The Problem of Excessive Military Spending in the United States

[madmusic]

William Nordhaus
Yale University

One way to consider the size of our military expenditures is by comparison with other countries. Other countries face security threats, and they respond by allocating funds to security. Is it plausible that the United States faces a variety and severity of objective security threats that are equal to the rest of the world put together? I would think not. Unlike Israel, no serious country wishes to wipe the U.S. off the face of the earth. Unlike Russia, India, China, and much of Europe, no one has invaded the U.S. since the nineteenth century. We have common borders with two friendly democratic countries with which we have fought no wars for more than a century. Only one country has nuclear weapons that can seriously threaten our existence. One conclusion from this thought is that either the U.S. has a vastly exaggerated sense of threats to it; or that other countries, even the richest ones, are universally neglectful of the threats to their security.3This simple thought experiment is of course too simple. The future might be different from the past, and we may be facing a “different kind of enemy.” If that is indeed the case, then we would presumably be restructuring our spending to better meet the enemy rather than retaining the same basic structure, a point I return to below. Additionally, it might be that national security is a global public good that the U.S. is supplying for the rest of the world. This is a complicated issue. During the cold war, some countries probably felt that the U.S. was indeed protecting them. The U.S. did go to war to defend orliberate dozens of countries over the last century. However, more recently, many countries, even our traditional allies in Western Europe, especially their populations, appear to believe that our supply of the public good of security is in fact harming their security rather than enhancing it. Additionally, under the Bush doctrine, whatever the rhetoric, it is clear that our military strategy and actions are driven primarily by U.S. security issues, and alliances are primarily ones of convenience and opportunity.

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[Terran1212]

1. But it's taboo to talk about reducing military spending!

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Points that have been made many times...

over the years.

It's forgotten that not that long ago we were an isolationist nation, and even refused to enter WWII at first.

It seems that actually winning WWII has given us some curious sense of empire. We seem to require an "enemy" to justify our existence.

[davepc]

3. Yet nobody calls for the removal of US troops from Europe and Japan

once we have over half a million troops hanging around in the CONUS with nothing to do and nowhere to go will congress have an ability to question their funding.

Pull the US military out of Europe and Japan and let the Japanese and EU pay for their own security.

[Hippo_Tron]

4. The cold war is over

And yet we're still building nuclear weapons as though we actually have someone to compete against.

I'm all for spending whatever it takes to win the "war on terror", if you want to call it that. But we could save billions if not trillions by spending the money on trying to catch real terrorists as opposed to fighting useless wars like Iraq and not to even mention coming up with an energy policy that doesn't directly finance the people that we are trying to kill.

They can call me a weak on defense all they want, but what they don't get is that just because we are a superpower, doesn't mean that we can solve all of our problems by bombing the shit out of them. If it were that simple, then we would have won the "war on terror" by now seeing as we have plenty of bombs and are very good at using them.

I know that foreign policy and the economics that go along with it. I know that the US economy is dependant on the military industrial complex and getting rid of it would not only hurt corporations but it would put many people out of work at least in the short-term. I don't claim to have all of the answers. I do know, however, that it is time to try something different and that this administration has no intention of doing that.

Also, it doesn't take a genius to read a chart saying what we spend most of our money on. The GOP pretends that they can cut the defecit by cutting the budgets of many federal programs. Their solution not only hurts millions of Americans but throws pennies at a multi-trillion dollar problem. There are two places that you can cut the budget and make a REAL dent in the defecit: defense and entitlement programs. It's obvious they won't touch entitlement programs because of the backlash that we've already seen, so something's got to give. The other option, of course, is to raise taxes. And we all know how much Republicans love doing that.

[Muddy Waters Guitar]

5. Just what Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about

The military-industrial complex profits from war, and as it grows more politically powerful, the incentive for stupid wars goes way up. Noam Chomsky's talked a lot about this, and while I often disagree with him, on this topic he's spot on.