Fun with slopegraphs: NATO defense spending as a percentage of GDP

As you may have noticed in the past, I have a strange fascination with visual renderings of data and concepts. I make up stupid graphs and charts all the time, and most of the time they have limited to no (to negative, even) utility. It should be pretty obvious that I am not a graphics guy, nor am I a stats guy -- I'm all about concepts and generalities, which is how I ended up as a strategist (!) -- so the execution of this stuff (as opposed to conception) does not come simply to me. But if I stumble across a way to visually explain an idea in a form that strikes me as massively simplifying, that seems like something worth sharing. I expose you to my stumbling efforts in the hope that people who are better than me with this stuff (read: everyone) will offer suggestions and improvements.

I've lately been playing around a little bit with Edward Tufte's "slopegraphs," which you can read more about here. Really I was just looking for an excuse to draw some and see if I could come up with something useful, so I went for a data set that's simple and familiar to me: NATO member states' military expenditures as a percentage of GDP. I used this year's Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database, which is generally accepted as the authoritative data source on this subject. And on the bright side, there will actually be some meaningful content in this post: I may not be able to draw good graphics, but I can sure as hell analyze (qualitatively, of course) and offer an interpretation of the substance behind them.

Here's what I started with:

That's an extremely jumbled effort at creating a slopegraph that shows the individual NATO member states' annual military expenditures at a four-year intervals through the first decade of this century (2001, 2005, and 2009*) with a few notable other countries thrown in for context. I've only included those NATO allies for which SIPRI had data for each of the three years, which means that Luxembourg and Iceland are omitted and the data represents 25** NATO countries. [* You'll see that in three of the four graphics, I've made a mistake by labeling the columns as '02, '05, and '08. I used the right data, I just typed the wrong numerals for the years. I'm not going back and changing it because the lines are hand-drawn and I'd have to either print a new page and re-draw the lines or just scribble out the incorrect dates by hand and then re-take photos and re-upload them and a whole bunch of other nonsense that's caused entirely by my primitive system, and I'm just not gonna do any of that. **FML, I'm just realizing that I somehow left Portugal out of my calculations, though it shows up in the right-hand column of the very first graph. The impact of this should be very small; just the same, I'll address it later.]

First let's do a really quick primer on slopegraphs in case you didn't click the link above (which you really ought to do, as you'll see a couple of extremely elegant and illustrative examples of this type of graphic). The point of a slopegraph is to be able to show comparative hierarchies of a particular measure while also visualizing trends like rate of change, both in a comparative and real sense. So on the left you see a list of countries ranked from top to bottom by military expenditure as a percentage of GDP in 2001, with Russia on the top at 4.1% and Latvia and Japan sharing bottom spot at 1.0%. The data for 2005 is shown in the middle column, connected by a sloped line to the same country's figure in 2001 and 2009, which data populates the right-hand column. Now you see a different hierarchy for 2009, so you can see both how the individual countries' percentages have changed (lines sloping upward from left to right show growth, obviously, and downward shows a decrease) and how the overall rank order has changed. There's a spatial element, too: were it not for variable spacing based on the value of each number, the slopes themselves would be meaningless.

In a sense, the jumble of lines on the lower half of the graphic helps to illustrate a significant point: that many NATO allies have spent less than the agreed-upon benchmark of at least 2% of GDP (represented by the horizontal red line). The clutter also starkly shows how the oft-noted difference in proportional spending between the U.S. and the rest of the allies is mostly a product of the last decade's wars: in 2001, after the significant U.S. defense budget cuts of the 1990s, American expenditures were among the highest as a percentage of GDP but not so dramatically separated from the pack. Also perhaps worth noting (and more on this later): while Canada's operational contributions to the war in Afghanistan mean that it is often singled out for praise by Alliance and U.S. officials, Ottawa devotes one of NATO's smallest shares of GDP to its military.

