Time to Demilitarize U.S. National Security Policy

The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the U.S. Department of Defense. Congress authorized $778 billion for national defense in 2022. Photo by Touch of Light. 

The Pitfalls of Great Power Competition

The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 not only ended America’s 20-year war, but also solidified a deeper shift towards great power competition. In recent years, the United States has fundamentally refocused its national security policy from counterterrorism and military operations in the Middle East to competition with Russia and China. “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security,” according to the 2018 National Defense Strategy, “is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” from Russia and China. Likewise, the U.S. Intelligence Community’s 2021 Annual Threat Assessment placed “China’s push for global power” as the top threat to national security, followed by provocative actions from Russia, Iran, and North Korea. As the Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategy Guidance explains, the United States must “contend with the reality that the distribution of power across the world is changing, creating new threats.” 

The new era of great power rivalry has changed military strategy and further elevated the importance of defense within U.S. national security policy. This is evident in rising top-line defense spending levels. In fiscal year (FY) 2022, the Biden administration requested $750 billion for defense, which Congress not only granted but also increased to $778 billion. By 2023, the defense budget will likely exceed $800 billion despite the retirement of older weaponry, such as littoral combat ships and A-10 fighter jets, that are expensive to operate. The budget’s priorities include shipbuilding, space force capabilities, missile warning and nuclear modernization, and long-range bombers—force elements that enable the U.S. military to deploy over vast distances and subsequently conduct sustained, large-scale operations across land, sea, air, and space domains. President Biden also maintained the country’s basic military infrastructure and long list of overseas commitments. According to the latest statistics published by the U.S. Defense Manpower Data Center, the Pentagon employs nearly three million people in military and civilian functions, including over 200,000 military personnel permanently assigned to bases in 176 countries. 

How should we evaluate the orientation of U.S. national security policy at this critical juncture? Current U.S. efforts to counter the resurgence of Russia and continued rise of China reflect a long-standing belief in Washington that preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia should be a key element of U.S. grand strategy. Defense planning and wartime operations since World War II have often been aimed at achieving this goal because the region holds the bulk of the world’s population, resources, and economic activity. As the global distribution of power shifts away from the United States, decision makers in foreign policy circles are naturally concerned about attempts by great power adversaries to undermine American security and prosperity. China’s intensifying gray zone aggression—attacks that occur in the gray area between war and peace—against Taiwan and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last month further highlight the perceived need to strengthen U.S. military capabilities. 

How and where the federal government spends taxpayer dollars should be a direct representation of the nation’s priorities. While renewed emphasis on great power threats may appear warranted in the wake of recent events, it is a mistake to privilege the development of military capabilities within U.S. national security policy-making and the federal budget process more broadly. Inflated defense spending and expensive overseas commitments not only drain the country of resources needed to compete with great power rivals over the long term, but also impede our ability to address nontraditional security challenges, such as climate change, pandemics, and natural disasters, which pose far greater threats to U.S. national security than belligerent state actors. A national security policy that relies primarily on civilian instruments of national power would better reflect the priorities of ordinary American citizens and pay strategic dividends well into the future. 

The American National Security State: By the Numbers

The main problem with current and proposed national security legislation is the relative weight given to military power over nonmilitary dimensions of security. The Biden administration’s FY 2022 defense budget illustrates this point clearly. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III stated that the budget request “takes a broader approach to national security,” but the actual allocation of resources does not match his rhetoric. The request included $112 billion for research, development, test, and evaluation; $52.4 billion for aircraft; $34.6 billion for naval forces; $12.3 billion for ground forces; $20.6 billion for space-based systems; and $122.1 billion for “readiness.” Meanwhile, the proposal included only $500 million for COVID-19 and pandemic preparedness and $617 million for addressing climate change—roughly 0.1% of the total defense budget.

The military’s outsized role in U.S. national security policy becomes even more apparent when accounting for defense-related activities outside the Pentagon. For example, the Senate Appropriations Committee recommended allocating $268.37 billion to the Department of Veteran Affairs for FY 2022. The National Nuclear Security Administration received nearly $20 billion for the research, development, and production of nuclear warheads and naval nuclear reactors, and Congress appropriated another $80 billion to the Intelligence Community. Defense spending also costs taxpayers over $150 billion in interest on the national debt. In sum, annual defense expenditures total more than $1.25 trillion and will continue to rise if policymakers maintain their current outlook on U.S. national security. By contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention FY 2022 budget stands at $15.4 billion, while the Environmental Protection Agency will receive a mere $1.8 billion to combat climate change. 

