At one time or another, the US has had to fight or at least confront just about other major power in the world--England, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, China, just for starters. We have also, at one time or another, had to fight representatives of just about every major culture in the world--Christian, Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto; and, of course, most recently, Islam. We have fought both of our neighbors: Canada and Mexico. And we have fought innumerable near neighbors, including Cuba, Panama, and Nicaragua. The point here is not that the US is uniquely belligerent--far from it. Instead, the point is that every country, including the US, must plan for the reality that loyalties and alliances can shift. As Britain’s Lord Palmerston said a century-and-a-half ago, nations don’t have permanent alliances, they have permanent interests. And the paramount interest has to be national survival.
Alexander Hamilton, who had fought in the Revolutionary War, articulated that view, setting the basic defense template for most of our subsequent history. Hamilton thought we should make the stuff of our defense on the homefront. Our first Treasury Secretary is remembered for his economic views, but in fact, his chief goal was national survival--no sure thing for the infant republic when he submitted his Report on Manufactures to Congress in 1791. The Report was, above everything else, a national security document.
In the late 18th century, the young nation of America was the third-richest in the world on a per capita basis. But it was in no sense a great power, or even an adequate power; as Hamilton had seen up close, we had nearly lost the Revolutionary War because of our inability to manufactures muskets, cannon, cannonballs, and so on. Even after that victory, American leaders were deeply and rightly concerned that European powers, if they made a concerted effort, could simply carve up, militarily, the new nation.
So Hamilton got right the point in his Report. On the very first page, he said that his prime goal was to “render the United States independent of foreign nations for military and other supplies.”
A few years before, in Federalist #34, Hamilton had offered a stark warning to the United States:
To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude that the fiery and destructive passions of war reign in the human breast with much more powerful sway than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace; and that to model our political systems upon speculations of lasting tranquillity, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.
In other words, to borrow the phrase attributed to the Roman Vegetius, si vis pacem, para bellum -- "if you want peace, prepare for war."
Hamilton further understood that military power was also a technological issue--preparation for war was not to be taken lightly. As he wrote in Federalist #25:
War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence, by perseverance, by time, and by practice.
That’s not only wisdom from Vegetius--if you want peace, prepare for war--that’s even older wisdom, from Aesop: Measure twice, cut once. In other words, prepare, prepare, prepare. So more than two centuries ago, Hamilton was warning us that we could never take our defense--which is to say, our survival--for granted. And it could never hurt to push technological innovation as a strategic tool for maximizing military success and minimizing casualties.
For most of our history, American leaders have understood Hamilton’s wisdom--and acted accordingly. We always understood the need to keep defense strength insourced, even as we worked to improve our technology. That’s why we developed the Bath Iron Works in Maine, for example, and a submarine factory in Connecticut, and shipyards in Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Oakland.
Wartime is no time to be relying on imports--especially if you might be fighting your chief trading partner for manufactured goods. But that keen sense of military/national security preparation has fallen out of political fashion lately.
For me, the “click” moment on the connection between manufacturing power and military effectiveness did not come until 2008, when I was working on the Mike Huckabee for President campaign. On the campaign plane, I was sitting alongside Cong. Duncan Hunter, Sr. (R-Ca.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC). We talked a lot about defense policy as we sat elbow to elbow; Hunter is a font of knowledge on the subject, beginning with his service as a combat grunt in Vietnam, all the way though to his chairmanship of the HASC for years in the middle of the last decade, until the Democrats won back Congress in 2006. Which is to say, he is a great resource to be tapped in the future.
The standout story for me was Hunter’s description of the desperate effort--desperate on his part, at least--to “up-armor” US military vehicles in Iraq. As we all know, the Pentagon went to war “with the army it had”--which was not the army it needed to win the long war in Iraq. In particular, our Humvee vehicles were disastrously inadequate to withstand enemy counter-measures; from the first, Humvees were vulnerable to enemy-fired rocket-propelled grenades and then, more chronically, to improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Hunter was acutely aware of this problem for many reasons, but one standout reason was that his own son, Duncan Hunter, Jr., was in combat in Iraq during the worst of the fighting. (Duncan Hunter, Jr. replaced his father in Congress in 2008.)
