Opinion

The Two-Page Defense
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, CA

By all accounts, the new coalition Government’s budget marked a milestone in the country’s fiscal history. The defense budget went from being a single line to two pages.   But is that enough?
No, since we are talking about spending some four to five percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) on defense, a burden that is twice as high as that of many other countries including the large neighbor to the east!
To place the budget in perspective, it is necessary to put it through three tests. First, what did we know about the economics of defense before the new budget came out? Second, what do we know now? Third, what do we still don’t know?
Previously, we did know how much the country was spending on defense (sans nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles). But we did not know whether that was the right amount.
We are no wiser now. It is possible that the last hundred million Rupees that are going to be spent on defense would have been better spent on educating the millions who remain illiterate (and who fall prey to the miasma of terrorism, among other ills), or on improving the health of the millions who suffer from chronic ailments or on feeding the millions who get by on a meal a day.
From international sources, we knew that the strength of the army was much larger than the strength of the other two services combined and that the other two services were much more expensive capital intensive. Now we know that the army’s share of the budget exceeds that of the other two services combined and that personnel costs account for half of the army’s expenses and less so of the air force and navy’s expenses. No surprise there.
But the budget fails to shed any light on several more fundamental issues. For example, did the acquisition of nuclear weapons provide the nation with a dividend in the form of lower spending on conventional forces?
Given the emergence of insurgencies along the northwestern frontier, should new lightly armed counter-insurgency divisions be raised to replace at least some of the conventional infantry and armored formations?
What existing weapon systems are irrelevant for addressing the new threat environment? Should their replacements be produced domestically or procured internationally? If the latter, from whom and how will the purchases be financed? Will these international purchases be subject to sanctions if a war breaks out with India?
The budget is silent as the sphinx on these strategic issues. This has to change. To paraphrase the French leader, Clemenceau, defense is too important a business to be left to the generals.
So, while the new openness about defense spending is a step in the right direction and should be hailed, it is a comment on the weak and fragile nature of the coalition government that the presentation of the defense budget was limited to two pages. Even communist China provides more detail about its military spending and often backs-up the budget with a white paper.
If Parliament is to discharge its fiduciary responsibilities, it needs a budget, not just an accounting enumeration. A good budget should flow from a clearly articulated defense strategy, an assessment of major and minor threats, and plans for neutralizing them.
It should place military spending in historical and regional context and discuss spending trends by category such as personnel and capital equipment. Aggregate spending should be shown as a percent of the GDP and this percentage should be benchmarked against neighboring and distant countries.
There should be a discussion of what is being done to eliminate waste in military spending and to ensure that the country does not shoulder a defense burden it cannot bear.
Moreover, the budget cannot simply be presented as a fait accompli. An open and candid debate about defense spending should take place through the length and breadth of the country.
The budget should grapple with the fundamental questions that arise in defense economics, such as those that are regularly discussed in journals such as Defence and Peace Economics.
For example, are the last hundred million Rupees that are spent on defense making the same contribution to national well-being as the last hundred million Rupees spent on human development? And are the last hundred million Rupees that are spent on the army making the same contribution to national defense as the last hundred million Rupees spent on the navy and the air force?
Until the Government answers these questions, it cannot expect Parliament to make well-informed policy choices. So while we should all praise the new transparency in defense spending, we should also remind ourselves of the dangers that I. H. Burney warned us back in 1963, since they are still “clear and present.”
To quote Burney, defense is “a cow of more than the sacred variety; there is a touch of the forbidden in it. All that a layman is allowed to hear about it — apart from paying for it — is that the nation’s armed forces are in fine shape to repel aggression.”
Alas, the fine shape of the armed forces was nowhere in evidence during the war of 1965 and even less so in the war of 1971. Pakistan paid a heavy economic price for pursuing national security through defense spending.
The military in Pakistan has largely modeled itself after its British and American counterparts. But the similarity does not go beyond regimental structure, training regimens, pageantry and weaponry. It merely adumbrates budgetary practices.
It is time to complete the story and to put an end to the notion that defense is an end to itself. In a modern democracy, it is the job of the Government to defend its budget before the people as represented by the legislature.
To give the process credibility, there should be civilian intellectual involvement in the process. Experts at think tanks and academics should be consulted to make sure the best decisions are made. A two-page defense of the defense budget will just not do.
The Parliament is owed a well-thought out defense budget that takes up 75-100 pages. Brevity is the soul of wit, as Shakespeare said, but as one of Lewis Carroll’s characters may have retorted, “A two-page defense is sure to leave the parliamentarians witless.”
(Ahmad Faruqui is an associate of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford. Faruqui@pacbell.net)

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