The military failure machine

Sorry, don’t know how tobermorey came out of ‘to be totally’.

Why is this so? Because blowing up things makes better television than teaching reading to first graders.

It is also true that the military industrial complex (in that rabid socialist D. W. Eisenhower’s phrase) is really profitable, and provides one of the last bulwarks of higher paying manufacturing jobs. I know folks who drive 3-4 hours commute a day to Lockheed Marietta..
The military has got great political support, is fetishized by a certain large number of folks, and is one of the only things done by the government approved of by ‘Conservatives/Libertarians’ (philosophically, as opposed to based on it’s results..)

I’d count Iraq/1990/1 as only “inconclusive” in the sense that the goal was not to remove SH from Iraq, just from Kuwait. In that one the military succeeded in their assigned task.

The gladiator invader of Grenada is rolling over in his grave.

You’re overestimating the success of the American armed services. Name 1 unequivocal victory in a major conflict that the USA fought as the sole or predominant combatant since the Spanish-American War. Only Gulf War 1 comes close (and we got that paid for by others). Americans have a particularly unfortunate triumphalist view of WWII in which the crucial roles of the Soviet Union, Britain, and the important roles of smaller states like Australia simply don’t exist.

American taxpayers insist on spending little on schools and then complaining how poor the schools supposedly are.

Let’s try fighting our next war solely with the state national guards, and fund those by property taxes, and see how that goes down.

“At least the majority of students, even at the worst schools, end up more or less literate.”

Not, perhaps, the apt comparison. “More or less” literacy can be achieved in a year or two, the school system has the kids for 12 years.

Fighting a war is, I would humbly submit, something rather more complex than that.

(I’d be prepared to argue, even if not too hard, that the majority of the population would become more or less literate in the complete absence of a public school system. Just the use of texts on mobile phones would get us a long way to that point over the 18 years before “graduation”.)

I’m talking here mostly about the views of the American public

The bellicosity of the American public is at least somewhat exaggerated. If we were that warlike by inclination, all the chicanery and subterfuge (Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs) wouldn’t be necessary.

Bertie Russell was not particularly notable as a social and political thinker, but he was onto something when he observed that US society substitutes quite rigid social control for its absent formal and substantive legal control of the population. (Cheerleading, football and the weirdly rigid (and weirdly carnal) hierarchies of high schools, frat-houses complete with hazing, hyper-patriotic flag-worship, regification of Mr President, these look pretty primitive and ritualistic from over here). No doubt some yarn can be spun about settler communities and the Wild West or something, I dunno.

The Strauss/Orwell doctrine of permanent war is surely part of that. WWI, Cold War I, WWII, Cold War II, (War on Drugs), War on Terror. ‘Emergency’ powers, a moratorium on criticism of the government, all the other benefits of using patriotism to appeal to atavistic tribal tendencies are obvious. Not that each generation of rulers has to gather in a smoky room and draw up blueprints for a nation-wide psyop. It’s how things are done – some understand it implicitly, some openly theorise about it, others accept it as standard or even buy into the belligerent attitude.

Not the only consideration, but an important one, surely?

BTW: Saddam didn’t expect war when he invaded Kuwait
…and correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s because US appears to have given him the impression – on the eve of invasion with troops massing on the border – that his excursion would be unopposed (with the predictable consequence that the US were invited to establish what became, also predictably, a permanent military presence in both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). And though that fact tends to be glossed over as some kind of misunderstanding when it isn’t politely ignored, that’s really n0t plausible, is it.

Anderson, from what I’ve heard American per-pupil expenditure is either the highest in the world or close to it.

The Daily Howler link was good, but I don’t actually recall many people visiting Finland to try and figure out their education secret. It’s usually those studious asians who are going to eat our lunch (just ask Tom Friedman!). And speaking of international comparisons, are there other countries which do a better job with comparable immigrant populations?

hardindr, that’s one of those myths.

Last time it came up on another site I looked up the immigration rates to various European countries and they are broadly similar to the US. The US has a somewhat higher percentage of immigratns than the UK, say, but it’s about the same as Germany or Sweden and it’s only a little higher than France, and Spain, and the Netherlands, and any number of other “1st World” nations.

RE Matt McGrattan:

I would be interested in the figures, if you have them. Interesting questions are immigration to European Union countries: what percentage decide to stay, where are the emigrating from, do European countries attempt to educate the children of immigrants through (mandatory) high school attendance, etc?

I don’t know if the premise of this post is correct. From my own recollections, people seem to prefer cutting military spending over cutting spending on education or conversely, increasing spending on education. (Googles) . . . hmmmm, here’s something from earlier in the year with a halfway decent graphic, a poll showing that cutting defense spending is more popular than cutting education or Social Security. Eyeballing suggests the split is approximately 23/13.

