Paradoxically, for a country whose pretension to worldwide hegemony is commensurate with its formidable military power, the debate on the American presidential elections of 2000 has only marginally touched on the problems of defence. To be sure, George W. Bush has engaged in a timid overbid on the subject of the national anti-missile network, promising to extend it to the entire territory of the United States - without, however, succeeding in appearing credible because of the absence of clear responses about the major political obstacles which hinder the project, and because of the technical and financial feasibility of the operation. For his part, Albert Gore pronounced himself in favour of the choice advocated by the Clinton administration, i.e. the installation of an initial system of 100 missiles deployed in Alaska, without excluding its future extension to other regions of the country. Basically, the two candidates seemed to agree on the principle when considering the NMD project as indispensable to the defence of the USA, all the more because the running mate chosen by Gore, Joseph Lieberman, had previously distinguished himself by his active support for this project, and by a systematic attitude to the defence problems which in no way yields to the hawks of the Republican party. Apart from this rather dull exchange on the anti-missile network, the only development of the defence debate during the presidential elections in 2000 was provoked by George W. Bush, when he declared that two entire divisions of the land army, if they were called on by the President to intervene, would be obliged to reply: "Not ready for duty, sir". This was the sign at the level of the general public of what the media call the "readiness debate", i.e. the polemic on the American armed forces' state of readiness.
Bush attracted a formal denial by the joint chief of staff, General Henry Shelton, on the subject of the two divisions. But it did not escape notice that the Republican candidate, as usual for his party, merely appeased the military.
For two years the Pentagon, with the active support of the diverse interests making up the famous "military/industrial complex", had insistently called for a substantial increase in the defence budget. The desiderata of the diverse armed forces in the matter of acquiring new sophisticated material and the necessity of increased balances in order to allow them to recruit and to retain their recruits, beyond the initial period of engagement and formation were invoked. This latter problem had become very acute when faced with competition from the private sector in an employment market particularly strained because of the lengthy economic expansion which the United States enjoyed uninterruptedly since 1991.
The Clinton administration had finished by losing the case to the Pentagon, all the more because it was preparing a new intervention in the Balkans, in Kosovo. It had to mollify the armed forces, who were already complaining of being too much in demand for "operations other than war", to the detriment of their strategic preparation, supposedly a priority. The result was that on 1st February 1999 the Defence Secretary, the Republican William Cohen - given a central role in the Democrat administration in order to bear witness to William Clinton's concern to be consensual in military matters - was bale to present a new six year plan for military expenditure for the fiscal years 2000 - 2005: this plan foresaw a global extension of 112 billion dollars, which represents, according to the terms of the Pentagon's communique, "the first long-term increase in defence allocations since the end of the cold war", i.e. since 1990.
The additional 112 billion foreseen consisted of the reinjection of 28 billion of actual economies in previous forecasts of costs and inflation, as well as an injection of 84 billion taken from the proposed excess in the federal budget. In the terms of this plan, justified in the name of "readiness", the annual military budget would reach 319 billion dollars for the fiscal year 2005 (of which 75 billion for acquisitions), progressing by almost 20% with regard to the 267 billion required for the year 2000 (and by more than 40% for acquisitions, with regard to the 53 billion in 2000). After the 2000 budget, members of the armed forces benefited from "the most important increase in military pay in one generation", according to the same communique, which was rich in superlatives.
This was not enough to satisfy the Pentagon, whose pressure for new budgetary increases started again to a greater extent after the Kosovo war. It was at this point that "alarming" reports about the state of preparation of the American armed forces were propagated, at the instigation of those referred to by George W. Bush at his party's convention. Thus the Pentagon sustained a more and more pressing campaign aimed at Congress and public opinion, aiming to obtain additional credit. This campaign distanced itself from any duty of reserve from Spring 2000, intensifying the race for the presidency and taking account of the fact that the Clinton administration had no more than a few months left. The military chiefs called for the addition of almost 30 billion dollars annually in the defence budget during the first decade of the new century. These demands constituted, according to the Washington Post, "an unprecedented demand for money by the uniformed services and requiring a massive transfer of federal resources - i.e. an increase of more than 10% in relation to the actual defence budget, almost equal to the entire education budget".
The military and their friends and allies had no difficulty in making themselves understood: for them, at the threshold of a new century, the market was the main thing, one could say. The two presidential candidates have thus sworn in unison that they were going to increase the defence budget even more, and by a considerable amount. The Bush team has promised to add 45 billion dollars over the decade, of which 20 billion for research and development and 10 billion for raising pay, without prejudging what this would cost in addition to the deployment of the NMD network, in favour of which the governor of Texas has declared himself, nor the extra effort for modernisation of armaments which he advocates. As for the team of the vice-president, who has not personally missed an opportunity to outbid his rival in the matter of militaristic patriotism, it has promised to add a global sum of 127 billion dollars in the same decade, letting it be understood that this figure can be revised upwards according to the disposable budgetary surplus.
