Monday, March 20, 2017

Outsized Defense Budget Poised to Become Even More Bloated



Let me state this up front: I’m glad the U.S. has the biggest, baddest military in the world and I hope it always stays that way. I have no problem with the U.S. being the top dog and the top spender, militarily.

The U.S. spends more money on its military, by far, than any other nation in the world. We’ve been No. 1 since the end of World War II and, in my estimation, that’s a good thing. I think we should always strive to remain No. 1.

However, I’m also in favor of fiscal prudence and responsibility. That’s why I’m concerned about Donald Trump’s call for a $54 billion increase in military spending in his recent Congressional address. Trump's new federal budget proposal calls for defense spending to jump 10 percent above its already world-leading level.

This increase would "push the Pentagon spending, already well beyond the Cold War average used to keep the now-defunct Soviet Union at bay, even higher,” writes National Security Analyst Mark Thompson.

The U.S. spent $596 BILLION on its military in 2015, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

That was more than the next seven countries (China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France and Japan) COMBINED.

Yet, in fiscal year 2017, US military spending is budgeted for an increase to $617.0 BILLION. Additionally, veterans' spending is budgeted at $180.8 billion and foreign policy / foreign aid spending is budgeted at $55.8 billion. All together, total U.S. government spending for defense is budgeted at $853.6 BILLION.

If that seems like a lot of money, it's because it is.

U.S. military spending in inflation-adjusted terms is higher than it has been since World War II, according to Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow and defense expert at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Here’s the rub: the national debt recently topped $20 TRILLION, and it is growing daily.

"The most significant threat to our national security is our debt," former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen famously declared in 2010. When the nation’s top military man said this, the national debt was just over $13 trillion.

Yet, the federal budget deficit is projected to add nearly $10 trillion to the federal debt over the next 10 years, according to projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Congressional Republicans, who have long sworn their allegiance to fiscal prudence and responsibility, will have to find a way to explain, endorse and rationalize a surge in military spending at the same time they are pledging large tax cuts for individuals and corporations, as well as huge cuts to much smaller budget programs.

Aside from the deficit, tepid economic growth is also a concern. Over the next 10 years, real economic output is projected to grow at an annual rate of 1.9 percent. No country can continually grow its debts faster than its economy, without leading to economic crisis.

The Defense Dept. knows that the military budget is bloated and wasteful. Everyone in Washington knows it.

The Pentagon commissioned a study, released in January 2015, which discovered $125 billion in bureaucratic waste.

However, the Pentagon quickly buried the study because it feared “Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget,” according to the Washington Post.

"Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

"For the military, the major allure of the study was that it called for reallocating the $125 billion for troops and weapons. Among other options, the savings could have paid a large portion of the bill to rebuild the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal, or the operating expenses for 50 Army brigades.

"But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper.

"So, the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website."

There are two primary excuses for more and more military spending. One of them is jobs.

Military contractors — such Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Gruman, for example — almost always build their hardware in multiple states. That way the jobs are spread over multiple congressional districts. Since no politician ever wants to vote to kill jobs, this is a very clever strategy. Creating jobs wins elections, while cutting them is always a losing proposition.

The other rationale/excuse is that, “The bad guys are going to get us.”

The Military-Industrial Complex and its political cronies have always created, and they always will seek to create, international bogeymen to advance their argument for new weapons, new wars and the continual flow of military contracts to weapons makers.

The justification is usually draped in the flag and sold as a matter of patriotism. According to this argument, if you support the military, you support more military spending. That makes you a patriot — a real American. If you don’t support more military spending, you are anti-American and a traitor.

It’s all so irrational, bogus and transparent, yet this argument is continually and reflexively made anyway. Many Americans still fall for it and even endorse it.

However, more spending doesn’t make the military stronger, better or more able.

“The only way to strengthen our national security is not to spend more money,” says Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, “but rather to reform the way the Department of Defense does business."

"It boggles the mind that the DoD cannot account for the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that it spends," says Davis. "A full twenty-six years after a federal law was passed requiring all parts of the federal government to provide Congress with an audit of its spending, there remains only a single government agency that has not complied: the Department of Defense. Even after being publicly rebuked by the Senate in 2013 for this failure—and wasting billions of dollars on failed auditing software—the Pentagon remains noncompliant.”

The U.S. already has the most powerful, most deadly, most advanced military in the history of humanity.

Given this reality, is it reasonable or rational for the US to spend even more money on its military?

I think the obvious answer is “no.”

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