Last week I briefly mentioned that in the ongoing debate about trimming the deficit the one sacred cow the Republican Party seems resistant to cut is the defense budget. This week, I’d like to talk about it a lot more than briefly.
Ever since the height of the Cold War, America has become the exact type of country President Dwight Eisenhower warned us against in his farewell address: a country ruled by the military industrial complex. Where not just our military (not even in most of the worst cases), but defense contractors, arms manufacturers, and anyone profiting off the business of war seem to lead policy.
It’s no secret that America’s military doesn’t have the most troops in the world (that would be China with almost double the number of active troops as the United States) but does outspend any other country by a staggering margin. For a military half the troop size of China’s, the United States spends 663 billion to their 93 billion. Even if you account for some accounting fraud certain pentagon officials—in an attempt to justify their budgets and avoid cuts—insist China is committing, there’s simply no way we don’t spend at least four times what they do. The country after them is our strongest world alley, The United Kingdom, who clock in at a relatively modest 67 billion dollars a year.
What accounts for this massive divide? There are a hundred different answers but primarily it might be the way we think about defense. For decades we were locked into a brutal game of one-upmanship with the Former Soviet Union, trying to outspend them on massive, advanced weapons at every corner while ignoring relatively inexpensive, sleek machinery. When the Cold War ended—in part because the USSR could no longer sustain foreign wars in countries like Afghanistan, propping up deadbeat communist regimes with aid in third world shitholes, and maintaining its military budget—our military spending didn’t decrease, it shot up. Now we find ourselves in the unenviable position of fighting a foreign war in Afghanistan, propping up deadbeat fascist regimes with aid in countries like Egypt, and maintaining the largest military expenditures in the world.
How out of control is spending? The largest Air Force in the world belongs to the United States. The second largest Air Force in the world also belongs to the United States in the form of our Navy. So unless the two go to war together, I think we’re pretty much safe. And yet we have already spent over 450 billion dollars on an F-35 fighter jet that critics call “The White Elephant of Fighter Jets” because it is ludicrously over budget, behind schedule to the point of farce, and is still not fully operational. There is a shortage of F-22s because several have been repurposed to make F-35s. A jet the defense contractor responsible for making (Lockheed Martin) has yet to produce a single usable model of.
Defense contractors, of course, are the other elephant in the conversation. The major corporations aren’t competitive, rarely bid on contracts, routinely overcharge the government even after running behind schedule and over budget, but are held in a bizarro world of accountability where the worst offenders are just given a larger blank check to make up the costs on. Halliburton alone overcharged the government a quarter of a trillion dollars during the first seven years of the Iraq war while its stock went up 900 percent during that same period. Halliburton is the most well known culprit but by no means the only one. Other companies made a fortune off doing poor contracting in Iraq that sometimes lead to shoddy electrical work that would electrocute soldiers in the shower or get them killed in the field due to defective equipment, but not sold to the government at any kind of a discount.
The irony is that our weapons no longer match our most prominent enemies. While America builds bigger and bigger weapons (and refuses to fully give up on the buffoonish Reagan-era dinosaur Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars”) our enemies get smaller and smaller. The days of a massive communist block of countries ready to march against us might have died with the Berlin Wall, but a loose confederation of glorified mafia calling itself a terrorist network has emerged. A cell of no more than six people might be planning to bring down a skyscraper in London but we’re exploring missile shields in space that might be useful only for an alien invasion?
The most effective tool against Al-Qaeda to date is also one of the least expensive: the unnamed fighter drone. It’s sleek, quick, small, and that’s the point: it’s invisible to the naked eye. It’s the perfect tool to be building instead of bulking up on a weapons supply we ultimately have no use for but to sell the leftovers (America is also the world’s largest armaments supplier). America’s military is waiting for Godot, stock piling everything for a major war almost to the point of creating one.
If you really look at how much the US spends to maintain its military it’s jaw dropping.
I agree…education always gets the short end of the stick compared to military issues.
I never thought I’d agree with something on this site, but I absolutley agree with this. The waste at the pentagon makes me sick to be a Republican. It isn’t capitalism up there. It’s socialism where a few companies are handed all the most lucrative contracts.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -Eisenhower
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