As in so many other propositions that have come up recently, when someone says that “Americans believe X”, you’ve got to ask “Which Americans?” The answer to that one seems to be when fully parsed, “The Americans who count.”

hardindr, they are in wiki. US is a little over 12% immigrants, UK is about 9, most other large European countries are in the 10 – 12% range.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-born_population_in_2005

The US has the largest total number of immigrants, but as a per capita % the US is solidly in the middle of the stats.

To the extent that they would actually concede any military defeats, I expect most Conservatives (even amongst the elite?) would blame this on the Dolschloss from the liberal media etc.

“The US military does an excellent job in defeating anyone silly enough to put a conventional army in the field against it. But, as a result there aren’t many adversaries so silly”

To be fair, you really have to count this as one of the benefits of a strong military, yes? It is a good thing that not many adversaries want to send conventional armies against us.

Aulus, I don’t think that a military force as big as the next several (I forget the exact number) combined is really necessary for that. Would you seriously maintain that it is?

I have heard once the phrase: “the dollar float in a see of oil”, and that is true, and it is the reason US can be printing money like hell without sink its own economy; as M. Friedman said “our debts are in dollars, not in yens, pounds or marks…and we have the printer”

The dollar as global currency is based alone in the multiple security agreements between the US and Saudi Arabia dating from Roosvelt presidency in the WWII, due to the paranoid of the royal saudi family. The military power is the base for that agreements and as consequence, the reason for the unique situation of the US economy

Relevant to the previous and quite diverting, if not exactly definitive: Rob Newman’s History of Oil

Bertie Russell was not particularly notable as a social and political thinker, but he was onto something when he observed that US society substitutes quite rigid social control for its absent formal and substantive legal control of the population. No doubt some yarn can be spun about settler communities and the Wild West or something, I dunno.

I think it can be expressed even more simply: you can take the ape out of the savannah, but you can’t take the savannah out of the ape. (Most of) our species is obsessed with that kind of status-seeking bullshit — so many that they literally diagnose failure to pay “sufficient” attention to social status as a mental disorder — and if it isn’t expressed through official channels it will come out through unofficial ones. Democracy is a great idea, for a species slightly saner than ours and more concerned with truth than trendiness. Otherwise we just keep screwing it up.

(Of course there’s a more hopeful school of thought that we can make ourselves smarter and stop following every strongman whose plan of action amounts to “rah, rah, ingroup!”, which is a pleasant-sounding ideal, but if it worked in practice, why would we have this thread? In practice, even the supposedly pro-reason side of the political spectrum psychologically needs an authority figure to rally behind and define their cause with a false impression of unity, and usually the first thing they do to create the impression of unity is find an outgroup to denounce.)

Name 1 unequivocal victory in a major conflict that the USA fought as the sole or predominant combatant since the Spanish-American War.

The 1941-45 war against Japan, which by an accident of history we refer to as if it were part of the 1939-45 war against Germany.

Field Marshal Slim and a fair few ANZACs call bullshit. Maybe predominant in numbers overall, but neither the first in the field nor visible on several important fronts.

Theophylact @43:

Yeah, possibly sacrificial, possibly preselected by someone who didn’t want her around; who knows what was going on. I don’t really know whether she was punished, treated normally, (secretly) rewarded or what. If she was actually punished or dispreferred (and if the transcript is accurate), then for all I know the punishment was for explicitly distancing herself from the message (or blaming it on Baker, pick your transcript).

But Saddam was not a moron, and basically a mix up about such a basic, well-deliberated and high-stakes matter has to be a very low probability event.

+ as is often the case, I think all the explanations and the stuff people ‘remember’ afterwards is pretty much worthless since the elephant is already in the room by then. (‘Fog of war’ just says that local testimony is testimony only of local events – it doesn’lt say that some subsequent tidying-up exercise trumps the untainted, unguarded evidence of first-hand witnesses (or, as here, transcribers).

Suggesting that it does is a surprisingly common and effective move; ‘we must wait until all the facts are in’ as a cover for ‘we must wait until we’ve had time to agree on a single dominant narrative that suits us and can be made to accommodate at least some of the more irrepressible bits of evidence’.

Concur of course with Roac. Whatever the importance of Burma 0r the ANZAC’s efforts, there was nothing the Allies did in the Pacific to qualify the “predominance” of the U.S., which basically whipped Japan with one arm tied behind its back.

(That testifies as much to the folly of the Japanese as to the excellence of American arms, but still, that’s what happened.)

@roac
That’s a lot of sideshows. Is it usual to try to determine which single combatant was responsible for an alliance’s victory?

