Pirates! (Militarism whack-a-mole #73)

by John Q on May 2, 2016

Making the case against militarism is very reminiscent of climate denial whack-a-mole. Demolish one spurious argument, and you’re immediately presented with another. For example, my post showing that the economic benefits of “keeping sea lanes open” could not justify more than a trivial proportion of current naval expenditure, got hardly any substantive responses (apart from tiger-repelling rocks), but a great many saying “what about the pirates?”.

I’ve done the numbers on this one, and they look pretty clear-cut. There are a bunch of estimates on the web of the annual cost of piracy ranging from $1 billion to $16 billion a year.

This seems implausibly high. The amount actually stolen by pirates or paid as ransoms is far smaller, less than a billion a year at its peak, AFAICT. Looking in detail, there’s a fair bit of double counting here (both actual losses and the insurance premiums which offset them are counted, for example), and the high-end numbers typically include some estimate of the cost of naval deployments on anti-piracy patrols. In particular. Still, in the spirit of fair play, I’ll go with $10 billion.

Turning to the US Navy* budget, it’s currently over $150 billion a year. That supports a fleet of 272 “deployable battle force” ships, implying an annual cost of over $0.5 billion per ship. So, the annual cost of piracy is the same as the cost of about 20 ships. To put it another way, reducing the fleet by one ship, and scaling down anti-piracy operations accordingly would have to increase global piracy by 5 per cent to yield a loss to the global shipping industry greater than the savings to the US (I leave aside the question of why the global shipping industry is such an important recipient of US foreign aid).

Having played military whack-a-mole many times before I can anticipate the responses in my sleep. So, I’ll open the comments threads, resist the temptation to take part, and whack the inevitable moles in a later post.

* The US spends more than other developed countries, but I don’t think the others get any more ship for their shilling, capability-adjusted.

** I’ve corrected some errors in the data I used in the original version. But the discussion made it pretty clear that the objections aren’t to the numbers but to the whole idea of weighing benefits and costs in anything to do with military expenditure.

{ 87 comments }

1

Gareth Wilson 05.02.16 at 6:43 am

Are there are miliary forces that you think are cost-effective? What about the 101st Airborne Division?

2

David R 05.02.16 at 6:48 am

The Navy has many roles, not just counter-piracy. It carries out a broad spectrum of activities including alliance building, humanitarian assistance, intelligence gathering and logistical support for land-based military operations. Also the cost of piracy is low because the world’s oceans are policed by the naval forces of many nations. If there were no navies to maintain order on the seas then the amount of piracy would undoubtedly increase.

3

david 05.02.16 at 8:04 am

I wasn’t aware that the point of sovereign control was to maximize shareholder return…

4

PlutoniumKun 05.02.16 at 8:48 am

I think its very hard to quantify piracy as it can be argued that the costs are very low now, precisely because the oceans are much better policed than, say, in the 18th Century, when piracy (and related extortion) was a major industry. But the obvious retort is that if piracy became far more common, then there would almost certainly be much cheaper ways of combating it than sending out nuclear submarines and missile cruisers. A handful of well armed and trained men on vulnerable ships, for example would deter most pirates (although this would not defend against State sponsored piracy, which was very common in the past).

Most of the arguments for blue water fleets are bunkum – humanitarian assistance can be provided much more cheaply by other means than assault ships and aircraft carriers, likewise intelligence gathering. Old style tall ships are far nicer and more popular for ‘flying the flag’ than missile cruisers. But I find it hard to argue that there wouldn’t be a major upturn in piracy related activities were all the world navies to withdraw from key shipping lanes, and much of this piracy could well be state sponsored, so it would be much more dangerous than random bunches of Somali fishermen.

Incidentally, I suspect that most navies are far cheaper to run than the US Navy. The US military is notorious for over designing and over specifying its combat ships. It has some economies of scale, but I doubt the Russians and Chinese are paying a fraction in real terms for their vessels. The Russians are known for having an ‘80%/50% approach to military purchases. They accept a weapon achieving 80% of the targets the military asks for, if that means it will only cost half as much. This is why they usually (not always) avoid some of the more notorious money holes created by the US military.

5

Salem 05.02.16 at 11:50 am

You’re playing whack-a-mole because you never get a solid hit on any of the moles, you just think you do. Having refuted your interlocutors to your own satisfaction, but no-one else’s, you are stunned that the same arguments reappear.

There is no logical reason we would expect a rock to keep tigers away. The lack of tiger attacks is consistent with the rock being tiger-repelling, but is easily explained by more prima facie plausible theories.

Consider by contrast a fence at the zoo, also claimed to keep tigers at bay. Here, we have sound logical reasons to expect that, absent fence, zoo customers get mauled. Rock and fence may appear to have the same empirical support, but you’re a fool if you equate them.

Pirates, naval conflicts, etc, are present threats, and navies are effective ways of protecting against them. They are the fence, not the rock. Perhaps we buy too much fence for our money, but your absurd maximalism in this series of posts discredits you.

6

Salem 05.02.16 at 12:02 pm

As for your purported cost-benefit analysis – David R lists a few of the many roles navies play beyond piracy. You have to demonstrate that the marginal cost of the resources deployed towards piracy is greater than the marginal benefit, not merely that the average total cost per ship (!) is implausibly high for the benefits of anti-piracy measures. Of course aircraft carriers are far too expensive to be justified on anti-piracy grounds. Good thing that’s not the justification then! Do you really claim that the much smaller boats used against pirates cost an average of $1.5 bn/yr to run?

I predict you will keep playing whack-a-mole forever.

7

Laie 05.02.16 at 12:36 pm

I may be a simpleton… my thoughts regarding the purpose of a navy are basically this: A) Its tasks include protection of own shores from blockade, bombardment, and invasion, and possibly projection of strength to foreign shores. B) it has to be there when needed. Given the lead times you can’t start building a navy after declaration of war.

A navy strong enough for war can certainly do some anti-piracy while not otherwise occupied, but I don’t see how that should become the main reason for it’s existence.

8

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© 05.02.16 at 12:53 pm

I know a more cost effective method to keep those people from being mauled, Salem.

Don’t keep tigers in zoos.
~

9

John Garrett 05.02.16 at 1:35 pm

The argument isn’t whether any military expenditure is justified, which is the core of most of these responses, but whether our current military expenditure is justified by the need, or the results. Will someone explain to me why keeping (30? 50,000) troops in West Germany is justified, for instance? Or spending more on the military than everyone else combined? Not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., etc.

JG

10

Adam Hammond 05.02.16 at 2:15 pm

Pricing crises is impossible. Presumably, we have a military sized to respond to rare, dramatic events that are hard to predict. The cost/benefit analysis is not going to be simple. I am personally convinced that the US spends too much on our military, and that over-spending is driven by capitalist greed in the industry. Nevertheless, the OP argument about piracy is facile at best.

