Cut the military budget I & II

Cut the Military Budget--I
By Christopher Hayes
This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.
February 11, 2009

The cardinal rule of bargaining is that the first number you propose should never be the number you actually think you can get, and nobody knows this better than the Defense Department. In September the Army Times reported that the Pentagon was preparing to box the new president in to a major increase in military spending by drawing up a budget before the election had been decided. The number it eventually leaked was $584 billion, a whopping increase of $68.6 billion over last year. It was kind of like telling the new boss that your old boss had already agreed to give you a $100,000 raise. In any other context, the sheer hubris would get you fired or laughed out of the room.

But the Pentagon budget is ruled by the appropriations equivalent of quantum physics, in which the normal rules of constraint do not apply. We still don't know how much the Obama administration is planning to give the Pentagon--the announcement of the number has been postponed--but reports indicate the number will likely be $527 billion, around an 8 percent increase instead of the 12 percent the Pentagon requested.

Despite that fact, propagandists like neoconservative Robert Kagan are already crying foul, arguing that the increase is insufficient and--more insidious--will cost jobs at a time when we're losing half a million a month. Military spending "is exactly the kind of expenditure that can have an immediate impact on the economy," Kagan recently wrote in the Washington Post, and any cuts would be a sign to the world that "the American retreat has begun."

"It seems like kind of the game they play every year," Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told me when I asked her about the rumored budget numbers. "The Pentagon puts out this hugely inflated number, and then it turns out that the 'cut' is from that hugely inflated number, so the Pentagon still wins. The number is $40 billion more than we spent last year."

You may think Barack Obama has the toughest job in Washington, but for my money it's Pemberton. Since 1989, when she left academia with a PhD in English, she's worked as an advocate for reining in the military-industrial complex in favor of a broader, less militarized approach to international security. Each year she and former Reagan Pentagon official and Center for American Progress senior fellow Lawrence Korb write an alternate Unified Security Budget. Their 2009 version identified $61 billion in cuts to military programs that could be made "with no sacrifice to our security."

Cutting the military budget has been a staple of the progressive agenda for decades, of course, but it's worth putting the budget numbers in context to highlight how out of control things have gotten across the Potomac in Arlington. Everybody knows that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been mind-bogglingly expensive--about a trillion-dollar bonfire. Less noticed has been the skyrocketing of non-war-specific Pentagon funding. Since 2001 the regular Pentagon budget has increased by 77 percent, while cost overruns in weapons systems have ballooned to $300 billion. "We've never been perfect there," says Korb. "But it has really gotten out of hand in the last eight years."

And those numbers don't fully capture the explosion in security spending because they don't capture security spending outside the Defense Department budget, in the departments of Justice, Energy, Homeland Security or the NSA and the CIA.

"Congress is not set up to consider the overall balance of what we're spending our money on," says Pemberton, who notes that the ratio of military to nonmilitary foreign engagement spending is eighteen to one. "Even the secretary of defense says this imbalance is not good for our security."

Indeed, over the past year Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made a series of speeches about shifting resources toward nonmilitary international engagement, as well as reducing spending on outdated weapons systems. "The spigot of defense spending that opened on 9/11 is closing," he told senators on the Armed Services Committee in January. "The economic crisis and resulting budget pressures," he said, would provide "one of those rare chances...to critically and ruthlessly separate appetites from real requirements, those things that are desirable in a perfect world from those things that are truly needed in light of the threats America faces and the missions we are likely to undertake in the years ahead."

Obama expressed similar sentiments on the campaign trail: "I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending," he said in a campaign video. "I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems."

Most recently, Rahm Emanuel hinted on Meet the Press that the administration might have the Pentagon in its sights as part of its promise to trim fat from the budget. "We have about $300 billion in cost overruns," he said. "That must be addressed, and we will be addressing it."

Sensing that the Obama administration has laid the rhetorical groundwork for a significant reduction of the inflated military budget, the military lobby has already launched a pre-emptive strike, pooling resources to fund a $2 million PR campaign arguing against cuts.

When in October Congressman Barney Frank called for a 25 percent reduction in the Pentagon's budget [see Frank's Comment on this page], GOP lawmakers went apoplectic, issuing a string of hysterical press releases attacking Frank as "reckless" and the proposed cuts as a "grossly irresponsible," "draconian" attempt to "gut national security."

The first concrete test of the strength of the military lobby and its allies in Congress is the battle over the fate of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet. Military experts agree that the F-22 is outdated and unnecessary. As Gates has noted, not a single F-22 mission had been flown in either of the current wars.

Production of the last Raptor is scheduled for 2011, but Congress has pressured the Pentagon (amazingly, against its will) to order more in this year's budget. Lockheed Martin, which stands to lose billions should the F-22 be discontinued, has launched an all-out PR war, leveraging the recession to argue that cutting the jet would mean the loss of 95,000 jobs. (It has even set up an online petition at preserveraptorjobs.com.) Most economists agree, however, that military spending is one of the least efficient ways of creating jobs per dollar of government spending.

That doesn't seem to bother members of Congress who represent districts where the F-22 is produced (a surprisingly high number, since the makers intentionally spread out production to maximize Congressional influence). When Obama took questions from Democratic House members at their annual retreat, the second question came from Georgia Representative David Scott, who pleaded to keep the F-22 going. Obama was evasive: "We also have to deal with the debt, and it is unsustainable. We have to make tough decisions."

