http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=202057
Soon after the invasion of Iraq was launched, war supporters and critics
alike, in a bow to the Vietnam era, began to speak referentially of the
"Q-word" -- for "quagmire," of course. By now, Iraq has had that
administration-inspired "Q" hung firmly around its neck, but what of the
engine pushing it, the Pentagon? Perhaps the "S-word" (for financial
"sinkhole") is in order. Is there anything stranger, for instance, than the
fact that, post-9-11, we have -- and are financing -- two official "defense
departments," both with rising budgets? There's the Pentagon, of course, but
also the hapless Homeland Security Department (not to speak of the lucrative
"homeland security" business that has formed around it and is already a $59
billion thriving global concern). And don't even get me started on the 16
official "members" of the U.S. "intelligence community." You couldn't make
this sort of thing up -- and yet we're all paying for it.
As Robert Dreyfuss, Rolling Stone's national security correspondent and
author of the unnervingly prophetic Devil's Game: How the United States
Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, indicates below, our
trillion-dollar-a-year homeland security state is still not seen in the
White House or most of Congress as enough of enough. Naturally, the one
foreign-policy course that might dramatically reduce our astronomical
"defense" spending would be cutting back on the American imperial mission to
the planet. But with two wars already underway, a garrisoned world, and U.S
naval forces flooding the Persian Gulf (and now shelling Somalia), that
option makes so little sense in Washington that just about no one even
bothers to bring it up. So let the good times roll. Tom
Financing the Imperial Armed Forces
A Trillion Dollars and Nowhere to Go but Up
By Robert Dreyfuss
War critics are rightly disappointed over the inability of congressional
Democrats to mount an effective challenge to President Bush's Iraq
adventure. What began as a frontal assault on the war, with tough talk about
deadlines and timetables, has settled into something like a guerrilla-style
campaign to chip away at war policy until the edifice crumbles.
Still, Democratic criticism of administration policy in Iraq looks
muscle-bound when compared with the Party's readiness to go along with the
President's massive military buildup, domestically and globally. Nothing
underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign-policy realists and
hard-line exponents of neoconservative-style empire-building more than the
Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the budget of
the Defense Department without end, while increasing the size of the U.S.
Armed Forces. In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other
organizations that make up the official U.S. "intelligence community" or
IC -- including the CIA -- and on homeland security is going through the
roof.
The numbers are astonishing and, except for a hardy band of progressives
in the House of Representatives, Democrats willing to call for shrinking the
bloated Pentagon or intelligence budgets are essentially nonexistent. Among
presidential candidates, only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and New Mexico Governor
Bill Richardson even mention the possibility of cutting the defense budget.
Indeed, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at
present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the
Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000
to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines. (The current,
Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of
65,000 more Army recruits and 27,000 Marines by 2012.)
How astonishing are the budgetary numbers? Consider the trajectory of U.S.
defense spending over the last nearly two decades. From the end of the Cold
War into the mid-1990s, defense spending actually fell significantly. In
constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon's budget dropped from a peacetime high
of $376 billion, at the end of President Ronald Reagan's military buildup in
1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996. (That compares to post-World War II
wartime highs of $437 billion in 1953, during the Korean War, and $388
billion in 1968, at the peak of the War in Vietnam.) After the Soviet empire
peacefully disintegrated, the 1990s decline wasn't exactly the hoped-for
"peace dividend," but it wasn't peanuts either.
However, since September 12th, 2001, defense spending has simply exploded.
For 2008, the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion,
compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in
2001. Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing "Global War on Terrorism" --
which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan -- for FY 2008, the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion. In
other words, even without the President's two wars, defense spending will
have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. Given that the United States has
literally no significant enemy state to fight anywhere on the planet, this
represents a remarkable, if perverse, achievement. As a famous Democratic
politician once asked: Where is the outrage?
Neocons, war profiteers, and hardliners of all stripes still argue that
the "enemy" we face is a nonexistent bugaboo called "Islamofascism." It's
easy to imagine them laughing into their sleeves while they continue to
claim that the way to battle low-tech, rag-tag bands of leftover Al Qaeda
crazies is by spending billions of dollars on massively expensive, massively
powerful, futuristic weapons systems.
As always, a significant part of the defense bill is eaten up by these
big-ticket items. According to the reputable Center for Arms Control and
Nonproliferation, there are at least 28 pricey weapons systems that, just by
themselves, will rack up a whopping $44 billion in 2008. The projected cost
of these 28 systems -- which include fighter jets, the B-2 bomber, the V-22
Osprey, various advanced naval vessels, cruise-missile systems, and the
ultra-expensive aircraft carriers the Navy always demands -- will, in the
end, be more than $1 trillion. And that's not even including the Star Wars
missile-defense system, which at the moment soaks up about $11 billion a
year.
