a couple of questions on ‘war footing’
what would that mean?
I met a former colleague for a bagel and coffee this morning. We hadn’t caught up in person for ages so I looked forward to hearing the buzz.
Early on he offered an aside that D.C. is on a war footing these days. Since we both taught in national security, I heard it, nodded, then we went on to specific things that had changed in the fifteen months since I stopped my 0400 commutes into town.
When I got home, the import of his aside hit me, not because the comment shocked me but because of what I don’t think we really remember about a war footing. We last had a total war mentality followed the 9/11 attack, coincidentally 22 years ago this coming Monday. Yet that experience was far different from what the nation underwent between 7 December 1941 and September four years later when the Japanese followed the German surrender earlier that spring.
I am not even sure Europeans, on the same continent, currently think of a war footing as the Ukrainians currently do. On going violence on behalf of a nation feelig threatened to its core existence is a profoundly deep shock.
The specific case my friend alludes to, of course, is conflict with China. We currently have a portion of the country desperately worried about China’s malign intentions and capacity to thwart U.S. behavioiurs. Some people believe China has the intention of dominating our day-to-day lives.
Yet the United States and China continue an economic interrelationship with dubious prospects for the desired decoupling so many anticipate. While many companies are in some stage of withdrawing from China while others appear determined to ride out Xi Jinping’s current nationalist zeal. So what exactly is our thinking about how armed conflict with that country of 1.3 billion people would affect us?
One of my repeated questions about Taiwan is whether the island’s population has the political will to fight a sustained conflict with China should that be necessary. An even more relevant but under considered topic is whether we have the will to take steps beyond sending the military to fight China? Would it just be fighting over Taiwan? Would it be a war to overthrow the government in Beijing as the CCP fears? Would it be a war with some other purpose? I have no firm answer so please offer one if you can descern a clearer response that the handwaving ‘worries about China’ that seem our current level of sophistication in the discussion, regardless who is talking. We are pretty vague which is not a good thing when it comes to war.
As you have heard me say before, we know what we don’t like but I am still searching for a clear national consensus on what we are willing to sacrifice and for what endstate. Help me out here.
In noting some fo the possible effects, I wonder how much pain we will tolerate at home as a nation, if we were to go full bore into conflict with the People’s Republic. Such an event has the potential for substantially changing the lifestyle of most Americans in over a sustained period.
The Afghanistan and subsequent Iraq conflicts were wars for those in uniform and their families but not for the bulk of us. According to the Census Bureau in 2020, 37% of the male population of this country were veterans in 1950 with World War II only five years behind us. That statistic does not even include those who would fight in Korea beginning that summer. The number of veterans today is 1 in 8 with a projected decline to 1 in 14 a mere generation from now in 2040. This is important in raw numbers as the veteran population is not increasing subtantially yet the overall national population most definitely is as we kiss 350 million. A small veteran cadre has social implications we would be foolish to ignore completely. I don’t care how we decide but we better we sure we have discussed this.
One of the harsh criticisms from military families as far back as the Vietnam War was the divide developing between those who served and those whose families feared receiving telegrams of their loved ones’s losses, the separations while the Service member was on deployment, and the range of associated inequalities with the remainder of society.
The dramatic shift from a conscription force in World War II to an all-Volunteer force in 1973 is important as a social question. but we often describe a potential conflict with China as if Beijing presents a similarly existential threat to the Japanese attack in 1941. Obviously the nature of OUR war objectives in a ‘China conflict’ would affect our ‘war footing’ but I haven’t heard our political leadership of either party parse these terms. Perhaps it’s a chicken and egg phenomenon (the type of attack would condition the response) yet assuming it an existential affair (do people even know what that means?) would seem to raise the ‘war footing’ conditions to resemble World War II more than any conflict since 1945.
The World War II generation is largely gone today so my anecdotal questions are hardly systematic in exploring the home front. Yet many histories of the period remind us first of food rationing. Petrol, clothing, and food were subject to government oversight merely 80 years ago to support the war effort. Today, much petroleum is imported from countries with growing ties to China. How would that impact us in a war? Americans became enamoured with cheap clothing produced by poorly paid Chinese workers two decades ago: would we be willing to pay much higher prices in case war breaks out? Clothing is pretty pedestrian but it would be a different approach for a society unaccustomed to sacrifice in too many quarters. U.S. agriculture is quite productive but how would a war affect that industry alone?
