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Real Or Imaginary Cuts In The Pentagon Budget?

By Dr. Peter Custers

31 January, 2011
Countercurrents.org

On the memorable day of January the 6th, the US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs of the US military Mike Mullen held a press briefing about their budgetary plans for the coming year. The key message they conveyed is that the Pentagon is forced to limit its spending, and that the size of the budgetary ‘cuts’ is pretty large, amounting to no less than 70 Billion US Dollars. It reportedly took the American Defense Secretary half an hour to explain the planned ‘reductions’. Such detailed explanations were essential - as is evident from Gates’ words - to allay the fears of Republican Congressmen. The Pentagon’s newly found ‘modesty’, after a decade of steady annual increases in allocations, immediately got the headlines worldwide. If one were to stop halfway the story circulated one would really think President Obama has cruelly put the thumbscrews on the fingers of his military chiefs. Only in the later part of the story the truth comes out, to an extent. Here it is stated that the Pentagon plans, in fact, to spend a robust 553 Billion US Dollars in the year 2011/2012, and that this represents no slimmed budget at all, but a 13 Billion Dollar increase, i.e. 3 percent growth after inflation, over the current military budget. And if one were careful enough to read till the end, one would mark that even this is far from the full story. For the 553 Billion US Dollars do not yet include the yearly allocations for the US’s wars in the Middle East.

Facts on the US’s war expenditures alone provide a revealing picture on the state of affairs under Obama’s Presidency. Memories tend to be short, but many Americans will recall that Barack Obama gained much popularity when campaigning for presidency via his presumed ‘anti-war’- stance. He was seen as a firmer opponent of the war in Iraq than his then adversary, Hillary Clinton. Before his inauguration Obama promised he would wind down the war, would streamline the Pentagon’s arms’ purchasing policies, and would otherwise promote more openness regarding governmental military spending. Outlays for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have meanwhile been incorporated into the official budget. Yet the overall level of spending on Middle Eastern wars has not changed. The allocations are $158 Billion in the Pentagon’s 2011 ‘base budget’, which puts the official total at over $700 Billion. What Obama has done is not reduce the Pentagon’s war budget, but shift resources towards the Afghanistan war! In a report drafted in 2007, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garret-Peltier, two economists of the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), offered calculations for the number of jobs the US would gain from a transfer in resources - from the war in Iraq (then responsible for the bulk of war spending) - to spending on education and energy conservation. The outcome of the exercise was that the US population stood to gain between 600 thousand and 1 million jobs!

Next, it is useful to put US military spending into a global perspective. This Robert Gates and other Pentagon officials have sought to do themselves. For they have repeatedly hammered on a presumed, and growing, ‘military threat’ from China. One of the arguments they cite is that China’s leadership displays little openness and hides the true size of its arms’ spending. This is probably true but does not fundamentally affect comparisons between the overall size of US’s and the total size of China’s spending on its army. In fact, the Pentagon’s own budget hides crucial facts. US think tanks and academicians in recent years have become increasingly vocal regarding the underestimation implied by budget figures the Pentagon puts forward. Numerous allocations are included in the budgets of Departments other than the Department of Defense. For instance, allocations for the treatment of soldiers wounded in the US’s incessant wars, and the money for the retirement fund, i.e. the pensions of people who have served in the military. These two allocations alone in 2009 amounted to about 150 Billion US Dollars. Another figure some academicians add to the Pentagon’s figures is one for interest payment on loans, since military spending frequently contributes to US budget deficits,. This figure is likely to be over 100 Billion US Dollars per year. In reality, the US to all likelihood spends over one Trillion, i.e. a thousand Billion Dollars, on maintaining its military might!

What, then, is the global perspective on the US’s military spending? How to compare the US’s with military spending by the rest of the world? A relatively low estimate for the US’s proportion is provided by the Stockholm based International Peace Research Institute. SIPRI believes the US spent 43% of the world total in 2009. These data can be further supplemented. One US-based think tank, for instance, has compared the US contemporary share of the world total with the share the US spent during the Cold War, which was a reported 26%. Thus, the share has increased greatly during the last twenty years. In the past, the main rationale for wasteful spending put forward by the US military was the existence of a powerful adversary, i.e. the Soviet Union. And although there existed a never ending controversy over the exact size of this adversary´s arms´ spending, - it was possible to speak of two superpowers possessing comparable military strength. Yet today there simply exists no credible military adversary. There is not a single adversary of the US which alone, or in combination with other adversaries or potential adversaries, comes anywhere near the US - in terms of military spending, and in terms of the military technology developed towards protecting US supremacy.

Clearly, it is not sufficient to question Gates and McMullen’s story regarding presumed budget ‘cuts’. We also need to question the very rationale put forward by the Pentagon to justify its, ever larger, spending. US academicians rightly point out that spending levels, if calculated in constant Dollar terms, tower at the very same level as during peak years of past wars, i.e. the wars fought in Korea and Vietnam. Yet the wars the US fights in themselves cannot explain even remotely, why a Trillion Dollars are wasted on maintaining world hegemony. For this it is necessary to pinpoint the macro-economic significance of these expenditures, i.e. their significance for the US economy as a whole. To speak in the words of the leading 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes: when fighter planes, missiles and submarines are manufactured, these do generate ‘multiplier’ effects. And by keeping military spending at an artificially high level, the US government makes sure they extend to the whole, 15 Trillion-size US economy. Keynes did not oppose this form of public policymaking, but in passing admitted it means one generates ‘waste’. Isn’t it high time – and in the interest of humanity’s survival – that we question the Pentagon’s extraordinary waste of natural and human resources towards this end?

Dr. Peter Custers, Writer/journalist, the Netherlands

(Article published in The Daily Star, Dhaka, Bangladesh, January 29, 2011)





 


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