Reihan Salam tries to make the case for increased military spending:

The United States does not spend enough on its military, and the longer we go without increasing military expenditures, the more dangerous the world is likely to become.

Determining how much the U.S. should spend on the military depends in large part on the role one thinks the U.S. ought to have and how much (or how little) our wealthy allies should spend on theirs. The assumptions that a lot of advocates for increased spending make are that the U.S. has to be responsible for “global order” and that our allies aren’t going to do enough to make up for any reductions in military spending that the U.S. makes. The first is extremely questionable, and the second is only true in large part because our allies have been encouraged to spend as little as possible on their own defense because they can count on the U.S. to bail them out if they get in trouble.

Christopher Preble counters the idea that our military spending is insufficient:

That is true only if one refuses to scrutinize the military’s missions, and accepts as a given that the United States must address all threats, in all places, and at all times. It only makes sense if the object is to discourage others, including our wealthy allies, from playing a larger role in their respective regions, or globally.

If we want fewer free-riding and “cheap-riding” allies than we have, the U.S. has to scale back on its own military spending and deployments to give them the incentive to do more. Otherwise, we will continue subsidizing the defense of the top industrialized nations of the world indefinitely. Increased military spending makes that outcome even more certain. That will place a large and ever-increasing burden on the U.S. while our allies do as little as they think they can get away with. Besides being absurd, that is also politically unsustainable. Good luck explaining to Americans in the decades to come that they have to accept cuts at home so that Japan and Germany can skimp on their own defense long after they became thriving postwar economies.

This arrangement makes the U.S. “indispensable” only in the sense that we have encouraged our allies to be utterly dependent and incapable of defending themselves on their own, which makes them fairly useless allies and increasingly turns them into nothing more than liabilities that the U.S. doesn’t need. Seventy years after the end of WWII and almost twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, that is a completely unacceptable burden for the U.S. to have to bear when our European and Asian allies are more than capable of providing for their own defense.

What about maintaining “global order”? The standard hawkish argument is that no one else will fill the role that the U.S. currently plays, but then the U.S. has actively discouraged our allies from even making the attempt for decades. The U.S. doesn’t want to encourage our allies to become more self-sufficient because that makes our military role in their regions less important or even redundant, but then this is what the U.S. should have been trying to do for the last twenty years. We aren’t “indispensable,” but successive administrations have kept things in such a way to make it seem as if there is no alternative to continuing the status quo.

The second part of Salam’s statement is simply wrong. The world might become more dangerous than it is with less military spending, or it might become less dangerous with less spending, or it might remain roughly the same. It is wrong to assume that the world becomes more or less dangerous depending on how much money we throw at the Pentagon. This is not only a fairly silly and American-centric way of thinking about international security, but it is demonstrably untrue. The world was much more dangerous and full of armed conflicts during the Cold War when our military budget took up a much larger share of our GDP, but that had a lot to do with the existence of the Soviet Union and its allies and proxies. When the U.S. started cutting back its military spending after the Cold War, the world didn’t become more dangerous than it had been during the Cold War, but was actually becoming much more peaceful and less violent overall. The most recent spike in instability and violence in the world in the last fifteen years has come at the same time that the U.S. military budget has been steadily rising and the U.S. has been using its military in one intervention after another. Given that experience, why would we assume that the world would be more dangerous as a result of not increasing military spending? Why wouldn’t we assume the reverse?

It’s amusing to say the least that Salam invokes Barry Posen (referred to only as “the MIT political scientist”) in his argument for increased military spending, since Posen’s case for restraint specifically lays out how the U.S. can continue to retain “command of the global commons” at sea while spending significantly less on the military overall. Posen summed up this view in an article from last year:

I want to emphasize that the military strategy and structure of Restraint is essentially maritime—“command of the commons.” The United States should invest its scarce military power in the maintenance of an ability to access the rest of the world. It should reduce, however, its regular military presence in the rest of the world. The United States should avoid certain missions altogether, especially coercive state and nation building. Thus the United States can radically cut the ground forces that seem most apt for garrison duties and counterinsurgency. Major force structure cuts should allow the United States to save significant amounts of money, cutting the defense budget to perhaps 2.5 percent of GDP.

In other words, the U.S. can do the most important and necessary tasks at a much lower level of military spending.

Salam tries to use our alliances as another excuse for more military spending, but many of these alliances require very little in the way of U.S. hard power to maintain them. Many of our defense pacts are with the countries in our own hemisphere, and those countries face no external threat that requires U.S. assistance to fend off. Our European and Asian allies could and should be encouraged to do more to provide for their own defense, and the wealthiest European members of NATO should be expected to do much more for the defense of Europe. None of that will ever happen if they know that the U.S. will continue increasing its own military spending to make up the difference. If our allies were poor and incapable of defending themselves, Salam’s appeal to spend more for our allies’ sake might make some sense, but our allies are among the wealthiest countries in the world and could do far more than they have done to secure themselves and their regions.

The case for increased military spending is not at all persuasive, and one of the chief witnesses that Salam called in its defense has made an argument for doing the exact opposite. The U.S. should begin learning to practice restraint, and part of doing that is learning to exercise some restraint in how much we spend on the military.