defense spending - c or d

OTM. There's no good reason why the US defense budget should be equal to the rest of the world's combined. I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing a global police force whose main purpose seems to be to ensnarl us in foreign conflicts and make us unpopular around the world.

To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail - and to a nation with a grossly inflated defense budget, every foreign policy problem looks like a military problem.

el sabor otFm. Can you imagine what this government would do to us if we actually had to engage in a full-scale ground war somewhere?

The 2007 budget will allocate roughly 800bn rubles (30bn USD) on defense spending, roughly 3% of the country's GDP. Growth in defense spending will be roughly proportionate to GDP growth, according to Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. Modernization of Russian armed forces was one of the key topics of President Putin's state of the nation address this year. Putin noted that even though Russia's defense spending was comparable to other nuclear states in GDP terms, that the gap in absolute figures was huge. And Russia needs to close that gap. Putin has also called for spending on military modernization and R&D to equal that spent on upkeep and ongoing expenses.

it makes a lot more sense to explode a nuke in the air then in ground, so less destructive energy is wasted.

Relative Size of US Military Spending, 1940--2003

It shows how defense spending really ballooned under Reagan. As a percentage of the discretionary budget, defense spending fell steadily under Clinton, so that at the end of his presidency it had returned to the level it was at when Reagan took office. Under Bush it has started growing again.

Winslow Wheeler on America's Defense Meltdown:

http://www.counterpunch.org/andrew12032008.html

The conventional wisdom amongst the elite in Washington is that they have done a pretty good job of taking care of our national defense, that things may be a little expensive but we have the best armed forces in the world, perhaps even in history, and we do the best for our troops by giving them the world’s most sophisticated equipment...

That’s all crap. None of it is true. None of it stands up to scrutiny. Let’s tick through it. First of all, we now have the largest defense budget in inflation-adjusted dollars since the end of World War Two. That has bought the smallest military establishment we have had since the end of World War Two. We now have fewer navy combat ships and submarines, fewer combat aircraft and fewer army fighting units than we have had at any point since the end of World War Two. Our major items of equipment are on average older than at any time during this period. Key elements of our fighting forces are badly trained. In other words we’re getting less for more....

Gates will do what he’s told on issues like Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s already made it clear that as far as managing the Pentagon is concerned he thinks he’s been doing a competent job. But during his tenure things have only gotten worse. The budget’s going up faster than ever before in recent history; the size of our forces is going south; the equipment continues to get older. We have a new report from the Congressional Budget Office that tracks the size of our weapons inventory and its age. This study shows that if everything goes perfectly according to Gates’ plans as revealed in his Pentagon budget, our forces will continue to shrink and the equipment will continue to get older.

The one exception is Obama’s plan to expand the number of combat units in the army and marine corps. That is turning out to be a question of much larger cost than people suspected. It’s going to cost us somewhere in excess of a hundred billion dollars. It’s very unclear therefore if that expansion is actually going to occur and the historic trend suggests that even if it does occur it will reverse itself in a few years and the additional units will be phased out.

from o. nate 2 years ago:

"There's no good reason why the US defense budget should be equal to the rest of the world's combined. I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing a global police force whose main purpose seems to be to ensnarl us in foreign conflicts and make us unpopular around the world."

of course there is a good reason our defense budget is so huge - probably a few reasons - but the main one is we are an empire. obama is an imperialist through and through. but, i have liked hearing barney frank and bernie sanders talking about slashing the defense budget. i hope there is pressure from the left on this issue.

Barney Frank:

Cut it

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....

The most glaringly obvious thing about the US military's budget is that they consistently buy weapons that are much too expensive to expend in war. When a $1,000 weapon like a RPG can take out a $30,000,000 weapon like a helicopter, your enemy can afford to flood the battlefield with cheap durable stuff, so that a really sizeable US force is going to burn through money like bejeezus trying to deal with it.

Our whole strategy seems to be, let's make our military appear so overwhelmingly superior that no one will dare to test it. Except the Vietnamese and Iraqis have already showed this to be a damn fool miscalculation and the whole world knows it.

No one, but no one would dream of invading the USA as a means of conquest and this would still be true if we spent 10% of what we now spend. So what's all this "defense" crap, anyway? Our current military is all about "offense", straight down the line. Which is for shit, in my view.

another fine Wheeler column:

Procurement in the 2007 "base" budget was $88 billion in inflation adjusted – "constant" – dollars. That amount is higher than any year since 1992, and $15 billion higher than Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney's last defense budget for 1993.

The problem is not money. Under this worse case scenario, the Pentagon would be left quite flush with money – plenty of it in historical terms.

The problem is that the Pentagon, as it currently exists, is incapable of surviving with less money; it is also incapable of surviving at a frozen – constant – level of spending. In truth, it is incapable of surviving with more money.

For years, more money for the Pentagon has meant smaller, older, less ready to fight forces. Since the 2000 DOD budget, presidents and Congress have added $1 trillion to the base (non-war) Pentagon budget and during that period our forces have decayed.

Between 2001 and 2012, the Navy's combat fleet shrank from 316 ships and submarines to 287, a decline of 10 percent. This is not a smaller, newer fleet; it is a smaller, older fleet—about four years older, on average, according to CBO. Is it better maintained and more ready to fight? Almost certainly not; for the past year the press has repeatedly reported on severe maintenance and readiness problems throughout the fleet, and Navy combat pilot training in the air has remained at historic lows.

The Air Force is worse off....

As long as the Pentagon is rewarded with special favor in the federal budget negotiations, business as usual there will prevail. Less money is the key to an affordable, reformed, more effective future for our armed forces; that may be counterintuitive, but so are smaller, older, less ready forces as a result of an added $1 trillion.....

That business as usual will mean that the forces are cut more than the money; the personnel budget is cut more than the hardware budget, and the troops and civilian workers are cut more than the bloat at the top. The decay – the shrinkage, the aging, and the lower readiness – will continue; in fact, it will accelerate.

http://counterpunch.org/wheeler08102011.html

Doug Henwood:

http://lbo-news.com/2011/08/04/wild-budget-math/