases. In the first phase the insurgency, tending to begin with what may seem like a preposterously small number of active combatants "fight as terrorists" because they are "too few to fight as guerrillas." The actions they take may attract others alienated by the situation to them, and certainly generate government repression, reinforcing the process as embittered citizens also sign up. A successful outcome of this phase (for the insurgents) is their attaining a "critical mass for extended operations and achiev[ing] recognition as a national champion."
The conventional wisdom is that this "political" phase is eighty percent of the conflict, and Polk does not differ on that point. However, Polk offers a more nuanced view of the remaining twenty percent, which other authors often characterize as simply a military component, in his characterization of the next two phases.
In phase two-which accounts for another fifteen percent of the conflict-the guerrillas act to disrupt the functioning of the state as such, and substitute their own "counter-state" for it. They keep the government from being able to maintain order, collect taxes or operate basic services while the guerrillas may attempt to do some or all of these things. This is not a matter of holding ground for the guerrillas, the objective rather to "take control and win over the people."
The third phase-a mere five percent, though also entailing the bulk of the fighting-involves a turn to larger-scale military operations on the part of the guerrillas. This means an end to "small-scale, hit-and-run" and a shift toward regular warfare.
Polk's analysis is much stronger in its consideration of the first two phases than the third, and in particular what makes for a successful phase three. The selected historical examples do not clarify that part of the issue. Where many of these insurgencies met with success, as in the Spanish struggle against Napoleon, or the Yugoslav and Greek resistance during World War II, the guerrillas were often players inside of a much larger context of interstate conflict. (The same might also be said of the American Revolution, or the insurgency in South Vietnam.) In other cases, an exhausted and collapsing empire was fighting a rear-guard battle to hold on to its colonies (as with the Spanish in the Philippines, the French in Algeria and post-World War II Vietnam, or the British in Kenya). Little explanation is offered as to why post-World War I Ireland and Afghanistan-where in the 1980s, massive foreign support was certainly a factor-constitute exceptions to that pattern. (In the case of Ireland, a brief word about public opinion is presented as the decisive difference.)
Additionally, while this book's emphasis is on long-standing historical patterns, some more consideration would have been due the changes that have occurred during the two centuries of history this book surveys. There is virtually no discussion of the impact of urbanization, which has been strongly correlated with the prospects for rebellion and revolution occurring (as in Jack Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World), but which in the analysis of some observers, makes it almost impossible for guerrillas to win (as Anthony James Joes contends in his recent study, Urban Guerrilla Warfare).
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to linger on these shortcomings, because of the importance of what the book does get right, in particular its recognition that combat operations constitute a relatively small part of the conflict. In this, Polk's study echoes the assessment of contemporary conflict advanced by General Rupert Smith in his book, The Utility of Force (my review of which for Strategic Insights you can read here). Phase One is ultimately where the war is won or lost, the rest just a matter of putting off defeat-and so to be avoided barring a readiness to fight such a war indefinitely.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Are Territorial Military Occupations Becoming More Difficult?
By Nader Elhefnawy
Neoconservative Max Boot's 2002 book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, a self-described history of America's "small wars" intended to sell the idea that empire is feasible and worthwhile, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again.
When I first read it, something seemed off about Boot's analysis. He made it seem too easy, and the events of recent years have helped clarify why that was. In the operations Boot describes, U.S. objectives were very limited, quashing an immediate, perceived threat, and otherwise leaving the countries much as they were, so that American forces were likely to return again in the not-too-distant future to do it all over again. By contrast, "proper" nation-building today entails the setting up of a stable government and functioning economy, then leaving with little expectation of a near-term redux.1
In short, territorial occupations are expected to accomplish far more than before. Of course, advocates of such operations point to the cases of Germany and Japan in the post-World War II period. However, these were anomalous in already having been economically viable industrial states, with significant, recent experience of modern civil society and democracy, and a high degree of ethnic homogeneity, eliminating the danger that ethnic or sectarian tensions would exert centrifugal forces in a moment of weakness. In short, it was a matter of getting the country up and running again, rather than building up what was never there in the first place (or dismantling what was there before and building up something entirely new), a much taller order.
The occupations of the immediate post-war period (of which the occupations of Germany and Japan were a part) represent exceptional rather than typical cases. U.S.-led occupations in Western Europe and Northeast Asia during those years represent six of the seven successful occupations that David Edelstein found out of a total of twenty-four he studied.2 A critical factor appears to have been the occupier's guarantee of the occupied nation's security against an external threat, specifically the Soviet Union, which quelled internal opposition.3 In other words, the rapid onset of the Cold War following the end of World War II created unique opportunities which are unlikely to recur in the foreseeable future.
Many observers also forget just how demanding the occupations were. The American presence in West Germany alone (and it should be remembered that there were also British and French zones) involved four hundred thousand troops. The U.S. occupation of Japan involved an even larger number of soldiers, four hundred and fifty thousand at its height--approximately one soldier for every 180 Japanese citizens.
Meanwhile, a number of developments have made occupation more rather than less difficult. Several of them have to do with changes in the countries to be garrisoned themselves, related to their modernization:
* Demographic expansion.
* Urbanization.
* Social mobilization.
Put simply, the populations to be administered and policed in the course of an occupation are larger; and are concentrated in much more complex environments. To give but one example, the population of Baghdad expanded twenty times between 1932 and 2006, producing a metropolis sprawling over some three hundred square miles, and containing seven million people.
That same urbanization, as well as higher levels of education, and greater access to media in virtually all locations, results in a population that is at least potentially more engaged politically, with predictable results. Moreover, all of these count for more in an age where conflict is characterized less by "industrial war" than "war amongst the people," to use General Rupert Smith's terms.4 Battlefield decisions count for far less, as do arms in general, these becoming more clearly just a way of creating conditions in which other "means and levers of power" can be brought to bear to produce the results. And given how slowly those levers work, conflicts "tend to be timeless, even unending."
All of this comes just as a number of other factors have combined to make it more difficult for the major military powers (and especially the developed states) to raise the kinds of military forces needed for long-term occupation:
* Again, demographics, or the graying of populations. Smaller youth cohorts mean smaller (relative) pools of manpower from which to draw armies. This trend is globally evident, but most advanced in North America, Europe, Russia, East Asia and Australasia, the regions containing the countries with the bulk of the world's military capability, and also the ones most likely to stage such interventions-with the countries where interventions are most likely usually in earlier stages of the process, resulting in a significant disparity.5
* Professionalization. The claim that modern armies can only be professional armies is an old one. Basil Liddell Hart made it after World War I, and again after World War II.6 He was proven wrong each time, but it may be that the claim is more valid today. Professional forces are necessarily smaller forces.
