The Defense News Gap
Why defense news matters
In past years, the public could count on Republicans for at least two things: 1) competence in national defense and 2) realism in international policy. Republicans haven’t always observed these positions — George W. Bush, for example, had decidedly non-realist foreign policy moments during his presidency — yet the Party has remained broadly committed to them across the years. With the advent of Donald Trump, all that has changed.
Almost since the moment he announced his candidacy, Trump maintained a lead over his rivals for the Republican nomination. What most startled observers — from casual consumers of news to political scientists alike — was his near-magical ability to withstand otherwise crippling gaffes and glaring inconsistencies. It’s not as if the media neglected to report on his antics; rather, Trump’s voting bloc were simply unswayed by any argument purporting to show Trump’s unfitness for the presidency.
But one aspect of Trump’s candidacy that did not face the scrutiny it deserved was his foreign policy “strategy” (I use that word loosely).
Trump represents the abandonment of a realistic and coherent defense strategy.
At first glance, it might seem as if the media did their job to contend with Trump’s foreign policy ideas. There was uninterrupted coverage and discussion of Trump’s promise to build a wall along our southern border. Later, in the wake of the Paris attack, Trump announced his Muslim travel ban, which the media endlessly dissected. Yet these aren’t serious positions. The media gave these views saturation coverage, sure, but Trump’s broader strategy — which is, consequently, far more significant to evaluate — went underreported.
Obviously, inflammatory remarks are going to generate more ratings than sustained reflection on policy minutiae. But this isn’t a call for the media to get so deeply into the foreign policy weeds that they alienate their viewers.
Here’s an example of a discussion we need to be having. There are calls for reducing the military budget and for decreasing the size of our military. The argument is that we spend so much more than other countries, and that we’re so vastly superior to them in terms of military capabilities, that we need to scale back.
Unquestionably, we’re big and powerful. Yet this has not kept aggressors from violently challenging us. Moving forward, we can expect hostile state and non-state actors to seek to advance their interests by damaging ours. Much is made about the size of our defense budget, but given the fact that our unparalleled military might has not immunized us from attacks, we need to maintain a commitment to an ever-evolving, continually-adapting defense apparatus that is able to meet the unpredictability of twenty-first century aggression.
But a discussion of this sort is often not on the books. As a society, our knowledge of defense matters has declined drastically. What we can expect the average American today to know about defense is far less than what Americans just a couple decades ago could claim to know.
What we need is defense news.
Defense news is not quite like political news. Political news is packaged and marketed at a broad audience in an easily digestible form; people like to read it and coverage nets commercial advertising revenue. Defense news, if you search for it, is sequestered on specialty websites and magazines and sandwiched between high-level ads sponsoring Honeywell cyber defense and Boeing airframes, i.e. services and products with price tags meant for governments and not people. Defense news consists largely of dry fact sheets, assessments of ship tonnage data, and budget estimates for airplane parts. It’s reported for policy stakeholders and decision makers, but not for the citizens it affects.
Why should we care about defense news? It’s complicated and technical, and we should leave it to the experts, right? Its actual level of complexity is no higher than any other field, which is to say incredibly complex but manageable through competent reporting, accessible explaining, and, on the reader side, a willingness and a dedication to be informed about a topic of nearly unrivaled policy importance.
The biggest obstacle standing between the common news consumer and a basic grasp of national defense issues in real time is an artificial cloak of complexity created by these experts and policy makers. They want to make it seem like no one else can do what they do, so that they can make decisions without popular input or oversight, much like the financial community prior to the 2008 crash. But while there is real complexity to defense issues, they are not complex in the way these experts and policy makers want to suggest. The complexities can be massaged, while still being respected, through accessible writing.
Let’s spell out more explicitly why we should care about defense news.
First, most of our discretionary national budget goes toward defense; about 20 percent of all government spending is defense related, and the intricacies of these budget items go largely ignored. If that seems bad, consider that $8.5 trillion — yes, trillion with a “t” — has been unaccounted for in the defense budget since 1996. The depth and breadth of this cost to the taxpayer is staggering. No one is being held accountable, and no one is demanding we change the playbook. The political will to restructure how the defense department spends does not exist. And this is largely because of our defense knowledge gap. Since no one knows, no one cares. Furthermore, why would elites governed by Keynesian economics, for which government spending is unproblematic, raise concerns about defense costs?
We must confront a very unpleasant truth. There exist a group of people who, if given the choice, would prefer a world without the United States of America.
The strength of this belief, the reasons behind it, and where they stem from are endlessly diverse. States such as North Korea actively and openly seek American annihilation, other states such as China are more concerned with displacing our hegemony, while yet other semi-states such as ISIS maintain a pathological animus for all lifestyles and governments that refuse to conform to their ideology. Problems exist for which there are no diplomatic solutions — these are problems that are (in whole or in part) defense problems. Defense problems require defense solutions, but for the most part Americans find out about the defense solutions while they are being implemented or long after the fact.
We can do better.
We have to do better.
It starts with a commitment to become informed, and to demand more of the institutions which are entrusted with helping to guide us, but are falling woefully short of that aim.
