Is national defence a public good?

At its simplest, national defense can definitely be considered a pure public good if its benefits to citizens are both nonexcludable and nonrival. If no citizen can be excluded from the benefits of a certain good once that good is provided, then the benefits of that good are nonexcludable. Usually the benefits of a good are nonexcludable whenever it is prohibitively expensive to exclude anyone from enjoying those benefits. When the consumption of the benefits of a certain good by one individual in no way diminishes the amount available for consumption to other individuals, the benefits of that good are said to be nonrival (Stiglitz, 1988).

National defense, however, serves at least two functions. At one level, the defense forces are created in order to repel any attack by another country. And at another level, the presence of a powerful defense force can deter an attack by another country from happening in the first place.

Whenever national defense deters attacks on the country from occurring, it definitely functions as a pure public good, as, first, no citizen can be excluded from enjoying these benefits, and second, the consumption of the benefits of a deterred attack by one citizen, will not in any way reduce the amount of these benefits available for consumption to other citizens (Kennedy, 1975, p. 43).

However, when an attack on the country does take place and the national defense forces get mobilized to repel it; national defense clearly ceases to be a pure public good. There are several related reasons for this. When a country is attacked, one area of the country may end up consuming defense resources at the expense of another area; making the benefits of national defense subject to rivalry between different parts of the country (Kennedy, 1975, p. 43). Moreover, the military establishment always has plans and estimates regarding which parts of the country are more strategically valuable. Consequently, during an attack, the military may very well decide to abandon some parts of the country to the enemy in order to focus on defending these more strategically valuable locations. This, in effect, makes some parts of the country excludable from the benefits of national defense in the event of war (Kennedy, 1975, p. 43).

However, according to Herman Kahn (2007, p. 180) the military which, in the event of an attack on its country, plans to abandon certain parts of the country in order to defend more strategic sectors and/or allow one section of the country to consume defense resources at the expense of another, is greatly undermining a valuable objective of defense: deterrence; especially if this is a country with a relatively small military force, such as Canada. In particular, since there are great advantages to striking first, the defense force of a small military power that will be left after this first attack can be expected to be quite small (Kahn, 2007, p. 180). Consequently, a plan which under such conditions calls for focusing the remaining defense forces on trying to terminate the war by attacking the enemy’s offense, while trying to limit the damage, is unsound; as it will lead the potential enemy to believe that, should he attack, he’ll get away with almost no harm to his country. So not surprisingly, such a plan would greatly reduce the deterrent role of the armed forces of a country preparing to being attacked. Consequently, according to Kahn (2007, p. 180), the plans of the military should call for ordering the small remaining force to attack the population and industry of the enemy’s country. Such a plan would remind the potential enemy that in the event of him undertaking an attack, his country will sustain considerable damage even if his attack manages to destroy the main part of the targeted country’s defense force; so he’ll be more likely to be deterred from attacking. Consequently, if Kahn is correct, the military establishment of a small military power, which, in the case of an enemy attack, plans on focusing its remaining forces on attacking the enemy’s population and industry, has, quite possibly, turned national defense into a public good even for the case of a defensive war.

References

Kahn, H. (2007). On Thermonuclear War. New Brunswick (U.S.A.): Transaction Publishers.

Kennedy, G. (1975). The Economics of Defence. London: Faber and Faber.

Stiglitz, J. E. (1988). Economics of the Public Sector. 2^nd ed. New York: Norton.