11

David 05.02.16 at 2:32 pm

Paying for military forces is like a lot of other things in life: you do it for reasons that may be largely, or even totally, non-economic, but which seem nonetheless compelling to you. You charter a boat because you want to see the Greek Islands. You hire a magician for your child’s birthday party.
There are basically three reasons why states might choose to have reasonably serious navies. The first is if you want to become, or remain, a nuclear power, since these days only sea-based systems are really survivable, and those systems in turn take a lot of protecting. The second is in support of your wider foreign and security policy. If you want to influence allies and neighbours, show the flag, influence the management and outcome of crises, have intelligence to share, and claim what you believe to be an appropriate political status, then you need to have cards to put on the table. International politics is a brutal game, and if you have nothing to offer you are simply ignored. Thus, the Australians could not have played the role they did in East Timor without a navy, and that navy has been strengthened and upgraded since. Likewise, the French were able to rescue their own and other nations’ nationals from the beaches of Lebanon in 2006 with their navy – there are some things you can’t hire private ships to do (for that matter, intelligence gathering is one of them as well). The third is where you have a long coastline with significant economic assets (oil, gas, fisheries) to protect.
In the last case, the economic case is obvious: a few frigates or large patrol boats and a few helicopters will help to secure economic assets many times their value. For the first, I suppose advocates of nuclear weapons would argue that they preserve the existence of the nation. Even if you leave human life out of the occasion, a country that suffers a nuclear attack is going to lose perhaps 75-90% of its GDP for a significant number of years: far more than the cost of any conceivable nuclear system. And finally, there are certainly some economic advantages to a pro-active security policy, though it’s never easy to quantify them. For example, the US gained enormous wider economic benefits from having forces deployed in Europe and Asia in the Cold War, just as the British had from their military domination of the oil-producing regions of theMiddle East.
In the end, all these things are choices, and few of them are easily reducible to simple financial calculations. And do leave the US Navy out of this – it’s not a useful example.

12

oldster 05.02.16 at 3:01 pm

In Shelby, John Roberts struck down preclearance requirements on voting regulations and thus rolled back five decades of progress on voting rights. His rationale was that there had not been much voter suppression of late, so who needs to guard against it? And now as a result of Roberts, millions of black people will be prevented from voting in the US.

I thought this was a pretty good line in RBG’s dissent from Shelby:
“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ginsburg wrote.”

You say rock, I say umbrella.

13

Richard M 05.02.16 at 3:04 pm

> The argument isn’t whether any military expenditure is justified, which is the core of most of these responses, but whether our current military expenditure is justified by the need, or the results.

Why don’t you make some attempt to try to make that argument, then? Because surely you can see the actual words you are writing in these posts just have no logical connection to the position you fall back on when challenged.

14

Manta 05.02.16 at 3:06 pm

The post is missing the context: it’s the continuation of other posts on the subject of navy being way too expensive for the benefits it gives.
http://johnquiggin.com/?s=navy
in particular,
http://johnquiggin.com/2016/03/20/keeping-sea-lanes-open-a-benefit-cost-analysis/
and
http://johnquiggin.com/2008/03/07/do-we-need-a-surface-navy/

15

Manta 05.02.16 at 3:09 pm

The burden of proof (and in particular the burden of giving a convincing cost-benefits analysis) falls squarely on the shoulders of those that are in favor of a big navy, not on those (like Quigging) that argue for downsizing it. Just like in every other situation where we spend public money.

16

Scott P. 05.02.16 at 3:13 pm

It’s a strange calculation that focuses on the present cost of piracy (which, by definition, navies are not able to control) as a proxy for the potential cost of piracy or sea lane interdiction.

I also found unconvincing the dismissal in the previous post of the possibility of unrestricted commerce warfare as a potential tactic, and the further assumption that any state-sponsored interdiction of the sea lanes would perforce be limited in space and time (and more over that only one such incident would ever happen at the same time, making it trivial to redirect traffic.

17

Sandwichman 05.02.16 at 3:17 pm

“Presumably, we have a military sized to respond to rare, dramatic events that are hard to predict.”

Which, presumably, explain why we spend so much on mitigating climate change… presumably.

18

Yankee 05.02.16 at 3:40 pm

The ONLY reason anyone has ANY use for advanced offenseve and defensive weapons like ballistic subs, world-beater fighter aircraft, shipboard missle defense, etc etc, is that other people have the like. Eliminate the RACE and the ARMS go away by themselves. Dream on, young hippie.

For pirates, a few shiploads of Marines was enough to put paid to Tripoli. Police action, not war.

19

Anderson 05.02.16 at 4:51 pm

Quiggin makes decent arguments against *anyone*’s having a big navy, but in real life, each country has to decide on the size of its own navy based in part on the navies of other powers.

“Liberal US gov’t listens to Australian academic, drastically cuts size of navy, is confronted with Sino-Russian threats as result” sounds like a particularly bad Tom Clancy knockoff, but that is not quite the same thing as saying that the consequent wouldn’t follow.

20

The Temporary Name 05.02.16 at 5:28 pm

The suckers are people BUYING navies. The US is churning a bunch of money around in its own economy. It’s the subsidy both parties find justifiable.

21

L2P 05.02.16 at 5:36 pm

“Will someone explain to me why keeping (30? 50,000) troops in West Germany is justified, for instance? ”

The first answer is, “As opposed to where?” Those troops might as well be in Germany as in America.

If your response is, “Let’s just get rid of those troops,” you’re basically saying that there is no reason for the US to have 1.25 Million troops instead of 1.3 Million. That’s . . . an argument, I guess? But it’s a nonsensical one. We can always marginally increase or decrease the size of our armed forces. The real argument is whether the US needs extremely large and expensive armed forces.

Note that there is no reasonable case for “The US needs no armed forces.” The only debate is how much. Can the US, currently acting as the major deterrent for all aggressive acts anywhere in the world, get away with Belgium’s level of armed forces? How does that change the general level of aggression in the world? Is it cheaper, perhaps, for the US to fund an overwhelmingly large army and not have to worry about this sort of crap?

The answer certainly isn’t obvious, no matter how much the OP wants to think it is. Even if you generally think there’s better things to spend money on.

22

L2P 05.02.16 at 5:41 pm

“For pirates, a few shiploads of Marines was enough to put paid to Tripoli. Police action, not war.”

Are you nuts? That was LITERALLY a war. The US fought the Barbary Wars for 5 years, then went back in 1815, and didn’t really win anything. The piracy stopped because the Europeans built ships that were too powerful for the Barbary pirates to face.

It was those Barbary wars that convinced even Jeffersonian democrats that the US needed a large navy.

23

L2P 05.02.16 at 5:50 pm

“The burden of proof (and in particular the burden of giving a convincing cost-benefits analysis) falls squarely on the shoulders of those that are in favor of a big navy, not on those (like Quigging) that argue for downsizing it. Just like in every other situation where we spend public money.”

The need for a big navy was proven centuries ago, just like the need for public spending on infrastructure. That was largely settled in the 18th and 19th centuries, and formalized by Mahan’s history of sea power. It’s so settled that puny countries like Argentina thought it overwhelmingly important to have a large navy, absent somebody like the US or England acting as an honest broker and protecting the sea lanes. It’s so settled that Germany arguably provoked WWI over who was going to have the biggest navy.

Quiggin is trying to upset a long- and well-established principle of governance, and has a pretty substantial burden of proof here. It’s like he’s arguing for Einsteinian physics back in the age of Newton. He better have some evidence.

This is more like Quiggin arguing that the speed of light is NOT constant.

24

Patrick 05.02.16 at 6:46 pm

@L2P #24

To me, the better analogy is biblical literalism. It was written in a book long ago, so you approach this topic with absolute certitude: “Any empirical arguments to the contrary are irrelevant.”

But military doctrines are not physics. They change with culture and technology. A 19th century treatise on naval power is only as relevant as the quality and applicability of its reasoning. If you want to examine that reasoning, I’d be interested in hearing. What were Mahan’s opinions on anti-ship missiles and missile defense systems?

25

ccc 05.02.16 at 6:53 pm

Anderson: “Quiggin makes decent arguments against *anyone*’s having a big navy, but in real life, each country has to decide on the size of its own navy based in part on the navies of other powers.”

Even if some nation X had a significantly larger navy than the US due to US naval downsizing that would not mean that X now rules over the US at sea. There is still political/economic power to use and militarily the possibility of airforce strikes and, as the very last resort, nuclear strikes. Whatever naval power X generated X would still not be blind to those facts.