* Diminished civic militarism. This extends not only to the willingness to serve in the armed forces, but the willingness to pay for large defense establishments, or politically support operations, particularly when they are messy, lengthy and open-ended. That those operations are much less likely to relate to traditional territorial defense, and more likely to consist of constabulry missions, also makes such operations less gratifying to traditional patriotism, so that this is not simply a function of more pacifistic culture.7
* The "rising cost of war." As societies develop, they afford more (and often more attractive) career opportunities in civilian life to the ambitious. Nonetheless, this is offset somewhat by the reality of high structural unemployment and underemployment, especially among the young.
* Task specialization. It is arguable that there is an increasing divergence between the kind of army necessary for fighting and winning conventional conflicts; and one that might be effective at the tasks entailed by occupation duty. (Modern conventional forces have high support-to-combat ratios, and an emphasis on high-performance equipment of marginal value to such operations, for instance.) Responding to this reality, strategist Thomas Barnett has gone so far as to suggest the U.S. develop two, different forces (the "Leviathan" and "SysAdmin" forces, respectively), one for each task.8
Some observers will also point to the pressure on militaries to preserve their forces, and the enlarged role of the media. It is likely the case that the sensitivity to casualties has been exaggerated in the past, and that the same goes for the scrutiny to which the media subject such operations.9 Nonetheless, these too are factors, despite the exaggerations.
In short, there are very considerable, structural reasons why occupations have become more difficult, and the plain and simple truth is that there is no tactical, technological or political "silver bullet" which will resolve those difficulties. The only reasonable response for the foreseeable future is the recognition of the limits of military power in general, and in particular the capacity of even the strongest military powers to perform these sorts of missions. This means not undertaking given missions with unrealistic ideas about the size or length of the commitments they entail if they are to be done right, or overselling what occupations can do, in the course of moving toward a sounder balance between means and ends.
1 Incidentally, this was never an object for the British Empire (so often held up as a model imperialist by neoconservatives like Boot, and Niall Ferguson), which was ready to go to the greater lengths of permanently garrisoning its possessions and in cases, transplanting significant numbers of colonists.
2 The sole exception was France after the end of the Napoleonic wars. David M. Edelstein, "Occupational Hazards: Why Military Occupations Succeed or Fail," International Security 29.1 (Summer 2004), pp. 49-91.
3 Edelstein, p. 81.
4 The core of this argument can be found in chapter seven of Smith's The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 269-307. You can also find it summed up in my review of the book for the journal Strategic Insights, which you can access here.
5 In 1950 the developed states accounted for about a third of the world's population; today they account for less than a fifth, with most of the world's population growth continuing in poorer and less developed states.
6 See Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future of War (New York: Garland, 1925); Liddell Hart, Defence of the West: Some Riddles of War and Peace (London: Cassell, 1950).
7 One can also argue that where civic militarism has not decreased, it has been redefined, Andrew Bacevich arguing that militarism has actually risen in American society in recent decades, pointing to a shift from an emphasis on service to politically "supporting the troops." See Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (New York: Oxford, 2005)
8 See Thomas P.M. Barnett, Blueprint for Action (New York: Berkeley, 2006).
9 As Martin Van Creveld recently put it, "'media' has become an excuse for failure." See Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq (New York: Ballantine, 2007), p. 217.
Neoconservative Max Boot's 2002 book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, a self-described history of America's "small wars" intended to sell the idea that empire is feasible and worthwhile, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again.
When I first read it, something seemed off about Boot's analysis. He made it seem too easy, and the events of recent years have helped clarify why that was. In the operations Boot describes, U.S. objectives were very limited, quashing an immediate, perceived threat, and otherwise leaving the countries much as they were, so that American forces were likely to return again in the not-too-distant future to do it all over again. By contrast, "proper" nation-building today entails the setting up of a stable government and functioning economy, then leaving with little expectation of a near-term redux.1
In short, territorial occupations are expected to accomplish far more than before. Of course, advocates of such operations point to the cases of Germany and Japan in the post-World War II period. However, these were anomalous in already having been economically viable industrial states, with significant, recent experience of modern civil society and democracy, and a high degree of ethnic homogeneity, eliminating the danger that ethnic or sectarian tensions would exert centrifugal forces in a moment of weakness. In short, it was a matter of getting the country up and running again, rather than building up what was never there in the first place (or dismantling what was there before and building up something entirely new), a much taller order.
The occupations of the immediate post-war period (of which the occupations of Germany and Japan were a part) represent exceptional rather than typical cases. U.S.-led occupations in Western Europe and Northeast Asia during those years represent six of the seven successful occupations that David Edelstein found out of a total of twenty-four he studied.2 A critical factor appears to have been the occupier's guarantee of the occupied nation's security against an external threat, specifically the Soviet Union, which quelled internal opposition.3 In other words, the rapid onset of the Cold War following the end of World War II created unique opportunities which are unlikely to recur in the foreseeable future.
Many observers also forget just how demanding the occupations were. The American presence in West Germany alone (and it should be remembered that there were also British and French zones) involved four hundred thousand troops. The U.S. occupation of Japan involved an even larger number of soldiers, four hundred and fifty thousand at its height--approximately one soldier for every 180 Japanese citizens.
Meanwhile, a number of developments have made occupation more rather than less difficult. Several of them have to do with changes in the countries to be garrisoned themselves, related to their modernization:
* Demographic expansion.
* Urbanization.
* Social mobilization.
Put simply, the populations to be administered and policed in the course of an occupation are larger; and are concentrated in much more complex environments. To give but one example, the population of Baghdad expanded twenty times between 1932 and 2006, producing a metropolis sprawling over some three hundred square miles, and containing seven million people.
That same urbanization, as well as higher levels of education, and greater access to media in virtually all locations, results in a population that is at least potentially more engaged politically, with predictable results. Moreover, all of these count for more in an age where conflict is characterized less by "industrial war" than "war amongst the people," to use General Rupert Smith's terms.4 Battlefield decisions count for far less, as do arms in general, these becoming more clearly just a way of creating conditions in which other "means and levers of power" can be brought to bear to produce the results. And given how slowly those levers work, conflicts "tend to be timeless, even unending."
