"Washington opened the sluice gates of military spending after the 9/11 attacks primarily not because it was the appropriate thing to do strategically but because it was something the country could do when something had to be done," military scholar Richard Betts wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2007.
Now, the national debate on whether deficits matter is over. The Democrats win this one hands down, and no one argues anymore. I recently heard an expert (sorry, I can't remember who) say that disaster will be starting in 5-6 years unless we address our deficits. Some think it has already started.
Personally, I am still not convinced the recovery is necessarily real, though I will publicly concede here that my prediction of 6 months ago or so that the markets would fall by now has been proved wrong. Still, the recovery hasn't convinced me.
But even if we do have a solid recovery underway, no one now doubts that the debt will kill us---its just a question of when.
There are only 3 parts of the budget big enough to yield meaningful savings: social security, Medicare, and defense (sorry, no reference at this time, maybe another day.) The Republican Plan is to cut none of those, while harping endlessly on the stimulus, saying it "shouldn't have been spent." But what do we do now? We know we face disaster without spending cuts or tax increases. Tax increases at this point in the economic cycle would be a disaster.
The only rational solution is cuts. The only political possible cuts are in defense. As the article cited below points out, the Soviet Union is gone, who are we defending against? A possible Chinese threat 20 years from now? The way things are going, 20 years from now we will be reduced to perimeter defense of the US---if we can afford that!
Time, Feb 24, 2010
The U.S. military is now spending more on defense, on average, than it did during the Cold War — even after the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are erased. (See pictures of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.)
Let's repeat that: even without a superpower rival like the Soviet Union — with its arsenals of nuclear weapons, fleets of tanks and armadas of warships, all manned by 10-foot-tall Red Army troops — the U.S. is now spending more preparing for war against, well, who knows, than we spent readying to fight Moscow. And the Obama Administration has made it clear that defense spending is going to continue to increase, even as fiscal pressures — for bailouts, health care, infrastructure — inexorably mount.
As far as the eye can see, U.S. taxpayers will be spending one-third more to maintain the U.S. military than their parents and grandparents paid for the nation's Cold War force.
To be sure, it would be difficult to hack away at the funds needed to wage the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet military spending today is 41% more than it was in 1998, not even counting the billions earmarked for the wars. The cost of a standing military, after eliminating inflation's impact, has soared to $459,000 per trooper — 78% higher than during President Reagan's defense buildup, 95% higher than in 1989 and three times the Vietnam-era average, according to a recent study by the liberal-leaning Project on Defense Alternatives.