@OC
There may be some wires crossed here; I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing. George S. implied that the defense establishment has a lot of influence because it makes up “a large percentage of the economy.” If big enough, it could saturate every aspect of American culture throughout the continent. I’m not sure that’s the case. Even given your version of the argument, how do you want to define your terms–include the supermarkets and gas stations that serve Boeing’s assembly line workers, the semiconductor manufacturers that provide the components for their onboard computers, the longshoremen who take the steel off the ships from Japan?

I think it is rather interesting to see the convergence of thought here. It is not just a small number of Democrats who want to take a bite out of the military budget.

During the DADT negotiations, Reid took the rather strange decision to take DADT out of the military procurement budget. Which was generally considered to be dooming its chances.

It appears that the GOP agreed to allow this maneuver because they recognized that it would give the Senate much greater bargaining power in stripping the second fighter engine out of the military budget which the House wanted but a majority in the Senate opposed.

It appears that more than a few of the Tea Party house members are thinking along similar lines. As newly elected members they have no seniority and so won’t be sharing in the spoils in any case.

Australia has 19 % foreign born and ranks in the top 10 so, yes it is possible to educate an immigrant population well – the US just isn’t doing as well as it should

Actually the military and educational system are very similar in that we spend a lot but don’t get value for our dollar.

Nick’s link captures it very well.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html

We really spend a lot and after correcting for demographics we do all right, above average. But we really aren’t getting value for the dollar.

Same thing with the military only more so. We really spend a ton. And aside from nation building efforts our military really performs well. But again we could probably spend 10o billion or more less and get the same results.

And that really is the story for public goods and services in the US. Enormously expensive and mediocre results.

re footnote #2: is there a source and/or methodology for the $5 million per soldier per year. I’d perhaps buy the $1 million figure, but $5 million certainly sounds like a lot. If my ‘rithmatic fails me not, at $5 million per, deployment of >150K troops in Afghanistan and Iraq comes out to more than the total defense budget of any given year so far, so there’d have to be a whole lot of deferred costs involved.

Even so, we can all agree that it is pretty darn expensive.

Other notes:
– I think the Korean war deserves a more generous assessment than you gave it. If you know someone from South Korea, ask them what they think.

– Of course you’re right about Vietnam being a failure, but then again everyone in America agrees, and it’s not as if people have forgotten about it or avoid mentioning it – which they would if they were trying to hold onto an idea of American invincibility.

– School funding in the US being a local rather than a national decision, some districts choose to prioritize education, spend a lot and get good results. Some districts do not or cannot. Some spend a lot without good results. It is commonly assumed that the bad schools dragging down the national average are in the big cities (I’m not sure how true that is). But the big cities often spend lavishly – New York City is around $20K per student per year (there’s some dispute as to how to measure that spend, but nobody with any knowledge on the topic claims less than ~$14K). How does that compare with other countries?

Sorry, don’t know how tobermorey came out of ‘to be totally’.

Well, if Tobermory were convinced, it should surely be totally convincing. After all, he is a wise cat.

By the way, I better clarify: I took my OECD assessment, whatever it was, in a Canadian school, not an American one. I wasn’t trying to make a point about the reliability of American scores.

‘American taxpayers insist on spending little on schools and then complaining how poor the schools supposedly are.’

Not true at all. The us spends loads more on public education than most other western countries. The more interesting thing is that they seem, to some extent, to be getting what you pay for. Better results once you consider the demographic and cultural challenges in the us. I was a bit surprised but it kinda makes sense since I always wondered how a school system with huge local autonomy was apparently not doing well.

Bianca Steele: The word under discussion is “predominant,” which is quantitative. I don’t have numbers and wouldn’t know where to find them, but without doubt, over 90% of the resources that went into the Pacific war, in manpower, industrial production, and everything else, was contributed by the US.

I have no intention of denigrating the British and Commonwealth contribution, but if you counterfactualize it out of the equation, you can’t seriously argue that the end result would have been any different. Superior brains and willpower can overcome significant resource disparities, but the mismatch in industrial capability between the US and Japan was obviously insuperable from the beginning — obvious to everybody but the Japanese leadership, with their groupthink samurai ideology of mind over matter.

(And when I characterize the Southwest Pacific as a stupid waste of effort, the stupidity was American. Or not stupidity, but inability to rein in MacArthur because of his (loathsome) political base.)

If you define military success as being able to kill 10 to 1, 20- 1 more of your adversary than taking losses. Well, the modern U.S. military has become more successful. And unless or until it faces a similar war machine, probably will continue that success in the future.

Pr Q said:

The US military has fought five large-scale wars in the past fifty years, resulting in a draw in Korea[1], a defeat in Vietnam, and three inconclusive outcomes in Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan.

