We have to reduce our military and defense spending. Wait! Don't go yet! I know what you expect. You expect to hear that conservatives, most notably Ronald Reagan, have built a huge, unmanageable, and undesirable military-industrial complex that does as much to defend our country as it does to encourage military options too quickly in international scuffles. Then you expect a slam-dunk rebuke of Republican congressmen that are always willing to give another dollar for guns but not a penny for health care, welfare, or education.
It would probably be worth reading that argument again, so that we all remember why America has been committed to such an expansive military in the last few decades. But I don't think rehashing that here will help us actually address the excessive military spending that is going on.
I bring military spending up because we have an enormous deficit and national debt right now. When I was 10 years old, the national debt was just over five trillion dollars. As my age has doubled, the national debt has more than doubled, putting it at over 12 trillion today. Is it going to be at 20 trillion when I'm 40 years old and 40 trillion when I'm 80? Just because my age is doubling doesn't mean I want the national debt to be.
Of course, deriding the size of the debt right now is really easy. We're in two wars and have been spending day and night over the last two years to keep our country out of a depression. It's about as basic as Keynesian economics gets: have the government spend more during an economic depression to turn the economy around. Pay back that debt when the economy is booming once again.
I have no hopes that trimming military spending is going to assuage all of our spending problems. Our government needs to keep a close eye on every dollar we spend. But military spending is often treated as sacred and above fiscal responsibility. Our national defense is obviously a much different matter than our education spending and deserves to be treated as such. Yet as military spending has increased over the last decade, and continues to increase under Obama's most recently proposed budget, it's worth asking if the military can't be one place where we can trim some excess.
Republicans have a tendency to get up in arms (pun intended) any time significant reductions to military spending are suggested. They believe that Democrats don't understand how vital our national defense is, don't appreciate the job we have carrying the world's Big Stick, and don't understand how much that costs. Republicans are probably right; the left doesn't always get or appreciate quite how far our military dominance goes toward protecting our global economy. Obama's desire to engage in vibrant diplomacy throughout the world is predicated on economic and military supremacy and some of that is reflected in how much money we spend on our military.
But because Republicans are so defensive over the military's budget, they attack any move to cut the military as totally unacceptable. They worry that giving an inch will mean a mile and cutting a single weapons program will turn into 20, even if some of those weapons programs aren't the most efficient or vital of programs.
And because policy is too frequently a matter of politics, the right postures themselves in the debate to paint Democrats as weak on national security, weak on protecting the American people, and ultimately unpatriotic. Just imagine how different it would have been for Bush to suggest cutting a weapons program than it is today for Obama. Republicans might have attacked Bush over the specifics of the program, but they'll attack Obama as a weak, peace-loving liberal. When politics make such a huge difference in the "policy" discussion, someone's being dishonest.
Here are some of the facts about military spending: according to a recent Time article by Mark Thompson, "The U.S. military is now spending more on defense, on average, than it did during the Cold War—even after the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are erased." In the 1980s, the reason for a burgeoning defense budget was the evil Soviet Empire.
But the Cold War is over. There's no arms race anymore. Our defense budget should reflect as much. Just as the end of the Cold War has meant a steady reduction of our nuclear arsenal, under both Clinton and George W. Bush, so should it mean a notable decrease in our military spending. I'm not advocating a dramatic reinterpretation of our defense budget, but we also can't ignore the fact that defense spending has only been growing for the last decade.
There are a few steps we should consider. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the Economic Club of Chicago this summer that "our [military] spending and program priorities are increasingly divorced from the very real threats of today and the growing ones of tomorrow." We still spend too much money based on Cold War ideas of conventional military engagement. The experiences we've had in Iraq, Afghanistan, and any number of places around the world show that conventional, mass invasion-type troops and weapons aren't our primary mode of war these days. As we strive to reduce spending, we should also work to restructure our spending to focus on the kinds of special forces and small conflict weapons that we need.
We should also consider creating a weapons program commission based off of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. When faced with the problem of closing military bases that were of little use but were very important to certain legislators and their districts, Congress formed an objective, nonpartisan commission to recommend base closings. (It's the commission that closed the naval base here in Brunswick.)
Weapons systems face the same problems that bases do: they create lots of jobs and are vital to the economies of individual towns across the country, regardless of their military usefulness. No politician can be seen advocating against a defense contract that would help their district. Politicians need an external group of experts to make nonpartisan recommendations that can't be derailed by pork-seeking legislators. Such a commission would ensure that important and workable defense contracts and weapons systems remained while ending excessive military spending that does more to provide jobs than security.
The bottom line is that a five to 10 percent decrease in military spending, carefully and intelligently executed over the next few years as we leave Iraq and Afghanistan, could go a long way towards lowering next year's projected $1.6 trillion deficit without risking our security at home or abroad. We can admit that we're spending beyond our means without giving up our military dominance in the world. If we don't find ways to trim our current budgets, both military and otherwise, a new round of taxes are going to be the only feasible way to get our budget under control. Just remember, it's not all about the size of your guns; it's more about how you choose to wield them.