Military Budget Follies
Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning that he left the $170 Billion for this year’s Iraq War costs out of the $514 Billion defense appropriation bill President Bush has just sent to the Congress. The Chairman of the committer, Carl Levin was a bit nonplussed.
So, Mr. Levin pressed, “That would be a total then of $685 billion” in Pentagon spending for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. “Does that sound right?”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Gates replied. “But as I indicated, I have no confidence in that figure.”
Neither do I. Forget the $514 Billion figure crammed with pork barrel goodies like $54.6 Billion for the V-22 Osprey, which Time Magazine called “A Flying Shame”.
”The plane’s most widely cited design problem is that one of its propellers can get caught in its own turbulence as it comes in for a landing, and that can cause the V-22 to roll over and head into the ground.”-New York Times, April 14, 2007
The worst problem is that the $685 Billion figure does not come close to telling us the extent of our defense expenditures. Thankfully there are Think Tanks like the Center for Defense Information that can help us plumb the real story. Here are some more figures left out of the budget.
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$17 billion for Department of Energy Nuclear Weapons research
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$3 billion for Selective Service and other GSA Military budget items
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$40.1 billion for Homeland Security
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$38.4 billion for State Department Arms aid and Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction costs
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$91.3 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs
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$12.1 billion for Military retirement in the Treasury budget
This brings us to a grand total of $886.9 billion for defense expenditures this year and that does not include the interest cost for all the money we are borrowing from the Chinese and the Petro States to pay for this boondoggle. If we continue to invest in a 300 ship Navy and other projects like Space Warfare as if the Soviet Union was still our mortal foe on the high seas and in space, while the rest of our global business competitors pour money into their 21st century infrastructures, we will end up a second rate economic power.
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Allen Taylor
“…we will end up a second rate economic power.”
And we’ve had at least 20 years notice of this danger. Paul Kennedy’s book attracted pretty wide notice at the time, so to the extent there is a policy elite in the United States (since 2001 I’ve really wondered about this) the “people in charge” should be acquainted with the danger. And of course, many others have made similar observations about the likely effects of military overreach. Kennedy wasn’t entirely alone on this.
But doing something about it requires Presidential leadership — something that we haven’t had a whole lot of in recent years.
STS, as the history of the Osprey demonstrates, strong will at the top isn’t enough to prevent this (It’s not like Cheney isn’t a sonofabitch or tough enough). So long as Congressmen and Senators put pork barrelling in their own electorates ahead of the overall national interest, you’re stuck with this farrago. Eisenhower – no pinko – warned of the danger of the military industrial complex, and many people thought he was unduly paranoid. But weapons systems are good business, and nobody with a big aerospace, weapons or electronics company in their electorate wants to do anything to make the military industrial complex less powerful.
The F-35 is another great disaster in the making. Intended as another “all-purpose” aircraft for all the services, it’s supposed to be stealth, suitable for vertical takeoff, supersonic, and able to do air to air combat as well as drop lots of bombs. Guess what? It’s massively over-budget, late, and won’t supercruise, which makes it short-ranged and very expensive to run in combat situations. Many Russian aircraft run rings around its current performance, though they lack its stealth capabilities (which are doubtful anyway). Sadly, the Australian Government, in a fit of “we really, really like you guys, here’s proof” has decided to buy these turkeys too.
The basic rule here is that you shouldn’t let politicians (or uninformed military personnel) design things for more “efficiency”. If there’s one thing the military’s good at, it’s designed very complicated ways to overcome inefficiency.
In the meantime, we should expect the military industrial complex to pay for a little more of their own R&D instead of doing it all at the taxpayers expense.
Perhaps we can view the “padded” (understatement of the year) military budget as part of the economic stimulus package. All I read about are the latest wave of lay offs at another bunch of companies.
Lots of unemployed corporate people. The military can recruit the ones under 30 to serve.
(Lots of problems with military recruitment right now)
http://www.slate.com/id/2182752/pagenum/all/#page_start
As college graduates they’ll boost the overall aptitude averages for the military, where they can ride out the recession by serving their nation.
They’ll come back so psychologically damaged that they won’t care that they’re unemployed and will instead wind up in the homeless population where they’ll have fully disappeared off the unemployment rolls by missing out on those fun gov’t phone polls on employment. (One in 4 homeless persons is veteran http://www.naeh.org/content/article/detail/1838 )
It’s a winning scenario for the current administration.
So as not to get caught up in my last comment. . .has anyone done any research as to how citizens would choose to distribute funding if they could assign their taxes paid to the parts of gov’t they cared most about?
Infrastructure and social programs would be coming out ahead of the military, right?
I have a vague sense of deja vous re: this question, so I’m sure the answer is out there somewhere.
Rachel-Don’t you think we need to rethink how military strength and soft power can work more efficiently? The tenants of mercantilism don’t work anymore.
Zak- I think citizens would choose to put their money towards schools and infrastructure. Not weapons.
While there is much to lament and lambast with the current state of the military-industrial complex, it is not wholly and completely evil in and of itself. Benefits do in fact trickle down to the street-level. Two shining examples would be the Internet, from a Darpa contract, and Vel-cro (from NASA I believe). That said, it seems to me that the military is concerned with fighting the last war. I think a global fight on par with WWI or WWII is unlikely going forward. That is, unless the US continues our ‘Captain Kirk’ing our way around our small planet, killing or screwing everything we come in contact with. But here is a thing that is hard for me to say, but I believe most sincerely the truth of it: The US has to rebuild out military. This is *NOT* to say that we need to spend billions and trillions on new weapons programs or platforms. In fact, we need seriously to pare-off and cut out the wasteful spending happening on the taxpayer dole right NOW. The Osprey is but one of the latest examples. What I am referencing is the manpower and quality defecit in our armed forces. Tomorrow’s generals are today’s captains and lower officers, and Iraq is chewing large holes in those pools of talent. Our retention rates are in the toilet, and rather than redouble our efforts, we are lowering our standards. The net effect of this will be a *FAR* less competant military leadership inside of a single generation. That, coupled with two other critical items: namely moving past petroleum, and fixing health care should be the triumvirate of the next President’s agenda. Then again, that advice and 80 cents or so might get you a cup of really crappy coffee at McDonalds…
Rachel,
By “Presidential leadership” I’m mean exactly the incentives problem you mention. Legislators have parochial interests to defend and are easily bought off. It takes a Teddy Roosevelt to take on the Trusts or an FDR to corral the banks, an Eisenhower to point out the danger posed by the military-industrial complex, an LBJ to take on the Solid South in the US Senate and pass civil rights legislation. And it took an old cold warrior like Dick Nixon to go to China.
Actually, as we were reminded recently in an exchange between Clinton and Obama, it often takes a combination of popular will and Presidential leadership. It took both the mass movement for civil rights AND the willingness of a veteran southern legislator in the White House to “do the right thing” at long last, for something lasting and consequential to get done.
When Bush and Cheney pander to the defense industries, it isn’t exactly leadership. This White House is just running a big diversion while the corporate boardroom-class raid the Treasury.
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