Come come now, that looks like dodgy score-keeping. You aren’t going to convince anyone when you load the scales of history to suit your case.

In Korea the US repelled the North Korean attack, which should surely count as a win – no one calls Britain’s repulsion of the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands a “draw”. Sure they did not achieve a rollback with the invasion of North Korea, but they got close. South Korea is a hugely important strategic ally.

In Vietnam the US suffered strategic defeat, but not on account of military failure in the field. The US military soundly defeated the VietCong which never recovered from the combination of the failed Tet Offensive, Phoenix Program and the destruction of Cambodian sanctuaries. Vietnamization and Operation Line backer I & II worked up until the Democrat Congress withdrew support for the Thieu government.

In Iraq the US has achieved two conclusive victories, expelling Iraq from Kuwait and the Baathist party from Iraq. A friendly government now more or less sits in Baghdad. No doubt one can argue about the merits of these military operations, but not the outcome.

In Afghanistan, well I agree the outcome is “inconclusive”. In fact you would have to count Al Quaeda as ahead in this conflict since the US has not achieved a smashing success comparable to the WTC bombings. But “inconclusive” is situation normal for Afghanistan a big pile of rocks and drugs whose strategic importance escapes me. Maybe Obama will pull something out of the hat.

Then there is the US victory in Kosovo, admittedly another pile of rocks but at least they did not take any casualties so I suppose it was worth fighting. And ETimor, where US military provided critical military assistance to prevent the TNI from assisting the militias. And US military support of Israel which has been critical in maintaining IDF hegemony over the region.

Finally and most importantly, Pr Q is overlooking the US’s most important military victory over the past fifty years: the Cold War. The US military-industrial complex proved superior in the production and distribution of arms which eventually forced the USSR’s military-industrial complex into receivership.

More generally, one does not have to fight and win wars to obtain the strategic advantage that comes from having a dominant military. Whether that strategic advantage is worth the cost in the great utilitarian scheme of things is another matter. Most Americans like the idea of being No One when it comes to Guns.

Pr Q said:

Moreover, in all sorts of respects the self-image of the US (as a land of opportunity and social mobility, a generous giver of foreign aid, a beacon of democracy in a generally undemocratic world and so on) seems in most respects to have been set in concrete by 1950. The failure to learn anything from a string of military failures and disappointments seems to fit with this. I’m talking here mostly about the views of the American public, but these views are even more predominant among the policy elite and the Foreign Policy Community.

There is no real mystery why the US military still retains high prestige amongst US political leaders. It is still trading on the political capital accumulated through its victory in the Cold War. And it has not suffered a USS Missouri or Saigon Embassy moment in the Global War on Terror.

Most of the US foreign policy community and pundits have spent most of their professional lives from, say mid-eighties through mid-noughties, savouring the fruits of US military dominance. Its really only in the past five years or so that things have gone sour. That is apparently too little time for the anti-militarist message to sink in.

The main thing that Pr Q is missing here in US history from 1950-90 is the prestige the US military achieved through its ultimate prevalence over the USSR’s military in both the Space Race and Arms Race, culminating in victory in the Cold War. That is what sticks in most policy makers minds.

Sure the US government suffered a massive set-back in Vietnam. But the extraordinary success the USAF achieved in winning the first Iraq war at trifling cost seems to have more or less balanced that ledger.

Now after its expensive misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan the US military is “back in the red” so to speak. But the set-backs and disappointments of the GWOT have not been reinforced by a humiliating surrender or rout, as occurred in Vietnam. Just as the economic set-back of the GFC was not reinforced by nationalisation and bankers doing the perp walk.

To really learn a lesson one needs to hit rock bottom and be humiliated by one’s enemies. It hasn’t happened to the US – yet. Meanwhile US leaders enjoy the kudos of talking loudly and carrying a big stick. With the PRC picking up the tab for the time being.

Of course one day, and that day may not come for some time, there will be a day of reckoning. The US will get into a confrontation with the PRC where its lawyers, guns and money will not count for much and it will be forced into a humiliating back-down. That will be the day that the calls for retrenching bases and beating swords into public schools are heeded.

mclaren,

Several flaws with your numbers. I’ll tackle here the $4 trillion decrease in GDP idea:
– average mortgage rates were never remotely close to 12% (in the relevant timeframe)
– not all mortgage interest is net bank profit – they face funding costs
– no reason why mortgage payments have to decrease by the full amount of the decrease in the underlying
– what about the losses suffered by foreign investors?

GDP really is still $14 trillion. The average American has not suffered a 30% decrease in income.

Regarding military expenditures: have you been careful to avoid double-counting throughout? Are you confident your categories do not overlap?

“An obvious reason for the focus on military spending is that Americans have massive confidence in their military and much less in their education system, particularly the public school systems.