The next graphic shows the average percentage of national GDP spent on defense for several sub-groups within the Alliance. "Old Europe" comprises those countries that were members during the Cold War, while "New Europe" includes member states added during the enlargements of 1999, 2004, and 2008. (Yeah, I know these grouping don't jibe with Don Rumsfeld's intent, but I don't care. I'm stealing his terminology, not his concepts.) Those new member states are grouped by their year of accession, though this may be the only thing they have in common: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; and Albania and Croatia in 2008. For reference, I've also included slopes for the entire Alliance, for the European members of NATO (excepting the U.S. and Canada), and for all non-U.S. members (European states plus Canada).

There are a several interesting notes here. First of all, you'll see at the bottom of the page that two numbers are in brackets: 1.500 in 2005 and 1.433 in 2009. These represent the 2008 and 1999 additions to the Alliance, respectively, and the bracketing of those low outlier values is intended to indicate that spatial representation of the data would take the data points beyond the lower edge of the paper.

Another thing that jumps out is that nearly all these averages are below 2%, including the full Alliance average -- the one that includes U.S. spending! The only groupings that averaged more than 2% of national GDP in any of the selected years were the Cold War-era European allies in 2001 and the two recent additions, Albania and Croatia, also in 2001. (This latter grouping would seem to have little significance, seeing as it's made up of only two countries and is skewed upwards by a relatively high 2.8% of GDP spent by a country that had seen war in the previous decade. The dramatic jump back up from 1.5% to 1.95% between 2005 and 2009 is similarly misleading: while Albania made small, incremental increases that surged after accession, Croatia's spending dropped off significantly in the early part of the decade and then remained stable.) And so it happens that in a decade of unprecedented global military expenditures and increased operational tempo and warfighting demands on Western countries, the point of highest average proportional spending by the relevant sub-groups was in 2001 -- prior to the start of those operations!

I alluded to this above, but you should also take note of the fact that the Non-U.S. NATO figures are a few percentage points below the European NATO figures across the board... meaning that Canada's thriftiness is dragging the purportedly stingy Europeans down.

Next up is the slopegraph that I think is the most elegant and powerful of the four: a comparison between "Old Europe" and "New Europe" with the European NATO figures included for reference.

Considering the popular wisdom about which allies are and are not pulling their weight in NATO, I think many people will be surprised to see this graphic. Of course, some analysts have perceived the not-so-subtle shift in new member states' priorities over the last several years. But here's the proverbial picture worth a thousand words: the former Eastern bloc countries have consistently contributed a smaller share of GDP, on average, to their defense over the last decade. As coalition operations in Afghanistan ramped up in the latter part of the 2000s, the traditional allies held spending steady or made slight increases. [I said before that I'd explain why Portugal's omission doesn't really matter, and here's a good opportunity: its values for 2001/2005/2009 are 1.9/2.1/2.1, which hold with the "Old Europe" trend and would actually have made the comparison with new members slightly more distinct.] The opposite is true of the former Eastern bloc countries, of which only Estonia and Albania (an aspiring and then brand-new member) aggressively increased their defense share.

The dynamics of this increasing disconnect between perception and reality are indicated by the last slopegraph, which shows each tranche of new members (and the "New Europe" line that represents the average of all post-Cold War additions) alongside the European NATO baseline. You should see that the scale of this graphic is somewhat different to that of the previous two, as a wider range of values is accommodated across a smaller vertical space.

We've already talked a little bit about the anomalous figures for the 2008 grouping, and frankly it might've made sense to just throw that one out. But take a look at the differences between the data for the 1999 additions and those allies that joined in 2004. The average share of GDP for Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, lauded as the most aggressively pro-Western of the new democracies to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain, dropped dramatically over the decade following their admission (including a staggering 19% decrease in average share of GDP from 2005 to 2009).