In fact, with regard to the volume of military expenditure, the two candidates are six of one and half a dozen of the other. As for the divergence between them on the priority use of defence funds, it is real, but relatively limited. The different strategic options envisageable from the point of view of the diverse tendencies at the heart of the American establishment have been reduced to four coherent visions, well set out in a study produced by the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think-tank of American foreign policy and the grand strategy.
Following this vade mecum, we can clearly place the Republican candidate on the side of the "reinforced defence" option, which aims to increase military effectiveness, to reduce selectively American participation in operations described as maintaining peace, to give priority to preparation for war and to invest in future technologies, including national anti-missile defence. In contrast, we could not attribute to the Democratic candidate the option of "prudent defence" which would have consisted essentially in maintaining things as much on the budgetary level as on the level of use of military forces over the whole gamut of operations, even to make certain reductions. Gore is, in fact, placed in a logic of budgetary prodigality which responds positively to the demands of the Pentagon: maintaining the level of engagement and strategic choices of the 90s and consequently increasing expenditure in a way to allow the President to ensure both the whole gamut of intervention (the full spectrum, in Pentagon language) and the famous "preparation for war".
The fundamental common denominator of the two candidates, the objective of bipartisan consensus in American defence policy, is no more than what determines the content attributed to the notion of "strategic Preparation". The principal question concerning this is that of the objectives whose functions are measured by the state of preparation of the American armed forces, as opportunely underlined by the allied ex-Supreme Commander of the NATO forces, Wesley Clark. Since the Bus administration and the Base Force Review of 1991, the scenario fixed as standard for the US armed forces in the post-cold war era is that of "two major regional conflicts", objectives confirmed under William Clinton by the Bottom Up Review of 1993 and the Quadrennial Defence Review of 1997, where they were re-baptised "major theatre wars".
Officially, the targets taken as a model for this strategic threshold have always been two "almost simultaneous" wars, according to the official formula, against Iraq and North Korea, the two "rogue states" par excellence. It was already possible to doubt, straight away, the plausibility of this official interpretation of the scenario, notably with regard to the manifest disproportion between the level of financing and preparation of the American armed forces maintained in the post-cold war era and the obvious debility of the two targets designated for military prosecution. One of the effects of growing tensions, since the Kosovo war, between Washington on the one hand and Moscow and Beijing on the other, is that the official American discussion has partly freed itself from the diplomatic inhibition which consisted in concealing the fact that Russia and China are the two real targets of the "two major theatres of war" fixed as the standard for the Pentagon's strategy of paroxistic dissuasion, corollary of the US claim to world hegemony.
The development of the debate in the 2000 presidential elections about "preparation" is eloquent on this subject. On 21st August, Governor Bush reiterated his accusation against the Clinton administration on the subject of a supposed "decline" in American armed forces, at the inaugural session of the Congress of the American organisation of former combatants, Veterans of Foreign Wars. Vice President Gore replied the next day, before the same assembly, in these terms: "As the land forces reported this very month, its 10 divisions are all ready for combat and capable of responding to the nation's call. Our navy has more than double the number of surface ships compared to China, and over three times more than Russia, while our air force is by far the biggest and most modern in the whole world. (…) Our military power is the strongest and best in the whole world".
The Republican candidate for the vice-presidency, Richard Cheney - who, it will be remembered, had been Defence Secretary in Bush senior's administration and one of the protagonists in the Gulf War before recycling himself profitably in the oil industry - quite naturally took over from his running mate. In a resounding speech given in Atlanta on 30th August, he again bemoaned the state of the American armed forces "overused and under-financed", taking a malicious pleasure in quoting Joseph Lieberman in support of his allegations. Using figures in a way which could deceive only naïve people, Cheney drew a parallel between the fact that American military expenditure is at its lowest ebb today as a percentage of the PNB since 1940, and the increase in foreign engagements by American forces during the last decade.
Drawing on the information propagated by the Pentagon after the Kosovo war and spread by the armed services commission of the chamber of representatives, he bemoaned the fact that at the end of this campaign of very high density bombardment (38,000 air strikes in 78 days) "the navy had only a little more than half the number of Cruise missiles necessary for two major theatres of war", whilst the air force had at its disposal only one tenth of its requirements of the same kind of missiles. The logic of such a calculation is clear. If, at the close of a bombardment as intensive as in Kosovo, against a Yugoslavia in the same category of power as Iraq or South Korea, the American armed forces are still required to be ready to be in the front line in "two major theatres of war", it is clear that the wars in question do not concern such adversaries, but may well concern other states with a different level of power.