All of this comes just as a number of other factors have combined to make it more difficult for the major military powers (and especially the developed states) to raise the kinds of military forces needed for long-term occupation:
* Again, demographics, or the graying of populations. Smaller youth cohorts mean smaller (relative) pools of manpower from which to draw armies. This trend is globally evident, but most advanced in North America, Europe, Russia, East Asia and Australasia, the regions containing the countries with the bulk of the world's military capability, and also the ones most likely to stage such interventions-with the countries where interventions are most likely usually in earlier stages of the process, resulting in a significant disparity.5
* Professionalization. The claim that modern armies can only be professional armies is an old one. Basil Liddell Hart made it after World War I, and again after World War II.6 He was proven wrong each time, but it may be that the claim is more valid today. Professional forces are necessarily smaller forces.
* Diminished civic militarism. This extends not only to the willingness to serve in the armed forces, but the willingness to pay for large defense establishments, or politically support operations, particularly when they are messy, lengthy and open-ended. That those operations are much less likely to relate to traditional territorial defense, and more likely to consist of constabulry missions, also makes such operations less gratifying to traditional patriotism, so that this is not simply a function of more pacifistic culture.7
* The "rising cost of war." As societies develop, they afford more (and often more attractive) career opportunities in civilian life to the ambitious. Nonetheless, this is offset somewhat by the reality of high structural unemployment and underemployment, especially among the young.
* Task specialization. It is arguable that there is an increasing divergence between the kind of army necessary for fighting and winning conventional conflicts; and one that might be effective at the tasks entailed by occupation duty. (Modern conventional forces have high support-to-combat ratios, and an emphasis on high-performance equipment of marginal value to such operations, for instance.) Responding to this reality, strategist Thomas Barnett has gone so far as to suggest the U.S. develop two, different forces (the "Leviathan" and "SysAdmin" forces, respectively), one for each task.8
Some observers will also point to the pressure on militaries to preserve their forces, and the enlarged role of the media. It is likely the case that the sensitivity to casualties has been exaggerated in the past, and that the same goes for the scrutiny to which the media subject such operations.9 Nonetheless, these too are factors, despite the exaggerations.
In short, there are very considerable, structural reasons why occupations have become more difficult, and the plain and simple truth is that there is no tactical, technological or political "silver bullet" which will resolve those difficulties. The only reasonable response for the foreseeable future is the recognition of the limits of military power in general, and in particular the capacity of even the strongest military powers to perform these sorts of missions. This means not undertaking given missions with unrealistic ideas about the size or length of the commitments they entail if they are to be done right, or overselling what occupations can do, in the course of moving toward a sounder balance between means and ends.
1 Incidentally, this was never an object for the British Empire (so often held up as a model imperialist by neoconservatives like Boot, and Niall Ferguson), which was ready to go to the greater lengths of permanently garrisoning its possessions and in cases, transplanting significant numbers of colonists.
2 The sole exception was France after the end of the Napoleonic wars. David M. Edelstein, "Occupational Hazards: Why Military Occupations Succeed or Fail," International Security 29.1 (Summer 2004), pp. 49-91.
3 Edelstein, p. 81.
4 The core of this argument can be found in chapter seven of Smith's The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 269-307. You can also find it summed up in my review of the book for the journal Strategic Insights, which you can access here.
5 In 1950 the developed states accounted for about a third of the world's population; today they account for less than a fifth, with most of the world's population growth continuing in poorer and less developed states.
6 See Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future of War (New York: Garland, 1925); Liddell Hart, Defence of the West: Some Riddles of War and Peace (London: Cassell, 1950).
7 One can also argue that where civic militarism has not decreased, it has been redefined, Andrew Bacevich arguing that militarism has actually risen in American society in recent decades, pointing to a shift from an emphasis on service to politically "supporting the troops." See Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (New York: Oxford, 2005)
8 See Thomas P.M. Barnett, Blueprint for Action (New York: Berkeley, 2006).
9 As Martin Van Creveld recently put it, "'media' has become an excuse for failure." See Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq (New York: Ballantine, 2007), p. 217.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
A Russian Resurgence? (Part One)
By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in the SPACE REVIEW, November 10, 2008
"RUSSIA RESURGENT" read the cover of the August 16, 2008 issue of The Economist, which depicted a giant Vladimir Putin towering over advancing ranks of flag-bearing Russian soldiers as fighters and attack helicopters streak past.
This none-too-subtle image was, of course, a reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia, which signaled the country’s return as a military heavyweight to many, a reading of events reflective of the usual media exaggeration. While it may still be too early for a really thorough assessment of the Russian military’s performance in the conflict, there is little reason to believe that the Russian armed forces have been seriously rehabilitated, despite the unveiling of schemes like the State Armaments Program—still in its very early stages—and gestures like the resumption of long-range bomber flights, and a handful of high-profile military exercises (like the recently announced joint exercise with the Venezuelan navy in the Caribbean). The Russian military’s success in a limited war with a much smaller and poorer neighbor is also a long way from the "long-range power projection" capability that some of those hyping Russian military power describe as a foregone conclusion by 2020, like Barry McCaffrey in a recent pitch for an ambitious aircraft procurement program in the Joint Force Quarterly.
Nonetheless, the perception marks a dramatic turnaround in the view of Russia compared with ten years ago. In 1998 Russia was widely regarded as a basketcase, and able to look forward only to more of the same. Today, it is seen as a vigorous, economically dynamic state that may not be the superpower it once was, but a much more substantial actor in international affairs, and with brighter prospects, than might have been guessed a decade ago. It seems only reasonable to wonder, then, if Russia's "resurgence" will translate to the country's position in space, as some are already arguing, notably Brian Harvey in his recent book, The Rebirth of the Russian Space Program.
The fall of a great space power
The Soviet Union had the world’s second-largest economy until at least 1980, and perhaps until the end of its life, which enabled it to be the space superpower that it was. Not only did it have a striking list of "firsts" to its credit from Sputnik on, but its vast infrastructure in space, its satellite networks and space stations, had no peer save the United States. And not even the US matched it in certain respects, like the sheer rate of satellite launches it was able to sustain.
Of course, this state of affairs did not continue. Following the country’s collapse in 1991, the division of the Soviet Union into fifteen states, and the disruption of the break-up, left Moscow with the trappings of the ex-superpower, the space program included, but just a quarter (or at most, a third) of the national income that had sustained them.
Predictably, the Soviet program collapsed after the country that had built it up. In 1992 the worldwide seaborne tracking fleet was recalled to Russian ports, for lack of the hard currency to pay for their stays in foreign harbors. The Buran shuttle program was cancelled the year after that. The GLONASS navigation system decayed, the 24-satellite constellation shrinking to a mere six craft by 2001 for lack of replacements. The plans to build on the Mir space station were never realized: Mir barely remained operational up to its deorbiting, and the remnants of that program were absorbed by the International Space Station. As Russian military launches fell from 28 in 1992 to a mere five in 2000, the country’s senior officers would increasingly complain of periods of "blindness" and "deafness," in which the number of Russian photo- and electronic reconnaissance satellites in orbit at a given moment dropped to zero.