Some of this can be explained by the reduced requirement for dramatic transformation of post-communist conscript armies, which was presumably significantly more expensive than operations, procurement, and other costs in the steady state. But surely much of it is attributable to the fact that the new member states faced less pressure to abide by pledges to hold defense spending high now that they could no longer be denied entry. The same downward spike was evident after the admission of the next tranche, consisting of Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the three Baltic states: after holding firm in the lead-up to the 2004 enlargement, the bottom has simply fallen out of several states' budgets in the time since then (to the tune of a 9% fall-off in average share between 2005 and 2009).

As Secretary Gates made clear before leaving office, worries about a two-tiered alliance no longer break down along the same lines as during the Bush administration, when the U.S. and its plucky new post-communist allies were thought to be eager for a fight in contrast with the staid and stingy Western Europeans. Instead the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Norway have held military spending relatively steady as a percentage of GDP while many new NATO members have sought to cash in on the security dividend of Article 5 guarantees to redirect some spending away from defense programs. These trends should have been predictable: after all, it was certainly in the interest of NATO aspirants to dedicate extra resources to defense for a time in order to achieve vital diplomatic (and by consequence, strategic) effects, while the military expenditures of traditional allies will have settled at their current levels through iterative analysis of defense requirements and other governmental spending priorities. Over the next decade, I'd expect we'll see the same phenomenon occur with the new allies, and barring unexpected surge requirements (which, of course, we can't do), spending/GDP ratios should be reasonably stable and settled across the alliance. Maybe Albania and Estonia will continue to increase spending and outstrip their similar neighbors, but probably not.

Proportional defense spending obviously isn't the only indicator of commitment to the Alliance's health and well-being, and it would be unfair to dismiss the contributions of Canadian, Polish, and Dutch soldiers (and Estonians, for that matter) just because of unimpressively average budgetary contributions. But it's certainly interesting to see how the numbers don't exactly sync with popular expectations.

This is what happens when you drink too much coffee and your girlfriend has to work late

I'm not really a terrorism guy, as I think most people know. But I've been reading and thinking about both the causes and objectives of terroristic violence lately, particularly the way that governmental authority and state capacity intersect with individual freedom and factional grievance.

Another interesting idea to me is the way that terrorism as we understand it today is a quite recent and short-lived phenomenon: terror was (in the words of Conor Gearty) "hardly ever to be found in any century up to and including the nineteenth" and simply "was not part of the equation of revolt." This was to some extent a matter of the technologies both of violence and of communication, but it was also a factor of the relationship between government and disaffected petitioner: the would-be terrorist lacked the means to inflict sufficient damage or to spread the message of his success, and in most places the state had no qualms about brutally quashing rebellion or dissent. To put it simply, terrorism didn't exist because it wouldn't have worked.

I'm also fascinated by a certain irony implicit in our 21st-century return to a more expansive definition of terrorism. It may sound absurd to state it in this fashion, but until very recently, terror was the fundamental, critical component to any definition of "terrorism"; violence outside of war was only unambiguously classed as terrorism when it was both politically subversive and indiscriminate -- when its intent was to create real public terror at its seeming randomness and insensitivity to the distinction between citizen and government. I'm not interested in having a drawn-out semantic argument about this, but it's curious the way we often refer to the 9/11 hijackers and to an Afghan who emplaces an IED alike as "terrorists." The aforementioned irony is in the fact that "pure terror" -- that is, indiscriminate violence intended to send a political message -- is less comprehensible to us for its apparent disconnection from the expressed objective just as it terrifies us more. The targeted violence most likely to actually influence policy directly tends more toward political subversion and irregular warfare. Terrorism is, in a sense, becoming less terrifying.

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about. And then I drew this:

(Click to make it bigger.) No, it doesn't make very much sense. No, I can't really tell you what the hell I was trying to accomplish when I drew it. No, I'm not going to type out all the captions and clarifying remarks. Yes, I want you to examine it and tell me how useless it is, and how very stupid you think I am, and how I ought to just stop trying to make everything into a damn graph already just because I've been reading a lot about Tufte this week.

