Schilde Publishes Journal Article on Military Superiority
Kaija Schilde, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, co-wrote a recent journal article on the pursuit of military superiority. The article was co-written by Rosella Cappella Zielinski, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University.
Shilde’s article, entitled “Strategy First: What Price Is Military Superiority Worth?” was published in the Texas National Security Review on June 26, 2018.
From the text of the article:
Long-term projections of the U.S. budget suggest spending decreases are coming. Stagnant tax revenue, growing entitlement spending, unfavorable demographic shifts, and deficit pressures, will combine to result in sustained military spending cuts. Indeed, various members of Congress and the military services have been sounding the alarm that the budgetary tap will be turned off and stay off for some time. Anticipated spending cuts have historically been met with concerns from the secretary of defense, the chiefs of staffs, service chiefs, and members of Congress regarding readiness, inability to deploy the necessary number of weapons systems to deter and defend potential aggressors, and the ability to assure allies. But is the trend towards sustained spending decreases necessarily catastrophic for military superiority? Perhaps not.
Money is, of course, a necessary component of military superiority, but it is not everything. Sustaining military superiority in a constrained budget environment is very possible. It simply depends more on how the defense budget shrinks rather than whether or how much it does. The degree to which cuts decrease, maintain, or increase military capabilities depends on how they are implemented. Cuts can be targeted, preserving some line items or services while cutting others, or they can be across-the-board, impacting all areas of the budget uniformly, regardless of strategic priorities. History shows that cuts may actually increase capabilities if specific areas of the budget are spared and funds are redirected away from unnecessary or inefficient programs and towards investments tied more directly to strategic priorities, provoking innovation, deliberate retrenchment, and fiscal solvency. Despite the advantages of targeted cuts, they are not politically easy to achieve, and only take place when policymakers have confidence in their understanding of the nature of the international threat environment.
Kaija E. Schilde is Assistant Professor at the Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies. Her primary research interests involve the political economy of security and transatlantic security. Her book, The Political Economy of European Security (Cambridge University Press, 2017) investigates the state-society relations between the EU and interest groups, with a particular focus on security and defense institutions, industries, and markets.