This is not to say that Russia was totally without successes in this period. That the program was able to stay alive on its old capital (and the income secured from commercial sales of its services) was by itself an achievement. Russia remained the world’s most active satellite launcher during the decade, and around the turn of the century a turnaround began. The Russian government initiated a restoration and modernization of GLONASS, and pioneered space tourism (just one of the ways in which the country has been an important player in the commercial services market), which optimists expect to see become a significant business. Most symbolic of all, Russian Soyuz launches have proven essential to the continued functioning of the International Space Station, especially after the Columbia disaster in 2003—during which it was the only nation in the world with an established manned spaceflight capability, a status to which some think it will return given the uncertainties about the shuttle’s future.
Nonetheless, the tendency in the media was to pay far more attention to the failures than the successes, in line with the generally bleak view of Russia’s situation, while doing exactly the opposite in the case of China (expected by everyone from science fiction writers to defense analysts to be the US’s great competitor in the future). Predictably, where Soviet space activity had once loomed so large in Western imaginations, in some ways, preposterously so (see "Space war and Futurehype," The Space Review, October 22, 2007) it is now easy to forget that this was ever the case. However, things have already started to turn up, and the Russian government has accordingly committed itself to an ambitious ten-year program, on which it hopes to build in the decades to follow.
The Russian Federal Space Program (FSP), 2006–2015
The program, first announced in July 2005, included not only the rehabilitation of GLONASS, the meeting of Russia’s commitments to the International Space Station program and the launch of a number of earth-monitoring and communications satellites, but the development of the Kliper space shuttle, the Parom space tug (a system long seen as a requirement for ambitious space development projects), and the Angara heavy-lift launcher; an upgrade of the Soyuz rocket; and a host of scientific programs, including the dispatch of unmanned missions to the moon and Mars, and a terrestrial experiment intended as part of a run-up to an international manned mission to Mars, perhaps in the 2020s.
Of course, all of this was to be funded by a substantial increase in the space budget. According to the best available data, Russia is to allot over $20 billion to its various space programs, $12 billion of them to the Federal Space Agency (with the rest going to military endeavors, and additional appropriations for GLONASS). Another $4.5 billion in commercial revenue are expected to go to the Agency, bringing the expenditures on the FSP up to $16.5 billion (out of some $25 billion going to space in total). Counting in the usual Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) factor, this may give the program the equivalent of $25 billion (out of a PPP-adjusted total of $40 billion on Russian space activity).
In other words, at best, the Space Agency budget may grow from the $1.4 billion commonly cited for 2007 to $2–3 billion by 2015. This means that the plan is for Russia to catch up with the levels of expenditure of France and Japan by the middle of the next decade. The ten-year program budget, even counting the supplementary commercial revenue, comes to what NASA spends in roughly one year (and the total space budget substantially less than what NASA and the Defense Department together spend annually). It is inconceivable that any of those other programs would accomplish so much with so little, and there have already been disappointments in this regard. The design and development bill for the Kliper ran five times as high as the Russian government’s original estimate.
Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted that even the sums discussed here will actually be available. Along with the inevitable ups and downs of the commercial market that is expected to carry a large part of the tab, this raises questions about the availability of the will and the means to keep the budgets at the planned level. It is worth noting that government allocations for the program already fell into arrears back in 2006. Additionally, given Russia’s rate of inflation (15 percent earlier this year), which frequently exceeds any announced plans for funding increases, the Space Agency budget may actually fall in real terms during this period.
Consequently, Russia will not only have to live up to these commitments, but spend more, or do less (perhaps trimming costs by using existing launch systems for a bit longer than hoped, or curtailing the scientific and exploratory programs in favor of priority services like GLONASS), or some combination of both. The government's ability to do any of these things will depend greatly on the performance of its economy. So will its ability to share out the costs of projects like the Kliper (in which the European Space Agency has taken an interest), since this will determine the view of Russia as a reliable partner, even more than international approval or disapproval of its actions. It only seems appropriate, then, to take a look at Russia’s renewed economic growth, rarely examined in any detail, but of crucial importance to any analysis like this one: the subject of part two of this essay.
Continue to Part Two.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Rethinking Military History, by Jeremy Black
New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 258.
The main themes of Black's Rethinking Military History, which readers of his other work are likely to have run across elsewhere, are that the writing of military history, especially as consumed by the broader public,
1. has focused overwhelmingly on Western Europe and the United States, to the neglect of the military history of other regions.
2. has been biased toward technological explanations for capability (and other developments).
3. has focused on "leading powers and dominant military systems, leading to a paradigm/diffusion model of military capability and change."
4. has separated the understanding of war on land and on sea.
5. has focused on interstate wars rather than war within states (with only a few exceptions, like the U.S. Civil War).
6. has failed to pay enough attention to "political 'tasking' in the setting of force structures, doctrines and goals, and in the judging of military success."
For the most part, I find it impossible to argue with his view of the state of military historiography, and on the whole I think he did a good job of offering a corrective in the book (except perhaps for point number four, which got comparatively little attention).
I also enjoyed the discussion of the writing of "pop" military history in the book's second chapter. Quite accurately, I thought, he analyzed the focus not just on Western history and interstate conflicts, but the tendency of writers to treat the same handful of wars over and over again while virtually ignoring every other subject. (Because he devotes so much time to the British market, the discussion of the status of Napoleonic era and World War I historiography is far less representative of the United States, but the principle is pretty much the same.) And of course, he notes the emphasis on biography, memoirs and operational accounts, at the expense of other kinds of writing.
You only need to check out C-SPAN's BOOK TV one weekend to see how much this is the case.
The main themes of Black's Rethinking Military History, which readers of his other work are likely to have run across elsewhere, are that the writing of military history, especially as consumed by the broader public,
1. has focused overwhelmingly on Western Europe and the United States, to the neglect of the military history of other regions.
2. has been biased toward technological explanations for capability (and other developments).
3. has focused on "leading powers and dominant military systems, leading to a paradigm/diffusion model of military capability and change."
4. has separated the understanding of war on land and on sea.
5. has focused on interstate wars rather than war within states (with only a few exceptions, like the U.S. Civil War).
6. has failed to pay enough attention to "political 'tasking' in the setting of force structures, doctrines and goals, and in the judging of military success."