But for some other countries your argument may hold, I grant that. But on the other hand quite a few countries could probably cut their military budgets drastically and free ride on the military expenditures of their friendly neighbors. E.g. several EU member states.

26

William Meyer 05.02.16 at 7:33 pm

I have always wondered where the political support for imperialism came from in the USA in the 1890s (it doesn’t seem to have existed in the previous few decades, or at least not that I’ve run across.) Pondering this led me to wonder if there are any serious attempts to understand or identify who within the US body politic largely benefits from and who pays for the attempt to “manage” or “control” political events outside our borders. I mean, this is simply one more political decision, for whom there should be people rationally in favor and rationally opposed, yet there is an amazing lack of this type of analysis if you look at, say, articles in “Foreign Policy”–which are almost all written by people whose careers would not exist except for the US’s very active tendency toward international manipulation and control.

Clearly the USA does not need anything like its current “defense” expenditure to simply “defend” itself from any credible threat of war or invasion, not even if one adds nuclear deterrence into the picture. So who gains, and who pays, for the rest? Why is this question so cloaked in mystery and silence?

I have wondered this for several decades now.

27

The Temporary Name 05.02.16 at 7:45 pm

Clearly the USA does not need anything like its current “defense” expenditure to simply “defend” itself from any credible threat of war or invasion, not even if one adds nuclear deterrence into the picture. So who gains, and who pays, for the rest? Why is this question so cloaked in mystery and silence?

Is it?

American businesses (and the economy in a lesser way, given that ordnance is a goddamned waste most of the time) gain from the spending. Massive amounts of staff are an employment scheme. Allied states gain from not spending on the military and spending on other things. The global cop is isolated enough not to worry about military challenges. The ability to wave the sword is an American political gain. The ability to blame America is a gain for every other country.

28

Layman 05.02.16 at 7:49 pm

“American businesses (and the economy in a lesser way, given that ordnance is a goddamned waste most of the time) gain from the spending. Massive amounts of staff are an employment scheme.”

It is essentially a permanent economic stimulus and jobs plan, though I’d personally prefer we printed money, employed some people to bury it, and then let others dig it up. Shovels are much less useful in making large-scale misery.

29

Phil Koop 05.02.16 at 8:00 pm

The US spends more than other developed countries, but I don’t think the others get any more ship for their shilling, capability-adjusted.

Oh really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt_class_destroyer.

30

Cranky Observer 05.02.16 at 8:12 pm

William Meyer: 1890 was approximately the date that the US industrial economy started its near exponential acceleration that would take it past Germany & England by 1920. Perhaps coincidence; perhaps not.

31

Igor Belanov 05.02.16 at 8:39 pm

I never realised that A.T. Mahan would be able to employ so many pseudonyms from beyond the grave.

32

Anderson 05.02.16 at 8:43 pm

26: “There is still political/economic power to use and militarily the possibility of airforce strikes and, as the very last resort, nuclear strikes.”

Besides overrating air power, this response also envisions the use of nuclear force to … what? Oppose an invasion of the U.S.? Okay. Respond to harassment or confiscation of our merchant marine? Unlikely. Frustrate an invasion of some allied nation? Vanishingly unlikely.

It’s a bit like saying one doesn’t need a fence, door locks, etc. because one can just shoot trespassers and burglars. Well, yes, but.

The Quiggin argument IMHO actually hurts the case for downsizing naval expenditures by posing the argument as “no navy vs. existing navy.”

33

ccc 05.02.16 at 9:04 pm

Anderson: “overrating air power”

Do you have good empirical evidence that air strikes are inefficient against an adversary that is stronger only in naval resources? Besides you skipped the part on political/economic power. There are of course also many other non-naval resources to use before it would come to nuclear war.

“It’s a bit like …”
No.

34

LFC 05.02.16 at 10:59 pm

Somewhat hasty take on the U.S. mil. posture:

ISTM the U.S. military budget and global military footprint (e.g. approx. 700 (v. roughly) bases all over the world) are driven partly by ‘the military-industrial complex’, partly by pork-barrel and/or constituent-centered politics (congressmen supporting the interests of contractors and other businesses in their districts), and also by a rather outdated ‘grand strategy’ and conception of the U.S. global role that persists to some extent as a result of inertia (plus, arguably, lack of fresh thinking in substantial segments of the foreign-policy and ‘natl-security’ elite).

Despite the view of some that there is a new cold war betw the US and Russia, the question remains whether the U.S. should have a force structure, base network, and nuclear posture that in some significant ways seem more suited for conditions c. 1960 than 2016. For ex., why have land-based ICBMs, esp. given the current level of overkill in the US nuclear sub fleet? The ICBMs are an anachronism. Why have ~200 gravity nuclear bombs deployed in Europe? Another anachronism. These weapons are not cheap to maintain and ‘modernize’, btw (esp e.g. when you also have to modify the F-35, already quite a boondoggle, so that it can carry nuclear bombs).

Also, shd the US divide basically the *entire world* into mil. commands (CENTCOM, AFRICOM, etc etc), appointing itself permanent ‘world orderer’ and keeping its allies in a perpetually secondary or tertiary role? The latest addition to the list, Africom, has extended the US mil. footprint in that continent, w several counter-terrorist and drone bases opening (w/o much media attention). Particular bases may have specific justifications, but I’m skeptical, to put it no more strongly, that the Pentagon carving up the entire planet into ‘commands’ is a good idea.

I do recognize that a certain amt of what the US military does these days is related to disaster relief (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, and other catastrophes) and that’s fine and some ‘forward deployment’ and basing is no doubt v. helpful for that. Particular missions like counterterrorism also require some forward basing and deployment. Whether that can justify ~700 bases scattered all over the world is, however, extremely dubious.

35

John Quiggin 05.03.16 at 12:04 am

OK, Anderson has managed to draw me out of my non-response mode

The Quiggin argument IMHO actually hurts the case for downsizing naval expenditures by posing the argument as “no navy vs. existing navy.”

Say what? The OP discusses the economics of a one-ship reduction in the existing US fleet.

36

Richard M 05.03.16 at 12:18 am

> The OP discusses the economics of a one-ship reduction in the existing US fleet.

Induction; if you remove 400 ships one by one, you end up with zero. So if your argument is correct, zero is the correct number of ships.

37

John Quiggin 05.03.16 at 12:55 am

@37 Good point! And, conversely, if it makes sense to add one ship, it makes sense to add as many more as you like, until you use up all the steel in the world. So, it’s proved by algebra that the existing fleet must be exactly the right size.

38

cassander 05.03.16 at 12:57 am

@LFC

>For ex., why have land-based ICBMs, esp. given the current level of overkill in the US nuclear sub fleet? The ICBMs are an anachronism.

Because they’re cheaper than the alternatives and if you don’t have a nuclear force as large as your opponents the possibility of a first strike becomes much greater.

>Why have ~200 gravity nuclear bombs deployed in Europe? Another anachronism.

because every time we try to take them out, our allies protest.

>esp e.g. when you also have to modify the F-35, already quite a boondoggle, so that it can carry nuclear bombs).

The F-35 is not getting a nuclear mission and almost certainly never will.

These are complicated issues. Don’t assume that just because you’ve never learned about them, there aren’t reasons for why things are they way they are.

39

derrida derider 05.03.16 at 12:59 am

Err, no Richard. Marginal cost/benefit is very rarely equal to average cost/benefit (ever hear of diminishing returns?). And Econ 101 is that it’s the margin, not average, that matters for choice. Your induction doesn’t hold here because the first ship has radically different marginal costs and benefits to the 400th.

