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4. NATIONAL SECURITY: Arms & Immigration
MILITARY BUDGET: written by William Hartung

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Peter Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

4. NATIONAL SECURITY: Arms & Immigration

MILITARY BUDGET:

William Hartung

As most Americans know. we’re at a critical moment for the future of our country and the world. And we need to devote time and resources to the most urgent challenges—that especially includes the huge and ever-growing Pentagon spending that takes away from other needs. Unfortunately, at the moment, we’re going in the wrong direction.

The House this year voted to add $37 million to the Pentagon’s request—more than the Pentagon even asked for—and that’ll push the budget for the Pentagon and nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy together to $850 billion. Now that’s far more than we spent at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars, more than a $100 billion more than at the height of the Cold War. This kind of spending can’t continue.

It’s hard to adequately describe what enormous sum that is compared to competing problems—more than a million Americans have died from COVID, we’ve been inundated with fires, floods, droughts related to climate change, and Americans are struggling just to put enough food on the table to live an active, healthy life. So put simply, we need to set our priorities straight if we want to make America safer, fair, more prosperous.

Here are some other few comparisons to show us just how huge the Pentagon budget is. In a time when we need creative diplomacy more than ever, the Pentagon gets fourteen times more money than the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined, and our $850 billion annual military budget is seven times the annual cost of the [renamed] “Inflation Reduction Act,” which Republicans previously blocked because they said it was too expensive.

Consider the proposed annual budget for just one item: we have thirty-five combat aircraft larger than the annual budget for the Centers for Disease Control. The cost of one new aircraft carrier—$15 billion—is more than we spend on the Environmental Protection Agency. The $20 trillion we spent on the Pentagon since 2001…just a quarter of that would be needed to decarbonize our electrical grid—i.e., no dependence on fossil fuels for electricity anywhere in America.

So unless something changes, we’re poised to spend a good $8 – 10 trillion on the Pentagon over the next decade yet we can’t afford to do that given all our other problems.

Now, a lot of Americans might say, “Well, we need to spend this to defend the country, and also most importantly to support the troops,” but unfortunately that’s not the case. More than half of the Pentagon budget goes to corporations. Just the top five: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman split over $150 billion a year. That’s almost 20 percent of the Pentagon budget going just to those five companies. And Lockheed Martin itself gets $75 billion a year, which is larger for that one company than the State Department and USAID combined. I can’t think of a more dramatic example of misplaced priorities than lining the pockets of that one contractor when our diplomacy is suffering.

Overall the Pentagon employs more than half a million private service contract employees. If you cap that and cut it by 15 percent you’d save $26 billion a year—over a quarter of a trillion over the next decade. And that can easily be done. They cost more than government employees; they often do redundant tasks; and they’re much harder to control and supervise. To make matters worse, we can’t really calculate how much money the Pentagon is wasting because they’ve never had or passed an audit— the only Federal agency for which that’s the case.

It’s not as if this money showered on the contractors is giving us value for the money. These big companies run tens of billions of dollars and cost overruns to deliver weapons that are years behind schedule and often don’t perform as advertised. Sometimes they even put our troops at risk because they’re so shoddily put together. And then you’ve got companies that gouge the government for spare parts—charging 10, 100, in one case 38,000 percent more than the thing actually should have cost. People like Senator Warren and others are trying to crack that problem.

Of course we need a strong national defense. But that’s not what our current strategy is providing. For example, the focus on China involves a huge amount of threat of inflation. The United States spends 2.5 times what China spends on its military; we have 13 times as many nuclear weapons; we have a more capable Navy and more capable Air Force. And unlike China, we have strong allies in East Asia: Australia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and we’re building relations with India. So the idea that the United States has to carry some huge military burden to “win a war with China” (which is not possible in a war between nuclear powers) should not be a goal of our policy. Our goal should be to defend our allies in the region, and for them to participate heavily in that undertaking.

On the other side, we need to cooperate with China to deal with climate change, pandemics, and the global economy. These problems cannot be solved without some sort of U.S.-China cooperation.

Also, we shouldn’t overplay the capabilities of drone systems and certainly don’t need thousands and thousands of tanks… don’t need thirteen aircraft carriers …and don’t need intercontinental ballistic missiles which are redundant and put us at risk of an accidental nuclear war. In fact, the Pentagon, the Air Force, the Navy are trying to retire some old systems that aren’t relevant to dealing with China, or much of anything else. And members of Congress from the districts where those things are built are pushing back, saying, “No, we need this ship that’s got a cracked hull, that can’t defend itself in combat. We need an airplane that’s less capable than the prior generation of planes and costs dramatically more.”

Something like the military reform movement that Senator Gary Hart pursued would have a lot of promise because it asks the right question: what’s the most effective way to defend the country? Even people who view themselves as somewhat hawkish could be open to that kind of approach as long as we don’t put all our faith in technology.