Bureaucratic Politics and Nuclear Proliferation

One of my favorite things is when two or more of my classes are covering very similar material. This semester, I am also taking Professor Sechser's PLIR 3080 class called "International Politics in the Nuclear Age." Recently, we have been learning about the optimistic and pessimistic views of nuclear proliferation. An essential part of the pessimistic perspective is the dominance of parochial interests among military staff and officers, who under Niskanen's economic model of bureaucracy, act as bureaucrats who try to maximize their agencies' budgets. Like most other bureaucracies, the Department of Defense is subject to monitoring problems. This is due to many reasons. First, units of national defense are hard to define, and as a result, military budgets are often determined by the quantity of soldiers, munitions, etc. In addition, the Department of Defense simply has no competitor, so there is no alternative source of information. As a result, there is no real incentive to compete and cut costs.

For proliferation pessimists like Scott Sagan at Stanford University, military officers are offensively-minded and are more likely to endorse preventive strikes against a proliferating state, say Iran if it continues to enrich uranium. This is called the Organization Theory of nuclear proliferation, which argues the more states that have nuclear weapons, the higher the chance of nuclear war. Given that military officers are offensively-minded, officers will tend more often towards advocating offensive strikes. These offensive strikes arguably require more "units" of national defense compared to defensive plans. Borrowing from Sagan's framework, the Department of Defense's military officers tend to assume that their parochial interests (maximizing their budgets) align completely with national security interests. Combining the two social science models together, the result is that in an environment of nuclear proliferation, offensively-minded military officers who seek to maximize their budgets will demand greater "quantities" of national defense such that the marginal costs are greater than the marginal benefits. In other words, there will be an "over-production" of national defense.