Just for the record, the two meaningful lines are the straight line slope running from bottom-left to top-right, which is labeled "susceptibility to mitigation by direct government action," and the dipping arc with red trim, labeled "vulnerability of high-functioning state." I guess the idea was to show the way that different purported root causes of terrorism could be mitigated, and to think about how important state strength is to those various forms of mitigation. Terrorist violence that is motivated by an overwhelming desire for substantive policy change, for example, would be insensitive to state strength (just as likely to occur in a strong state as in a weak one) while comparatively "simple" to mitigate or avoid through concrete, direct action by the government (politically unpalatable as that may be). On the other end of the spectrum you have sociopathic or nihilistic terrorism (which, again, is no less likely in a high-functioning state than a failed one), a type of random and truly terror-inspiring violence that the government is virtually powerless to proactively suppress. [Here I think of the Michael Caine character's quote in one of the recent Batman movies: "Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."]

Hm, whoa, look at the time! Two questions for you:

1) Is there any chance that this graphic says anything meaningful to you, has any explanatory power, or provides any insight whatsoever (beyond "Gulliver is an asshole with too much time on his hands")?

2) What's wrong with it, from the perspective of conceptual accuracy?

How to kill a perfectly good lunch hour fiddling with an essentially meaningless thought experiment; Or: How this graph mathematically proves withdrawal is a good idea

Step 1: Browse Abu Muqawama

Step 2: Observe new post positing a simple graphical model for Chinese and Iranian engagement in Afghanistan

Step 3: Immediately assume that this model is fundamentally flawed in extremely simple, easily illustrated way

Step 4: Second-guess, equivocate, hedge, rethink, repeat

Step 5: Sink an hour into playing around with your own draft

Step 6: Refresh browser, notice that Ex has appended explanatory update that basically resolves concerns

Step 7: Review Step 3, revise conclusion to reflect that Gulliver's brain is fundamentally flawed in an extremely simple, easily illustrated way

Step 8: Choke yourself

Seeing as I've now spent so much effort demonstrating my high nerd quotient and talent for auto-distraction, I suppose I ought also own up to being a blowhard and a popinjay by sharing the product of my scribblings. (N.b.: the time I spent carefully modifying Ex's graph was meant to have been dedicated to a far more substantial post, one illustrated by yet another semi-original visual aid. That one will have to wait.)

I promise this made sense a few hours ago

So there it is: my redrafting of Ex's graph and some explanatory notes. What the hell does it all mean?

First of all, I think the original depiction suffers from a well-intentioned attempt at parsimony and elegance. The concept being depicted is too complex to be accurately rendered with just two lines. I understand the attempt, and the logic behind it is so simple as to be nearly self-evident: as U.S. engagement in Afghanistan decreases, other states will likely become more involved in the country so as to protect their interests. In the near term, those states that view the U.S. as a competitor will try to bandwagon off American efforts -- taking advantage of the stability dividends of NATO presence in Afghanistan to serve their own economic and geopolitical interests -- while enjoying the relative benefit of reduced U.S. readiness and flexibility attendant to the commitment of a substantial force. As the American footprint shrinks, countries like China and Iran will seek to assert themselves in Afghanistan so as not to suffer an interruption to the largely beneficial status quo.

Ex lays all of this down in two simple assumptions. (There are certainly more implicit in the model, but it's a good beginning.)

Let's start by assuming both China and Iran have an interest in U.S. military assets remaining in Afghanistan at great expense. Let's also assume that neither country, both with interests in Afghanistan, wants more instability.

Ok, so let's double back: Here he's saying that Iran and China want instability in Afghanistan to continue at present levels so as to ensure the U.S. continues to dedicate resources and military assets to it, but that China and Iran have broader interests in Afghanistan such that increased instability would be detrimental to them (outweighing whatever benefit is derived from continued heavy U.S. involvement). Put another way: an increase in Afghan stability would benefit those interests that exist independent of the relationship with the U.S., while harming the specific interest those countries have in continued U.S. involvement in the conflict.