Are Americans aware that a globalised effort would likely lead to a substantial degradation in the food supply available, certain from overseas? The United States is a major food producer in virtually every category of food stuffs yet the impacts of climate change threaten that self-sufficiency. Additionally, the United States might well become a supplier for some of our allies and partners should war unfold as Japan and Korea, for example, have diminishing populations so the governments in Seoul and Tokyo would confront choices on whether to send the male population to war or the fields. Would we all sacrific to assure our allies had food to keep them in the fight? Australia and Canada are important sources of wheat and beef but how would their production levels mesh with our own? I have not seen much conversation on this point.
Similarly, if the United States entered a generalised war footing, the increase in women in the work force would spike a bit from the current status. Yet far more women currently work outside the home than was true in 1941 so it that status would be less starkly different. Yet consequences would still exist. The United States is overwhelmingly a service economy today with far fewer in manufacturing. What source would provide workers for those manufacturing and agricultural positions left vacant in such a conflict? African Americans became more integrated into the U.S. work force in World War II but would there be a similar bump in 2026, as an arbitrary year? Would we turn to immigrants in an era when those groups receive such negative reactions? What other unexamined social impacts are we not even considering? We are not a paragon of social cohesion these days.
What would be the effect on federal income taxes and associated state taxes to pay for the war itself? In one of the truly strange decisions during the Global War on Terror, the Geroge W. Bush administration not only did not raise taxes but cut them to stimulate domestic economic spending if I remember correctly. Remember the GWOT, as it was known, did not directly affect many, if not most, of the country yet we had a tax cut for all. A 2019 study argued the cost of the war was $6.4 trillion, plus interest on the federal debt, for the United States alone. That staggering figure included not only the costs of executing the conflict over almost twenty years but included a trillion needed for veterans’ care as would any future conflict regardless of its duration. This would pile on a federal debt now significantly higher because of Trump and Biden era borrowing which put the national debt at $31.42 trillion ten months ago.
The following chart represents some interesting data on our national debt. The second column is dollar figures in rounded billions of dollars. The third column with the % is the debt-to-gdp ratio. This number is the accumulated government debt relative to our annual economic gross domestic product (the overall amount of growth by all goods and services produced in this nation). Put another way, if the number is low, a country can pay its debt without incurring more debt simply to do so. Right now, our debt repayment requirement is above the annual gross domestic product of the United States.
1939 $40 51% Depression ended
1940 $43 49% FDR increased spending and raised taxes
1941 $49 44% U.S. entered WWII
1942 $72 48% Defense tripled
1943 $137 70%
1944 $201 91% Bretton Woods
1945 $259 114% WWII ended
1946 $269 119% Truman's 1st term budgets and recession
1947 $258 103% Cold War
1948 $252 92% Recession
1949 $253 93% Recession
1950 $257 86% Korean War boosted growth and debt
1951 $255 74%
1952 $259 71%
1953 $266 68% Recession when war ended
1954 $271 69% Eisenhower's budgets and Recession
1955 $274 64%
1956 $273 61%
1957 $271 57% Recession
1958 $276 58% Eisenhower's 2nd term and recession
1959 $285 55% Fed raised rates
1960 $286 54% Recession
1961 $289 52% Bay of Pigs
1962 $298 50% JFK budgets and Cuban missile crisis
1963 $306 48% U.S. aids Vietnam, JFK killed
1964 $312 46% LBJ's budgets and war on poverty
1965 $317 43% U.S. entered Vietnam War
1966 $320 40%
1967 $326 40%
1968 $348 39%
1969 $354 36% Nixon took office
1970 $371 35% Recession
1971 $398 35% Wage-price controls
1972 $427 34% Stagflation
1973 $458 33% Nixon ended gold standard and OPEC oil embargo
1974 $475 31% Watergate and budget process created
1975 $533 32% Vietnam War ended
1976 $620 33% Stagflation
1977 $699 34% Stagflation
1978 $772 33% Carter budgets and recession
1979 $827 32%
1980 $908 32% Volcker raised fed rate to 20%
1981 $998 31% Reagan tax cut
1982 $1,142 34% Reagan increased spending
1983 $1,377 37% Jobless rate 10.8%
1984 $1,572 38% Increased defense spending
1985 $1,823 41%
1986 $2,125 46% Reagan lowered taxes
1987 $2,350 48% Market crash
1988 $2,602 50% Fed raised rates
1989 $2,857 51% S&L Crisis
1990 $3,233 54% First Iraq War
1991 $3,665 58% Recession
1992 $4,065 61%
1993 $4,411 63% Omnibus Budget Act
1994 $4,693 64% Clinton budgets
1995 $4,974 64%
1996 $5,225 64% Welfare reform
1997 $5,413 63%
1998 $5,526 60% LTCM crisis and recession
1999 $5,656 58% Glass-Steagall repealed
2000 $5,674 55% Budget surplus
2001 $5,807 55% 9/11 attacks and EGTRRA {Bush tax cuts}
2002 $6,228 57% War on Terror
2003 $6,783 59% JGTRRA {another Bush tax cut with 2010 expiration} and Iraq War
2004 $7,379 60% Iraq War
2005 $7,933 61% Bankruptcy Act and Hurricane Katrina.