For the most part, I find it impossible to argue with his view of the state of military historiography, and on the whole I think he did a good job of offering a corrective in the book (except perhaps for point number four, which got comparatively little attention).
I also enjoyed the discussion of the writing of "pop" military history in the book's second chapter. Quite accurately, I thought, he analyzed the focus not just on Western history and interstate conflicts, but the tendency of writers to treat the same handful of wars over and over again while virtually ignoring every other subject. (Because he devotes so much time to the British market, the discussion of the status of Napoleonic era and World War I historiography is far less representative of the United States, but the principle is pretty much the same.) And of course, he notes the emphasis on biography, memoirs and operational accounts, at the expense of other kinds of writing.
You only need to check out C-SPAN's BOOK TV one weekend to see how much this is the case.
About This Blog
This is one of my (Nader Elhefnawy's) two personal blogs. (The other is Raritania.)
This particular blog is principally concerned with my areas of interest in politics, international affairs, economics and technology.
Comments Policy
Reader comments are welcome, with this going even for comments on older posts, but they are moderated (with the help of a spam filter). Where these are concerned I reserve the right not to post and/or delete any comment for reasons including but not necessarily limited to their looking like spam (typically a result of the comment's marginal or nonexistent relevance to the subject of the post, inclusion of suspect links, etc.), or their being of an abusive or incoherent nature. (The final judgment about these matters, of course, rests with me.)
I generally endeavor to post those comments consistent with these necessary rules as quickly as possible, and to respond to every one of them as quickly as possible, but because of the moderation process it may take some time for comments to go up, and still longer for me to respond to them.
Your patience and understanding in the meantime are appreciated, and I look forward to your feedback.
Other Contacts
Should the reader need to contact me in a manner other than leaving a comment they can use the Contact Form on the right side of the page.
This particular blog is principally concerned with my areas of interest in politics, international affairs, economics and technology.
Comments Policy
Reader comments are welcome, with this going even for comments on older posts, but they are moderated (with the help of a spam filter). Where these are concerned I reserve the right not to post and/or delete any comment for reasons including but not necessarily limited to their looking like spam (typically a result of the comment's marginal or nonexistent relevance to the subject of the post, inclusion of suspect links, etc.), or their being of an abusive or incoherent nature. (The final judgment about these matters, of course, rests with me.)
I generally endeavor to post those comments consistent with these necessary rules as quickly as possible, and to respond to every one of them as quickly as possible, but because of the moderation process it may take some time for comments to go up, and still longer for me to respond to them.
Your patience and understanding in the meantime are appreciated, and I look forward to your feedback.
Other Contacts
Should the reader need to contact me in a manner other than leaving a comment they can use the Contact Form on the right side of the page.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
On Dark Ages
By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in THE FUTURIST (November-December 2007, pp. 14-19). Used with permission from:
World Future Society
7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450
Bethesda, Maryland 20814 USA.
301-656-8274
www.wfs.org
I spend a lot of time thinking about the future-maybe too much. As a professor of literature, I often teach and write about science fiction. As a writer on security issues, I'm often thinking about the shape of future war and future peace. In this kind of work it is routine for projections, planning documents, and studies to look to 2025, 2050, and even beyond. In the process they posit a future where science fiction has turned into science fact. Thinking about the future in such ways, and coming into constant contact with the thoughts of others about the same things, I find myself exploring the ways people used to picture the future, and all the things that didn't happen-the bad as well as the good.
Naturally, I can only wonder how people in the future will look back on the present-and about all those in the present who suspect there may be no one able to do so. During the lats few years, there's been an explosion in books with words like "collapse," "catastrophe," and "dark age" in their titles. While millenarian religion always seems to be doing a brisk business, there is also no shortage of secular doomsday scenarios at any given moment.
A natural disaster like a large meteor impact or the eruption of a supervolcano might wreck the world in one fell swoop. (David Keys's Catastrophe, in fact, argues that a massive volcanic eruption in the sixth century did bring about the collapse of the ancient world.) The Cold War may have ended, but the risk of large-scale nuclear war remains, particularly the risk of a war beginning accidentally. (This almost happened in the "Norwegian rocket incident" of January 1995, when the Russian military mistook a weather rocket for a ballistic missile.) Relatively innocent scientific research might unleash a technological catastrophe on the world, high-energy particle accelerators tearing open the fabric of the universe, a tidal wave of tiny robots turning the planet into gray goo as Martin Rees describes in Our Final Hour.
A number of unhappy factors have combined in recent years to boost the discussion, however. One is concern about a shrinking supply of oil amid high energy prices and war in the Persian Gulf. Another is the destruction of the natural environment by the activity of a rapidly growing human population, and in particular a widening recognition of human-driven climate change. Still another is an apparent growth of irrationalism and a rejection of science, evident in religious fundamentalism, New Age fads and the like, the subject of Carl Sagan's last book, The Demon-Haunted World. While not comparable to concerns about a major nuclear war, terrorism has also fed such worries, with biological weaponry, computer attacks and so forth causing some to argue that a few quick blows could bring modernity crashing down all around us.
Conservatives may worry less about resource shortages or the environment, and view religiosity in any form as a positive development, but find other causes for worry. Population growth in and of itself also may not bother them much, but the disparities inside that growth often do. Low birth rates in the industrialized world and rapid population growth in poor countries sending waves of immigrants to the former cause them great consternation. They also worry about the widespread questioning of traditional attitudes toward nationalism, culture, race, sex, religion, capitalism and so forth, which they see as opening the gates to barbarians within and without.
Of course, there are also writers who go to the other extreme and dismiss such concerns completely. In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman promises to trace the history of the idea rather than pass judgment on it, but he ends up rejecting thinkers on the subject as a collection of pathetic neurotics and concludes his study on a triumphalist note.
The History of Civilization Collapse
While Herman may dismiss the idea, the fact remains that advanced societies have collapsed in the past and protracted "dark ages" have followed, and it seems only natural to ask why they did so. Why do the problem-solving abilities of societies give out? Why is it that instead of going on forever forward and upward, societies so often stagnate, decline and collapse, leaving behind little but ruins for archaeologists to pick through? In other words, was the process inevitable, or could something have been done about it? Learning the answer to that question might tell us which of the many seemingly catastrophic threats to our survival we should be most concerned about, or whether, as Herman argues, we aren't unnecessarily fixated on catastrophe.