40

Cranky Observer 05.03.16 at 1:00 am

= = = So, it’s proved by algebra that the existing fleet must be exactly the right size. = = =

Perhaps geometric logic would be a more appropriate tool.

41

LFC 05.03.16 at 1:02 am

Re the invocation of Mahan on this thread, here’s a passage from Fareed Zakaria’s From Wealth to Power (p.134), emph. added:

In the first chapter [of ‘The Influence of Sea Power upon History’], which was the most widely read part of the book, Mahan clearly stated his central thesis: as a great productive nation, the United States needed to turn its attention to the acquisition of a large merchant marine, a great navy, and, finally, colonies and spheres of international influence and control. Not only was this necessary, Mahan asserted, it was inevitable, an inexorable step in the march of history. Mahan had expounded on these themes in his lectures at the Naval War College in the late 1880s, and he continued to propagate them through articles, books, and speeches throughout the 1890s.

IOW, he was an imperialist in the standard late-19th cent. mode. Doesn’t nec. mean he was wrong about sea power, of course, but worth noting.

42

david 05.03.16 at 1:22 am

the mistake is the assumption that the purpose of state-sponsored piracy is profit or that the purpose of asserting naval power is profit

43

LFC 05.03.16 at 1:23 am

@cassander

I would draw your attention, re the F-35, to this from Barry Blechman and Russell Rumbaugh, “Bombs Away: The Case for Phasing out U.S. Tactical Nukes in Europe,” Foreign Affairs, July/Aug. 2014, p.171:

Over the next decade, the NNSA [Dept of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration] plans to spend billions modernizing various nuclear warheads. The organization describes this project as an extension of an existing program, but its plans are in fact much more ambitious. The B-61 [that’s a bomb/warhead] extension, for example, aims to fold four different warheads into a single design in order to improve their accuracy and reduce their explosive yield — at a cost of at least $8 billion. The air force would also have to spend about $350 million to make the F-35 capable of carrying nuclear weapons and an additional $1.4 billion to allow the bomb to be guided when delivered by F-35 fighters or stealth B-2 bombers.

44

LFC 05.03.16 at 1:27 am

The OP was about the navy so I shdn’t have derailed onto other things. But I do wonder what countries cassander thinks are plotting (in the sense of being suicidal enough to contemplate) a first strike vs the US — the only plausible candidate wd appear to be North Korea. I’ll leave it at that.

45

cassander 05.03.16 at 1:39 am

> to make the F-35 capable of carrying nuclear weapons and an additional $1.4 billion to allow the bomb to be guided when delivered by F-35 fighters or stealth B-2 bombers.

there have been some calls to make the f-35 nuclear capable, and studies done of the cost. That does not mean it is currently planned, it is not, and it is not likely ever to be done. The Air Force is

But I do wonder what countries cassander thinks are plotting (in the sense of being suicidal enough to contemplate) a first strike vs the US — the only plausible candidate wd appear to be North Korea. I’ll leave it at that.

And you demonstrate my point for me. Why is a first strike suicidal? Precisely because the US has massive nuclear arsenal large enough that it can’t be taken out by a first strike.

46

cassander 05.03.16 at 1:54 am

> to make the F-35 capable of carrying nuclear weapons and an additional $1.4 billion to allow the bomb to be guided when delivered by F-35 fighters or stealth B-2 bombers.

there have been some calls to make the f-35 nuclear capable, and studies done of the cost. That does not mean it is currently planned, it is not, and it is not likely ever to be done. The Air Force is currently delaying arming its new bomber with nukes, it’s not going to arm the f-35 any time soon.

>But I do wonder what countries cassander thinks are plotting (in the sense of being suicidal enough to contemplate) a first strike vs the US — the only plausible candidate wd appear to be North Korea. I’ll leave it at that.

And you demonstrate my point for me. Why is a first strike suicidal? Precisely because the US has massive nuclear arsenal large enough that it can’t be taken out by a first strike.

47

LFC 05.03.16 at 2:14 am

ok, last comment on this, re David @11
I suppose advocates of nuclear weapons would argue that they preserve the existence of the nation. Even if you leave human life out of the [equation], a country that suffers a nuclear attack is going to lose perhaps 75-90% of its GDP for a significant number of years: far more than the cost of any conceivable nuclear system.

The issue is not whether US shd have a nuclear arsenal but (1) what kind and (2) what levels of overkill, for lack of a better word, are required. For ex., a single US Ohio-class nuclear submarine carries warheads w/ 32,000 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. That’s just one submarine. The US has an entire fleet of them. And that fleet is only one leg of the ‘triad’.

48

J-D 05.03.16 at 2:17 am

Australia used to have aircraft carriers. Now it has no aircraft carriers. It seems very unlikely that the decision to dispense with aircraft carriers was based on a calculation that aircraft carriers are never useful; it seems much more likely that it was based on a calculation that there is no realistic prospect of Australia facing a situation in which an aircraft carrier would be worth having. If it’s possible to do this sort of calculation for Australia, and for aircraft carriers, it should be possible to do it also for other countries, and other kinds of forces. It should be possible to describe, at least in general terms, the kind of situation in which aircraft carriers would be worth having, and the kind of situation in which submarines would be worth having, and the kind of situation in which MCMVs would be worth having, and so on (perhaps, the kind of situation in which nuclear weapons would be worth having?); and then to assess whether there’s a realistic prospect of your country facing that kind of situation.

49

jackspartow 05.03.16 at 3:12 am

jq is arguing from the average when the pt of concerns is in the tails

50

Andrae 05.03.16 at 4:00 am

If you’re going to do a cost-benefit analysis then it would help to keep the ‘costs’ roughly in the same ballpark as reality. You do not include the cost of maintaining capital ships in a discussion about piracy.

The capital cost of a capital ship (DDG/SSN/CG/LHD/CVN etc.) is roughly the USD$1.5bill cited in OP (doubled for USN procurement, which shouldn’t be assumed).

The capital cost of a basic piracy hunter depends on your CONOP, but sits around the USD$100mil mark for the state-of-the-art vessel (OPV with helo)—this cost to be amortised over the various other non-piracy related low-intensity roles this sort of vessel is suited for.

51

John Quiggin 05.03.16 at 4:37 am

@50 Perhaps you should check your facts before correcting others. The USN used destroyers and other capital ships in the Somalia pirate episodes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maersk_Alabama_hijacking

As ought to be clear from the OP, I’m concerned with piracy as a justification for actually existing navies.

52

david 05.03.16 at 4:54 am

@49 J-D

True. The difficulty here is not in calculating the situations, however, but in building agreement on the kind of foreign policy goals Australia should legitimately have. My read is that JQ only accepts national existential threats as a legitimate basis for a surface navy; everything else is to be philosophically subject to a narrow cost-benefit analysis – but since the Seventh Fleet deters all existential threats that could possibly be deterred by a surface navy, there’s no need for a surface navy.

But Australia has other goals, partially informed by its historical experience. The most obvious is an intense awareness that its regional interests are not exactly the same as the UK or the US – that there were and probably will be situations where the aircraft-carrying nuclear powers would prefer to engage or disengage from some knotty mess in Southeast Asia in some way dissimilar to Australia (e.g., the divergent interests that collapsed SEATO, or for that matter led to the weak Allied front in the Far East during WW2 to begin with).