2006 $8,507 61% Bernanke chaired Fed
2007 $9,008 62% Bank crisis
2008 $10,025 68% Bank bailout and QE
2009 $11,910 82% Bailout cost $250B ARRA added $242B
2010 $13,562 90% ARRA added $400B, payroll tax holiday ended, Obama Tax cuts, ACA, Simpson-Bowles
2011 $14,790 95% Debt crisis, recession and tax cuts reduced revenue
2012 $16,066 99% Fiscal cliff
2013 $16,738 99% Sequester, government shutdown
2014 $17,824 101% QE ended, debt ceiling crisis
2015 $18,151 100% Oil prices fell
2016 $19,573 105% Brexit
2017 $20,245 104% Congress raised the debt ceiling
2018 $21,516 105% Trump tax cuts
2019 $22,719 107% Trade wars
2020 $27,748 129% COVID-19 and 2020 recession
2021 $29,617 124% COVID-19 and American Rescue Plan Act {major deficit spending}
2022 $30,824 123% Inflation Reduction Act and student loan forgiveness
In sum, we currently incur more costs to pay our national debt than the economic production of the nation annually.
Would the United States return to incarcerating Chinese Americans as Japanese Americans experienced in the early 1940s? How many generations back would we consider Chinese Americans threats to our national security? Would children of inter-married families be subject to the same incarceration and distrust? Chinese Americans already note greater hostility from many fellow citizens but what would a war create?
These are the narrowest tip of the iceberg for domestic issues in discussing a war footing in any China contingency as currently suggested. How would we as citizens react to this and are we truly preparing for it in light of our current national discussions of the threats it poses?
Similarly, not responding to a China threat would have major implications as well if we genuinely determine as a democratic nation that China threatens us. But are we seriously discussing this? Really? Where and how?
The conflicts since 1945 have not been total wars as true for World War II. We saw the Cold War as an existential concern as well but it was not a kinetic conflict in the same day-to-day manner. What would war be like with a nuclear armed China fearful we intend to end CCP rule? How would it affect us day in and day out as citizens?
We would do well to think about these equestions as we ponder what to many specialists seems an unavoidable event. These are neither inconsequential nor simple choices but I am especially concerned they are being underappreciated as day-to-day realities for all of us. Social problems already plague us; can we really assume that we would unite in a China conflict? I confess I wonder. This is a national discussion we truly need and soon.
As noted, I don’t pretend to predict fully the paoply of issues. I welcome your thoughts and hope you will have answers to these initial musings. Thank you for reading this Actions Create Consequences, especially those of you who take the time to help us expand our civil, measured debate on something so crucial. Profound thanks to the subscribers who financially subscribe to this discussion. Please feel free to restack (with the button below) or send to your communities and friends.
It was a tranquil, beautiful sunrise. I close this week hoping you have a safe, restorative weekend. Be well and be safe. FIN
Kimberly Amadeo, ‘US National Debt Year by Year’, thebalancemoney.com, 18 January 2023, retrieved on 9 September 2023 at https://www.thebalancemoney.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to-gdp-and-major-events-3306287
David Roza, ‘801,000 Dead, $6.4 trillions spent, and no end in sight: the true costs of the Global War on Terror’, taskandpurpose.com, 15 November 2019, retrieved at https://taskandpurpose.com/news/global-war-on-terror-cost/
Jonathan Vespa, ‘Those Who Served: America’s Veterans From World War II to the War On Terror’, American Community Service Report, ACS 43, U.S. Census Bureau, June 2020, retrieved on 9 Septebmer 2023 at https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/acs-43.pdf