As Herman's study attests, no small number of thinkers has attempted to address these concerns, especially during the last two centuries. Not every story those writers tell is the same, but there is a great deal of overlap in their accounts of particular declining societies, and declining societies in general. Values once adhered to seem irrelevant, and institutions that worked before no longer do so (or at least, it seems that way). Governments become less effective at collecting taxes from their citizens, and at providing them with the services that justified such exactions. Insecurity rises due to widespread crime, intensified class warfare, and fighting among elites themselves. Achievement in the arts and sciences drops off (or at least it seems that way). In the end a society is left susceptible to threats that it might once have coped with successfull and the barbarians--once easily held at bay--are suddenly in the Colosseum.
Moral vs. Material Decline
While these thinkers recount many of the same incidents and trends, the theories they propose as to why these things happen vary widely. They do, however, tend to fall broadly into one of two categories-mystical explanations, and materialistic ones. Many of the "mystical" writers are rightly criticized for being weak on cause and effect, but they often identify a culprit nonetheless, such as the exhaustion of a people's "life force," or the genetic impoverishment of a once-triumphant nation. Others point to a nebulous moral decline, or the replacement of an intuitive or spiritual approach to life by barren rationality, a phase that may initially have been fruitful but, carried far enough, means decadence. Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Pitrim Sorokin, Christopher Dawson and many others developed theories along such lines. Their thinking has more recently been echoed by Pat Buchanan in books like The Death of the West.
The writings of the materialistic theorists are similarly varied, but they usually find economic explanations for decline. In recent years, scholars applying complexity science to the problem, such as Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies and Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War have added considerable theoretical sophistication to this approach. It is by no means new, however, and Carroll Quigley's 1960 book The Evolution of Civilizations is an outstanding example.
For sociologist Quigley the key to success or failure is a society's "instrument of expansion." This is a social mechanism enabling it to accumulate and invest resources in economic, political and cultural enlargement. Medieval feudalism, early modern mercantilism and laissez-faire capitalism are just a few examples of such systems. After early successes, these mechanisms produce diminishing returns, which clash with the rising expectations of a population that had likely been expanding up to that point. The resulting economic scarcity, insecurity and inequality lie at the root of the ills that follow, including the "moral decline."
Consider the case of ancient Rome, a popular one given the over-reliance of many of these writers on Classical history in developing their "universal" theories of civilizational rise and fall. Starting in the third century B.C.E., Roman agriculture began to shift away from a foundation of small, independent farmers to plantations worked by slaves. The farmers went into the cities-and the legions-where they participated in a sequence of brutal, class-driven civil wars and the conquest of the Known World, a process that destroyed the republic and ushered in the reign of the emperors. That reign became increasingly oppressive, the empire weaker and weaker economically, militarily, demographically and culturally, and in the end the barbarians overwhelmed it.
Writers of a more mystical bent see the formerly austere Romans corrupted by a loss of religious faith, an influx of foreign cultural elements and the temptations of wealth and urban living. The result is the popular image of depraved elites wallowing in cruelty, sensuality and luxury, while the rabble lived only for bread and circuses. Rather than enabling renewal the spread of an otherworldly, pacifistic Christianity is commonly blamed for undermining the last of the original virtue of the Romans, providing an object lesson in the danger that alien ideas will fill a moral vacuum. The only wonder is that the empire lasted as long as it did, given the circumstances.
Economics-minded writers instead point to the limits of economic development for preindustrial, agrarian societies. The Roman Empire was sustained by territorial expansion, and especially the opportunities expansion brought to acquire slaves and plunder. These were eventually exhausted, however, and the empire was left managing many unprofitable territories that drained its resources. Attempts to redress the problem often worsened it, for instance the debasement of the currency (which set off a wave of inflation) and the increasing tax burden (which the wealthy shifted away from themselves and onto the poor, who had less and less to tax).
In response the government became increasingly heavy-handed, ineffective and torn by usurpers and civil wars, this instability rising right at the same time as the pressure from land-hungry barbarians. This strangled the empire's commerce and economic productivity, and in particular its insecure, overburdened farmers, often driven to abandon their land and turn bandit or join a spreading manorial economy. The resulting feedback loop of declining productivity, state weakness and insecurity drove the western empire to collapse.
Questioning the Inevitability of Civilization Decline
So, is the process of civilization decline inevitable, or can something be done about it? There are writers who argue that Rome's fall was indeed inexorable. Philosopher Oswald Spengler took the organic analogy of a civilizational life cycle to such an extreme that he mathematically charted the future of Western civilization through the third millennium. Still, even he recognized the possibility of societies arresting their own decline. Civilizations can bring much of their strife to an end by uniting in a "universal empire," the way that Rome united the Known World of its day, an idea that can also be found in Toynbee and Quigley. They may even enjoy a "golden age" of sorts, as Rome did in the second century C.E. under the "Five Good Emperors."
Such actions, however, are just stopgaps unless the underlying causes are dealt with. This is much more difficult to do, especially if one leans toward mystical explanations. Several writers, like Toynbee and especially Sorokin, see the only real way out in a religious renewal.
Many of the materialistic authors also offer a grim prognosis, but they are less prone to insist on the certainty of decay. Quigley, for instance, saw a way out in the replacement of a failed instrument of expansion. When feudalism failed in the fourteenth century, centralized, mercantilist nation-states appeared in Western Europe. When mercantilism hit a wall, financial capitalism came along. While he saw the Western world as having been in another such crisis since 1929, he did suggest a possible way out, based on molecular technology and renewable solar energy. (Intriguingly, many observers who have never read Quigley now regard molecular technology and solar power as the driving technologies of the future.)
While not framed as the narrative of a civilization's rise and fall, David Hackett Fischer's The Great Wave presents a pattern of crisis similar to the one Quigley described. He identifies crises in the fourteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries, each coinciding with a wave of inflation, the last ongoing at the time of his writing. Fischer notes, however, that better technology and organization each time around made the crisis less severe than the one that preceded it. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s saw nothing like the famines and epidemics that made Europe's population implode in the early fourteenth century.
Of course, the same technology and organization made the war that ended the decade the most destructive in history. Troubled societies usually have no shortage of astute observers diagnosing their ills and recommending workable solutions for at least some of their problems. The weak link in the chain tends to be politics, the capacity of societies to change their collective behavior when a given way of doing things stops working. This is very difficult to do in the face of old habits and vested interests.
This challenge may loom especially large for Americans, who may be more attached to recent attitudes and behaviors than any other major nation because of the cherished successes those approaches seem to have brought the nation in the twentieth century--global economic predominance, victory in wars hot and cold. There is also the very nature of those attitudes and behaviors. The brand of rugged individualism Americans celebrate sits uneasily with talk of a common good. Decades of culture war and market fundamentalism have also left their mark, the results memorably described in Morris Berman's Dark Ages America.