Yet judged by results, the opposite should surely be the case. Why is this so?”

This neglected question actually has a simple answer. Everyone (virtually everyone) in America spends 13 years in the public school system. Plus (virtually) every parent has kids in the system. Relatively few Americans have direct experience with the military, and even if they do, it’s as employees, not as consumers of the end product.

Oh yeah, I didn’t mean to imply that Finland was like the US. Just that the US isn’t a massive outlier compared to much of Europe when it comes to both rates of immigration and total numbers of existing immigrants [which a lot of Americans still believe]. It was once true, of course, it just isn’t true now.

I wouldn’t myself ascribe the failure of the Swedish educational system to large numbers of immigrants

You’d want to demonstrate that the failure existed first, surely? As Moe Tkacik would say, is that a thing!?

@Jack 72

I think that Vietnam actually have the reverse effect on the elites.

Rather than conclude that military power was of limited utility, Bush, Cheney and fellow chickenhawks were set on erasing the memory of the defeat.

That is the reason they could not tollerate the fact that Saddam survived the end of the first Iraq war, it sent the wrong message as far as they were concerned. So they were looking to start a new war from the moment Bush took office.

It is now very clear that the current rate of military spending is increasing, not decreasing the risk of war. As long as the US appears to be so strong compared to possible adversaries there will always be some group of idiots looking to use the military power.

During the buildup to the Iraq war, the US was being told two claims that should have been realized as utterly incompatible. The first being that the US is weak, so weak that it risks imminent destruction if it does not start a new war. The second being the exact opposite, that the US is so strong that success is guaranteed.

The US needs to reduce its military spending to less than a quarter of its current rate. There is absolutely no national security justification for the current level of spending.

J. Strocchi @70:
The US military soundly defeated the VietCong which never recovered from the combination of the failed Tet Offensive…

The Tet Offensive was a military defeat for the N.Vietnamese/Viet Cong but a psychological victory. And that was what mattered.
The US dropped more bombs on N Vietnam than were dropped in all theaters during the entirety of the Second World War. It’s hard to claim that Rolling Thunder and most of the other bombing ops were military successes. It’s one thing to claim that the war could have been ‘won’ if the US had done X Y or Z, e.g. a ground invasion of N Vietnam. But you can’t write revisionist history through counterfactuals, and the Vietnam revisionists have not persuaded me of their line that ‘the US really won, it was just all those demonstrators and congressional Democrats’ fault that the outcome was defeat’. This gives too little credit to the tenacity of the N Vietnamese and their ability to absorb extremely high losses.

Spending 60% more on education than Germany and getting worse demographically adjusted results is not a good return on your dollar. Spending the second most and getting the 7th best demographically adjusted results is not good return on your dollar.

And it has not suffered a USS Missouri or Saigon Embassy moment

USS Maine?

and a thriving South Korea is the proof

But then there is the non-thriving North Korea. Perhaps, without the war, a communist-ruled Korea wouldn’t be as horrible as it currently is. It still wouldn’t be great, but it would have be quite an improvement if the DPRK had been more like China or Vietnam. So if the gain for the South Koreans have been offset by the loss for the North Koreans, it’s not obvious that there’s any net gain.

Tim Worstall,

I’m mostly familiar with California, but I can assure you that for most property, and almost all commercial property, property tax rates in the 50’s and 60’s were many more times what they are now. Matter of freezing the assessed value in 1978 (allowing only 1% annual increases) as property values, maybe I should say costs, increased 10-15% in most years. When my parents died their house (bought for $16,000) sold for a million and half, while their property taxes were less than half of what I was paying on a place worth well less than a third of that only a mile away.

Matter of freezing the assessed value in 1978 (allowing only 1% annual increases) as property values, maybe I should say costs, increased 10-15% in most years.

And the cause of this is incidentally related to schools themselves. When the state government mandated that school districts spend no more than a certain amount of money per pupil, whatever their revenue, and give the resultant surplus up to other districts, the natural result, which is agitation for lower tax rates until they matched expenditure, happened.

Norwegian Guy:

“Perhaps, without the war, a communist-ruled Korea wouldn’t be as horrible as it currently is. It still wouldn’t be great, but it would have be quite an improvement if the DPRK had been more like China or Vietnam. So if the gain for the South Koreans have been offset by the loss for the North Koreans, it’s not obvious that there’s any net gain.”

Interesting counterfactual. Did North Korea become more whatever it is as a consequence of its non-conquest of the South? Or would the conquest of the South just have extended its regime to all Koreans? I’m skeptical of the first thesis.

@Myles SG – is that really what the origin of Prop 13 was? Caps on school spending?

