Donald Trump may be stingy with his money, but he likes to spend other people’s dollars. And since he doesn’t pay any taxes, all those tax dollars in the treasury are just other people’s money. That’s good, because he has some new toys in mind and he knows just how many he wants.
Donald Trump laid out a national security plan that would dramatically increase defense spending and troop levels during a Wednesday address at the Union League of Philadelphia. …
The real estate mogul, who has frequently criticized the expense of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the campaign trail, then pledged to eliminate the sequester on defense spending. Under his leadership, Trump said, the U.S. military would have an active army of about 540,000 people, a 36-batallion Marine Corps, larger Navy and Air Force fleets, a “state-of-the-art” missile defense system and greater funding for the Defense Department’s “cyber capabilities.”
And he’ll expand the military—by getting rid of the military:
He said he would end the caps on military spending, or sequester, that were imposed after the 2011 debt ceiling battle, adding that the additional spending would be offset through “common sense reforms” in other areas of government and by paring down military bureaucracy. But he did not offer specifics.
When you’re smarter than all the generals, you don’t need them any more. That should really save on the military bureaucracy.
If you’re keeping score, that’s about a 50,000 person increase in the Army, and about a bajillion dollars of spending on ships, planes, and thingamabobs that the services themselves haven’t requested.
Other than running the show direct from the Oval Office, how does Trump intend to pay for all this?
Some options included replacing retiring federal employees with a “smaller number of new employees,” trimming federal bureaucracy and “unleashing American energy.”
Unleashing energy. Because right now we’re all … leashed? But Trump isn’t counting on just Americans to pay for a bigger American military. He's also going to tap our overseas allies for some pay-for-protection.
Trump suggested that he would “respectfully” ask allied countries to whom the United States provides security to pay more for that protection and would urge all NATO allies to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense, as the United States does.
According to Trump, those NATO countries “will be happy to do it.” Germany, Japan, South Korea and the other countries that have U.S. military protection will “willfully understand” that they should pay more because they are “economic behemoths,” Trump predicted.
Build that military! And you know who’s going to pay for it? Other people. And they’re going to be happy about it. Just like the Mexicans will be about building that wall.
But Mr. Trump was otherwise vague on the specifics of how he would pay for his goal of building the Army to about 540,000 active troops; expanding the Navy to roughly 350 surface ships and submarines; and increasing the size of the Air Force to at least 1,200 fighter aircraft.
Not all of these numbers make sense. The Air Force already has more than 1,200 fighters in service, with hundreds more F-35s on order. So maybe what Trump means is that he’s going to make the Air Force smaller to pay for making the Army bigger? Likewise, the active and reserve fleets of the Navy include over 430 ships … though only 233 are commissioned combat vessels. So if Trump means bringing the whole force down to 350, that’s quite a cut. If he means bringing the combat level up to 350, that’s an insane increase.
Probably he means the insane increase. After all, it’s not his money.