This is all predicated on the idea that the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan contributes to stability, and that their departure will likely presage instability (absent other mitigating circumstances), or at the very least that a precipitious withdrawal of all American forces would threaten whatever stability currently exists. The Chinese and Iranians, then, want instability so much as it's required to cement American presence (and thus enhance their own position vis-a-vis the U.S.), but not so much as to threaten their own independent interests.

But what if decisions about U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan were made independent of assessments about the country's stability? What if the timeline for withdrawal was not controlled or impacted significantly by the security situation, and American troops were to be brought home without a care for whether or not the Afghan government could be counted on to secure predictable political outcomes? Because as it happens, that's our reality: NATO has pledged to turn over primary responsibility for the country to its own government by 2014, a benchmark that's helpfully highlighted on the graph. With a withdrawal timeline set, we can't argue that stability impacts force sizing in any meaningful sense. So U.S. troop levels aren't going to increase, and in fact are going to decrease on a generally predictable schedule. As such, we can eliminate that variable from our assessment of Chinese and Iranian interests and say that stability in Afghanistan is an objective "good" for those countries.

This is worth repeating: because China and Iran benefit from Afghan stability in a broad sense, and because the only detrimental effect those countries suffer from Afghan stability is increased U.S. flexibility and readiness, and because U.S. troop levels (and thus flexibility and readiness) are determined by an independent political decision and are thus not connected to Afghan stability… we can ignore U.S. troop numbers and say that all things which increase Afghan stability benefit China and Iran.

Still with me?

If Afghan stability benefits Chinese and Iranian interests – that is, if there’s a directly proportional relationship between the two – and if it’s assumed that stability will decrease after 2014, then China and Iran will seek to engage in behaviors that either counter this decline or mitigate the relationship between Afghanistan and their other interests. (This means that their options are to make Afghanistan less impactful on their other interests or to try to make Afghanistan more stable. This is the same choice the U.S. is facing right now, and we’ve determined that the threat of terrorism makes it impossible to pursue the first option. At least until 2014.) So as U.S. troop levels go down, Chinese and Iranian willingness to take stabilizing actions must increase in order to keep the “Afghan stability” indicator from spiking downwards. This is a decidedly different concept from what the original graph is meant to represent.

Of course, I wrote all that before Ex made his "clarification" (which is really a correction!). So you can see on my chart that I've redlined "Chinese and Iranian interest in a stable Afghanistan" on the original graph and replaced it with "Chinese and Iranian willingness to take actions to ensure stability." The conflation (or at least confusion) of these two variables was a major flaw. I addressed this by adding a new line which you can see across the top of my version: "Chinese/Iranian interest in Afghan stability." Over a limited timescale, this measure should stay relatively flat. The dotted line that scoops upward from "willingness" to "interest" is meant to illustrate the mistake we make if we fail to consider the intended U.S. withdrawal timeline: our adversaries' enduring interest in Afghan stability is only variable if a decrease in stability is met with a flexible U.S. response -- meaning an escalation and the attendant consequences for readiness.

Does this new graph have any broader meaning or explanatory value? Well, it ought to indicate that so long as we're willing to assume that other countries have an interest in Afghan stability, reducing our troop presence is certainly the correct decision. It prevents potential competitors from continuing to bandwagon and coattail, and we reap benefits from improved readiness and increased strategic flexibility. (But we already knew this, right?) It also means that those states that perceive a threat to their interests from uncertainty in Afghanistan should be lining up to get involved in a productive, stabilizing capacity -- both now and after the U.S. heads for the exits. (An predictable and unfortunate side-effect is that the internationalizing of the conflict absent strong U.S./NATO leadership is likely to have negative outcomes for the Afghan people, if not for "stability.") So why isn't that happening? Well, there are a few options: either A) those other countries don't perceive a similar level of threat from instability; B) they feel as though they're sufficiently shielded from the negative effects of instability or that the U.S. will continue to shield them in some way, even without troops on the ground; or C) they simply don't believe the U.S. is really going to leave.

That's what spits out at the end of all this? Fuck, what a waste of time.