BUZZFLASH– The August 9 announcement by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates of
cost-containment measures at the Defense Department should not obscure
two underlying facts. First, as he conceded, these proposed economies
will not result in cutting the overall Pentagon budget, which is slated
for expansion. And, second, as a Washington Post article reported,
“defense officials characterized them as a political preemptive strike
to fend off growing sentiment elsewhere in Washington to tackle the
federal government’s soaring deficits by making deep cuts in military
spending.”
But why should anyone want to cut the U.S. military budget?
One
reason is that—with $549 billion requested for basic military
expenditures and another $159 billion requested for U.S. wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan—the record $708 billion military spending called for by
the Obama administration for fiscal 2011 will be nearly equivalent to
the military spending of all other nations in the world combined. When
it comes to military appropriations, the U.S. government already spends
about seven times as much as China, thirteen times as much as Russia,
and seventy-three times as much as Iran.
Is this really
necessary? During the Cold War, the United States confronted far more
dangerous and numerous military adversaries, including the Soviet
Union. And the U.S. government certainly possessed an enormous and
devastating military arsenal, as well as the armed forces that used it.
But in those years, U.S. military spending accounted for only 26
percent of the world total. Today, as U.S. Congressman Barney Frank has
observed, “we have fewer enemies and we’re spending more money.” /
Where does this vast outlay of U.S. tax dollars—the greatest military
appropriations in U.S. history—go? One place is to overseas U.S.
military bases. According to Chalmers Johnson, a political scientist
and former CIA consultant, as much as $250 billion per year is used to
maintain some 865 U.S. military facilities in more than forty countries
and overseas U.S. territories.
The money also goes to fund vast
legions of private military contractors. A recent Pentagon report
estimated that the Defense Department relies on 766,000 contractors at
an annual cost of about $155 billion, and this figure does not include
private intelligence organizations. A Washington Post study, which
included all categories, estimated that the Defense Department employs
1.2 million private contractors.
Of course, enormously expensive
air and naval weapons systems—often accompanied by huge cost
over-runs—account for a substantial portion of the Pentagon’s budget.
But exactly who are these high tech, Cold War weapons to be used
against? Certainly they have little value in a world threatened by
terrorism. As Congressman Frank has remarked: “I don’t think any
terrorist has ever been shot by a nuclear submarine.”
Furthermore,
when bemoaning budget deficits, Americans should not forget the
enormous price the United States has paid for its wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. According to the highly-respected National Priorities
Project, their cost, so far, amounts to $1.06 trillion. (For those
readers who are unaccustomed to dealing with a trillion dollar budget,
that’s $1,060,000,000,000.)
When calculating the benefits and
losses of these kinds of expenditures, we should also include the
opportunities forgone through military spending. How many times have
government officials told us that there is not enough money available
for health care, for schools, for parks, for the arts, for public
broadcasting, for unemployment insurance, for law enforcement, and for
maintenance of America’s highway, bridge, and rail infrastructure?
Admittedly,
there are other reasons for America’s failure to use its substantial
wealth to provide adequate care for its own people. Some Americans,
driven by mean-spiritedness or greed, resent the very idea of sharing
with others. Furthermore, years of tax cuts for the wealthy have
diminished public revenues.
Even so, it is hard to deny that
there is a heavy price being paid for making military power the nation’s
top priority. With more than half of U.S. government discretionary
spending going to feed the Pentagon, we should not be surprised that—in
America, at least—it is no longer considered feasible to use public
resources to feed the hungry, heal the sick, or house the homeless.
We
would do well to recall an observation by one of the great prophets of
our time, Martin Luther King, Jr.: “A nation that continues year after
year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social
uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr.
Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New
York/Albany. His latest book is Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of
the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford University Press).
© COPYRIGHT BUZZFLASH, 2010
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