This same logic is in the Pentagon's quarterly report on the state of preparation of the American forces, the quarterly Readiness Report to the Congress. The most recent, which covers the second quarter of 2000, states, halfway between the two rivals for the presidency, that the army's state of preparation is making perceptible progress, thanks to the increase in the defence budget, but that further efforts would certainly be needed. According to this report, the course of operations like toe aerial campaign in Kosovo at a major theatre of war would not pose any problem, but the course of a second major war would involve risks. Not that America would risk defeat, which is unthinkable according to the Pentagon, but simply that it could cause more human loses during deployment for the second major war to be waged simultaneously!
The same balance had already been drawn up in the quarterly report of the Pentagon at the congress on the Kosovo war:
"Concerns have been raised about the way the operation by allied forces has affected the capacity of the (Defence) Department to meet the more difficult demands associated with its defence strategy: to wage and win two major wars almost simultaneously. If such a war had broken out while the US was engaged in Kosovo, the Department is sure that the challenge could have been met, although at a higher level of risk than would have been the case had the American forces not been involved in the Kosovo operation. The Department recognised these risks at this time, and made various adjustments to our stance and our plans to cope with this. In accordance with the US defence strategy, if we had faced the threat of two major wars, we would have withdrawn our forces from other activities, including the operation of the allied forces, but we are sure that would have had the upper hand in the final analysis".
So let us quote the quite recent report of the Congressional Budget Office on the maintenance cost of the American armed forces at the level required by the strategy of "two major theatres of war". The report is clear about the comparison between real forces and real adversaries against which to measure the state of military preparedness.
"The American armed forces are unequalled today. As regards numbers, some Russian and Chinese conventional arms and forces (mostly non-nuclear) might equal and, in rare cases, surpass those of the US. But American forces' capacity by far surpasses those of other nations when one takes account of factors such as training, preparation for war, sophistication of weapons and availability of communications and information networks. Nevertheless, some regional power in the world are hostile to American Interests and pose threats which are at the centre of a large part of current defence plans. Iran, Iraq and North Korea are the nations causing most concern, although they have considerably smaller forces than Russia and China, let alone the US. Their forces are nowhere near the level of American troops and equipment in many other dimensions quoted above".
Consequently the CBO estimates the budget necessary for the maintenance and state of preparation of American forces at a constant level in relation to current military policy, at 327 billion dollars, i.e. 50 billion more than the current level of military expenditure! If this were not the case, it would be necessary, according to the CBO, either to reduce the participation of American forces in operations other than war, or to reduce their state of strategic preparation with regard to two major theatres of war. This estimate is certainly grist to the mill of the Pentagon, by making its claim for an increase of 30 billion annually seem moderate, all things considered.
This staggering increase, which indicates a return to the militaristic spirit of the cold war, could not happen in reality unless to the detriment of social and environmental expenditure, or even economic equilibrium, without even having the very relative rationality of the expenditure during the Reagan era - as much from the point of view of the relaunch of a declining economy as from that of the humiliation of the Soviet adversary. Beyond the prosaic interests which it satisfies - difficult to explain to themselves in the United States of today, given the very diminished relative weight of the specific military industry - a similar increase testifies to the kind of megalomania and paranoia by which the country seems to be affected and which has its expression and its source in the considerably increased impact of the hysterical political trend of the hard right, following the example of the experience of the early years of the cold war.
Against the worrying trend, minority voices, but not those of less importance, have risen from the very heart of the American power elite. Those, for example, of big names of the first period of the Clinton administration, when he reduced military expenditure to the advantage of social issues and the reduction in the budgetary deficit: people like William Perry, the predecessor of William Cohen at the Defence Department, and John Shalikashvili, chief of staff of joint operations from 1993 - 1997, also those of Lawrence Korb, director of studies on the Council on Foreign Relations and joint Defence Secretary under Ronald Reagan, and Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, and association of almost 500 business leaders and retired military people. The former argue for maintaining military expenditure at its present level; the latter for a substantial reduction in this expenditure for the benefit of the education and health of their fellow citizens, emphasising the irrationality of the costly choices of the Pentagon with regard to very high technology equipment.
Lawrence Korb sums up the opinion of these "reasonable men: "We do not need to squander billions of dollars to arm ourselves to wage a war which we have already won". The insatiable appetite for domination which can motivate certain men is beyond reason as it is beyond clear-sightedness.