An Inadequate Defense Budget? Compared to Whom? Compared
to When?
by Winslow T. Wheeler
Many Republicans and numerous Democrats, especially on the House and
Senate Armed Services Committees, have been characterizing the US defense budget
as inadequate.
They propose to release the Pentagon from the
statutory spending caps set by the Budget Control Act of 2011 and its
"sequestration," which would keep some, but not all, Pentagon spending in the
neighborhood of $500 billion, annually, for several years. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the
Secretary of Defense and any other Pentagon official near a microphone have been
cheering them on.
Absent from all their talking points are three salient facts:
1.
President Obama's 2015
request for all national security related programs would exceed $1 Trillion;
2.
the US outspends any
other nation, especially presumed threat nations, by a huge amount,
and
3.
under the dreaded
sequestration, the Pentagon portion of national security spending would remain
at historically high levels.
There is a major mismatch between the actual size of the US defense
budget and the characterization of inadequacy given to it. The enormity of the US defense
budget, even under sequestration, is readily apparent in both relative and
absolute terms.
Each year, the International Institute for Strategic
Studies (IISS) in London and the
Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI) release
independent and widely respected estimates of international defense
spending.
While their methodologies and, therefore, their
estimates differ, their data show the same fundamental picture: the US vastly
outspends what many in the US today characterize as the threat nations: China,
Russia, Iran, Syria and North Korea. We
outspend them not just individually but collectively, by a factor of at least
two.
The
data for 2013, the latest available, are shown in the figure
below.
(Note that, as stated in the comment in the graph, the data for Iran,
Syria and North Korea are from previous years or-in one case-the CIA's World
Fact Book.
This is because of measurement uncertainties for
more recent years.
However, in no case would more up to date data
alter the overall picture.)
The IISS released its data in a publication titled The Military Balance earlier this year; the SIPRI just released its data base
this week. While the two differ (SIPRI's estimates include spending outside
official defense budgets) and some may disagree with one or the other
methodology, the basic picture is the same: US defense spending is more than
twice the size of all presumed threat nations combined. According to the IISS, the US
spending is 2.9 times the presumed threats; according to the SIPRI, the US is
2.1 times them all.
Notably, the budget year displayed, 2013, is the
first year that the sequestration process went into effect in the
US.
In order to support its world-wide empire at the turn of the 19th
century, Great Britain adopted the "two power standard" which called for the Royal Navy to be equal to the combined strength of the next two largest navies in the
world.
The US has more than doubled that standard as
regards budgets, and yet our politicians and senior defense officials complain
such outspending is inadequate.
There
are two caveats to the argument that these data show the defense budget to be
disproportionately large, not small: one puts current spending in a historic
context that shows today's over-spending to be even more inappropriate; the
other calls into question whether it is the size of current spending or the
quality of America's national security leadership that is
inadequate.
First, it is fundamentally misleading to characterize China, and even
Russia, as major threat nations. Today is very much unlike the 1948-1990 Cold War when the Soviet
Union and the Warsaw Pact constituted an ongoing existential nuclear and
conventional threat to the US and a dogmatically communist People's Republic of
China actively fought US armed forces or supported others doing so in two wars
involving hundreds of thousands of US ground forces. Instead, China is a major trading
partner and creditor nation with the US, and Russia, even taking into account
its occupation of Crimea and potential further invasion of Ukraine (no matter
what the cause), constitutes a regional power, even if major, very unlike the international
superpower the Soviet Union comprised and that exercised itself with active
hostility throughout Europe, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
When we faced these truly existential threats, the Pentagon's budget
was significantly smaller than today. See the graph below annually
displaying the Pentagon's post-World War Two budgets in dollars adjusted for
inflation using the Office of Management and Budget's economy-wide
deflator.
Note especially how today's so-called "inadequate"
spending compares to average annual spending during the Cold War (the dashed,
horizontal line, which occurs at the $355 billion
level).
That we today declare ourselves inadequately funded at a far higher
level of spending than we budgeted against a much larger, much more hostile
threat is remarkable. More money in the face of lesser
threats is not quite the penury so many claim.
Second, we should listen closely when today's political and military
leaders asset they cannot manage at the spending levels they face under the
Budget Control Act.
They are quite correct to say they are unable to do
so.
Recent history proves
that.
·
Our military hardware is outrageously expensive, but much of it
is a step backwards in performance.
·
Since the mid-1990s Congress has increased money for DOD pay and
benefits but huge portions of it has been for indiscriminant, across-the-board
military pay raises, double pensions for many armed service retirees, bigger
benefits for the survivors of World War Two veterans and much else that is
intended to buy off political constituencies rather than address real security
problems, let alone the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
·
Under the full-on spigot of the post-9/11 era, the Pentagon's
civilian and military leadership has bloated itself to historically
unprecedented levels of overhead, including military staff, civilian government
employees and contracted-out personnel.
·
In their ultimate malfeasance, none of our national security
leaders have bothered to fundamentally understand the dimension of the
overspending problem as the Pentagon remains unaudited and un-auditable
twenty-four years after the passage of the Chief Financial Officers Act of
1990-intended to require the Pentagon to understand and report what it does with
its money.
The relationship of US defense spending to that of presumed
threat nations and the girth of contemporary defense spending compared to a time
of greater threat does not call into question the adequacy of the size of
today's US defense budget; it calls into question the competence of current US
political and military leadership, both in the Pentagon and in
Congress.
No comments:
Post a Comment