An Argument for Many Arsenals of Democracy
The United States is, once again, facing a confluence of regional conflicts with the potential to challenge its capacity to sustain the world order—a challenge unlike anything with which the United States has been forced to contend since World War Two. In the face of such a challenge, many analysts question whether the United States is presently able to muster the fortitude to ensure the continued existence of the liberal world order. That is the wrong question.
As much as the United States constructed the twentieth-century world order, and has long remained its singular bastion and leader, the United States has never acted alone.
Most Americans, for example, are familiar with the Lend-Lease Act, the legislation which enabled the United States to supply its European and Russian allies with a steady stream of newly-manufactured armaments and defense materiel to combat the Nazi war machine, during World War Two. This effort was, generally, the origin of the phrase “arsenal of democracy”—although the exact source was a Roosevelt “fire-side chat” radio broadcast from December 29, 1940.
Far fewer, however, are aware of a concept called “Reverse Lend-Lease,” without which World War Two could not have been won. Reverse Lend-Lease was a critical form of mutual aid; while the United States had the financial and labor resources to develop its manufacturing prowess, the U.S. armed forces were woefully under-prepared for the logistical burdens of a massive, world war. Unlike today, when the United States has more than 800 land, naval, and air bases in eighty countries—across all of the regions of the world, including Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, and the Americas—before World War Two, the U.S. military was not a true expeditionary force.
Immediately prior to World War One, the United States had only maintained a standing army of 100,000 troops, and the equipment to match. The United States had relied heavily upon the draft during the wars of the nineteenth century. During the Civil War, in which more than three million men fought, both sides were initially able to rely upon the influx of volunteers ready to fight for a perceived righteous cause—in addition, as is often the case, many were under the impression that the war would be short, full of glory without sacrifice—but, each side had to turn to conscription as volunteers became scarce as the war progressed, around late-1862 to early-1863. The Spanish-American War, described by then-Secretary of State John Hay as a “splendid little war,” only required 280,000 soldiers, none of whom were draftees.
In April 1917, when the United States declared war upon Germany, the nation was faced with the urgent need for mass mobilization, which catalyzed the passage of the Selective Service Act in May 1917. The Selective Service Act enabled the United States to mobilize approximately three million troops, in just a year and a half. However, due to the United States’ lack of preparedness, U.S. troops were not participating at the front until a year after it declared war, in May 1918—making the United States a major combatant for only the last six months of the war. The true contributions of the United States were in weapons exports, which increased from $40 million to $2.3 billion (by more than 5000 percent, or 50-times) between 1914 and 1918. When U.S. troops did, finally, deploy to Europe, the French were “delirious with joy” and the American soldiers were met with cries of “Vive l'Amérique (transl. ‘Long Live America’).”
While America could manufacture defense materiel, it had no experience with large scale international operations—the likes of which the empires, monarchies, and states of Europe had been fighting, in some form or another, for two millennia. In fact, some sources state that World War One was the first war ever fought by the United States to defend foreign soil. This is nominally incorrect: the rallying cry of the Spanish-American War may have been “Remember the Maine” but that war was as much fought over the explosion of the battleship, the U.S.S. Maine, as World War One was fought over the sinking of the Lusitania. World War One was, however, the first war fought to defend foreign soil that required any real sacrifice from the American people and that taxed the American armed forces.
Due to the United States' inexperience and lack of logistical capabilities, it had to rely upon the United Kingdom to ship U.S. manufactures and troops to the European front, and it had to rely upon the French for most other logistical management, including weapons and troop transport. In other words, the United States provided the bodies, and Europe provided everything else. In fact, due to the United States’ relative inexperience and Europe’s desperation, France actually requested that American troops be added to French lines, and fight under French commanders—a request against which American commanders, particularly General John Joseph Pershing, protested vehemently.
Fast-forward to just before World War Two, and the United States only possessed fourteen overseas bases, all of which were on remote island territories, like Guam, Hawaii, or the Phillipines. The United States’ European presence was virtually non-existent. Yet, the United States was asked to engage in another massive, international conflict. Thus, when U.S. troops were sent to Europe, Great Britain and the Commonwealth housed them in hotels, specially constructed barracks, and even some country homes. The British constructed the American troops’ hospitals, recreation centers, and airfields. Britain fed the United States’ troops, clothed them, and provided them with blankets for Europe’s notoriously inclement weather—none of which the United States could readily provide. Britain provided its motor vehicles, landing craft, as well as telephones and telegraphs—to transport U.S. troops to the front and facilitate effective command and control during combat. U.S. fighter pilots were sent to Britain without their aircraft and flew British Spitfires until at least 1944. Pamphlets distributed to American service-members stationed in Great Britain urged them to show gratitude for the immense sacrifices made by the British people to accommodate U.S. troops, these pamphlets stated, “Every American soldier is an unofficial ambassador of goodwill….It is always impolite to criticize your hosts; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies.”