Today's generation appears to be one of cyberpunk anti-heroes, alienated and alone for all the promised connectiveness of their technology, abiding by no rules in its scramble to survive and succeed, and incapable of even imagining a different sort of world. However, no cultural moment lasts forever, and it's not impossible that this phase has just about run its course.
In either event, the toughest part of any effort will probably not be the availability of wealth, technology or ideas, but getting societies to use these resources to take serious action. This will mean recovering lost social capital, not in the sense of bringing back a stifling conformity, but drawing people out of their solipsism. It will mean restoring rationality and depth to a political discourse divided among a confusion of ideologically-slanted outlets preaching to their respective choirs and the superficial, tepid dialogue of the mainstream, and widening the too-narrow range of ideas that can get a hearing from a general audience. It will mean the cultivation of a mind-set that Thomas Homer-Dixon in his recent The Upside of Down terms "prospective," able to cope with uncertainty and complexity in its efforts to "prevent or forestall horrible outcomes," if necessary through fundamental, far-reaching solutions. And it will mean "idiot-proofing" those solutions so that they can survive the hostility of the vested interests which invariably appear.
As Quigley notes, it was not possible for state-building monarchs, the rising middle classes and rebels from the long-suffering peasantry to defeat the feudal aristocracy's resistance to change outright, but they did succeed in going around them, and built the modern world in doing so.
Originally published in THE FUTURIST (November-December 2007, pp. 14-19). Used with permission from:
World Future Society
7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450
Bethesda, Maryland 20814 USA.
301-656-8274
www.wfs.org
I spend a lot of time thinking about the future-maybe too much. As a professor of literature, I often teach and write about science fiction. As a writer on security issues, I'm often thinking about the shape of future war and future peace. In this kind of work it is routine for projections, planning documents, and studies to look to 2025, 2050, and even beyond. In the process they posit a future where science fiction has turned into science fact. Thinking about the future in such ways, and coming into constant contact with the thoughts of others about the same things, I find myself exploring the ways people used to picture the future, and all the things that didn't happen-the bad as well as the good.
Naturally, I can only wonder how people in the future will look back on the present-and about all those in the present who suspect there may be no one able to do so. During the lats few years, there's been an explosion in books with words like "collapse," "catastrophe," and "dark age" in their titles. While millenarian religion always seems to be doing a brisk business, there is also no shortage of secular doomsday scenarios at any given moment.
A natural disaster like a large meteor impact or the eruption of a supervolcano might wreck the world in one fell swoop. (David Keys's Catastrophe, in fact, argues that a massive volcanic eruption in the sixth century did bring about the collapse of the ancient world.) The Cold War may have ended, but the risk of large-scale nuclear war remains, particularly the risk of a war beginning accidentally. (This almost happened in the "Norwegian rocket incident" of January 1995, when the Russian military mistook a weather rocket for a ballistic missile.) Relatively innocent scientific research might unleash a technological catastrophe on the world, high-energy particle accelerators tearing open the fabric of the universe, a tidal wave of tiny robots turning the planet into gray goo as Martin Rees describes in Our Final Hour.
A number of unhappy factors have combined in recent years to boost the discussion, however. One is concern about a shrinking supply of oil amid high energy prices and war in the Persian Gulf. Another is the destruction of the natural environment by the activity of a rapidly growing human population, and in particular a widening recognition of human-driven climate change. Still another is an apparent growth of irrationalism and a rejection of science, evident in religious fundamentalism, New Age fads and the like, the subject of Carl Sagan's last book, The Demon-Haunted World. While not comparable to concerns about a major nuclear war, terrorism has also fed such worries, with biological weaponry, computer attacks and so forth causing some to argue that a few quick blows could bring modernity crashing down all around us.
Conservatives may worry less about resource shortages or the environment, and view religiosity in any form as a positive development, but find other causes for worry. Population growth in and of itself also may not bother them much, but the disparities inside that growth often do. Low birth rates in the industrialized world and rapid population growth in poor countries sending waves of immigrants to the former cause them great consternation. They also worry about the widespread questioning of traditional attitudes toward nationalism, culture, race, sex, religion, capitalism and so forth, which they see as opening the gates to barbarians within and without.
Of course, there are also writers who go to the other extreme and dismiss such concerns completely. In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman promises to trace the history of the idea rather than pass judgment on it, but he ends up rejecting thinkers on the subject as a collection of pathetic neurotics and concludes his study on a triumphalist note.
The History of Civilization Collapse
While Herman may dismiss the idea, the fact remains that advanced societies have collapsed in the past and protracted "dark ages" have followed, and it seems only natural to ask why they did so. Why do the problem-solving abilities of societies give out? Why is it that instead of going on forever forward and upward, societies so often stagnate, decline and collapse, leaving behind little but ruins for archaeologists to pick through? In other words, was the process inevitable, or could something have been done about it? Learning the answer to that question might tell us which of the many seemingly catastrophic threats to our survival we should be most concerned about, or whether, as Herman argues, we aren't unnecessarily fixated on catastrophe.
As Herman's study attests, no small number of thinkers has attempted to address these concerns, especially during the last two centuries. Not every story those writers tell is the same, but there is a great deal of overlap in their accounts of particular declining societies, and declining societies in general. Values once adhered to seem irrelevant, and institutions that worked before no longer do so (or at least, it seems that way). Governments become less effective at collecting taxes from their citizens, and at providing them with the services that justified such exactions. Insecurity rises due to widespread crime, intensified class warfare, and fighting among elites themselves. Achievement in the arts and sciences drops off (or at least it seems that way). In the end a society is left susceptible to threats that it might once have coped with successfull and the barbarians--once easily held at bay--are suddenly in the Colosseum.
Moral vs. Material Decline
While these thinkers recount many of the same incidents and trends, the theories they propose as to why these things happen vary widely. They do, however, tend to fall broadly into one of two categories-mystical explanations, and materialistic ones. Many of the "mystical" writers are rightly criticized for being weak on cause and effect, but they often identify a culprit nonetheless, such as the exhaustion of a people's "life force," or the genetic impoverishment of a once-triumphant nation. Others point to a nebulous moral decline, or the replacement of an intuitive or spiritual approach to life by barren rationality, a phase that may initially have been fruitful but, carried far enough, means decadence. Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Pitrim Sorokin, Christopher Dawson and many others developed theories along such lines. Their thinking has more recently been echoed by Pat Buchanan in books like The Death of the West.
The writings of the materialistic theorists are similarly varied, but they usually find economic explanations for decline. In recent years, scholars applying complexity science to the problem, such as Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies and Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War have added considerable theoretical sophistication to this approach. It is by no means new, however, and Carroll Quigley's 1960 book The Evolution of Civilizations is an outstanding example.