Not all of it, but yeah. From Wikipedia, the first paragraph under “Background”, in the article for Prop 13:

“Proposition 13 drew its impetus from 1971 and 1976 California Supreme Court rulings in Serrano v. Priest, […] that a property-tax based finance system for public schools was unconstitutional…the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution…required that all states provide to all citizens equal protection of the law. The court ruled that the amount of funding going to different districts was disproportionately favoring the wealthy. Previously, local property taxes went directly to the local school system, which minimized state government’s involvement in the distribution of revenue…The Court ruled that the state had to make the distribution of revenue more equitable. The state legislature responded by capping the rate of local revenue that a school district could receive and distributing excess amounts among the poorer districts.”

Note that it is the California Supreme Court, rather than a federal court, which made the ruling, in case you wonder why this didn’t apply outside California. The article goes on to talk about rising property values and inaccurate assessments.

I don’t think the judges quite intended to defund Californian schools when they made the ruling, but unintended consequences et al. Of course, we are really engaging in Monday-morning quarterbacking.

@Myles, various: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the CA SC’s reasoning — the previous system DID provide very unequal governmental services to students living in different areas for no good reason.

They just failed to anticipate that California conservatives (a) would prefer to sabotage the school system rather than see it become more egalitarian, and (b) would succeed in doing so.

I bet there are social groups in Finland that score low on tests. If you adjust for those groups, Finland will look better.

Yes, but the US has more poor people relative to its total population and they are poorer than Finland’s poor. Thus they drag down the average score more. (I don’t know what a median-to-median comparison between the US and Finland looks like.)

Note that because of how averages work and the distribution of US incomes, a *large* majority of the US population has below average income. (I wonder if there’s any systematic study of that particular metric — e.g. comparing nations or time periods — or if it’s considered not useful compared to more sophisticated ways of measuring the income distribution.)

The super-rich don’t skew the US’s average educational outcome upward the way they skew its average income for two reasons: (1) the best education money can buy isn’t really THAT much better in outcome terms than a merely quite good education, so the megawealth of the US rich doesn’t provide any added value in educational terms because most or all falls after the saturation point, and (2) the children of the super-rich can’t score better than perfect in any event. Essentially, in the US you can be 1000x richer than the guy who mows your lawn, but your kids can’t be 1000x smarter than his (the egos of US CEOs notwithstanding).

ejh @ #89 said:

Provided we’re not bothered about an extrardinary rate of death and destruction. Well, all in a good cause.

Provided we don’t take into account the thirty years following the war. Well, it all turned out….

The Korean war, at least in its critical first half, was a successful war in that it saved S Korea from N Korea’s subsequent fate. Its a pity Macarthur, in its inconclusive second half, failed to save N Korea from N Korea’s subsequent fate. Some might say it was worth a shot.

Any other interpretation is just Stalinist apologetics. And a despicable betrayal of our troops sacrifices.

Norwegian Guy,

“But then there is the non-thriving North Korea. Perhaps, without the war, a communist-ruled Korea wouldn’t be as horrible as it currently is. It still wouldn’t be great, but it would have be quite an improvement if the DPRK had been more like China or Vietnam.”

Maybe or maybe it would have been worse. How many did Mao kill in China? Tawain for all it’s faults seems like a better deal. And the aftermath of the Vietnamese liberation was mass exodus, mass murder, and mass re-education.

Any counterfactual is possible but based on what actually happened in N Korea, China, and Vietnam it looks very much like the effort was very much worth it for S Koreans.

101 – “Any other interpretation is just Stalinist apologetics. And a despicable betrayal of our troops sacrifices.”

103 – “And the aftermath of the Vietnamese liberation was mass exodus, mass murder, and mass re-education.”

So in another manner of speaking our use of WMD’s and back to the stone age bombings were not only productive, but the right thing to do in that peremptory kinda way.

“War is hell” ~ Col Mike Kirby

Pr Q said:

That’s a record that makes the worst inner-city public school look pretty good. At least the majority of students, even at the worst schools, end up more or less literate….Kristof is right that even where the use of military power is successful in its own terms, it is unlikely to be cost-effective – his striking observation on this is that the cost of one US soldier in Afghanistan is the same as that of 20 schools.

Shorter Quiggin: the utilitarian opportunity cost of military expenditure in terms of health and education spending foregone is huge, probably orders of magnitude in difference. And military expenditure on wars are generally “disutilitarian”, that is generates negative returns.

When you boil it down, its difficult to calculate the RoI on military expenditure. The social benefits of global force projection power are not all that obvious.

Further to upthread, the US’s policy makers and public are biased in their estimate of the value of military expenditure because they have reaped most of the benefits of victory big conflicts of the 20thC (victories in WWI, WWII and Cold War) without having to pay for the major cost, which is a foreign army marching across your land.

