Nixon, Ford, and Carter aren’t anyone’s three favorite presidents. But defense policymakers today could learn something from how they handled the hard times of the 1970s: They shifted costly security burdens to foreign partners while pulling US forces out, and they cut defense budgets generally while protecting long-term investments in “seed corn” technologies that would pay off later, like stealth then or robotics now.
Those are some surprising conclusions of a report on “Strategy In Austerity” being released today by Andrew Krepinevich and his co-authors at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Looking at both US and British history, the report argues that current prophesies of American decline are overstated. We’ve been in dire geostrategic and economic straits before, Krepinevich and company write, but we still managed to strategize our way out — and it didn’t take Founding Father-class leadership to do it.
Most defense literati look back on the 1970s as the dark era of the “hollow force,” when the military was shrinking, its equipment was obsolete, and its troops were demoralized and undisciplined. That’s all true, but even so, successive administrations managed to keep funding research and development in a few key areas that laid the foundation for the Reagan buildup in the eighties, the Gulf War victory in 1991, and indeed much of America’s military successes since.
Today’s mainstay weapons like M1 tanks, F-16 fighters, and Aegis warships were largely bought in the eighties but developed in the seventies. Precision-guided munitions like laser-guided bombs saw some of their first successes towards the end of Vietnam but developed dramatically during the 1970s, along with early computer networks and digital command systems, scaring Soviet observers, who feared the US was on the cusp of a “military-technical revolution.” The 1970s also saw crucial experiments in the radar-evading technologies that would become known as “stealth,” which CSBA argues so unnerved the Soviets that they spent far more on anti-aircraft defenses than the US did on the planes to attack them — what CSBA approvingly called a “cost-imposition” strategy.