And second, Australia – not the UK or US or France – is the country that gets to be neighbours with Indonesia and Singapore and Vietnam: neighbours whose domestic politics are by definition foreign, whose domestic elites regard Australian third rails with a mixture of amusement and contempt. Australia can de facto veto Papua New Guinean attempts to institute a death penalty or Timor-Leste attempts to un-invite Australian “help” in extracting its oil and gas, but it can hardly sway Indonesia, Singapore, or Malaysia in those regard. Conversely the latter are prone to regarding Australian NGOs participating in their politics as proxy neocolonialism. We can talk about the Lombok treaty and ASEAN notions of sovereignty but in practice the Australian public is unwilling to sign up to the idea that they are obliged to polite deference to the non-white ‘barbarians’. And there is a long and glorious history of Southeast Asian geopolitics proceeding by landing overwhelming forces first and letting the fait accomplis sort themselves out later (including, by the way, Australia’s own 1999 intervention in Timor Leste).

Given this, it seems reasonable to 1) not take “understandings” over appropriate levels of escalation for granted, and 2) carry a stick so big that Jakartan politicians cannot wag the dog. Not at any level, not even the Indonesian Navy trying to force an issue by simply refusing to cooperate on suppressing migrant boats and illegal fishermen and, yes, pirates.

So: surface ships. Return on investment is not “it”.

53

J-D 05.03.16 at 5:46 am

david @53

I don’t know whether John Quiggin considers only national existential threats as a legitimate justification for a surface navy, but what I do know is that you have not explained what are the other situations in which you think a surface navy would be worth having. If you offer an attempted justification in which you argue that a surface navy might be worth having (for Australia) in a situation where Indonesia does X, or where Vietnam does Y, or where Malaysia does Z, your case might have merit or it might not; but if you offer an attempted justification in which you argue that a surface navy might be worth having (for Australia) because Indonesia exists (nearby), it’s obviously insufficient.

Look at the precise words of what you’ve written.

‘… Australia has other goals … most obvious is an intense awareness … second, Australia … is the country that gets to be neighbours with Indonesia …’

Obviously you don’t mean that the goal for Australia (in the context of this discussion) is to have an intense awareness, or that the goal is to be neighbours with Indonesia. Yet that’s what you seem to have written. What you actually do mean I don’t know.

I get closer to an understanding where you write ‘… it seems reasonable to … carry a stick so big that Jakartan politicians cannot wag the dog …’

I suppose that might mean that we might face a situation where the Indonesian government won’t do what the Australian government wants it to do, and a surface navy could be worth having because it could be used to force the Indonesian government to comply; or it might mean that we might face a situation where the Indonesian government was trying to force the Australian government to comply with its wishes, and a surface navy could be worth having because it could enable us to resist that pressure. Perhaps it doesn’t matter which, because neither of those attempts at justifications will stand up; but then perhaps your actual meaning is a third possibility which I have failed to guess.

54

david 05.03.16 at 6:39 am

Um…? We actually already live in a world where Australia did in fact send missile frigates and five thousand soldiers into Indonesia to liberate East Timor. We still live in a world where Australia uses its navy to simultaneously threaten the Indonesians into cooperatively enforcing Australian priorities on fisheries and immigrant boats, and yet bribe the Indonesians with effective control over “their” waters.

Is it “worth it”? I don’t know, I’m not Australian. Take it up with your fellow citizens. But taking this demonstrated past foreign policy goals for granted, a surface navy is logical: there are no other plausible ways to exercising such influence on Jakarta.

55

david 05.03.16 at 7:22 am

(which is not new to Southeast Asia, as a tactic; Indonesia itself annexed West Guinea and East Timor via infiltrating deniable insurgents, then overtly invading, and then presenting it as a fait accompli to the Netherlands or Portugal: both far too weak to launch recovery operations. Stir adroit manipulation of Cold War politics to taste. Compare e.g. India’s annexation of Goa or for that matter Russia in East Ukraine and Crimea today. Timor-Leste and PNG today can be fairly said to resent Australian influence, I think, but fear Jakarta yet more. )

56

J-D 05.03.16 at 8:10 am

david

Consider the following argument:

‘It is possible that at some point the Indonesian government will decide to withdraw from West Papua. If it does, there may be violence as there was when the Indonesian government decided to withdraw from East Timor. If that happens, Australia may want to do what it did then, namely, encourage and participate in an international humanitarian and peace-keeping force. In that situation, a surface navy could be worth having.’

Now that argument is spelled out, I’m curious to know what John Quiggin might have to say about it (although I recognise that he’s reserved this particular post for discussing the role of navies in combatting piracy, leaving other possible justifications for discussion elsewhere).

My point about an argument like that was not that an argument like that couldn’t possibly justify a surface navy for Australia; my point was that no argument like that had been spelled out.

57

david 05.03.16 at 8:59 am

Fair. I think that description is a little too generous to Australia’s contradictory panoply of motives in East Timor, and it distracts from the point of taking-these-motives-as-given, as opposed to sketching existential hypotheticals.

Australia supported the annexation to begin with (unlike its opposition to the Soviet-backed annexation of West Guinea), for pragmatic Cold War reasons. And the withdrawal came about through Australian lobbying at a time of Indonesian domestic struggle between reformists and the hardliners. I don’t know that John Howard went into it wanting to risk a war, inasmuch as wanting to making a gesture (for Australian audiences!) disavowing continued tacit Australian support, and blunder after blunder escalated it into a crisis where it was either emergency invasion or genocide on an Australian watch.

Maybe it was better than a continued slow burn. Maybe it wasn’t. Who can say?

In acknowledging all this confusion, we’re already very very far away from JQ’s idealized rational-calculation-of-return-on-investment, though.

58

Manta 05.03.16 at 9:13 am

@24 L2P 05.02.16 at 5:50 pm

“The need for a big navy was proven centuries ago, just like the need for public spending on infrastructure. That was largely settled in the 18th and 19th centuries, and formalized by Mahan’s history of sea power. It’s so settled that puny countries like Argentina thought it overwhelmingly important to have a large navy, absent somebody like the US or England acting as an honest broker and protecting the sea lanes. It’s so settled that Germany arguably provoked WWI over who was going to have the biggest navy.”

So your examples of usefulness of a big navy are the one who ended in disaster? Very convincing examples, actually, but for the opposite of your thesis.

59

David 05.03.16 at 11:57 am

It’s curious that much of this debate is a mirror image of conversations I have with militarists (not all in uniform) and hawkish strategists. For them, everything revolves around new “threats” which have to be met with more money and new toys. JQ on the other hand demands that precise threats be proved to exist, even if he’s chosen a bad example (piracy) which does exist and where a response of some kind is obviously needed. Increasingly, though, we’re getting out of the “threat” ghetto these days, and into the world of threat-independent planning, where the question is not “who shall we be afraid of next?” but rather “what missions do we rationally think we might ask our armed forces to carry out?”. Implicit in this is the idea that many of the actual missions will be unforeseen (as usually happens) and many will be driven by factors that are largely or wholly political. A cost-benefit analysis may suggest that you should give up your amphibious capacity, but the next year large numbers of your nationals may need taking off beaches in a conflict zone, and you won’t be able to do so. Waving the DCF analysis around in front of parliament may not be very persuasive. Given that you can’t do everything, this requires a system of establishing priorities based on reasonable expectations.
It doesn’t have to be irrational in its planning either. For example, if you decide on a nuclear force at sea, you can’t, unfortunately, have only one submarine (LFC@48). But neither do you just choose some random number. If you are going to have a submarine available to launch at all times, conventional wisdom says you need a total of at least four. One will always be in refit, one will be leaving, one returning etc. Five is apparently ideal and would enable you to have two submarines on station. That’s why the British chose five (later reduced to four) Polaris submarines in the 1960s, and why the French originally operated five of theirs, reduced to four in the new generation. So fourteen US Trident submarines (not all of which would be operational at any one time) isn’t necessarily either irrational or excessive – as with all such calculations, it depends what you want to do, and where your priorities are.

