Defense Spending 101: The Truth about US Military Spending

To incentivize a long-term debt reduction deal, members of Congress last year set up painful mandatory cuts

called sequestration. Because budget negotiations failed, America’s men and women in uniform will suffer

nearly $500 billion in cuts over the next decade

–

unless Congress acts by Jan. 2. This 10 percent chop comes on top of more than $800 billion in cuts already imposed by the Obama administration. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta

says sequestration would be “devastating” but others contend the world’s mightiest military needs a trim. What

are the facts?

Didn’t US defense spending more than double during the last decade? Can’t we return

to those previous levels of spending as the wars wind down?

It is true that the defense budget has more than doubled. But those increases were largely tied to fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and conducting the war on terror globally. Not surprisingly, this has meant a near

tripling in the “operations and maintenance” segment of the defense budget as equipmen

t and ammunition is used at a far-higher rate than in peacetime. And when one removes the funds associated with fighting those wars, the underlying base defense budget from 2001 to 2008 only increased by an average of 4 percent annually, adjusted for inflation. Just looking to the last decade leaves out important parts of the story. When President Clinton was leaving the White House and Dick Cheney, then-

candidate for vice president, told the military that “help [was] on the way,” the country’s defense bur

den had fallen to a post

–

World War II low

—3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). The prior eight years had been marked by a “procurement holiday” in which too few new military

platforms (ships, planes, and helicopters, for example) were being developed and bought to replace aging inventories of military equipment. It was also a period in which general readiness, especially of the US Navy and the US Army, to go to war if necessary was low. In short, when one talks about the increase in the defense budget, one has also to remember the hole the American military was in. And, even so, the defense burden of the

base defense budget at the end of President Bush’s term in office stood at approximately 3.5 percent.

Since most of the new funds went to fighting the wars, rising personnel costs tied to putting servicemen and

women in harm’s way, and keeping increasingly aging equipment up and running, the problem of fixing the “procurement holiday” from the 1990s has not been adequately addressed. As An

drew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has noted, the increase in defense spending has produced

a relatively “hollow buildup” when it comes to new systems and new equipment.

And, finally, there remains the cost

of “resetting” the military; that is, ensuring the force that returns after

successive deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere and uses increasingly worn-out equipment in battle are given the necessary level of new training and working equipment to meet contingencies yet to come

—

as they surely will. There is not only a moral obligation to bind the wounds and tend to the families of those who have fought so well and so long, but also to provide them with what they need to continue to answer the call to service.

Sequestration hits discretionary spending and defense equally, $500 billion each. But

isn’t that the way it should be if Congress is incapable of managing to pass targeted

reductions in spending? What war are we going to lose if we cut $1 trillion from the defense budget?

As figures 1 and 2 indicate , sequestration does virtuall y nothing to address the source of the federal government’s fiscal problem, which comes from the unchecked growth in spending on social “entitlements.” In 2012, Medi