For sociologist Quigley the key to success or failure is a society's "instrument of expansion." This is a social mechanism enabling it to accumulate and invest resources in economic, political and cultural enlargement. Medieval feudalism, early modern mercantilism and laissez-faire capitalism are just a few examples of such systems. After early successes, these mechanisms produce diminishing returns, which clash with the rising expectations of a population that had likely been expanding up to that point. The resulting economic scarcity, insecurity and inequality lie at the root of the ills that follow, including the "moral decline."
Consider the case of ancient Rome, a popular one given the over-reliance of many of these writers on Classical history in developing their "universal" theories of civilizational rise and fall. Starting in the third century B.C.E., Roman agriculture began to shift away from a foundation of small, independent farmers to plantations worked by slaves. The farmers went into the cities-and the legions-where they participated in a sequence of brutal, class-driven civil wars and the conquest of the Known World, a process that destroyed the republic and ushered in the reign of the emperors. That reign became increasingly oppressive, the empire weaker and weaker economically, militarily, demographically and culturally, and in the end the barbarians overwhelmed it.
Writers of a more mystical bent see the formerly austere Romans corrupted by a loss of religious faith, an influx of foreign cultural elements and the temptations of wealth and urban living. The result is the popular image of depraved elites wallowing in cruelty, sensuality and luxury, while the rabble lived only for bread and circuses. Rather than enabling renewal the spread of an otherworldly, pacifistic Christianity is commonly blamed for undermining the last of the original virtue of the Romans, providing an object lesson in the danger that alien ideas will fill a moral vacuum. The only wonder is that the empire lasted as long as it did, given the circumstances.
Economics-minded writers instead point to the limits of economic development for preindustrial, agrarian societies. The Roman Empire was sustained by territorial expansion, and especially the opportunities expansion brought to acquire slaves and plunder. These were eventually exhausted, however, and the empire was left managing many unprofitable territories that drained its resources. Attempts to redress the problem often worsened it, for instance the debasement of the currency (which set off a wave of inflation) and the increasing tax burden (which the wealthy shifted away from themselves and onto the poor, who had less and less to tax).
In response the government became increasingly heavy-handed, ineffective and torn by usurpers and civil wars, this instability rising right at the same time as the pressure from land-hungry barbarians. This strangled the empire's commerce and economic productivity, and in particular its insecure, overburdened farmers, often driven to abandon their land and turn bandit or join a spreading manorial economy. The resulting feedback loop of declining productivity, state weakness and insecurity drove the western empire to collapse.
Questioning the Inevitability of Civilization Decline
So, is the process of civilization decline inevitable, or can something be done about it? There are writers who argue that Rome's fall was indeed inexorable. Philosopher Oswald Spengler took the organic analogy of a civilizational life cycle to such an extreme that he mathematically charted the future of Western civilization through the third millennium. Still, even he recognized the possibility of societies arresting their own decline. Civilizations can bring much of their strife to an end by uniting in a "universal empire," the way that Rome united the Known World of its day, an idea that can also be found in Toynbee and Quigley. They may even enjoy a "golden age" of sorts, as Rome did in the second century C.E. under the "Five Good Emperors."
Such actions, however, are just stopgaps unless the underlying causes are dealt with. This is much more difficult to do, especially if one leans toward mystical explanations. Several writers, like Toynbee and especially Sorokin, see the only real way out in a religious renewal.
Many of the materialistic authors also offer a grim prognosis, but they are less prone to insist on the certainty of decay. Quigley, for instance, saw a way out in the replacement of a failed instrument of expansion. When feudalism failed in the fourteenth century, centralized, mercantilist nation-states appeared in Western Europe. When mercantilism hit a wall, financial capitalism came along. While he saw the Western world as having been in another such crisis since 1929, he did suggest a possible way out, based on molecular technology and renewable solar energy. (Intriguingly, many observers who have never read Quigley now regard molecular technology and solar power as the driving technologies of the future.)
While not framed as the narrative of a civilization's rise and fall, David Hackett Fischer's The Great Wave presents a pattern of crisis similar to the one Quigley described. He identifies crises in the fourteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries, each coinciding with a wave of inflation, the last ongoing at the time of his writing. Fischer notes, however, that better technology and organization each time around made the crisis less severe than the one that preceded it. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s saw nothing like the famines and epidemics that made Europe's population implode in the early fourteenth century.
Of course, the same technology and organization made the war that ended the decade the most destructive in history. Troubled societies usually have no shortage of astute observers diagnosing their ills and recommending workable solutions for at least some of their problems. The weak link in the chain tends to be politics, the capacity of societies to change their collective behavior when a given way of doing things stops working. This is very difficult to do in the face of old habits and vested interests.
This challenge may loom especially large for Americans, who may be more attached to recent attitudes and behaviors than any other major nation because of the cherished successes those approaches seem to have brought the nation in the twentieth century--global economic predominance, victory in wars hot and cold. There is also the very nature of those attitudes and behaviors. The brand of rugged individualism Americans celebrate sits uneasily with talk of a common good. Decades of culture war and market fundamentalism have also left their mark, the results memorably described in Morris Berman's Dark Ages America.
Today's generation appears to be one of cyberpunk anti-heroes, alienated and alone for all the promised connectiveness of their technology, abiding by no rules in its scramble to survive and succeed, and incapable of even imagining a different sort of world. However, no cultural moment lasts forever, and it's not impossible that this phase has just about run its course.
In either event, the toughest part of any effort will probably not be the availability of wealth, technology or ideas, but getting societies to use these resources to take serious action. This will mean recovering lost social capital, not in the sense of bringing back a stifling conformity, but drawing people out of their solipsism. It will mean restoring rationality and depth to a political discourse divided among a confusion of ideologically-slanted outlets preaching to their respective choirs and the superficial, tepid dialogue of the mainstream, and widening the too-narrow range of ideas that can get a hearing from a general audience. It will mean the cultivation of a mind-set that Thomas Homer-Dixon in his recent The Upside of Down terms "prospective," able to cope with uncertainty and complexity in its efforts to "prevent or forestall horrible outcomes," if necessary through fundamental, far-reaching solutions. And it will mean "idiot-proofing" those solutions so that they can survive the hostility of the vested interests which invariably appear.
As Quigley notes, it was not possible for state-building monarchs, the rising middle classes and rebels from the long-suffering peasantry to defeat the feudal aristocracy's resistance to change outright, but they did succeed in going around them, and built the modern world in doing so.
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