60

christian_h 05.03.16 at 1:47 pm

My conclusion from this thread: boys love their toys. Arguing for global naval power is basically gun nuttery writ large.

61

Collin Street 05.03.16 at 2:03 pm

> Australia used to have aircraft carriers. Now it has no aircraft carriers.

Actually we have two aircraft carriers. Before that we had two rather clever pocket helicopter carriers.

62

Anderson 05.03.16 at 3:04 pm

36: I did not, in fact, take the OP as sincerely advocating that a one-ship reduction would redress naval overspending and bring an end to the era of “Quiggin on Naval Spending” posts. I instead took it in the context of previous posts.

(My own suspicion is that the USN, for ex, needs to cut much more than a single ship.)

63

Trader Joe 05.03.16 at 3:15 pm

If the composition of the most probable disruptive threats that would require military action are mainly terroist type organizations – ISIS, Al qaeda etc. that would argue for far less destroyer type naval power but potentially more aircraft carriers and command and control platforms, so to that end JQ likely has a solid point.

No doubt the savings can easily be spent on more spying, intelligence gathering and call monitoring which seem to be the perquisites of the ‘catch terrorists’ mandate.

64

Steve Kyle 05.03.16 at 4:50 pm

I am an economist who is also a long distance sailor. You are missing a big category of costs due to pirates. Many long distance sailors (“cruisers” is how they are typically known) now do not go through the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean as they used to do pre-pirates. They now do one of two things:

1. Go around South Africa which is a longer route and harder on the boat

2. They don’t go at all which has its own cost

Either way they are typically not getting to the Med at all. I dont know about most of them but for me the Med would be a dream come true for a sailor – full of history and great places to see, but it ain’t gonna happen via the traditional route for a circumnavigator.

There are other places where there are analogous costs. E.g. many Caribbean sailors used to keep their boats in Trinidad during hurricane season but no longer do because of piracy reports. They either go somewhere else (a large cost because they have to keep their boat somewhere much less safe during a hurricane in which case they have to pay up to the insurance company or risk losing their boat) or skip the Caribbean altogether (another cost)

I dont know that this would change your calculations all that much but it seems fair to include these costs.

65

John Quiggin 05.03.16 at 7:16 pm

@63 This is almost as bad as the argument from induction presented by Richard M. Do you really not understand how marginal analysis works?

@65 Costs of rerouting for commercial shipping are taken into account in the estimates presented in the OP. But your point illustrates the kind of disproportion that is typical here. Implicitly, you are suggesting destroyer escorts for pleasure boats. Why shouldn’t I ask for a company of marines to accompany me every time I visit a location where I might face a risk of armed robbery?

66

Stan 05.03.16 at 7:17 pm

“Australia used to have aircraft carriers. Now it has no aircraft carriers.”

Correct, there are no true aircraft carriers in the Aussie navy. There are two amphibious assault ships that can carry helicopters. They are by no stretch of the imagination aircraft carriers.

67

david 05.04.16 at 12:14 am

Costs of rerouting for commercial shipping are taken into account in the estimates presented in the OP. But your point illustrates the kind of disproportion that is typical here. Implicitly, you are suggesting destroyer escorts for pleasure boats. Why shouldn’t I ask for a company of marines to accompany me every time I visit a location where I might face a risk of armed robbery?

Well, since you mention it. If you were in credible threat of armed robbery, is your position that a cost-benefit analysis on the part of the police is an appropriate way to deal with armed robbers? This is an oddly Randian utopia.

(noting, again, that “pirates” can be subtle – that mixing nationalist insurgents with Sulu pirates was an actual Indonesian tactic during the Confrontation. It’s not “can your navy shoot the average pirate”, but “can your navy shoot pirates who are operating from bases you can’t touch and who are attempting to use their presence to apply pressure on your domestic politics”. Does it become okay if the armed robber promises not to shoot you if you vote Liberal? After all, that would certainly reduce the cost to that below of a company of marines! You could just do what they want.)

68

J-D 05.04.16 at 2:19 am

David @60

‘Given that you can’t do everything, this requires a system of establishing priorities based on reasonable expectations.’

As far as I can tell, that’s exactly what John Quiggin is suggesting.

69

david 05.04.16 at 4:31 am

As far as I can tell, that’s not. The bickering over the optimal way to achieve reasonable foreign policy goals is a cover for a decades-old battle in Aus and NZ politics over what constitute legitimate foreign policy goals.

Disagreement is of course reasonable. It also seems to me, however, that in practice Australia wants to be able to send expeditions to international missions in Bosnia or Timor Leste or what-have-you, or police its claims in its own waters, and involve itself it its immediate neighbourhood under restrictive rules of engagement, but without being entirely subject to US discretion and distractions (in particular where, as in the South Pacific, its geopolitical interests are not exactly the same as American interests). It cannot do this with a glorified Coast Guard, it cannot do this with an all-submarine navy, it cannot do this via shore air bases and batteries, it cannot do this via adjunct specialist forces operating off the Seventh Fleet, and it cannot do this with exclusively diplomatic pressure. So, frigates and destroyers.

An Australian pacifist doesn’t even have the good fortune to be in New Zealand, which is comfortably far away from the Indonesian archipelago – from where any substantive diplomatic incidents actually occur. Populist splendid isolation is much harder to sustain.

I mean, we’re talking about pirates. Okay, fine, so think about Indonesian pirates. Obviously you can’t rain tomahawks onto them. It might just be illegal fishermen. It might just be a migrant boat. A ship has to go out there, and it has to be a sufficiently armed ship that the Indonesian Navy – which isn’t strong enough to contain co-national piracy, doesn’t really care that much about doing so, but really really resents Australian naval presence – doesn’t gain anything by making nationalist gestures.

Or sea lanes. Someone argued in the last thread that the commercially-viable ports are actually really few in number and so a meaningfully damaging blockade by semi-state actors is plausible, contra JQ’s analysis. Maybe, I don’t know; that question turns on the counterfactuals of commercially-viable ports. My sense is that Australia won’t tolerate things getting that far to begin with; its fear is not “what happens if we are totally denied existentially-critical sea lanes a la WW2” but “what happens if we are slightly inconvenienced on the sea lanes, especially when other countries are not similarly inconvenienced, and then some blowhard in Jakarta says wellllll maybe we’ll do something about it if you make concessions on this, this, and that….”.

In an Australia populated by philosopher-king John Quiggins, everyone gets down to enthusiastic Coasean bargaining, maybe. In actually-existing Australia, I don’t think that politics is tenable, net-return-on-naval-investment be damned. Until that point is settled, I don’t think the argument over having seven versus eight frigates is being made in good faith.

70

J-D 05.04.16 at 5:36 am

david @68

It seems plausible that the devotion of increased resources and effort to anti-armed-robbery activity by the police could reduce the incidence of armed robbery. Yet in practice some upper bound is set on the devotion of police resources and effort to anti-armed-robbery activity. I don’t suppose anybody has carried out a formally quantified cost-benefit evaluation, but the effect is the same as if they’d carried out at least an approximate informal equivalent. Yes, perhaps we could give the Armed Robbery Squad more resources, but we’d have to take them away from the Fraud Squad; or, if we increased total police resources, we’d have to divert them from other areas; and given the existing level of resources for the Armed Robbery Squad and the existing incidence of armed robbery, it would take a lot of increased effort to reduce the incidence further, and perhaps it’s not justified? People may perhaps be reluctant to say that it would be too expensive to bring about a further reduction in the size of the problem, but they may be willing to concede that it’s not realistic to try to eliminate armed robbery altogether and that it will always be a problem on some scale, and the practical effect can be the same.

