Preparing For An Unpredictable World

First step: Admit you don't know what's coming

Given the state of the world, should the United States increase, maintain, or cut military spending? Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith have debated that question, with Smith first arguing for maintaining or increasing spending, Yglesias disagreeing, and Smith responding nuh-uh.

I’ll stay agnostic on this. (I’m Canadian. They’re not my tax dollars.)

Here, I only want to offer a couple of comments that sprang to mind when I was reading Noah Smith’s latest essay. For three reasons: First, there is some relevant historical context that isn’t as widely known as it should be given how fundamental it is to important debates. Second, I want to share a superb illustration of how organizations – militaries, governments, corporations, any other organization -- can make themselves more resilient to the shocks and surprises that are inevitable in an uncertain, highly unpredictable world. And thirdly, it’s interesting history. And interesting history needs no more justification than that.

I’ll start with that historical context.

Smith makes much of the fact that in the Second World War, the United States made good use of the USS Washington, a battleship it started building a year before the war started, and more than three years before a vigorous Japanese wake-up call convinced the United States to get involved (late as usual, as a Canadian of my grandparents’ generation would say). “Even in WW2, we relied heavily on weapons that FDR started building years before the war even began,” Smith notes. “Construction of the USS Washington began in 1938. The B-17, the mainstay of our heavy bomber force, began construction in 1936.”

All true. However, that spending was far from routine. By the mid-1930s, and certainly by the late-1930s, it was clear to anyone with one eye and a newspaper that the risk of a major war was rising rapidly. The ramped-up military spending that built the B-17 and the USS Washington was a response to a clear threat. (It also came at a time of padlocked factories and soup kitchens, which made military spending sensible economic and social policy.)

More importantly, that spending ramped up from an almost absurdly low level -- because, until the Cold War, Americans despised large peacetime militaries as the hallmark of Prussians, Czars, and other European undesirables. In the land of the free, the peacetime military was kept no larger than needed to sustain the structures that would allow the military to massively scale up in the event of a major war (and for occasional meddling in Latin American politics).

The First World War fit the template perfectly: When war broke out in Europe in 1914, America stayed out. Its military had 100,000 regulars – fewer than Bulgaria – and they kept themselves busy by invading Mexico under the command of General John “Black Jack” Pershing. But in 1917, the US declared war on Germany and within a year Black Jack commanded two million American soldiers in France. And yet when the war ended, the military was shrunk as quickly as it had expanded. On the eve of the next world war, the United States had fewer soldiers than Portugal.

This traditional American approach to military affairs has, as far as I can tell, vanished from American collective memory. That’s a shame. It raises a question more radical than whether the existing military budget should be cut: Is it feasible in today’s world to deal with the threat of major war not by maintaining a force capable of fighting a major war in constant readiness but by maintaining a force only large enough that it can be scaled up rapidly if needed?

For the record, I have no idea what informed answers to that question would look like because I’ve never seen it debated. That’s because, I suspect, the “traditional American approach to military affairs” is now completely alien to Americans, most of whom would be shocked to discover that Americans did not always love the idea of supporting a large peacetime military. (Fun fact: In early 1941, when the Pentagon was being planned, the huge new military headquarters was supported by politicians who thought a war was coming and the military would have to expand massively. But after the war, they all assumed, the military would shrink again. So what would the giant new headquarters be used for? President Franklin Roosevelt, who signed off on the project, thought it would become the archives of the federal government.)

Now, on to the point about organizational resilience in an uncertain world.

Following the Second World War, American planners saw the future of warfare. It was nuclear. Big nukes, little nukes, it didn’t matter. If there was conflict, nukes would be involved, so Army, Navy, and Air Force planners got very busy figuring out how such conflicts would unfold and preparing America for them. The result was a proliferation of nuclear weapons in all shapes and sizes. My favourite is the “Davy Crockett”: Picture something only a little larger than a bazooka mounted on a tripod, with a nuclear warhead about double the size of a fully inflated football. It detonated with the force of 20 tonnes of dynamite.