President Roosevelt understood what all great strategists understand: wars are won and lost based upon logistics. President Roosevelt and his administration never spoke about Lend-Lease as a gift or as a business arrangement (a loan to be paid back) which is what is now the primary narrative taught in the United States primary and secondary school textbooks. Instead, Lend-Lease—and Reverse Lend-Lease—was described along the lined of “a pool of resources in which and from which contributions and withdrawals are made as the demands of the fighting fronts dictate…,” such a pool was vital to the Allied Powers’ victory. By the summer of 1944, after about two years of the United States participation in World War Two, Great Britain had spent anywhere from two-and-a-half billion dollars to three-and-a-half billion dollars on aid to U.S. troops. To be clear, this is the equivalent of approximately $40 billion to $60 billion in today’s dollar—approximately equal to Great Britain’s current annual defense budget.
Now, the approximate three billion dollars of mutual aid may seem to pale in comparison to the thirty billion dollars provided by the U.S. to Great Britain, but this statistic is misleading. First, the total fifty billion dollar sum spent on the entire Lend-Lease program included the construction of factories and cargo vessels to facilitate Lend-Lease (a rough estimate of 12 percent of the total, or six billion dollars), but which became integral parts of the U.S. economy after the war, and could not be considered “gifts” or transfers to our allies. Remember that the United States did not possess any logistical capacity prior to World War Two, and British cargo vessels often had to pick up Lend-Lease goods in American ports for transport back to Europe. Second, the large sum of fifty billion dollars for Lend-Lease was about one-sixth of the total U.S. expenditures on World War Two, which equaled about $300 billion. Third, at the time, it was estimated that the U.S. contributions under Lend-Lease accounted for only 10-percent of British war materiel and likely less for the Soviets, according to a pamphlet titled “How Shall Lend-Lease Accounts Be Settled? (1945)”.
Comparatively, according to the same primary source, a conservative estimate is that about a third of all U.S. supplies during the war, until the summer of 1944, were donated by Great Britain. In February 1943, Time Magazine reported that U.S. forces in the U.K. only needed to spend $1,000,000 on their upkeep, since the previous June, because the United Kingdom provided for every conceivable need for the U.S. forces. Once again, just as in World War One, the United States provided its heroes, and Europe provided everything else.
At the end of World War Two, the United States faced the difficult task of getting those heroes home; the citizenry had been promised repeatedly, under the slogan “Home Alive by ‘45,” that troops on the European Front would be home by Christmas of 1945. Despite the fact that the war had served as impetus for the complete overhaul of the United States’ obsolete interbellum sea-lift vessels, by virtue of President Roosevelt’s 1936 Merchant Marine Act, through the completion of thousands of mass-produced Liberty and Victory ships, capable of carrying about five hundred to six hundred troops each, the United States still couldn’t complete such a massive withdrawal by itself. The United States, once again, turned to its European allies to help carry American sons and daughters home.
After the war, the United States existed as one of the last two remaining global powers, and it realized that a standing U.S. armed force was necessary as a guarantor of the soon-to-be newly-constructed world order. In particular, the occupation of Japan necessitated the presence of approximately one million U.S. troops. The United States’ occupation zone in Germany required another several hundred thousand soldiers. Thus, the United States was left with a force of approximately one-and-a-half million troops, which some officials were concerned would leave the United States military short-staffed and vulnerable. The irony, of course, is that three decades prior, a force of 100,000 soldiers was considered sufficient to defend U.S. national interests, in times of peace. During the Cold War, ever since the 1950s, it was common for the U.S. armed forces personnel count to exceed two million or even three million. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did the U.S. armed forces allow its troop count to again fall below two million, and it has been in veritable free-fall ever since.
Following the end of World War Two, Americans are taught that the United States charitably created the Marshall Plan to assist in reconstructing Europe, and this is largely accurate. However, what is rarely discussed is that the Marshall Plan created a massive European Market for American products. In fact, Europe and the United States practically functioned as one economy after the end of World War Two. In 1979, Paul Krugman offered a theoretical exploration of this form of economic arrangement, catalyzed by the mutual benefits of economies of scale, a seminal theory that would win him the Nobel Prize in 2008. Basically, the United States produced goods in demand in Europe, and influenced European policy makers to industrialize to produce goods in demand in the United States, leading to prosperity for both parties—but certainly, more so for the United States. By producing above national demand, for the European market (and Europe doing the same), production costs were dramatically reduced, and thus, so were purchase prices. The result was an increase in real wages (i.e., purchasing power) within the United States and Europe, an increase in the variety of goods available in the market, an increase in market demand, and an increase in industrial output across the board. This model provided the United States with its proverbial Golden Age, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the age of prosperity and consumerism. After World War Two, the United States did not run a trade deficit until 1976, and the deficit of the late-1970s as well as the early-1980s was almost entirely due to the increased cost of petroleum imports. Thus, while Europe provided the United States with bases for its troops and missiles, as the real ideological front of the Cold War, that was not its primary contribution. Europe was the foundation upon which the United States’ economy was built, the very same economy that was able to out-compete a floundering Soviet Union, and carry the West into the twenty-first century.
