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Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Defense Needs To Be Part of Budget Debate
By Winthrop Quigley
Journal Staff Writer
The Congressional Budget Office released its long-term assessment of the federal budget last week, and it was scary. Oddly enough, though, CBO had not one word to say about national defense, where the federal government will spend 20 percent of taxpayers' dollars this fiscal year.
The nonpartisan, well-respected Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget issued its analysis of the CBO analysis the next day. It didn't mention the $664 billion defense budget either.
Our debt is expected to be 62 percent of gross domestic product at the end of the current fiscal year, up from 40 percent at the end of 2008. CBO projects that if things go really wrong, the federal debt could reach 185 percent of GDP by 2035. More likely, absent any big changes, it will be about 67 percent of GDP for the next decade or so.
CBO and the committee accurately observe that federal commitments to health spending, mostly on Medicare, and to spending on retiree pensions, mostly Social Security, which together consume about 40 percent of the current fiscal year's budget, have to be reassessed. These commitments are enormous and the sheer momentum of demographics means that without changes this spending is absolutely unsustainable.
A look at defense spending suggests that either our strategists are mired in a Cold War world that ceased to exist 20 years ago, or the force of American arms is not designed to defend our borders but to defend an empire. If we're fighting the Cold War, our leaders are incompetent. If we're building and defending an empire, they are dishonest about what our national interests really are.
With a change in command in Afghanistan, this seems like the perfect time to discuss, just as we are doing with health care and Social Security spending, what we want for our money and how much we're willing to spend to get it.
The scale of military spending by the United States is nothing short of astonishing. The Defense Department budget is bigger than that of all other federal departments and agencies combined. The second most expensive department is Health and Human Services, which at $78.7 billion is one-eighth the size of Defense.
The United States spends more on its military than the defense budgets of the next 17 biggest spending nations combined. China, the second biggest military spender in the world, has a military budget of $98.8 billion. Russia, our traditional rival, has budgeted $61 billion.
The American military owns, leases or otherwise controls acreage approximately equal to that of the state of New York. It has 539,000 buildings and other structures located at 4,700 sites in every state in the country, plus Washington, D.C., 121 sites in American territories and 716 sites in 38 other countries.
Presumably defense spending is guided by President Barack Obama's national security strategy, dated May 2010. The strategy is striking for its lack of military ambition and for the scope of its diplomatic ambition. On the military front, the government wants to defeat al-Qaida and its terrorist affiliates. In Afghanistan, we want to "reverse Taliban momentum" and improve security for the Afghan people. We want to keep Pakistan from becoming a failed state and we want to finish withdrawing troops from Iraq. We want to protect Europe from missile attacks from the Middle East. We want to "secure cyberspace," strengthen the NATO alliance, help Mexico defeat its drug cartels, and that's about it.
Our China, Russia, Sudan, North Korea, Iran, India, Africa and Latin America strategies all rely on alliance building, partnerships and diplomatic initiatives. Obviously, these efforts have to be backed by a credible American military. The question is, how much is enough?
It is reasonable to ask, how do our military installations in Antigua, Aruba and the Bahamas secure cyberspace or keep Pakistan from failing? Why do we have 270 facilities in Belgium, 29 in Luxembourg and 227 in the Netherlands, three countries that are so close and so small you could drive through all of them in a few hours in heavy traffic? How do those 526 facilities reverse Taliban momentum?
In Germany alone, the United States military operates on 187 sites. Back in the 1960s when there was some real possibility the Soviet Union would mount a massive tank offensive against Western Europe, this kind of presence made some sense. It makes no sense today.
I suspect budget-makers and analysts don't like to talk about military spending when our troops are in harm's way. It might look like our country isn't fully behind our men and women in uniform.
Expending our children's lives and the nation's treasure on things we the people don't really care about is not supporting our troops. We owe them our most mature, informed and thoughtful decisions. We're finally facing those decisions when it comes to health care and Social Security. Defense spending needs the same scrutiny.
Upfront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Winthrop Quigley at 823-3896 or wquigley@abqjournal.com
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