Of course its nice to be King of the World. But even if one is committed to being the global hegemon it might still make sense to cut defence spending and use the money saved for bribes and aid. A good comparison would be JAP, which since the end of WWII has been spending about 1% of its national income on defence. Up until the rise of the PRC it seemed that JAP was on the road to global economic hegemony.

And the US has managed to rise to the top despite, or because, it has had long periods when it did not spend all that much on defence. This graph tracks the US’s per capita defence spending over the period 1792-2015. Obviously major expenditure spikes during periods of heightened conflict – Civil War, WWI, WWII, various Cold War episodes and now the GWOT. But otherwise the default level of expenditure is not extraordinary, and trending down sharply since the end of the Cold War until 911.

My prediction is that the US’s defence expenditure ratio will begin to fall by mid-way through the tennies, particularly as the lower USD begins to bite. And the futility of waging guerilla warfare right the way across Southern Eurasia finally penetrates certain skulls.  Especially whilst the PRC keeps its powder dry and bides its time. Thats when the call will go up to retrench bases and cancel expensive weapons programs.

We often compare the US to earlier world powers like the British Empire, but I’ve always thought that we are more like Switzerland with nuclear weapons. We’ve never really had fun running the world the way the British or the French did. Like the Swiss we mostly just want to make a lot of money and be left the hell alone. It makes us impatient and testy because we just don’t enjoy the job we’re doing. War is fast, diplomacy is slow, so let’s just forget all that talking blow some stuff up. Maybe it will work this time and then we can get back to business.

108#Jack
“If, as appears to be the case […] the rehash of communist propaganda …”

Thank you Jack, for setting me straight. No more fantasy for me.

I’ve always thought that we are more like Switzerland with nuclear weapons.

Trust me on this: in the last half-century, no one outside of the US has thought the US was like Switzerland with nuclear weapons.

Switzerland itself on the other hand has seriously considered to develop nuclear weapons, but considered it expensive for the benefits.

I don’t think that is really true. The us military has command structures for all parts of the globe, and there are permanent bases on all continents and carrier groups permanently assigned to distant oceans.

The us spends fortunes on control of the oil of the middle east, which it does not need in peacetime. Europe after all has no problem getting oil and gas in peacetime, even from Russia. Control of the middle east is mostly relevant to give the us a preemptive upper hand in a large conflict of a kind that might not be in the picture for decades.

I’d say that ever since ww2, us military policy is based on the principle that the us dominates as of the globe as it can, and that it will continue to do so for at least another generation. The quick fixes are temporary conflicts within a much larger frame.

I am not knocking special ed. My own child was in special ed in public school and it did wonders for him. The special ed. teachers are well trained and dedicated and I am grateful to them. It was a lot better than my having to pay $50.oo a week for him out of my own pocket, which we nevertheless did willingly when he was too young for public school.

The fact remains that the average spent per student in the prosperous white suburbs was $15,000 and up, approaching what is spent for a private school. Conservatives, however, will tell you that in “inner” DC they also spend $15,000 per child (my figures may be somewhat dated here), when the cost of special ed is included in arriving this figure. However, the figure for non-special ed in D.C is really $7,000. Inner city schools don’t have the tax base or parental know-how to come up with more money from local sources, whereas in the suburbs parents gladly shell out $10,000 or more in local real estate taxes and can afford both special ed and luxuries for non-special ed.

Everyone knows these disparities are unacceptable. But now they want to remedy the situation not by investing more money in educating poorer children but by removing due process and pensions from teachers in order to spend even less on them.

A big problem with comparing investment on military versus civil industries is that civil industries don’t always have a Kodak moment. And politicians thrive on media oxygen.

The exception that proves the rule are roads, bridges and dams. Politicians love to claim credit for those – they get to appear at the opening and get a nice plaque on the wall commemorating their ribbon cut. But of course infrastructure is nation building and frequently justified on national security grounds.

Military affairs are much more media-friendly, if they go well. One has soldiers hoisting the flag, the defeated enemy being rounded up and marched through the streets, or a conference where one can sign a treaty and declare victory. At least one can point to a shiny new weapons system which makes a loud and satisfying bang, such as a rocket that goes to the Moon. Just look at the way Nixon was all over the astronauts like a rash.

But school programs…don’t get a medal award ceremony. Nixon spent a huge amount of money and political capital administering desegregation of Southern schools. But did anyone notice, let alone give him any credit for it? Not on your nellie.

In fact every single liberal on the face of the Earth has spent the past 40 years yelling at the top of their voice that Nixon was the worst kind of racist, because of a few off-color remarks he made off the record. It didn’t even stop when he died, in fact it got worse.

