Squaring the Pentagon: The politics of post-Cold War defense retrenchment

The late 1980s saw the end of the longest defense buildup and the beginning of the longest period of defense retrenchment in American history. Despite a decade of retrenchment, the U.S. remained by far the world's dominant military power. This dissertation attempts to discern what happened during the post-Cold War defense drawdown and explain why that was the case. Drawing on literatures addressing the politics of retrenchment in other policy domains, it argues that policy feedback mechanisms helped to create inertia in favor of maintaining a relatively large defense budget of a shape similar to that of the Cold War. This inertia was overcome, though only temporarily, because the end of the Cold War coincided with the deficit-driven collision with another powerfully path dependent policy system, spending on social entitlements.; Most recent research on defense politics has focused on aggregate defense spending levels. However, simply understanding aggregate spending is inadequate for scholars interested in national security, which depends on both the size and shape of the defense budget. Congressional intervention played a significant role in shaping the programmatic details of post-Cold War retrenchment. Using a historical approach and new quantitative metrics, this dissertation demonstrates that congressional intervention in the defense budget first rose then declined in the course of the decade of retrenchment. The locus of this intervention shifted back from floor debates to congressional committees, ending the aberrant “Outside Game” of defense politics in the 1980s identified by Lindsay. This dissertation also provides a new test of the hypothesis that congressional intervention was motivated by parochialism—the concern of members of Congress for the economic benefits defense spending provided to their constituents. This claim has long been conventional wisdom among policy makers but was largely rejected by past scholars' statistical analysis of voting on defense issues. An innovative method tracking congressional committees' changes to individual programs in the defense budget and comparing them with the benefits provided by those specific programs to legislators on the committee verifies the parochialism claim.