Similarly, it seems plausible that an intensification of naval anti-piracy activity could reduce the incidence of the problem, and yet I haven’t heard that anybody is advocating trying to ramp it up to the level where piracy is totally eliminated. If we’re going to draw the line at some point, is there a better way of deciding where to draw it than the kind of calculation John Quiggin is suggesting?

71

J-D 05.04.16 at 6:56 am

david @70

‘… My sense is that Australia won’t tolerate things getting that far to begin with; its fear is not “what happens if we are totally denied existentially-critical sea lanes a la WW2” but “what happens if we are slightly inconvenienced on the sea lanes, especially when other countries are not similarly inconvenienced, and then some blowhard in Jakarta says wellllll maybe we’ll do something about it if you make concessions on this, this, and that….”. ‘

I don’t know whether it’s the case that Australia maintains a surface navy in order to avoid being slightly inconvenienced, but if it is the case, then that’s not a sensible reason.

72

david 05.04.16 at 7:58 am

Some context:

http://johnquiggin.com/2008/03/07/do-we-need-a-surface-navy/
http://johnquiggin.com/2009/04/25/do-we-need-a-surface-navy-again/
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/10/04/who-needs-a-navy/
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/10/and-it-continues
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/10/you-brought-a-coastal-defense-ship-to-a-battleship-fight
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/10/06/the-quote-doctors/

I think it’s fair to question good faith.

That aside. In practice modern Western liberal democracies seem to decide first on what % of GDP to spend on defense – non-US NATO has a 2% target, as does Australia – and then look toward maximizing the capabilities that can be purchased with that 2% (for comparison: WW2 peaked at >40%). Identifying particular threats is not a priority, as capital-D David noted. Procurement becomes more about domestic pork vs foreign relationship-building. That something ‘modular’ and ‘best in class’ will be bought seems taken as given.

One problem is that the lifetime of tanks, jets, and ships far exceed the temporal span of threats. Another is that their lifetime is so long – half a century, easily – that forecasting diplomatic relationships becomes difficult. And last, procurement is readily politicized so forming a good faith democratic consensus is amidst regional/service rivalries is tricky.

To translate to armed robbers, actual decisionmaking is rarely a global constrained optimization problem. Instead, one democratic contest sets the overall tax/revenue level, another sets the justice budget and manpower level relative to other spending priorities given that budget, another (often appointed) policing entity decides procurement given that budget, and a third (also appointed) entity decides policing priorities given procured capabilities.

I don’t know that this process is optimal. But perhaps it obtains governing majorities at each level more readily, plus also being “good enough” given the sorts of magnitudes on hand.

73

David 05.04.16 at 8:52 am

The last few commenters have essentially been talking about creating a secure environment , which is what the police and military basically do. If JQ gives an economics lecture in Sydney, or wherever, he doesn’t need an armed escort because the Australian government has provided strategic level security for its citizens. This can never be perfect, but if he’s attacked or robbed there is an organisation available to respond quickly, investigate and prosecute. No serious criminologist would ever suggest that the police can, or should, follow members of the public around and provide them, even in groups or areas, with actual physical protection. That’s effectively impossible. Robbery squads don’t go around stopping armed robberies, they investigate them, and try to break up gangs specialising in that activity, as well as improving bank safety etc. It’s the chances of being caught, not the chances of being stupid, that deter criminals. But if JQ goes to give a lecture in Kabul, he’ll need a dedicated close protection team because the local authorities can’t assure that level of strategic security. The same argument applies to pirates or whatever – strategic control of the space in which they would like to operate discourages them, because the costs are not worth the benefits.

74

David 05.04.16 at 8:53 am

Edit “the chances of being stopped that deter criminals.” Bloody auto-correct.

75

Collin Street 05.04.16 at 9:14 am

> They are by no stretch of the imagination aircraft carriers.

From the wiki!

Juan Carlos I is a multi-purpose amphibious assault ship in the Spanish Navy (Armada Española). Similar in role to many aircraft carriers, the ship has a ski jump for STOVL operations, and is equipped with the AV-8B Harrier II attack aircraft. The vessel is named in honour of Juan Carlos I, the former King of Spain.[7]

The new vessel plays an important role in the fleet, as a platform that not only replaces the Newport-class LSTs Hernán Cortés and Pizarro for supporting the mobility of the Marines and the strategic transport of ground forces, but also acts as a platform for carrier-based aviation replacing the now withdrawn aircraft carrier Príncipe de Asturias.

I mean, some conversations you simply can’t have because the signal-noise ratio is too low.

76

J-D 05.04.16 at 11:21 am

David @74

However the functions of the military (or of the police) are described, their capacity to perform them is subject to resource constraints. The explicit decision that has to be made on the resources to allocate is also effectively a decision to place a limit on performance of function. The line has to be drawn at some point, and if you know some way of deciding where that line should be drawn that is better than the kind of calculation John Quiggin is suggesting, you haven’t shared it with the rest of us.

77

J-D 05.04.16 at 11:23 am

Collin Street @76

Also from Wikipedia:

‘The ski-jump ramp of Juan Carlos I has been retained for the RAN ships, although is not intended for use. The Spanish use the ramp to launch Harrier jet aircraft, and although operating STOVL aircraft was decided against early in the Australian procurement process due to cost and detraction from the ship’s main role, redesigning the ship to remove the ramp would have added unnecessary cost to the project. The retention of the ski-jump has prompted multiple recommendations that fixed-wing aircraft be operated from the ships (primarily envisaged as a flight group of F-35B Lightning II STOVL aircraft). The RAN has maintained that embarking Australian-operated, fixed-wing aircraft was not under consideration, although has conceded that cross-decking with other nations’ aircraft could possibly occur. In May 2014, Minister for Defence David Johnston stated in media interviews that the government was considering acquiring F-35B fighters for the Canberra’s, and Prime Minister Tony Abbott instructed 2015 Defence White Paper planners to consider the option of embarking F-35B squadrons aboard the two ships. This assessment found that the cost of modifying the ships to operate jets would be very high, and the idea was rejected before the completion of the White Paper.’

In summary, although the ships are capable of modification for use as aircraft carriers, they have not been so modified or so used.

78

david 05.04.16 at 11:58 am

My comment got et by the spam filter; here’s a repost of the non-linky bit re: J-D @72

In practice modern Western liberal democracies seem to decide first on what % of GDP to spend on defense – non-US NATO has a 2% target, as does Australia – and then look toward maximizing the capabilities that can be purchased with that 2% (for comparison: WW2 peaked at >40%). Identifying particular threats is not a priority, as capital-D David noted. Procurement becomes more about domestic pork vs foreign relationship-building. That something ‘modular’ and ‘best in class’ will be bought seems taken as given.

One problem is that the lifetime of tanks, jets, and ships far exceed the temporal span of threats. Another is that their lifetime is so long – half a century, easily – that forecasting diplomatic relationships becomes difficult. And last, procurement is readily politicized so forming a good faith democratic consensus is amidst regional/service rivalries is tricky.

To translate to armed robbers, actual decisionmaking is rarely a global constrained optimization problem. Instead, one democratic contest sets the overall tax/revenue level, another sets the justice budget and manpower level relative to other spending priorities given that budget, another (often appointed) policing entity decides procurement given that budget, and a third (also appointed) entity decides policing priorities given procured capabilities.

I don’t know that this process is optimal. But perhaps it obtains governing majorities at each level more readily, plus also being “good enough” given the sorts of magnitudes on hand.

79

Ragweed 05.04.16 at 5:10 pm

During the Somali pirate episodes, I was privy to some discussions in which a consultant to US Naval intelligence was able to share some non-classified insights into the challenges that faced attempts to address piracy in the African horn.

