Activists question how US can justify spending even more on defense ‘when we can’t manage to turn the lights on in Puerto Rico’

Does the US really need a huge boost in military spending?

Donald Trump’s new idea for a grand military parade has been met with an outcry from critics, who warn that in addition to its strong despotic whiff, such a stunt would waste millions of taxpayer dollars.



But the Pentagon might soon find itself with more flexibility to satisfy that presidential whim and more, if a budget deal expected to be struck in the Senate this week goes through.

The bipartisan budget was expected to include $716bn for military spending in 2019, up 13% from 2017 spending levels and a solid 7% rise from what the White House had requested. The increase would be achieved by temporarily removing caps imposed by the so-called sequester of 2013 and by additional “emergency” funding tagged for “overseas contingency operations”.

Critics, including Stephen Miles, director of the Washington DC-based Win Without War advocacy group, said the new military spending numbers were a symptom of misplaced national priorities.

Congress rushes again to pass budget deal amid fresh bipartisan opposition Read more

“When our nation can’t manage to turn the lights on for the people of Puerto Rico, when we can’t help those suffering from opioid addiction get treatment, and when we can’t ensure education and healthcare to all of our citizens, how is it possible we can justify spending billions more on weapons that don’t work to fight enemies that don’t exist?” Miles said in a statement issued on Wednesday.

The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, supported the deal, calling it a “win for the American people”.

In 2016, as the world’s biggest military spender, the United States racked up a larger outlay ($611bn) than the next eight countries combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The potential $80bn leap in military spending in 2018 would itself surpass the total annual military budget of any other country apart from China.



The extraordinary levels of US defense expenditure were highlighted in a recent report by the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

The US “spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France and Japan combined”, the report said, and yet “US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world”.

Military leaders and elected officials from both major parties have for years been calling for an increase in military budgets, arguing that the United States has a unique role in contributing to international order and a unique challenge in securing its citizens.

“It is incumbent upon us to field a more lethal force if our nation is to retain the ability to defend ourselves and what we stand for,” the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, said in outlining a new national defense strategy last month.

The new US strategy states that “inter-state strategic competition”, especially with China and Russia, and “not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security”. The strategy called for funding to build “a more lethal, resilient, and rapidly innovating Joint Force”.

Mattis has lobbied Trump to support a larger US military footprint in Afghanistan, where US troops have been stationed continuously for more than 16 years, and elsewhere overseas.

Trump seized on the proposed bump in military spending as a key to selling the budget deal, which must be passed through both houses of Congress before he can sign it.

“The Budget Agreement today is so important for our great Military,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “It ends the dangerous sequester and gives Secretary Mattis what he needs to keep America Great. Republicans and Democrats must support our troops and support this Bill!”

The public sense that the defense department needs more money may have been damaged earlier this week, however, by the revelation that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies had lost track of more than $800m in construction projects, according to an internal audit by the accounting giant Ernst & Young. Politico first obtained the report.

The prospect of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars going down a similar hole prompted grumbling among Democrats.

“The last thing we should be doing is approving another increase in defense spending without first determining how the Department of Defense is spending our tax dollars,” tweeted the congressman Ro Khanna of California.

Other elected officials warned that free military spending would contribute to an explosion in the national deficit, on top of trillions in projected shortfalls from Trump’s tax plan, disaster relief spending and, possibly, infrastructure spending.

The House speaker, Paul Ryan, dismissed that criticism on Thursday. “We could get rid of the military and we still would have a deficit,” he said.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate economist, mocked the newfound conservative sanguinity about deficits.

“Why, it’s almost as if all those deficit hawks were phonies from the beginning, using fake fiscal concerns to hobble a Democratic president,” Krugman tweeted.