How High is Up? The Defense Budget gets even crazier Posted by Lorelei Kelly

For those of you concerned about the state of US security--levees that don't collapse, for example, or bridges that don't fall into the Mississippi river, sit down before you see these numbers.

Last week, both houses of Congress approved the conference report on the Fiscal Year 2008 Defense Authorization bill, H.R. 1585. The bill includes $506.9 billion for the Department of Defense and the nuclear weapons activities of the Department of Energy. The bill also authorizes $189.4 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This funding is NOT counted as part of the $506.9 billion.

Center for Arms Control and Non Proliferation has an itemized description of what's in the budget.

The amount of Cold War lard is truly astonishing, especially given the fact that the military itself is hollering from the hilltops that it can't be responsible for all of our national security needs and that today's problems just don't have military (read "Cold War weapons systems") answers.

Keep in mind, today's defense spending is 14% above the height of the Korean War, 33% above the height of the Vietnam War, 25% above the height of the "Reagan Era" buildup and is 76% above the Cold War average

In fact, since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the annual defense budget - not including the costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan - has gone up 34%. Including war costs, defense spending has gone up 86% since 2001.

Even the venerable Council on Foreign Relations has thrown down the glove on defense spending. Check out this very nice piece by Richard Betts in this month's Foreign Affairs. Oh, and even the director of the Congressional Budget Office is commenting on defense spending. (so much for stodgy bureaucracy, this guy has his own blog!!!) He has a good comment up, but I've had enough business school classes to know that all of this means that we are in deep financial trouble when it comes to security finances-- and just digging ourselves deeper.

Comments

[Don Bacon]

At a time when the US is not threatened by any other military force, the "defense" budget is largely porky corporate welfare.

Robert McNamara, back in the 1960's, introduced the new science of systems analysis to the Pentagon. Now the Pentagon budget would be categorized by type of force and based on actual defense needs. On actual needs! What a concept. But the Vietnam adventure ruined that.

Now, in the new millenium, without any significant threat, the basic Pentagon budget is almost entirely driven by the dollars that come in to each Congressional district, with congressional representatives fighting to keep those dollars at present levels or increase them through earmarks or however else they can. Reps brag on the dollars they bring in, and decreased "income" is not an option. There is no hope of ever getting a rep to agree to less dollars coming in to his or her district. It won't happen. Procurement spending is spread all around with sub-contracts to make sure that all reps are covered. There's a map somewhere on somebody's wall with dollar figures entered in each congressional district, and they must be maintained. This isn't rocket science, it's just smart politics.

There is no hope. Well, there is one--a strong Decider as President who can dictate terms. But such a decider would want an even larger military budget, so there you go. Democracy, in this respect, is a failure. Military spending is a drug, but there's no war on this drug.

The Pentagon wants even more, and so do the reps. What they will do to rationalize more useless spending is to relate it to GDP. It's only four percent now. Huckabee wants a Reagenesque level of six per cent--$780b. Nobody will bother to ask, in a systems analysis sort of way: Why relate military spending to GDP? What could possibly be the relationship between how much the US spends on jet fighters and the inflated prices Americans pay for second homes, vacations, and fine art? Or for China-made stuff sold in WalMart? There is no relationship except in their minds. But they'll shout it and the MSM will report it, and the government will borrow the money from our Asian friends, and we'll repay the loans with inflated dollars when the dollar isn't worth a nickel. Hey, that already happened.

As for the men and materiel bought with this inflated budget, what good are they if you don't use them? The new systems, tactics and equipment have to be tested, for one thing, under actual combat conditions. Between the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs", plus the trip-wire forces in 120 countries and the navy fleets sailing back and forth off alien shores there will always be a reason to field-test the latest military gadgets, explosive and otherwise. This is when the spending and the profits really jump--wartime.

[Don Bacon]

news report:
In an unusual two-step, [House] lawmakers first voted 253-154 to approve the omnibus spending bill; they then voted 206-201 to add $31 billion for troops in Afghanistan to the measure.

So three reps voting the wrong way cost us $31b--a hundred bucks of borrowed money for every man, woman and child down the rathole--and 27 reps didn't even vote. This was on top of an already obscene bill that wasn't even seriously debated. Bush is happy with this emocracy in action.

[Howl]

::Keep in mind, today's defense spending is 14% above the height of the Korean War, 33% above the height of the Vietnam War, 25% above the height of the "Reagan Era" buildup and is 76% above the Cold War average::

As Mr. Bacon pointed out above, this does not factor in for the increase in the size of the economy. Of /course/ we spend more on defense now than we used to: in WWII, a top-of-the-line fighter aircraft cost far less than a million dollars; now it is more than two hundred times that.

Not linking defense budget size to increases in complexity and cost, inflation, and comparison to the GDP is simply an exercise in grandstanding and back-patting. To follow Mr. Bacon's logic, should we limit the price we'll pay for a soldier's rifle to $5 each, the price of a musket in 1776?

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Don Bacon: "Military spending is a drug, but there's no war on this drug."

Word.

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This is a gross as the FISA bloggers. Gross.

The defense budget is non military. It's federal jobs, etc.for dems. They are only worried about the non military money.

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Aerospace Daily & Defense Report
December 18, 2007

Senators Pressure White House For More C-17s

Nineteen senators are pressuring the White House and Pentagon to "rightly fund" C-17 aircraft production by including it in the forthcoming fiscal 2009 budget request due to Congress in February.

Two letters, dated Dec. 13, were dispatched . . ."We encourage you to work with DOD leadership to have C-17 funding added to their budget," . . .

Signatories of the two letters include nine Democrats and 11 Republicans, most of them from states in which Boeing has a significant business interest. They include Democrats Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Christopher Dodd (Conn.), Maria Cantwell (Wash.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Joseph Lieberman (Conn.), Patty Murray (Wash.) and Ron Wyden (Wash.).

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The main problem with the defense budget is that it spends too much money on the wrong things such as the F-22 and aircraft carriers snd not making military officers better able to fight the war on terror such as schools that teach them local politics and culture in potential war zones such as Afghanastan and Iraq.

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