(Chart by SIPRI)

(Chart by SIPRI)

Once unthinkable in a time of two wars, Democrats and Republicans alike are insisting that the billions spent on the military can be significantly cut back over the next decade as the nation struggles to reduce its spiraling debt. [...] Although the long-range proposals favor significant defense cuts, many Republicans and Democrats have been reluctant this year to vote for reductions. Earlier this month, the House overwhelmingly backed a $649 billion defense spending bill that boosted the Pentagon budget by $17 billion. The legislation included $119 billion for the two wars. During debate, the House easily turned back efforts by liberal Democrats and tea party Republicans to slash billions. Still, tea party-backed Republicans have prevailed on occasion, most notably in February when they led the effort to eliminate funds for a second engine for the next-generation F-35 fighter plane.

Donna Cassata writes

When Senators are talking $800 billion in defense cuts over 10 years, with Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) upping that to $1 trillion, and Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) doing likewise, it's made to sound in the traditional media somehow like every dirty friggin' hippie's wildest dream. It's certainly a move in the right direction. But, in fact, all the proposals presented so far don't go deep enough given how much defense spending soared in the 2000s. But it's too deep, according to the generals.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States spent 42.8 percent of total world military expenditures in 2010. That's 11 percent more than the total of the next nine largest spenders. And just three weeks ago, the House passed an incredible $649 billion defense bill for next year that is $17 billion more than this year.

Actual spending for military purposes is much higher. There's the portion of the interest on the debt that covers the cost of previous wars, and the cost of taking care of veterans of those wars, and the portion of the Department of Energy's budget that covers nuclear weapons, and the cost of some CIA operations, all of which brings the total to a trillion or more a year depending on what is included or left out.

We shouldn't be cutting veterans benefits, obviously. But perhaps we can find ways to create fewer veterans in the future.

The cuts proposed just don't go far enough in making that possibility a reality. The Frank-Paul proposal, for instance, plans for only $147 billion in savings over 10 years for the Afghan and Iraq wars. But the United States will spend $165 billion on those wars in 2012 alone. Only in a scenario in which the U.S. remains in those countries long beyond what we've been told will be the case would that level of savings make sense.

And then there are those foreign bases.

“According to the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report, the U.S. military now maintains 662 foreign sites in 38 countries around the world,” Nick Turse wrote in Salon in January. He went on to say that's a ridiculous undercount:



To give an example, the 2010 Base Structure Report lists one nameless U.S. site in Kuwait. Yet we know that the Persian Gulf state hosts a number of U.S. military facilities including Camp Arifjan, Camp Buering, Camp Virginia, Kuwait Naval Base, Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Udari Range. Add in these missing sites and the total number of bases abroad reaches 1,074. Check the Pentagon's base tally for Qatar and you'll come up empty. But look at the numbers of Department of Defense personnel serving overseas and you'll find more than 550 service men and women deployed there. [...] Saudi Arabia is also missing from the Pentagon's tally, even though the current list of personnel abroad indicates that hundreds of U.S. troops are deployed there. From the lead up to the First Gulf War in 1990 through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military stationed thousands of troops in the kingdom. In 2003, in response to fundamentalist pressure on the Saudi government, Washington announced that it was pulling all but a small number of troops out of the country. Yet the U.S. continues to train and advise from sites like Eskan Village, a compound 20 kilometers south of Riyadh where, according to 2009 numbers, 800 U.S. personnel (500 of them advisors) were based.

It's grand that both Republicans and Democrats are considering big cuts in defense spending. But they aren't nearly big enough. And as long as there continue to be bipartisan votes for more spending like the lopsided one that just passed the House with only 87 "nays," even those proposals are a pipedream held in check by war hawks and the military-industrial-congressional complex. When will we ever learn?