Abstract
Under what conditions does the USA adjust its defense spending dramatically? Scholars have identified many factors that affect military budgets, from international threats to domestic politics. Yet, most existing studies use regression analysis to estimate average marginal effects, thereby neglecting large-scale outlier “punctuations” that, though rare, supply theoretical insights, set institutional trajectories, and shape aspirations for future policy. Blending scholarship from public policy, international relations, and defense analysis, this article uses punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) and a mixed-method research design to argue that either a change in war policy or a presidential transition is necessary for a US defense spending punctuation. War debates and presidential transitions facilitate punctuations by triggering shifts in policymaker attention and policy subsystem structure, two mechanisms central to PET theorizing. In its quantitative section, the article uses a mathematical threshold to identify four punctuations since 1950: Truman’s Korean War buildup, Eisenhower’s post-Korean War drawdown, Kennedy’s peacetime civil defense buildup, and Bush I’s post-Gulf War, post-Cold War drawdown. War policy or a presidential transition figured prominently in each case. In its qualitative section, the article analyzes the Kennedy period in greater detail because, lacking a hot war, the case was least likely to witness a punctuation and therefore represents the hardest test for PET. In line with the theory’s expectations, Kennedy’s muscular agenda setting and subsystem shaping interacted with rising Cold War tensions to cause a dramatic-but-brief increase in civil defense funding to guard against a Soviet nuclear attack.
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Notes
A spending punctuation occurs when the observed frequency of large budget changes in a distribution’s tails exceeds the normal distribution’s expectations. See “Quantitative analysis” section.
The analysis begins in 1950 due to data availability. See “Quantitative analysis” section.
A policy subsystem is defined by a substantive issue and geographic scope. It is composed of stakeholders including officials from all levels of government, representatives from interest groups, and scientists and researchers (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1999).
A notable recent exception is Zielinski 2016.
The 1980s US defense restructuring known as “Goldwater-Nichols” offers a case in point.
During the Cold War, the USA fought wars in Korea (1950–1953), Vietnam (1964–1973), and the Persian Gulf (1990–1991) (Palmer et al. 2015). After the Cold War, the USA fought overlapping wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (2003–2011). All years listed are inclusive fiscal years. I count a fiscal year as a war year if the war occurred during any part of the fiscal year because Congress enacts supplemental appropriations to fund unplanned military operations. For the post-Cold War period, I count a fiscal year as a war year if the US military had more troops deployed in foreign countries than the post-Cold War average of 308,000 (Kane 2016). That procedure yields one war from 2003 to 2011, the peak years of US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During the Cold War, defense spending averaged $496 billion during war and $467 billion otherwise (FY 2017 dollars). Since 1991, it averaged $692 billion during war and $489 billion otherwise (DoD 2016).
Troop deployments do not wholly determine spending levels because expenditures-per-troop have increased steadily since 1973, when the USA adopted an all-volunteer force. They have skyrocketed since 9/11 as the US government has granted pay increases, housing allowances, and healthcare benefits to service members (Barno et al. 2011). On average, the USA deployed approximately 600,000 troops in foreign countries during the Cold War, versus about 308,000 since then (Kane 2016).
The USA averaged $509 billion under unified government and $510 billion otherwise (FY 2017 dollars; DoD 2016). The calculations reflect the alignment prevailing for most of each fiscal year.
Republican presidents averaged $571 billion during war and $480 billion otherwise (FY 2017 dollars; DoD 2016). Democratic presidents averaged $561 billion during war and $469 billion otherwise.
Budget authority is the authority to incur legally binding obligations. Congress typically provides such authority through annual appropriations bills.
Outlays count funds appropriated in previous years, thereby picking up the effects of decisions made up to 10 years before.
Some experts include these additional activities under defense spending (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008), but I focus strictly on DoD’s activities.
The analysis omits military construction; family housing; revolving and management funds; and trust, receipts, and other expenditures. Domke (1992) also excludes these subcategories.
The analysis omits a third schema, major force programs, because the data only go back to FY 1962 (Enthoven and Smith 1971: 53–58).
From 1950 to 2015, annual spending changes in military personnel ranged from −10% to 59%, whereas procurement ranged from −60% to 372% (Table 1).
Verifying the “crossings of standardized densities” is sometimes called the Dyson–Finucan condition (Balanda and MacGillivray 1988: 112).
Each histogram’s bandwidth is determined using Sheather and Jones’s data-driven kernel density estimator, which provides “a sensible trade off of […] bias and variance” (Jones et al. 1996: 406).
The Chen–Shapiro test outperforms alternative techniques across various settings related to distribution symmetry and sample size (Romão et al. 2010: 585–89).
Figure 7 omits three observations that qualified mathematically as punctuations but resulted from funding recategorizations, not from attention-driven, agenda-altering policy decisions about spending levels. The observations constitute false positives or “procedural punctuations” (John and Bevan, 2012: 90–92). See Appendix in ESM for detailed discussion and a robustness check.
The 1962 defense-wide punctuation’s observed probability density is technically 0.00005 less than the normal distribution’s expectation. Since the difference is tiny, the conservative move is to include the case and see if PET’s attentional and subsystem mechanisms hold true. I follow that conservative course of action in the article.
Eisenhower inherited the 1953 budget from Truman, so 1954 was the first year he controlled the process.
See note 6 for the article’s operationalization of war. The wars were in Korea (1950–1953), Vietnam (1964–1973), the Persian Gulf (1990–1991), and Iraq and Afghanistan (2003–2011).
Since O&M funds spend out immediately, cutting them generates savings quickly (Kaufmann 1986: 7).
DoD’s Office of Civil Defense assumed functions from the White House’s Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM), which became the Office of Emergency Planning (later the Office of Emergency Preparedness). In 1958, OCDM had been formed by merging the Federal Civil Defense Administration and Office of Defense Mobilization (both established in 1950).
In FY 1962, civil defense spending comprised 14 percent of total defense-wide spending. It therefore represented one of the largest contributing factors to Kennedy’s defense-wide spending punctuation. Another contributing factor was McNamara’s introduction of new defense-wide institutions and processes to bolster civilian oversight, including the systems analysis office and the planning, programming, and budgeting system. From 1960 to 1962, the number of civilians in DoD performing these defense-wide tasks had grown nearly 12-fold (Mahnken 2008: 61).
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Nate Allen and John Speed Meyers for feedback on earlier versions of this article. The views expressed are mine alone and do not reflect the positions of the US Navy, Department of Defense, or US government.
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Sharp, T. Wars, presidents, and punctuated equilibriums in US defense spending. Policy Sci 52, 367–396 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-019-09349-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-019-09349-z