So its little wonder that some politicians devote more resources to military rather than civil programs. At least they get to have some fun with guns whilst they have the whip-hand.

It’s very difficult to gauge what a military failure is.

For instance, the Korean War was initially a success in protecting the appalling government of South Korea against the appalling government of North Korea, but the attempt to conquer North Korea was a total failure (and, yes, probably did provide immense legitimacy for the Kim dictatorship into the bargain). In the broadest sense of the word, Korea also provided a strong cement for American imperialism in the East and in Europe (legitimating massive increases in military spending in Britain, for instance, and thus basically wrecking the Labour government). So, globally a victory even if doubtfully a victory in Korea itself.

The Vietnam War was a partial success in doing immense damage to the North Vietnamese state and preventing the South Vietnamese rebels against the appalling government there from overthrowing it — although that appalling government did eventually prove incapable of defending itself after the Americans cut their losses. However, I don’t think the American government’s image has ever recovered from Vietnam. It was, in international terms, a kind of Bay of Pigs lasting for eight years. Hence, while one can argue that the Americans partially won the war (Noam Chomsky does, for instance) it was politically disastrous.

The First and Second Gulf Wars were very interesting episodes. In both cases the United States provoked a war with a very weak state in order to intimidate the world. In the former case, I think it’s clear that they succeeded; American intimidatory capacity was enormously enhanced by the Baghdad bloodbath. On the other hand, Americans were not admired or liked as a result of demonstrating the capacity to slaughter weakly-armed forces of a fairly insignificant state.

In the latter case, they totally failed. U.S. intimidatory capacity was not at all enhanced by rolling into Baghdad and taking over Saddam Hussein’s job, and it led to the complete collapse of the U.S.’s declining image (outside the US) as a country which could be trusted with any political responsibility at all. The reason why feeble countries like Russia and Brazil punch above their weight in global politics is because the rest of the world thinks, with excellent reason, that the U.S. government are a bunch of seriously deluded psychopaths.

This would not at all be altered by declaring victory in Baghdad, Kabul, Mogadiscio or anywhere else the American diplodocus drops its gigantic dung.

What size of military machine does the US require?

The US should reduce the size of the military budget until fools like John Bolton are no longer clamoring for another war believing that the US cannot possibly lose.

Reducing the military budget by 5% of the current expenditure per year would be a good start. There is really no reason that the US needs to spend even half of what it currently spends on the military.

Even with Putin slowly turning the country back into a police state, Russia would have to roll through the ex-USSR satellites and Eastern Europe before he got to the cold war era borders. Why would Russia even try when they know that the Soviet occupation failed?

PHB @ #123 said:

Given the difficulty that the US has in its military adventures, I think we are forced to conclude that the idea of the USSR being poised to invade the US or Western Europe was always a ridiculous, self-serving fantasy.

By that logic we must also be “forced to conclude that the idea of the USSR poised to invade” Eastern Europe ”was a always a ridiculous self-serving fantasy”. Oh, wait a minute…

The fact that some countries have experienced “difficulty…in military adventures” has not stopped other countries, still less the USSR, from having a go from time to time.

In military affairs one judges capabilities first. The fact is that the Red Army started as a party militia in 1917 and within 40 years had defeated the Tsarist Army, the Wermacht, was in control of pretty much all Northern Eurasia, developed nuclear weapons and put a man into orbit. I am impressed and NATO planners would be derelict in their duty if they did not have the same impression.

And by the mid-seventies, sure, the USSR’s ideological generator had run out of steam. But they still packed a pretty impressive military punch. So just to be on the safe side, it made sense to stick with the containment strategy.

The First and Second Gulf Wars were very interesting episodes. In both cases the United States provoked a war with a very weak state in order to intimidate the world.

The first and second Gulf Wars were actually quite different. The US did not “provoke” the first one in any recognizable sense of “provoke”, regardless of what the US ambassador at the time said or did not say to Saddam Hussein. The first Gulf War was a genuine coalitional effort with widespread international support and legitimacy. The second (the invasion of Iraq in 2003) was not. (The US undoubtedly did some stupid things in between the two Gulf Wars, such as leaving US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. But that’s a different issue.)

the effort wasn’t consistent with the way other similar situations are treated

There haven’t been that many similar situations in recent years. Operation Desert Storm was launched under UN authorization (SC Res 678 of 29 November 1990). There are lots of questions one could raise about how the war was conducted (scale of civilian casualties and suffering, ‘the highway of death,’ etc.), but the decision to initiate the first Gulf War, as distinct from how the war was conducted, seems to have been “as near to a legitimate and lawful [one] as any war of the twentieth century” (R. Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.216).

No, what I meant is the I/P situation; military occupation being tolerated indefinitely in that case, for some reason.