One of the biggest issues was that the US Navy, with a mission primarily aimed at ship-based warfare, was seriously lacking in the law enforcement skills necessary to meaningfully address piracy. Addressing piracy is not a matter of sailing around the ocean and blowing up ships that fly the skull-and-crossbones. It requires people skilled in evidence collection and maintenance of evidence chain-of-custody, and in international civilian and criminal law. It also requires a clear civilian government with authority to hold and try suspected pirates, but that also conforms to acceptable human and civil rights standards (apparently some possible trial countries were rejected because of their tendency to cut off hands and the like). You can’t just whisk suspected pirates off to Guantanamo and

In a sea full of small fishing boats, determining which ones are pirates and which ones are actually fishing is not easy. Randomly boarding and searching every boat is not feasible, nor consistent with maritime law (in some cases it can be construed as piracy itself). And being present with a destroyer to escort every commercial shipping vessel that transited the area was completely unrealistic.

The solution to piracy is a force of small frigate-class or patrol vessels and surveillance aircraft that are nimble enough to be able to intercede in an incident, as well as international cooperation to address the legal issues around arresting, holding, and trying suspected pirates. It is a very different mission from that for which modern navies are prepared.

80

Ragweed 05.04.16 at 5:27 pm

““For pirates, a few shiploads of Marines was enough to put paid to Tripoli. Police action, not war.”

Are you nuts? That was LITERALLY a war. The US fought the Barbary Wars for 5 years, then went back in 1815, and didn’t really win anything. The piracy stopped because the Europeans built ships that were too powerful for the Barbary pirates to face.”

The end of the Barbary-coast piracy had more to do with Waterloo than ship design. While the Napoleonic wars were going on, it was more convenient for European powers to pay tribute to the pirate states, using the pirates as tools against their enemies. Once Europe was no longer at war, they could focus on a united front against the Barbary coast states.

The US also found it easier to pay tribute rather than us military solutions – the decision to build a Navy and send the marines to Tripoli only occurred when the tribute was costing 10% of the US federal budget, and the sultanates were trying to double the tribute payments.

81

jgtheok 05.04.16 at 5:49 pm

JQ @ OP:

Err… not that I expect actual facts to change any opinions expressed in this thread… but where is that “just shy of “$400 billion a year” figure coming from?

From http://www.navy.mil:
The Department of the Navy released its proposed $161.0 billion budget Feb. 2 for fiscal year 2016.

Not that deterring piracy is the most critical mission of the U.S. Navy. An honest cost-benefit analysis might look at the build/operating costs of ships typically assigned to such missions, and compare those costs to estimated changes in losses due to piracy should those ships be taken out of commission. Of course, that would require deep expertise in the relevant economics, and at least some grasp of actual military spending, so that’s a lost cause here – carry on whacking virtual moles…

82

John Quiggin 05.04.16 at 7:52 pm

@83 You’re right on the budget number. I mistakenly relied on Wikipedia for this number. I’ll correct this when I get a moment/

83

J-D 05.04.16 at 8:54 pm

david @80

First deciding how much you’re going to spend and then deciding what you’re going to spend it on is not a sensible way to proceed; but even if it were, you can’t go from there to ‘maximising capabilities’, because that provides you with, for example, no way to decide the allocation of resources between, say, the Armed Robbery Squad and the Fraud Squad, or, say, your navy’s anti-piracy capability and other capabilities of the armed forces.

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awy 05.05.16 at 9:12 am

a bunch of things

there are politicians trying and succeeding in overcapacity of old stuff in the navy, contiguous u.s. assets etc. but the explanation for the lack of benefit in your analysis is lack of consideration for the downside as well as comparing the current open framework to a world of exploitative mercantilism backed up by force. the u.s. takes away the militarism option for other countries as a development model

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ZM 05.05.16 at 9:39 am

John Quiggin,

I think probably a navy is going to be helpful in the coming decades since there is going to be so many climate change refugees in our area.

We have seen in Australia how our Defence forces were ver important in responses to natural disasters onshore like the Queensland floods in your state, so I imagine that our regional Defence forces are going to have to cooperate over the next several decades to respond to increased natural disasters and sea level rise etc that will destabilise our region in the Asia-Pccific.

This is not to really encourage militarism per se but I saw at a climate change public lecture a defence expert talk about how with climate change there will need to be a turn from national security to human security, and certainly it will be better to have our defence forces in our region well prepared to cope and cooperate to deal with climate change emergences and destabilisation.

I saw a talk as well by Admiral Chris Barrie who was the Chief of Defence in Australia, launching the report “Australia’s longest conflict: our climate security challenge in the 21st century” and he certainly saw a need for the Defence forces to plan to deal with climate change related emergencies etc in the coming decades, and he was on the 7.30 report that night and mentioned the need to plan for the high numbers of refugees which are predicted to be caused by climate change by 2050 of about 200 to 250 million, which is 4 or 5 times the current numbers which is already at a crisis point not seen since WW2.

So I think spending on the Navy is important since the Navy is going to be probably the military institution most useful to help our Pacific neighbours in the decades ahead.

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David 05.05.16 at 11:31 am

These are problems which are well understood by defence economists and defence planners, even if the solutions are not obvious. Indeed, the inherent uncertainty of defence (compared to education, health etc) is such that “solutions” are not really possible, since you have to cope not only with the unexpected in the world, but with changes in government policy as well. So within ten years you may move from a neighbor which you see as a threat, to a neighbor undergoing convulsion and civil war where you try to provide humanitarian and security assistance, to a neighbor that needs help rebuilding its security system. And all this will probably happen faster (as my lower-case namesake suggested) than you can change force structures, let alone buy new equipment.
Defence economists would love to come up with purely rational method of deciding the size of the defence budget and what to spend it on, but for the reasons given above this isn’t really possible. But neither does the decision have to be completely irrational. For example, if you define a series of tasks which together require three frigates at sea at any one time, then with maintenance periods, endurance limitations, training and work-up etc. that may equate to five available now or at short notice. But maybe one will always be in dry-dock, so you buy a total of six. Arguments like this are made all the time by defence procurement organisations, and they are rational as opposed to irrational, even if they rest on a foundation of assumptions. But doesn’t everything?

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J-D 05.06.16 at 12:12 am

David @88

‘So within ten years you may move from a neighbor which you see as a threat, to a neighbor undergoing convulsion and civil war where you try to provide humanitarian and security assistance, to a neighbor that needs help rebuilding its security system. And all this will probably happen faster (as my lower-case namesake suggested) than you can change force structures, let alone buy new equipment.’

All true; but it still seems reasonable to me to want to know whether our current defence policy is based on perceiving any of our neighbours as current threats and, if so, which ones, as what sort of threats, and why.

‘For example, if you define a series of tasks which together require three frigates at sea at any one time, then with maintenance periods, endurance limitations, training and work-up etc. that may equate to five available now or at short notice. But maybe one will always be in dry-dock, so you buy a total of six.’

The process you describe begins with defining a series of tasks. My problem is with the idea that you can make sensible decisions about what sort of defence force to have without defining its tasks. For example:

ZM @87
‘I think probably a navy is going to be helpful in the coming decades since there is going to be so many climate change refugees in our area.’

‘So I think spending on the Navy is important since the Navy is going to be probably the military institution most useful to help our Pacific neighbours in the decades ahead.’

So, let’s define the tasks the navy might have to carry out to assist climate change refugees — that will help guide decisions about what kind of navy we should have.

Or, returning to the original point, if one purpose of the navy is to counter piracy, what tasks is the navy carrying out (or should it be carrying out) for that purpose? If the Australian navy is not engaging in combat with pirates, and if it’s not patrolling areas with a high incidence of piracy, it seems reasonable to ask in what sense it’s performing an anti-piracy function.

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