Defence spending

What about Colombia? our contry has been spending around 5% of GDP every year since 2000 and any thing help to our peace! War is it the answer?

Are the "Drivers" you show as a percentage of the budget take into account payroll social security and medicare deductions. How can you propose spending cuts taken from the backs of the retirees when the government has taken $1.7 trillion from their trust fund, or the Medicare recipients who are still paying premiums for care that is limited by the discretion of the insurance underwriters? At age 88, I am am still
making those payments. How about you and our elected officials? How about Greedy Corporate America?

All the rhetoric deals with numbers between 2012 and onward.
Military might was unable to win the invasion ofeither Iraq or Afghanistan Two backward countries that have drained trillions of dollars in following up,unfinished for at least another 20 years for non military reasons.

I always thought that militarycampaigns are, like football or basketballgames were to be won.
Did this change after Kuwait??

Perhaps the American Military can only win in tests of self defence.
However this has yet to be demonstrated.

We need another Harry Truman to take the wheel.
ahmencher@gmail.com.

Funny what is threatening the US military budget is not the pending cuts as much as the chronic insane cost overruns for every single weapon system which are delivered years late and billions over budget (just look at the new carriers being commissioned which are 5x over their original budget and will probably end closer to 8-10x before they are actually commissioned), the massive waste spent on maintaining a bloated and oversized nuclear weapons force and delivery systems associated with it (1,000 nuclear warheads deployed on a much slimmed down system would be more than adequate to deter any nuclear adversary including the Russians instead of spending the projected $300B+ over the next 10 years alone to maintain the current system), and the retirements costs for the pensions and especially the healthcare costs for veterans of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts.

The other thing is that the concept of a Defense Department begs the question of defense of what? Are we getting our money's worth of increased global trade compared to our military outlays? I don't know. I do know that if we have an effect, the rest of the world, with the possible exception of Great Britain is free riding to one extent or another.

But things like big surface ships are the squad cars of the global cop. They are only good for police actions where those on the receiving end don't have any serious capability. In any kind of real war they will either have to hide or will be sent to davey jones locker. Same with manned war planes, especially fighter jets. To the extent that speed and maneuverability still matter, the pilot and all the gear he needs to stay alive is dead weight. In any real war, the idea of manned fighter jets brings the word Agincourt to mind and the idea that we should be spending so much money on manned fighter jets is the last wheezing gasp of the middle ages and the joust and single combat. You can be that anybody we might conceivably have a serious problem with has been paying considerable attention to our recent use of drone planes.

A bit breathless. R.M. sounds as if he's been betrayed by his own colleague. Lexington simply concluded that the failure of the Super Committee means the fat years are over.

This is another example where reduced growth of hoped-for spending is described as "massive cuts".

Good post and I agree, but I'm curious about whether things like the VA and other ongoing liabilities are included. If after Iraq and Afghanistan, the military is going to owe a lot more to veterans in pensions and benefits in 2017 than it did in 2007, and if that comes out of the same budget then it could be that growing only 15% means big costs to contemporary military spending.

We should scrap the Next Generation Bomber and put it off for maybe a decade. Considering that the F-35 and F-22 have been huge debacles in cost overruns, I think the Pentagon needs to take a very close look at what it's doing before getting involved in another major procurement.

I can't speak to what the effect of the triggers will be but the bipartisan and non-partisan consensus seems to be that they're unacceptable. Like with climate change, I'll go with the experts until I'm convinced otherwise.

Setting funding levels by comparison is bad budgeting. According to Ron Paul, we can eliminate the IRS and still have 1990's revenue. Anyone think that's a good idea? I don't have the numbers but it's plausible that the US collects more tax revenue than all other countries combined. Is that an argument for lower taxes?

I want cuts in defense both immediate and more phased out over time. But they have to be based on need rather than irrelevant comparisons.

I can see the talking points now. If the rest of the world doesn't buy our debt, we'll be forced to use more cost-effective means of 'defense' such as bio/chem.

The military in the US is their way of doing social welfare. The training programs, make work programs, R&D research programs, etc. are huge. The rhetoric over "crippling of our military" is nothing but a smoke screen for protecting their favorite cash cow. As one American put it "The best job in town is at the armory".

Cheers

Funny, if you're not invading and policing the world, your national security will be very vulnerable. So let's turn everyone anti-American and after we finish with Iraq and Afghanistan, we're gonna bomb Iran. And after Iran, who knows who'll come?

I agree that defense spending should be considered during this time of tight economics. There certainly is a "Don't Touch" mentality when it comes to defense spending.

On the contrary, defense spending employs a considerable number of people, many of whom are first responders to natural disaster relief efforts such as the recent events in Japan and Haiti. Furthermore, defense spending in the past has contributed to the development of extraordinary beneficial technology such as the World Wide Web and GPS. What potential technology might we stifle because of thoughtless cuts? So to say (as some commenters have) that the U.S. only spends defense money to "blow [stuff] up" or police the world is not entirely accurate. When people are in need, they count on the U.S. to help out. How much U.S. defense spending is actually aid to other nations' defense systems?

I do appreciate the balanced nature of this article! Thanks for the food for thought!

I won't mention anthing about the defined-benefit retirements that the military contractor workers have.

I just popped in to say, "I "still" like Ike!"

Regards

My guess is that "19%" figure is an understatement, as portions of actual defense spending are not actually included under the DoD. Like our nukes.

Defense spending wastes societal and global resources, and also weakens the U.S. in the medium and long term. Cutting it seems like something people of most ideological persuasions should be able to get behind, but "spending a lot of money on things that can blow shit up" has been conflated with "patriotism" for too long now.

"I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade."

- Kurt Vonnegut

Nice to see a decent visual of the comparative magnitude of US spending vs. the rest of the world. Good show, RM.

Even better, though, would be a decent visual of US spending + allied spending vs. un-allied spending. That would give us a truer picture of the threat we face...

I think a reasonable approach would be to tie US military spending to that of the next X un-allied countries combined, where X is subject to negotiation. But probably not more than 10, I should imagine.

After all, it's pretty unlikely that allied countries will attack us. In fact, the nature of "allies" is that they would actually come to our defense. And it's also pretty unlikely that all of the un-allied countries in the world would attack us simultaneously.

Such an approach would provide a natural curb on military adventurism and nation building (see: Iraq), which would be, I daresay, conservative.

It would also force us to spend our dollars more wisely. For instance, how well are all those aircraft carriers doing in terms of protecting our troops from $40 fertilizer bombs in Afghanistan? Not so well, really. What's the ROI of our current infrastructure vis a vis our current threats? Not so good, really.

I am a conservative, but even I recognize that the defense budget needs to be trimmed. I don't have a huge problem with the cuts -- my big beef is that Social Security and Medicare also need to be cut. Along with defense, those 3 expenditures are the biggest budget busters, and are in dire need of trimming across the board.

EVERYTHING in Washington now has "doomsday scenario" painted in wet red lettering across the side. :(

Rhetoric is America's last great export...

But America needs a large military for two main reasons. First it fights more wars than all other nations (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq x 2, Afghanistan plus many smaller scraps in Latin America etc). It is a violent and aggressive nation. Second, and partly because of this, America has enemies all over the world. Anti-Americanism is active in Europe, South/Latin America, the Middle East, Russia, China, Asia. It therefore needs a large presence to defend itself from a range and depth of enemies far in excess of any other nation. A result of 50 years of aggression and belligerence all over the world. You can't simply ignore the past and become a regular nation with a regular sized military with so many enemies.