• Military spending Military spending By the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – January 5, 2005 Whatever the merits of America’s misadventures in Iraq – and they are few – the war may at last force Congress and the Pentagon to change
• Military spending
Military spending
By the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – January 5, 2005
Whatever the merits of America’s misadventures in Iraq – and they are few – the war may at last force Congress and the Pentagon to change the way they spend the nation’s $416 billion annual defense budget.
Simply put, the United States cannot afford to keep large numbers of troops deployed while simultaneously building weapons those troops are unlikely to need.
The Bush administration has come to realize that something has to give, particularly with a budget deficit almost precisely the size of the military budget. On Dec. 23, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz – ironically, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war – approved cutting $30 billion in hardware costs over the next six years.
Because of the nature of military appropriations, which stretch program costs over many years, the precise size of the cuts is hard to estimate. Some reports have suggested the cuts could be twice as deep.
But by the most conservative estimate, the Air Force and Lockheed Martin Corp. stand to lose $18 billion because of fewer purchases of F/A-22 Raptor fighter-attack planes and C-130J Hercules cargo planes. Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics would lose $8 billion in shipbuilding costs for next-generation destroyers and submarines. The Navy could see the USS John F. Kennedy, one of its 12 aircraft carriers, mothballed instead of refitted. Boeing Corp. could see $5 billion in missile defense spending cuts, as well as cuts in its St. Louis-based future combat systems program.
As significant as these cuts are, the trend is more significant.
More money is being shifted from hardware to manpower. The Army, badly strained from continuing deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, will gain $25 billion for recruiting and training new troops, as well as for retaining current soldiers. But every dollar that goes to a grunt on the ground is one that doesn’t go to a contractor in Guccis – or a plant worker in Georgia or St. Louis.
Already, key members of the Senate and House have begun rushing to defend defense projects in their home states. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., has vowed to protect the Air Force’s Raptor program; the plane is built in Marietta, Ga. Legislators in Florida, where the Kennedy is based, and Virginia, where it would be refitted, are complaining about downsizing the carrier fleet. Similar protests can be expected from other members of Congress as the cuts threaten jobs in their districts.
Counting supplemental appropriations for the global war on terrorism and the fighting in Iraq, the United States will spend well over half a trillion on defense this year. That’s an ungodly amount of money.
Even so, it’s not enough to have it all – boots and bullets, health care and housing, body armor and Buck Rogers missile systems – without running a deficit that will bankrupt us.
To paraphrase Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, this would be a good time to begin a debate on the military we need instead of the one we want.