But despite Hunter Sr.’s efforts to accelerate the up-armoring of the vehicles, the Pentagon said back to him that it would not be so easy--in fact, could not be done for years. Why? Because, Hunter told me, the US simply could not make enough armor plate to protect our vehicles. It was a simple problem of lack of supply, and it took years to solve the problem, until Humvees were either adequately armored, or replaced by the newer and stronger MRAP vehicles.
Needless to say, this procurement paralysis was a deeply frustrating experience for Hunter Sr.--not to mention a perilous experience for Hunter, Jr. and his fellow troops. And it should be noted that much of the support for Operation Iraqi Freedom fell away during the crucial years of 2004-2006, when it seemed that Uncle Sam did not know what he was doing in Iraq. From an Iraq hawk’s point of view, the war effort needed the reinforcement of better technology; “moral clarity” would not suffice.
To put it bluntly, we had not gone to Iraq with the army--more to the point, the equipment--that we needed. And even after Iraq went critical, the Bush administration was slow to see the challenge, and to respond to it. Such preparation and response would have required a serious rethinking of our policy toward manufacturing and procurement, and a overarching resolve to make sure that we could always get what we needed for our troops. In other words, the mobilization effort would have been expensive and difficult--but it would have been worth it.
And of course, we are starting to learn that we aren’t adequately prepared to win in Afghanistan, either--but that’s a point to dwell on, in more detail, in the future.
In the meantime, we can say that the same blindspot toward military/national security preparedness is cropping up in a new arena. That new arena of satellite communications--as vital an arena, of course, as any in this Information Age.
Astoundingly, the US is headed toward offshoring some of its most vital communications. In other words, we are setting ourselves up for a repeat of the armor-plate-shortage in the sky. If present trends continue, down the road somewhere, we will discover that the satellite communications we need either won’t work, or won’t be there.
This spring, Iridium Communications--the satellite-phone company best known for its spectacular corporate flameout in the late 90s--announced that it would buy $2.1 billion worth of satellites from a French company, Thales SA, thereby bypassing American competitors, most notably, Lockheed Martin. From an economic point of view, it is, shall we say, interesting that such a huge contract--all those good jobs at good wages--is going to a foreign firm in these recessionary times. We might ask: Whose economy do we wish to stimulate?
Even more urgently, there’s the question of whether or not we want to outsource our satellite production--and thus, inevitably, our satellite production capacity--to a foreign company in a foreign country. That’s exactly what Hamilton warned against. This author is no Francophobe; I never bashed France for its unwillingness to be part of the Iraq-bound “coalition of the willing,” for example, and I have many times praised French president Nicolas Sarkozy for his willingness to confront Islamic radicalism within his own country. Yet for reasons stated earlier, it’s simply not smart to depend on another country--any country--for vital national security equipment. The US after all, pioneered the communications satellite; it’s a great “national champion” or “tentpole” industry if there ever was one.
But most urgently, the Iridium system is not very good as a tool for communication--and that, too, is a national security concern. The Pentagon relies exclusively on Iridium to provide “sat phones” to our troops around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. But substantive reports show that the Iridium network is not effective and not reliable. According to a National Science Foundation/Raytheon presentation--see key slide below--the Iridium network shows a "data drop rate" of at least 20 percent, even in the South Pole, which is one of Iridium’s better regions, in terms of satellite footprint. That is, there’s a better than one-in-five chance that a call won’t go through on the Iridium network, and a pretty good chance that a will eventually be dropped. That’s no way to practice “netcentric” warfare.
Thus we are reminded of Hamilton’s wisdom: “War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence”--and that means constant diligence about technology, and its constant improvement. The phrase “close enough for government work” is at best a synonym for waste, but in wartime, subpar performance is far worse--it’s a threat to our national security.
Our troops deserve the best we can give them, and so we should do our best to give them our best. Here in the US, people are filing lawsuits because Apple’s latest iPhone suffers a drop rate of .5 percent--why should our troops suffer a drop rate that is 40 times worse?
So why is this happening? And what to do about it? Those are topics for future posts, but for now, the mission of the Defense Strategy Institute is to revive the wisdom of Hamilton--our first goal should be to render the United States independent of foreign nations for military necessities. True then, true now.
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