By one count, U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the
combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran,
Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. The United States accounts for almost
half -- approximately 48% -- of the entire world's spending on what we like
to call "defense." Again, according to the Center for Arms Control and
Nonproliferation, U.S. defense spending this year amounts to exactly twice
the combined military spending of the next six biggest military powers:
China, Russia, the U.K., France, Japan, and Germany.
Despite this, like presidential candidates Clinton and Obama, the
right-wing Democratic Leadership Council is pushing hard to tie the party to
increased military spending. Writes journalist Aaron Glantz:
"'America needs a bigger and better military,' reads an October report
by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, the policy arm of the
centrist Democratic Leadership Council that counts Senators Hillary Clinton
(D-NY) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) among its members.
"'Escalating conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the
all-volunteer force to the breaking point,' the report says. 'Democrats
should step forward with a plan to repair the damage, by adding more troops,
replenishing depleted stocks of equipment, and reorganizing the force around
the new missions of unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, and civil
reconstruction.'"
So hostile is the atmosphere in Congress to cuts of any sort in military
spending that even a recent effort by traditional defense critics to suggest
ways to reorient the Pentagon's budgetary priorities turned out to involve
but the most modest of rebalancings. A coalition of these critics from
organizations such as the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for
American Progress, and other left and left-center groups, including such
experts as Larry Korb of CAP, Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense
Alternatives, and William Hartung of the World Policy Institute, suggested
cutting $56 billion from offensive weapons systems, but then proposed to
shift fully $50 billion of it into areas such as homeland security,
international peacekeeping, and "nation building."
Why, exactly, we need to increase Pentagon spending even in those
categories is mystifying, since no country is actually threatening us and --
if the Iraqi and Afghani wars were settled -- the problem of terrorism could
be adequately dealt with by mobilizing relatively modest numbers of CIA
officers and FBI and law enforcement agents. The fact that such respected
defense critics feel compelled to put forward such a lame proposal is a sign
of our crimped times; a sign that, pragmatically speaking, it is simply
verboten to criticize Pentagon bloat, even given the current,
Democrat-controlled Congress. It's not that the public is pro-military
spending either. Indeed, in a Gallup Poll conducted in February, fully 43%
of Americans said they believed that the United States is spending "too
much" on defense, while only 20% said "too little." Rather, it's a sign that
the political class -- perhaps swayed by the influence of the
military-industrial complex and its army of lobbyists -- hasn't yet caught
up to public opinion.
And it's important to keep in mind that the official Pentagon budget
doesn't begin to tell the full story of American "defense" spending. In
addition to the $650 billion that the Pentagon will get in 2008, huge
additional sums will be spent on veterans care and interest on the national
debt accumulated from previous DOD spending that ballooned the deficit. In
all, those two accounts add $263 billion to the Pentagon budget, for a grand
total of $913 billion.
Then there are the intelligence and homeland security budgets. Back in the
1990s, when I started reporting on the CIA and the U.S. intelligence
community, its entire budget was about $27 billion. Last year, although the
number is supposed to be top secret, the Bush administration revealed that
intelligence spending had reached $44 billion. For 2008, according to media
reports, Congress is working on an authorization of $48 billion for our
spies.
Again, when I first wrote about "homeland security" in the late 1990s --
it was then called "counterterrorism" -- the Clinton administration was
spending $17 billion in interagency budgets in this area. For 2008, the
budget of the Department of Homeland Security -- that mishmash, incompetent
agency hurriedly assembled under pressure from uber-hawk Joe Lieberman (even
the Bush administration was initially opposed to its creation) -- will be
$46.4 billion.
To a rational observer, such spending -- totaling more than $1 trillion in
2008, according to the figures I've just cited -- seems quite literally
insane. During the Cold War, hawks scared Americans into tolerating
staggering but somewhat lesser sums by invoking the specter of Soviet
Communism. Does anyone, anywhere, truly believe that we need to spend more
than a trillion dollars a year to defend ourselves against small bands of
al-Qaeda fanatics?
Robert Dreyfuss, an independent journalist in the Washington, D.C. area
and Rolling Stone magazine's national security correspondent, is the author
of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
He writes frequently for Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, The Nation,
Mother Jones, and the Washington Monthly. His web site is
RobertDreyfuss.com.
Copyright 2007 Robert Dreyfuss
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