Our Big, Fat Defense Budget
I suppose I should be happy to live in a country that can afford to spend nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars a year on defense even though we are relatively safe, historically speaking. But the defense spending that the President proposed to Congress Monday is so excessive that I can only manage outrage. Everyone complains about earmarks, but they cost $17 billion across the government last year. That’s just two months in Iraq; pocket change in the Pentagon.
Hawks, like Admiral Mike Mullen, the new Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, argue that, hey, it is only 4 percent of GDP. After all, they say, we used to spend far more of our wealth on the military, especially during wars – 35 percent of GDP in World War II and 9 percent in Korea.
That argument, popular as it is, baffles me. The US is about six and half times as rich it was in 1950, adjusting for inflation. Economic growth means that devoting a pegged portion of GDP to the Pentagon is to annually increase defense spending, whatever happens with foreign threats. That’s a silly way to spend tax dollars, to put it mildly. The sensible way to provide defense is look at your enemies’ capabilities and likely scenarios for defeating them and back spending out from that – whether that amounts to one percent of GDP or 30.
And it is not just the waste that offends. According to Steve Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the budget will leave the Pentagon short – by $10 to 20 billion a year – of the cash it needs to meet its own requirements. That’s because the budget avoids choice, the essence of strategy. As Fred Kaplan noted the other day, instead of selecting a method of providing defense that would create winners and losers among military services and their platform communities, the non‐war budget basically gives the services what they want under a topline. It also gives each service roughly the same relative share of the total as they received in each year since the Kennedy administration, with only a slight uptick this year for the ground forces. That tells you a great deal about George Bush’s claim to have transformed the military.
The worst thing about the budget is that it is bipartisan. No one influential complains. Congressional Republicans on the defense committees are either for it or want more. Democrats knock the Iraq funds, but accept the other $560 billion. History says that the defense budget – at least the non‐war portion – that emerges as law next fall will deviate only slightly from what the President submitted.
Why is no one opposed? For one (and I could go on), both parties embrace brands of militaristic hegemony – the idea that that we are better off with massive military predominance over all other powers and that there is a military solution to most foreign policy concerns. Want a liberal world? Buy enough carriers and F‑22s so that we can dominate it. China’s growing? Arm so heavily that they cannot compete. Pakistan troubles you? Draw up an invasion plan. Africa is disorderly? Create Africa Command.
But really you can’t blame politicians, who have to get elected. You have to blame the intellectuals who shape public opinion. Blame my field, political science, which has largely decided to avoid studying such unsophisticated questions as the requirements of our defense (and hiring those who do), leaving security debates short of truly independent experts. Blame the beltway pundits who avoid challenging the post September 11 explosion of militarism or lead the parade.
The good news is that bad things, the Iraq war and the growth of entitlements’ cost, are waking people up to the idea that maybe this isn’t the best use of tax dollars. DoD plans and insiders say FY 2009 will be a peak year for defense spending, and that we are about to hit a downward trend. Here’s hoping.
