The Reading Blog

One of the things that I hope the new administration will examine closely is our unhealthily bloated military spending budget. And I am certainly no the only one thinks this is an important issue. To start, read The New York Times November 2, 2008 article “Pentagon expects Cuts in Military Spending” which reported that,

After years of unfettered growth in military budgets, Defense Department planners, top commanders and weapons manufacturers now say they are almost certain that the financial meltdown will have a serious impact on future Pentagon spending. Across the military services, deep apprehension has led to closed-door meetings and detailed calculations in anticipation of potential cuts. [...] The obvious targets for savings would be expensive new arms programs, which have racked up cost overruns of at least $300 billion for the top 75 weapons systems, according to the Government Accountability Office. Congressional budget experts say likely targets for reductions are the Army’s plans for fielding advanced combat systems, the Air Force’s Joint Strike Fighter, the Navy’s new destroyer and the ground-based missile defense system.

Then move on to The Nation (November 18, 2008) Editor’s Cut Katrina Vanden Heuvel “Smart Defense” which summarizes viable ways to trim the budget while maintaining the necessary strength and security. According to Vanden Heuvel,

[...] Even a senior Pentagon advisory group–the Defense Business Board –recently concluded that the current budget is “not sustainable.” And according to the Boston Globe, “Pentagon insiders and defense budget specialists say the Pentagon has been on a largely unchecked spending spree since 2001 that will prove politically difficult to curtail but nevertheless must be reined in.”The current budget allots over $500 billion to defense, and an additional $200 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a recent editorial in the New York Times tells us, the budget is “nearly equal to all of the rest of the world’s defense budgets combined.” It represents 57 percent of the total discretionary budget.

In Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2009, research fellow Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies, and former US Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, outline not only cuts that need to be made to implement a sane defense budget, but also the shift in priorities required to confront the real security challenges of the 21st century. The Unified Security Budget (USB) pulls “together in one place US spending on all of its security tools: tools of offense (military forces), defense (homeland security) and prevention (non-military international engagement.) This tool would make it easier for Congress to consider overall security spending priorities and the best allocation of them.”

In a recent DefenseNews op-ed, Pemberton and Korb write: “The balance between our spending on military forces and other security tools–like diplomacy, nonproliferation, foreign aid and homeland security–needs to change.”

For example, the USB demonstrates that forgoing the scheduled increase in the troubled F-22 fighter jet for FY 2008–$800 million–would be sufficient to triple the amount spent on debt cancellation in the world’s poorest countries. Or increase by 50 percent US contributions to international peacekeeping operations. Or triple the amount allocated in FY 2007 for domestic rail and transit security programs.

Along the same lines, canceling the Bush administration’s initiative to build offensive space weapons could provide the $800 million needed to double the originally requested annual budget for the State Department’s Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization.

The report offers $56 billion in cuts to spending on offensive weapons, and $50 billion in new expenditures on defense and prevention. It transforms the Bush administration’s 9:1 ratio of spending on offense as compared to defense and prevention, to 5:1. According to the report, “This budget would emphasize working with international partners to resolve conflicts and tackle looming human security problems like climate change; preventing the spread of nuclear materials by means other than regime change; and addressing the root causes of terrorism, while protecting the homeland against it.”

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and its Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) network of progressive experts also released a report last year– Just Security–which details how $213 billion could be cut from US military spending. Even with this cut the US would retain the largest military in the world and spend over eight times more than any of the next largest militaries.[...]