Dollars and Nonsense

Fred Kaplan has a good review of BushCheney's FY2008 military budget at Slate. He sums up all the spending in and out of the Defense Department for a total of $739 billion.

The military budget that President Bush released today is much bigger than the official summaries let on. It's not $481.4 billion, as the Defense Department is claiming. No, a squint through the fine print of the White House and Pentagon budget documents reveals that the true request for new military-spending authority comes to $739 billion.

Measured in real terms (that is, adjusted for inflation), that's about one-third higher than the previous record for U.S. military spending, set in 1952, when more than 30,000 American soldiers were dying in the Korean War and the Pentagon was embarking on its massive Cold War rearmament drive.

Kaplan goes on to point out that no other nation can even remotely match the United States military. The irony is that this invincible force cannot prevail against determined bands of guerilla insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, which tells me that the US is either a) fighting the wrong war or b) poorly used in a world of assymetric warfare. Or both.

If I were king or president, military spending would drop precipitously. I think this nation can defend itself with far less. As Pierre Tristam notes, America spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. We could dial it down a bit at little risk to ourselves, despite all of the alarums and fearmongering by the polititians and military bureaucrats who seek to protect their favored programs and weapons,no matter how dubious.

Even more pernicious than the dollar cost of all this military might is the increasing militarization of American society. Tristam makes this point with the example of the Lichfield, Pennsylvania police department, now ready to defend (or attack) its citizens with a full array of military weaponry.

This is the America my generation will bequeath to our heirs?