Despite the encouraging rhetoric from the administration, Lockheed Martin won the first round in December, when Gates included funding for four additional F-22s in a draft of the upcoming war supplemental. Defense lobbyists scored another victory in the appointment of Bill Lynn as deputy defense secretary. A longtime lobbyist for Raytheon, Lynn was the first recipient of a waiver from the stringent new White House rules against hiring lobbyists. Says Pemberton of Lynn, "He never met a weapons system he didn't like."

The path of least resistance for the Obama administration, legendarily parsimonious with its political capital, will be to continue on the path and avoid what will unquestionably be a vicious and hard-fought battle to impose some kind of rational boundary on the security budget. The fight for a sane rebalancing of our security budget will be led by members of the House.

Earlier in the year, Pemberton met with one of the Obama transition teams to discuss the Pentagon budget. She wouldn't tell me what they discussed, but when I asked her whether she thought they were committed to reining in the Pentagon, the weary look her in eyes made me think it's going to be, in the words of a former defense secretary, a long, hard slog.

(Strange, a word search of this article didn't bring up oil , gas , or fuel .)

And fuck Lockheed Martin.


Cut the Military Budget--II
By Barney Frank
This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.

I am a great believer in freedom of expression and am proud of those times when I have been one of a few members of Congress to oppose censorship. I still hold close to an absolutist position, but I have been tempted recently to make an exception, not by banning speech but by requiring it. I would be very happy if there was some way to make it a misdemeanor for people to talk about reducing the budget deficit without including a recommendation that we substantially cut military spending.


Sadly, self-described centrist and even liberal organizations often talk about the need to curtail deficits by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that have a benign social purpose, but they fail to talk about one area where substantial budget reductions would have the doubly beneficial effect of cutting the deficit and diminishing expenditures that often do more harm than good. Obviously people should be concerned about the $700 billion Congress voted for this past fall to deal with the credit crisis. But even if none of that money were to be paid back--and most of it will be--it would involve a smaller drain on taxpayer dollars than the Iraq War will have cost us by the time it is concluded, and it is roughly equivalent to the $651 billion we will spend on all defense in this fiscal year.

When I am challenged by people--not all of them conservative--who tell me that they agree, for example, that we should enact comprehensive universal healthcare but wonder how to pay for it, my answer is that I do not know immediately where to get the funding but I know whom I should ask. I was in Congress on September 10, 2001, and I know there was no money in the budget at that time for a war in Iraq. So my answer is that I will go to the people who found the money for that war and ask them if they could find some for healthcare.

It is particularly inexplicable that so many self-styled moderates ignore the extraordinary increase in military spending. After all, George W. Bush himself has acknowledged its importance. As the December 20 Wall Street Journal notes, "The president remains adamant his budget troubles were the result of a ramp-up in defense spending." Bush then ends this rare burst of intellectual honesty by blaming all this "ramp-up" on the need to fight the war in Iraq.

Current plans call for us not only to spend hundreds of billions more in Iraq but to continue to spend even more over the next few years producing new weapons that might have been useful against the Soviet Union. Many of these weapons are technological marvels, but they have a central flaw: no conceivable enemy. It ought to be a requirement in spending all this money for a weapon that there be some need for it. In some cases we are developing weapons--in part because of nothing more than momentum--that lack not only a current military need but even a plausible use in any foreseeable future.

It is possible to debate how strong America should be militarily in relation to the rest of the world. But that is not a debate that needs to be entered into to reduce the military budget by a large amount. If, beginning one year from now, we were to cut military spending by 25 percent from its projected levels, we would still be immeasurably stronger than any combination of nations with whom we might be engaged.

Implicitly, some advocates of continued largesse for the Pentagon concede that the case cannot be made fully in terms of our need to be safe from physical attack. Ironically--even hypocritically, since many of those who make the case are in other contexts anti-government spending conservatives--they argue for a kind of weaponized Keynesianism that says military spending is important because it provides jobs and boosts the economy. Spending on military hardware does produce some jobs, but it is one of the most inefficient ways to deploy public funds to stimulate the economy. When I asked him years ago what he thought about military spending as stimulus, Alan Greenspan, to his credit, noted that from an economic standpoint military spending was like insurance: if necessary to meet its primary need, it had to be done, but it was not good for the economy; and to the extent that it could be reduced, the economy would benefit.

The math is compelling: if we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity even with a repeal of Bush's tax cuts for the very wealthy.

I am working with a variety of thoughtful analysts to show how we can make very substantial cuts in the military budget without in any way diminishing the security we need. I do not think it will be hard to make it clear to Americans that their well-being is far more endangered by a proposal for substantial reductions in Medicare, Social Security or other important domestic areas than it would be by canceling weapons systems that have no justification from any threat we are likely to face.

So those organizations, editorial boards and individuals who talk about the need for fiscal responsibility should be challenged to begin with the area where our spending has been the most irresponsible and has produced the least good for the dollars expended--our military budget. Both parties have for too long indulged the implicit notion that military spending is somehow irrelevant to reducing the deficit and have resisted applying to military spending the standards of efficiency that are applied to other programs. If we do not reduce the military budget, either we accustom ourselves to unending and increasing budget deficits, or we do severe harm to our ability to improve the quality of our lives through sensible public policy.

The only reason I put these articles up in full is because I'm pissed off at this publication. Every time I turn around I'm having to shred a bunch of junk mail begging me for $ to pay for the mail delivery of it. I specifically subscribed to this publication so I could read it online and avoid the build up of paper in the house because at that time there was no recycling pick up here. Not that any of my fucktard neighbors can separate the recyclables from the trash anyway.