America’s Addiction To Military Spending

(Courtesy Think Progress)

The political discussion in Washington and across the country of late has been dominated by arguments over spending and the ballooning deficit and national debt. While last week’s deal between Democrats and House Republicans to slash an extra $40 billion of domestic spending averted a government shutdown, it did not include any substantive cuts to the portion of government spending that is eating up an increasingly large amount of the federal budgets: the United States military.

While members of both parties remain averse to significant reform to the bloated Pentagon budget, a new report outlines the scale of U.S. military spending that has outpaced every other country in the world.

To put it into context, America’s yearly war-making largess now makes up nearly half of all global military expenditures. By every country. In the entire world.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that the United States spent just under $700 billion on military expenditures in 2010, including the standard operating budget for the Pentagon and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was a 2.8 percent increase from the year before and amounts to more than the military spending of every other country combined, including six times as much as second-place China.

More worrisome is that military spending has grown to represent nearly 5 percent of the nation’s GDP, a figure the Stockholm think-tank says is ” the largest economic burden outside the Middle East.”  And that number is likely to rise given that military spending has gone up over 80 percent in the last decade.

Despite the shocking numbers on military costs and the ongoing debate over the deficit and spending cuts, no cures appear likely for America’s addiction to military spending.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has already asked for an increase in defense appropriations for the next fiscal year, and Gates and other military leaders are already seeking a long-term delay of the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq schedule for the end of the year. At least several thousand soldiers could remain in Iraq for an “extended stay.”

The partisan negotiations over the federal budget that almost caused a government shutdown last week saw Republicans pressing for — and receiving — billions of dollars in across-the-board cuts to domestic programs. But the Pentagon was spared, with only $2 billion sliced from total military spending for the remainder of the year, which still comes out to an increase from 2010 levels.

And while Republican lawmakers in Washington, along with an increasing number of Democrats and the White House itself, rattles sabers over the deficit and the need for a drastic reduction in federal spending, the Pentagon is apparently immune to their sweeping plans.

Take the budget blueprint released by Rep. Paul Ryan, the chair of the House Budget Committee and the GOP’s top man when it comes to “deficit reduction” plans and proposals (and a new favorite of the fawning Washington punditocracy). It’s been called “bold” and “imaginative.”  But it follows the status quo when it comes to the Pentagon.

Ryan’s proposal for “prosperity” includes trillions in cuts that impact nearly every facet of government spending, a wholesale revolution in Medicare and Medicaid, changes in the tax code (to benefit the rich, but that’s another story)…but nothing on the yearly leaps in military spending that has brought the total the United States spends to a mind-boggling total of a million dollars each year (including things like “homeland security” and spending on veterans).

Instead of taking on tough decisions in order to cut the defense pork, Ryan falls back on standard keywords to excuse the trillion dollar gorilla in the room that extols the virtues of “our brave men and women in uniform” and the “fierce enemy” we face from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond.

As Time Magazine’s Mark Thompson writes…

Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to cut the federal budget is garnering a lot of attention because it makes tough choices. Except when it comes to defense spending, that is. Unfortunately, the Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the House Budget Committee embraces the twin tom-toms used by those who think it’s perfectly fine for the U.S. to continue spending more money on the military than it did during the Cold War.

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Here’s what Ryan’s report says on that score: “Brave men and women in uniform are engaged with a fierce enemy in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other theaters of the ongoing global war on terrorism.” Kindly check your wallets when adjectives like “brave” and “fierce” are being thrown around in a purportedly objective document detailing our military needs.

Shockingly, the annual military spending spree by the federal government is not enough for some. One conservative think-tank has criticized President Obama’s proposed 2012 Pentagon budget of nearly $600 billion — excluding the two wars — as too low, calling instead for $720 billion to protect America from a “dangerous” world.

Again, from Time’s Mark Thompson…

Are we obligated to spend $10 billion annually on missile defense forever (every morning, Boeing boasts on Washington radio how its missile shield is defending the nation, which makes one wonder why they need to spend money to tell us that when there is nobody out there threatening us…it seems the military equivalent of giving every 5-year old on the soccer team a trophy)?