The Bush administration’s budget for fiscal 2009 proposes $2,650 billion in total expenditures. While 46 percent ($1,210 billion) are to pay for non-military outlays, a whopping 54 percent ($1,440 billion) are earmarked for the armed forces. The latter sum includes $653 billion for the Defense Department, $150 billion for defense-related spending by other departments, $38 billion, a relatively small amount, for the “war on terror,” and $162 billion vaguely categorized as supplemental military expenditures. Eighteen percent of the military budget is to cover the cost of past wars, such as veterans’ benefits and interest on borrowed funds.
The 2009 budget does not appear to be taking into account the full potential cost of continued U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though expensive future military operations overseas are clearly anticipated. This budget represents the highest level of spending since World War II when the U.S. was attacked and faced heavily armed enemy forces in both East Asia and Europe.
Today such existential tests of military strength and technology are nowhere in the offing unless the administration chooses to launch another unprovoked invasion of foreign territory. At present, our most threatening adversaries are hidden and widely dispersed terrorist cells of a few thousand Muslim volunteers equipped with relatively primitive arms.
The 2009 budget allots at least 4 percent of gross domestic product to the armed forces. Already in 2005, the U.S. military budget was larger than the combined cost of the world’s 168 biggest national defense budgets, and over eight times larger than the official military budget of China.
Critics claim that tens of billions of dollars are being wasted on systems such as the F-22 fighter plane, the V-22 Osprey (a helicopter that can be transformed into a conventional aircraft), the Virginia class submarine, and an unworkable and unnecessary missile defense system.
Most of these programs were initiated during the Cold War that ended 18 years ago and are not meeting urgent specific challenges in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. Proposals for troop increases that were made not only by the President but also by presidential hopefuls McCain, Clinton, and Obama apparently presume that we will continue to need more troops for occupied territories and military bases all over the world.
The website “Obama for President,” for example, states: “Expand the Military: We have learned from Iraq that our military needs more men and women in uniform to reduce the strain on our active force. Obama will increase the size of ground forces, adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 Marines.”
So far, the presidential contenders have chosen not to detail what foreign and military policies they propose to pursue. Do they recognize that even if Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had possessed nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, military force would not have been the most effective way to address the problem? Would they insist on rigorous inspections by international agencies as the best way to prevent dangerous weapons programs? And would they be willing to work against the proliferation of nuclear weapons worldwide, including China, Russia, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, and Iran, as well as Israel and our own country?
There exists a widespread fear that terrorists could obtain bombs or bomb-making materials from one of the states possessing nuclear arms, particularly where they are not adequately secured. That is why Congress endorsed the Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction program that invests in dismantling “loose nukes” and bomb-making materials in Russia and elsewhere. Regrettably, however, the President now wants to reduce funding for the Nunn-Lugar initiative to $414 million dollars, or less than two days worth of spending on the war in Iraq.
To be fair to the Bush administration, however, we also need to mention that it recently requested funds for the hiring of 1,000 new diplomats. They certainly are more urgently needed than bullets and bombs.