Defense Spending is Spending
Brad DeLong has a post on the long-term fiscal outlook for the country where he violates an important unwritten rule of conventional wisdom-dom — he treats defense spending as actual spending involved in tradeoffs with taxes and other forms of spending. Normally, the exact same “deficit hawks” who freak out at every single cent of domestic outlay think nothing of tossing another $8 billion a month at Iraq or eagerly embracing the latest weapon system. Brad’s specific proposal is decidedly un-radical:
[S]top sending our soldiers–the best-trained and best-equipped high tech armed forces in the world–abroad to be military police in countries riven by sectarian conflict where they do not speak the language–and so return defense spending to its late-1990s share of GDP.
I think I’d probably go a bit further than that in terms of paring back. But either way, I think it’s vitally important as a first step to just put defense spending “on the table” — to recall that the fiscal cost of our defense posture is a real cost.
Sort Comments By: Top Rated | Date
13 Responses to “Defense Spending is Spending”
Leave a Reply
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
August 25th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Good luck. For the last couple of decades we’ve seen any attempt to discuss the military & related budget as if it were in the realm of actual spending portrayed as some traitorous liberal plan to hate the troops and surrender to The Enemy.
Including to this day, Bill Clinton gets blamed as ‘destroyin da militerry’ for George Bush Sr’s base closings & force drawdowns, and Saint Ronnie is still discussed as a ’small government’ Republican.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Now may be just the time for some brave souls to start pointing out what our spending on defense has cost us and what little we have gotten for it. And what suckers we are for providing the defense for much of the world.
August 25th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Mary, our defense spending provided us with NATIONAL SECURITY.
This is the ultimate need of a society — not to be annihilated, overriden by barbarian hordes who would kill, destroy, rape, pillage and humiliate. This is priceless.
With that frame in mind, we could inspect our military spending afresh. If we drop this or that, will the hordes break through our gates? Where are our gates? What are the hordes?
I think that we should prepare ourself for the most dire scenario, say, a pincer attack by Canadians and Mexicans combined, with some Russo-Persian help for a good measure. I guess, the police department of NYC can repel Canadians (I think it has superior numbers), while California Highway Patrol should take care of Mexicans. National Guards of Ohio and and other border states can pitch in. There is still a problem of approaching Russo-Persian armada.
I can’t escape the impression that a small fraction of our forces would suffice.
But, what if the Russo-Persian armada would attack Europe instead? The good news is that Europe is surprisingly hard to attack in that manner. Mediterranean can be defended very simply at 3 points of entry. Baltic is now an EU lake with minute Russian presence. Circumnavigating Africa or Arctic would leave the armada rather exhausted.
Plus, Europeans have more manpower and arms than Russians and Persians combined, and worst come to worst, they can even resort to trade sanctions and hacker attacks.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Mary again: “and what suckers we are for providing the defense for much of the world.”
My question would rather be: whom are we kidding, rather than “whom are we defending”.
In Korean peninsula, we are defending a country with twice the population and 20 times GNP of the adversary, large military force and fortified border. They can manage.
In Persian Gulf, we are defending several countries agains, well, “Russo-Persian armada”. Our allies outspend Iran something like 6 times over. If this is not enough, they should think about spending their money wiser. Plus, MAED is functioning there: mutually assured economic destruction. The attacker can severely damage the economy of the adversaries. but not without suffering the same.
In Europe, most assuredly Europeans can manage.
What else? Australia? From Indonesia? Indonesia from East Timor? (Wisely, we do not offer protection to East Timor, but if Australia feels so inclined…) Vanuatu from Kiribati?
August 25th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Nahgunnahappen.
Democrats should push for 1 million additional Guard and Reserves, a brigade in every Congressional District and fund it by taking the money directly out of major weapons systems and keep defense spending flat. The cultural makeup of the US means we’re going to spend way too much on the military for a long time. It’s better that it’s spent on pay for enlisted personnel in pay and benefits with some secondary benefits to local communities (disaster relief and even infrastructure construction if the units are engineering) then on Larry Lightbulb Space Laser program that costs $3 billion dollars that benefits the shareholders of Lockeed-Martin and Boeing.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:13 am
I couldn’t agree more. Defense spending is like a huge elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.
Defense is an important priority for the country, but spending on defense to the exclusion of infrastructure, health care, education, social programs, etc. is misguided.
The first thing that has to go are the no-bid, guaranteed profit (cost plus), open ended contracts. These contracts are a bad idea from the start. They do nothing to ensure accountability and in fact encourage contractors to be wasteful in both time and money in order to drive up their profit.
The next thing that has to go is this fetishistic desire to be however many decades ahead of the rest of the world’s military technology. This causes us to spend money on programs like missile defense which are just sci-fi pipe dreams. Some weapon systems cannot be wished into existence, no matter how many billions you throw at them.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Clinton gets slammed even though his defense spending proposals were lifted intact from neo-con proposals.
It’s the singer not the song.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Note - It’s probably something like $45 billion dollars a year to add 1 million guard and reserve. That’s roughly 10% of the current military budget. If you sell the shift to personnel as strengthening defense then you have cover down the road to take a dramatic bite out of the other 90% of defense spending. When the GOP moans you say “we added a million troops!”.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:37 am
This illustrates another unquestioned item.
DeLong just assumes that our military is too good to be relegated to such scut work as police action. It would be a waste of money to relegate them to such.
However, according to military expert H. John Poole, the reverse it the case.
The brutal truth, according to Poole, is that - compared to Eastern armies - American soldiers are so poorly trained in basic combat skills that they are not up to police work. Poole asserts that the military value of the high tech equipment and training American soldiers have is trumped by the stealth skills that Eastern soldiers have mastered. He has written a series of books to this effect.
Poole asserts that adopting his changes would not only give rise to a better military but would be less expensive.
August 25th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I think another problem would be do we really want highly trained killing machines providing basic civilian type security. The skills needed for police work are very different than those for combat.
The fact that military spending is considered to be near-untouchable is a problem, especially since a large part of it is just corporate welfare. DDX, SDI, and RAH-66 for example. Sure you can cancel some of them, but keeping them canceled is hard to do, look at the B-1.
August 25th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Poole goes precisely into this in Dragon Days: Time for “Unconventional” Tactics
To compress a several hundred page argument into a sentence, basically, according to Poole, the hard-and-fast dichotomy between “combat” and “police work” is not useful given the realities of 21st century warfare.
August 25th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Add in the fact that military program expenditures are spaced out over several fiscal years to make them difficult to cut and the problem looks even worse.
August 25th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
There’s a great cover story in the May issue of Reason about the war spending budgetary shenanigans.