In part, the emphasis on nuclear weapons was a result of President Dwight Eisenhower’s strategic calculation that by threatening the Soviets with massive retaliation in the event they started a conflict, they would not. But it was also the product of hubris. The modernist culture of the era was convinced of our ability to fully understand systems and predict events. This was the time of Le Corbusier and the planned city. With science and reason, anything could be fully anticipated and planned for. Even war.  

A perfect expression of this hubris came from General Omar Bradley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said, “large-scale amphibious operations such as those that occurred at Sicily and Normandy will never occur again.” Not less probable. Never. Less than one year later, the US carried out a large-scale amphibious landing at Inchon, Korea.

At least US forces were capable of such a landing. The problem with optimizing an organization for the anticipated future is what happens when an unanticipated future presents itself. And far from being optimized, the organization is incapable.

On July 14, 1958, following a coup in Iraq, the president of Lebanon told the United States his government would fall if an American force were not landed within 48 hours. Although the Army had been planning for a such an operation in the area for the previous two years, it took four days to put boots on the ground. But as it turned out, that failure didn’t matter. The Marine Corps was in Lebanon within 15 hours of being given the order to move.

Uniquely in the American military, the Marines did not buy into the inevitability of nuclear weapons dominating future battles. One reason for that was a command culture in which uncertainty was a given, like gravity. It didn’t matter what the PhDs said, the Marines reasoned. War couldn’t be predicted. Prepare accordingly. So when the other services were busy planning for various permutations of nuclear war, the Marines developed “Marine Air-Ground Task Forces” expressly designed to move fast and adapt in a wide array of situations, from war to humanitarian relief.

So who was more useful? One clue is that the Davy Crockett was never fired. And here are some key statistics from historian (and Marine Corps Reserve lieutenant colonel) Aaron B. O’Connell, in his book, Underdogs.

In the first three decades of the Cold War, there were two major wars and 215 discrete incidents in which the President used the military in situations short of war. Signaling resolve with nuclear weapons (by repositioning nuclear forces or raising alert levels) occurred 19 times, constituting just 8 per cent of the total incidents. Marine Corps ground combat forces, by comparison, participated in 39. Thus, while the Marines never exceeded 9 per cent of the total armed forces in this period, the President used them in 35 to 40 per cent of all military incidents and in four-fifths of the incidents requiring ground forces.

There was more than wisdom behind the Corps’ approach. Since the 19th century, politicians and military leaders had questioned the very existence of the Marines. What did they do that was necessary and couldn’t be done by the other services? At many points, there was no clear answer to that question. Immediately after the Second World War, despite the Corps’ successes in the war, a strong push to scrap the Marines got underway in Washington. By rejecting the conventional wisdom about nuclear weapons and sticking with their shit-happens-deal-with-it culture, the Marines set themselves apart. Why should they exist? Because they were different in ways that successive presidents found invaluable.

So what’s the lesson for resilience in an uncertain world? Redundancy is good. Competition is good. Diversity of thought is good. It’s also expensive, of course. But now that we are all familiar with how those amazingly efficient and inexpensive just-in-time supply chains can go haywire, we should all know that sometimes cheaper isn’t cheaper.

Another lesson from the Marines: Anticipating that large-scale amphibious landings would indeed become increasingly difficult in the face of enemies with missiles and nuclear weapons capable of taking out fleets, the Marines looked for something that would allow fleets to stay safely out in the ocean while still providing troops for landings. Their answer was the helicopter, a tool the Marines advanced more than anyone else. As it turned out, the helicopter was never used the way they anticipated it would be. But helicopters are the Swiss Army knives of vehicles, capable of doing something useful in almost any situation – and the Marines made great use of them over the decades.

In an ideal world, we would predict what’s coming and prepare ourselves accordingly, but we don’t live in that world. In this world, predicting and optimizing is a dangerous mistake.

In 1946, Air Force officers asked their Marine liaison to give a lecture on the Marine Corps’ organizational structure. There is no such thing, he responded. The Marines “stayed in a continual state of disorganization so they could be ready for anything.”

A little overstated. But that’s the spirit.