This history is important because it provides context for present foreign policy discussions. President Biden’s first-in-the-nation’s history, National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) is an excellent contribution to the revival of the United States’ defense industrial base (DIB). Other brilliant ideas—such as the creation of pre-approved weapons packages (in which the Bradley and Patriots would have to play a crucial role, due to their performance in Ukraine), which would be rapidly deployed to allies in crisis to avoid the undignified groveling before a gridlocked U.S. Congress that Ukraine has been forced to endure—have been discussed in The National Interest, and elsewhere, and they also are significant contributions to restoring the United States’ arsenal capability.
However, the first step to restoring this capacity is grounding the West’s expectations in reality. If the United States was ever the “arsenal of democracy,” it became so after World War Two—not before and not during. I suppose it could be argued that, although the United States far exceeded the economic capacity of the Soviet Union and it was the Soviet system that collapsed, the United States’ litany of failures prior to that collapse—stalemate in Korea, retreat from Vietnam—discredit that claim all together. However, I do not agree with such an argument. I believe it is more accurate to state that the United States is a singular leader, without which the liberal international system could not exist. However, this should not be confused with stating that the United States is the only state that has contributed to upholding that order. The United States has never walked that path alone.
The hard truth that is so often ignored in the United States is that, while the liberal world order would not exist without the United States, the U.S. would be nothing without its allies.
That being said, the right questions to ask as the West faces a confluence of crises is whether or not the United States and the nations of Europe will re-adapt to unite behind our common cause. Just as during both World Wars, the United States relied upon Europe for logistical support, and during the Cold War it relied upon Europe for economic prosperity, the United States now must rely upon Europe to supplement its arms manufacturing capabilities—if the West is to successfully withstand the threats of this new era and defend the liberal world order from the oncoming totalitarian onslaught.
I firmly believe that the United States will eventually, once again, reach the peak productive capacity of the Cold War defense industrial base. However, for this to happen, President Biden must be re-elected to a second term, with an agreeable U.S. Congress, so that there can be a joint pursuit of this goal in all branches of the U.S. government, through the application of the Biden Administration’s NDIS. Moreover, President Biden must be succeeded by principled, responsible leaders with a solemn, sober understanding of the United States’ critical moral role, abroad. This process will take a decade or more.
Yet, America’s enemies aren’t sitting and waiting to fight the United States at its best—and the West is only at its best when the United States, its standard-bearer, is thriving. Putin, in Russia’s 2023 Foreign Policy Concept and secret addendum announced an all-out information war against the United States and the West—which is always the earliest step of Russia’s concept of hybrid war, such as it waged in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine from 2014 to February 2022. Moreover, paired with Putin’s frequent, mad ramblings about tearing down the liberal world order, and rebuilding a Russian order through his barbaric assault upon the existence of a Ukrainian nation, this document paints a picture of the future that Russia intends to build, which is as bleak as it is dystopian and absurd. Furthermore, Western intelligence sources are firm in their assessment that Xi Jinping has directed his armed forces to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027—just three years from now, and it is appearing more and more feasible by the day that Ukraine could still be locked in its war for survival against its former colonizer, at the same time as China launches that invasion. All of this occurs as Iran, yet another chaos-monger, assaults the world order at every opportunity.
Ever since the United States abandoned its so-called “two-war” doctrine, after the end of the Cold War, it has been ill-prepared to fight a conflict on multiple fronts. Moreover, today's antagonists are infinitely more powerful than Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, or the Soviet Union ever were. Thus, even if the United States were to reach its Cold War defense industrial production capacity, by some miracle, in time to face these crises head-on, it likely would not be sufficient to neutralize twenty-first-century threats. Therefore, in order to save the liberal world order as we know it, the United States must encourage European weapons development alongside its own, and Europe has to be ready to do its part. Only with many “arsenals of democracy”—much like the pooling of defense materiel in World War Two and the conjoined economies of the latter half of the twentieth century—can the West truly defeat totalitarianism once and for all.
