Knowledge And Decisions

The longer time horizon of a one-party totalitarian state is a military as well as political advantage. In the short run, elected officials in a democratic country have incentives to convert military expenditures into social welfare expenditures, since the former involve long-run national interests and the latter have short-run political payoff. This is especially so in an era when high levels of fixed governmental obligations and voter resistance to higher taxes leave little room for financial maneuvering, other than cutting the military share of the budget. In the United States that share has already been reduced by more than 40 percentage points in the past quarter century.²⁶⁷ A totalitarian government like the Soviet Union need make no such reductions, nor has it.

Not only are there political dividends in cutting defense spending — defense “waste” by either allegation or definition — to finance social programs; there are also more direct political dividends from advancing toward “peace” through military agreements with the Soviet Union, regardless of the long-run consequences of the specific terms of those agreements. The political advantages of such agreements fall within the time horizon of elected incumbents, while any later consequences are left for future administrations or generations to cope with. Again, this is not to claim that such explicitly cynical calculations are made. The point is that this is the tendency of the incentives, and human rationalization in the face of tempting incentives is a common phenomenon. As Congressman Les Aspin remarked, “you’ve got to cut the defense budget if you want sufficient money for your own programs.”²⁶⁸ The net result is an asymmetry in the bargaining power of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Politically, American elected officials need to make such agreements moreso than do Soviet officials, who are in a position to hold out for terms which neutralize those weapons in which the U.S. has an advantage and enhance the prospects for those weapons in which the U.S.S.R. has an advantage. At any given time, the results need not be a blatant imbalance. The cumulative effect over time is what matters.

The history of the West in general and the United States in particular is not encouraging as regards military preparedness. In the 1930s, the American army was only the sixteenth largest in the world, behind Portugal and Greece. In 1934, despite the aggressions of Japan in the Orient and the rise of Hitler in Europe, the budget of the U.S. army was cut 51 percent, to help finance New Deal programs.²⁶⁹ Overall military expenditures were reduced 23 percent in one year,²⁷⁰ and total military personnel on active duty fell below a quarter of a million in the early 1930s, drifting downward each year from 1930 through 1934.²⁷¹ The Civilian Conservation Corps of young men working in forests was larger than the army — and the CCC recruits were paid more.²⁷² Attempts to train them militarily were defeated politically by a pacifist protest led by intellectuals — John Dewey and Reinhold Neibuhr.²⁷³ Later, attempts to build some semblance of military defense for the Philippines were criticized by the editor of the Nation, who asked why the islands’ people were not being taught to live rather than to kill.²⁷⁴ This lofty assumption of unconstrained choice — three years before Pearl Harbor — takes on a grim or even hideous aspect as an historical background to the devastation of the Philippines and massive, unspeakable atrocities against its people by invading Japanese armies. American soldiers in the Philippines vainly attempted to defend themselves with obsolete rifles, mortars a quarter of a century old, and mortar shells so old that they proved to be duds in 70 percent of the cases.²⁷⁵ On Bataan, four out of five American hand grenades failed to explode.²⁷⁶ Attempts to break through the Japanese blockade of the Philippines had to be made “with banana boats hired from the United Fruit Company, and with converted World War I destroyers.”²⁷⁷ These were among the long-run costs of the “savings” on military expenditures during the previous decade. Actually it was not a saving but a disinvestment — a current consumption of future resources.