The Big Picture

Defense programs consume a disproportionate amount of federal resources despite the fact that nontraditional security issues carry far more serious implications for the safety and economic well-being of American citizens than most instances of foreign military aggression. This can be illustrated briefly by comparing the magnitude, scope, and probability of threats posed by China to that of nonmilitary problems facing U.S. national security. 

What is the relative impact of great power competition with China on U.S. national security? The most devastating outcome for U.S. national security involving China would be nuclear war. In June 2021, satellite images revealed the construction of 350-400 new missile silos that house intercontinental ballistic missiles for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF). The expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal increases the chance that nuclear missiles would survive a first strike by the U.S. military and stand a greater chance of penetrating U.S. missile defense systems. However, nuclear exchange is unlikely because neither state wants to risk mutually assured destruction. The threat of nuclear attack against the American homeland, though significant, is minimal due to the very low probability that nuclear war will occur. It is also important to recognize that the possibility of Beijing launching a nuclear strike only exists to the extent that the United States threatens China’s core security interests. 

The military security implications of China’s rise are confined primarily to East Asia. The PLA fields the region’s largest fighting force, as well as advanced long-range platforms that threaten U.S. bases located in neighboring countries. The PLA’s military reform initiatives and modernization of conventional assets, such as armored divisions and fifth-generation fighter jets, strengthen its ability to successfully invade and hold Taiwan. China’s island-building campaign also threatens U.S. dominance over critical sea lines of communication (SLOCs) in the South China Sea, which provide passage for one third of all global maritime trade. The possible interference in commercial activity cannot be ruled out, but is unlikely given China’s economic interdependence with the United States and its allies. In fact, the costs of trade disruption or limited conflict in the South China Sea would fall disproportionately on China. Whereas China has relied heavily on export demand for manufactured goods to fuel its economic growth, the United States is one of the least trade-dependent countries in the world. 

Beijing possesses neither the desire nor power projection capabilities to threaten a conventional military attack against the American homeland. Instead, the most immediate problem Chinese belligerence poses for U.S. national security is cyber espionage. Beijing conducts cyber intrusions that directly impact U.S. citizens living outside Chinese borders, such as hacking journalists, stealing private information, and subverting tools that allow free speech online. Chinese intellectual property theft costs the American economy thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in lost revenue. The National Security Administration has warned that Chinese government hackers also target U.S. computer networks involved in national defense and steal sensitive military industrial secrets, including the F-35 fighter jet’s design and electronics data. China’s push for global power presents a clear challenge to the United States in the cyber, economic, and technological domains of policy. 

The realization that great power threats undermine U.S. influence, though important, is insufficient to justify the budgetary effects of current defense spending levels. The impact of nontraditional security threats such as climate change and pandemics vastly exceeds Chinese belligerence in scope and severity. China’s efforts to achieve regional preeminence may undercut U.S. influence, but the dangers of heat waves, droughts, wildfires, extreme precipitation, flooding, and other severe weather events intensified by climate change are existential. As MIT professor Kieran Setiya explains, “[t]here is a genuine possibility that within the coming century, we will hit temperatures that are deeply incompatible with the continued existence of human life.” The Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018, projected that climate change will reduce U.S. GDP by 10% and threaten $1 trillion in public infrastructure and private property. By the end of the century, heat stroke and similar heat-related illnesses may kill tens of thousands of Americans every year. As if climate change is not worrisome enough, COVID-19 has caused the deaths of over 900,000 Americans since early 2020. A report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services warned that “future pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, do more damage to the world economy and kill more people than COVID-19” without investments in pandemic prevention and response. 

The present orientation of U.S. national security policy works off the false premise that protecting our vital national interests requires U.S. military dominance. The reality is that the trillions of dollars we spend on weapons systems and defense programs aimed at countering China do nothing to solve the most pressing threats to the American people. 2021 saw the Pentagon receive a $768 billion windfall of federal funds as wildfires raged across California, tens of millions of Americans struggled to pay their bills, and healthcare providers lacked an adequate supply of medical equipment to respond to one of the worst pandemics in modern history. The devastating impact of these events on human well-being and safety makes clear that a narrow, state-centric conception of national security belongs to great power competitions of the past. Going forward, policymakers should adjust federal spending priorities to account for nontraditional dimensions of security, like climate change, natural disasters, and pandemics. The military’s ubiquitous role in national security affairs should be replaced with alternative measures that combat the most serious threats of our time.

Trey Sprouse is a senior at Columbia College studying political science. You can reach him at lrs2202@columbia.edu with questions or comments.