Don't Believe the Threat Inflation Hype

Our system creates many incentives for the military to exaggerate the number and severity of foreign threats.

Sen. Wicker wants you to be frightened by self-interested threat inflation:

When America’s senior military leaders testify before my colleagues and me on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors, they have said that we face some of the most dangerous global threat environments since World War II. Then, they darken that already unsettling picture by explaining that our armed forces are at risk of being underequipped and outgunned.

Our system creates many incentives for the military to exaggerate the number and severity of foreign threats, and it also creates incentives for them to claim that they lack sufficient resources to face them. The warnings that the U.S. faces “some of the most dangerous global threat environments since World War II” would be more credible if military leaders hadn’t been saying essentially the same thing for decades no matter what was happening in the world. Ten years ago, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said, “I will personally attest to the fact that [the world is] more dangerous than it has ever been.” Senior military leader make outlandish statements like this before Congressional committees all the time, but that doesn’t prove anything about the state of the world.