You Can't Eat Bullets

In the last few days I have seen several newspaper headlines that talk about the "gutting" of the defense budget and have listened to a number of politicians in both parties talk with paroxysmal spasms about the destruction of the military and the loss of associated jobs (miraculously right there within their own district).

What they are so upset about is that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has advocated cutting a total of $1.4 billion from the missile defense program. This act, cutting funding to a program that has been replete with problems and failures, is completely sensible and represents a negligible cut in defense spending.

Or at least it is being portrayed as a cut in defense spending. It is in reality nothing of the kind. The Obama Administration has submitted a Defense Budget request of $534 billion. Compare this to the last Defense Budget submitted by Bush which was for a total of $513 billion. Hopefully, our educational system has not collapsed to the point that we are unable to see that this is an increase of $21 billion, NOT a decrease.

This is but a sad example of how skewed the debate has become around the defense establishment. Cutting one sorry program is decried as damaging the military even when the largest military budget in history has just been proposed. Rather than bemoaning the loss of one spectacularly bad program and trying to manipulate the public through lies that an increase is a cut, the real questions should be about the fact that this is the largest budget in history.

The facts of world military expenditures argue that we are completely off base when it comes to the issue of defense spending. We are not cutting anything, but we certainly should be. Let us look at the figures.

According to CIA- The World Factbook, posted at globalsecurity.com, the U.S. spent $623 billion dollars on military expenditures in 2008 and the rest of the world combined spent $500 billion. China had expenditures of $65 billion and Russia clocked in at $50 billion. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute put the numbers in 2007 at $547 billion for the U.S. (45% of total) $58.3 billion for China, $35.4 billion for Russia and $59.7 for our ally Britain which was second in total expenditures.

In other words, we spend around half of the total worlds military expenditure dollars. The only two countries with any realistic ability to challenge our military superiority, China and Russia spend only around a tenth of what the U.S. does. Put another way, if we were to cut our expenditures in half and they were to triple their spending we would still outspend each of them by at least $100 billion.

What are we so afraid of? Terrorism? No amount of money on earth can stop a person who is prepared to give up their own life. But the events of 9/11 cannot explain our excessive military buildup. Fighting fanatics is more about intelligence than weapons and soldiers. Geographically the U.S. is one of the most protected nations on earth. Protected by two oceans, we seriously have to question what we are so worried about. Our need to feed the military budget comes close to suggesting a collective paranoia.

In an era where politicians of all stripes are expressing concerns about deficits this is the logical place to start. The U.S. could easily pull $300 billion off the books by beginning a return to a sensible military budget. This won't happen, of course, as Eisenhower's warning of the military industrial complex has become true. Our politicians are not worried about our defense, they are worried about defending their base - the military contractors to whom they are beholden.