In the wake of 9/11 we went on a defense spending binge – there really is no other way to view it. Career professionals in defense procurement who are honest will tell you the same thing. It was as if someone turned on a fire hose of money and pointed in at the military. It was not always spent wisely or well, but it sure got spent. Back in March of this year I wrote a column called “In Search of Enough Security.” At that time I made the following observations:
(M)ilitary spending has more than doubled since then (9/11). The actual Defense Department baseline budget has gone from $308 billion in 2001 to $534 billion this coming year, but to that number has to be added another $130 billion for ‘overseas contingency operations,’ and another $350 or so billion for defense-related expenditures not in the DOD budget, and you end up with a cool trillion in real military spending.
We outspend the entire rest of the world combined. Chop out our major allies (UK, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Israel) and we out-spend the rest of the world over one and a half times. China is in the midst of a major build-up. We outspend them by between seven and nine times.
There is no need to identify evil conspiracies behind this torrent of defense spending, The demons were mostly those of our own damaged psyches in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As a nation we suddenly felt vulnerable, a sensation we are unaccustomed to. As a nation we are also inclined to want to fix a problem and defense spending seemed like a reasonable approach. In my opinion it was about as rational as any post-traumatic attempt at self-medication through excess — which is to say not very rational at all.
The most recent budget increases the defense budget, but that may finally be about to change. At last legislators and senior defense officials are beginning to take a hard look at our broken defense procurement system and enormous overhead costs, and trying to find better ways of doing things.
How bad is the problem? For starters, forget about weapons procurement, overseas military operations, and off-budget defense-related expenditures. Just look at the non-operational overhead cost of the U.S. armed forces. It runs us $200 billion dollars a year , and that’s before we buy a single tank or airplane or move a single service person overseas.
I know, more meaningless numbers, right? So here is some perspective on that overhead figure: it is equal to the combined total military spending of the next four largest military budgets on the planet: those of China ($65 billion), Russia($50 billion), France ($45 billion), and the United Kingdom ($43 billion). It is larger than the gross domestic products of 141 out of the 181 national economies in the world, as currently listed by the International Monetary Fund.
And that’s just overhead.
Can we cut all of that, or even a majority of it? Of course not. But there are a lot of things we can do much more efficiently than we manage at present. An independent panel of corporate executives, acting as efficiency consultants to the Pentagon, submitted their draft report yesterday with recommended efficiency savings of $100 billion over the next five years. That’s a start.
More promising still are the early recommendation of the Sustainable Defense Task Force, a broad-spectrum group of defense and budget thinkers assembled at the behest of a bipartisan group of legislators, including bedfellows as odd as Barney Franks and Ron Paul. Here’s a link to the draft of the report, released last June, which identifies potential savings of $960 billion in defense spending by 2020.
What we need is a genuine national debate about defense spending, the foreign policy goals that spending is intended to support, and where these stand in our national priorities. The increasingly partisan nature of Washington has made that debate difficult for many years, but growing bipartisan support for a reexamination of defense spending makes it more likely we will hear some reasoned discussion of issues instead of just party talking points.
How bipartisan is it? An increasing number of Republicans are coming out in favor of cuts in defense spending, and here are a few stand-out examples.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) joined Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in sponsoring an amendment to cap defense spending. The amendment was not passed, but a number of Republicans voted for it and it would have capped spending at below the requested amount in President Obama’s 2011 budget.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) sent a letter to President Obama’s deficit commission which argued specifically for defense spending cuts.
Kori Schake, former foreign policy advisor to John McCain and now with the conservative Hoover Institution, recently argues that, “Conservatives need to hearken back to our Eisenhower heritage, and develop a defense leadership that understands military power is fundamentally premised on the solvency of American government and the vibrancy of the U.S. economy.”
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
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Gary Humfleet said:
Excellent assessment. What problem we have will not be solved by throwing money at them. I was rather surprised, pleasantly at some of the people names as taking stands in favor of spending cuts.
July 24th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
Frank Chadwick said:
Thanks, Gary. Too often calls for a reassessment of our defense needs have been met with the charge that the speaker was trying to disarm America in the face of the enemy, or was advocating “passive resistance,” or some other absurd claim. The fact that we could cut our defense spending by almost 90% and still be the number one military spender in the world does not suggest we ought to cut it by anywhere near 90%, but does suggest our priorities have gotten completely out of whack.
We are in the opening round of a global economic struggle with China’s emerging powerhouse of an economy. China spends less than one tenth what we do on the military, and instead makes massive investments in education, research, and physical infrastructure. If that continues, we will lose the race. In fact, so far we aren’t even suiting up.
I believe there is a growing realization that we have to get serious about long-term economic growth and infrastructure investment, and that is finally bringing people from all across the political spectrum to the table on this issue.
July 26th, 2010 at 11:23 am
Sensemaker said:
I have always been under the impression that American government acquisition is deeply flawed and the taxpayers do not get their money’s worth. This is most obviously true in the case of military spending.
Sensemaker
July 27th, 2010 at 4:00 am
Frank Chadwick said:
Sensemaker, I think it depends on the agency. Sone agencies do an amazing job with the resources they have, and I’d include important chunks of the military in that. I don’t think anyone does a better job training soldiers for combat than do we. But I certainly agree that weapons procurement is badly broken.
The fault there is not entirely, or even principally, with the military. They work, sort of, with the system they have been given. The problem instead is the lack of clear priorities from above and that stems largely from the fact that we have not had, in my opinion, a clearly thought-out and articulated foreign policy strategy since the Cold War. It’s hard to determine what the military needs to be ready for when the government doesn’t have any idea itself what it may be interested in next week.
July 27th, 2010 at 1:59 pm