Barney Frank: The New Mandate on Defense
No, it’s not to spend more—it’s to spend less, and liberals should not flinch from that position.
Barney Frank
There were so many encouraging signs for liberals in the election results this year that one of the most significant has been overlooked. For the first time in my memory, a Democratic candidate for President argued for less military spending against a Republican candidate who called for great increases—and the Democrat won <...> I have been greatly frustrated in the conversation about the need to do long-term deficit reduction by the extent to which establishment opinion focuses on “entitlements”—namely efforts to provide decent means of support for Americans in our retirement years—as a major cause of the deficit, and ignores the extremely large contribution made to this problem by military expenditures that are far beyond any rational assessment of our national security.
A Changed World
In the past few years, with President Obama having completed the withdrawal from Iraq, with the killing of Osama bin Laden, and with the announcement of a plan to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014 (too late, but an improvement over the open-ended commitment Obama inherited), it has become possible to get some political traction for our efforts to cut military spending. Because so much of that spending stems from overreach advocated by those who believe that America should be the enforcer of order everywhere in the world—and because we subsidize our wealthy European and Asian allies by providing a defense for them so they need not spend much on their own—there has been increasing conservative support for reining in the military budget...Earlier this year, for the first time that I can recall, a majority of the House of Representatives voted to reduce the military appropriation recommended by the House Appropriations Committee. The cut was only $1.1 billion—less than it should have been—but it was a decision that froze spending at the previous year’s level, and it passed by a vote of 247-167, with the support of both an overwhelming majority of Democrats (158-21) and a significant minority of Republicans (89-146).
Deficit reduction over the long term must include significant reductions in military spending along with tax increases on the very wealthy if we are to avoid devastating virtually everything we do to promote the quality of life at home. A realistic reassessment of our true national security needs would mean a military budget significantly lower not only than the one President Obama inherited, but that which he now proposes. That is, by next year, we no longer should be forced to spend additional funds—close to $200 billion a year at their peak—in Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, we can reduce the base budget by approximately $1 trillion over a ten-year period (this includes the $487 billion reduction that President Obama proposed in early 2012) while maintaining more than enough military strength to fully protect our security and those of our allies that genuinely need help because they are too poor and weak in the face of powerful enemies. (Should the nation decide in a democratic way to go to war again, that would require an increase in the military budget, and I would hope, in taxation to pay for it.)
Getting the military budget down to that level—which would mean a reduction of about $250 billion from what it was in the first year of the Obama Administration—faced two obstacles at the beginning of this past year. First was the traditional political concern that the Republican presidential candidate would have an advantage over the Democrat on the question of who can better protect our national security. Fortunately, Obama understood that things have changed, and that the American people are ready for a reduction in military spending. Governor Romney, operating in the traditional conservative mode, missed it. One of the most important signs that the public was ready to support a rational—i.e., significantly reduced—military budget came during Clint Eastwood’s ramble at the Republican National Convention. One of the few coherent things he said in that memorable debate that he lost to a chair was that the President should have announced his willingness to pull out of Afghanistan altogether. This criticism of the President from an antiwar position elicited cheers from the Republican delegates.
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I don't know if it is 70% or 80%to be precise, but it is certainly in that ballpark. I offer you two simple ways to get at that.
1) Compare what we spend to others. Why do we spend so much more? Is our geography particularly hard to defend? Actually, no. We have vast oceans on the east and west and friendly neighbors on the north and south. Maybe one could argue we should spend twice what the UK or France spends, but they are much closer to the biggest threats. If we spent double France or the UK, that would be about $200Bn a year. But we spend WAY more than that, and that isn't even counting the CIA budget that is secret and immense.
2) Look at HOW we use our military. When was the last time we employed our military to defend Americans in America? The Civil War, I guess. The Spanish-American war was somewhat close to home, but still was about imperialism and expansionism, largely for the benefit of a few wealthy people. I would stipulate that WWII was in defense of Americans and the existence of our country. But everything else in the last 100 years has mostly been for the benefit of the wealthy. And most recently, our force has mostly been used for the benefit of multinational corporations that have no particular connection to America and pay little or no taxes here. Why are we paying for that? Shell and BP want us to stabilize the big oil regions, they ought to pay for that.
