In case you were wondering if the debt-ceiling pact has ushered in a new age of thinking about military spending, the answer is no, hell no and no way. The hawks
are determined to keep cuts in the Pentagon budget to a minimum over the next decade, and the
lobbying has already begun. Or rather, it is being stepped up, because lobbying for military spending is relentless.
Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money in politics, predicted that the deficit-reduction talks will produce a “lobbying-palooza” on Capitol Hill.
“Any bill that involves this kind of money, the companies with a vested interest are going to spend whatever it takes to protect their bottom lines,” she said.
But the "lobbyists" don't just hail from the industrial portion of the military-industrial-congressional complex. Indeed, the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, has posted a letter on the Pentagon website noting potential dangers from ill-thought-out cuts, which, of course, sounds like plain old common sense. But he also called deep cuts "unacceptable." Directly addressing Pentagon personnel, he wrote:
I promised in my first message as secretary that I will fight for you. That means I will fight for you and your families as we face these budget challenges.
From Pentagon officials themselves there's a growing caterwaul about layoffs and other damage to the economy, but especially to the national security. That's a siren that, once sounded, is hard to shut off. And because, despite everything, Democrats are still labeled "weak on defense," it's an alarm likely to have a big impact on the coming debate. Expect the discussion to quickly shift from how much to cut from the military to how little can be cut and presented as a BFD.
The Obama administration has already told the Pentagon to prepare for cuts of $350 billion to $400 billion over the next 10 years. But $500 billion could be added to that if a triggering mechanism were to take effect because of a failure to agree on total spending cut by the so-called Super Congress. That's the bipartisan committee of 12 that is charged with coming up with a deficit-reducing agreement by December. If it doesn't, $1.2 trillion in mandatory cuts will kick in automatically, half of them in military spending.
But such expenditures under the agreement is broader than what gets spent by Pentagon. They include the budgets for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Energy, which has a substantial budget for dealing with the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. Some $100 billion of the total military spending could come from those three areas.
Another half-trillion in cuts for the Pentagon itself is widely seen by the military-industrial-congressional complex as way too much and, from Panetta, the generals, congressional hawks, weapons manufacturers, the usual ideologues like John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld and Bill Kristol, and the White House itself, which has hinted at a total 10-year cut about double the $350 billion already proposed.
But would an $850 billion cut be as draconian as it's being made out to be? Hardly.
The Congressional Budget Office puts military spending for 2011-2021 at $7.8 trillion if there were no cuts. The highest level of cuts that would incur if the Committee of 12 fails to come to agreement and the Pentagon has to eat half the mandatory cuts would bring military spending down to $6.85 trillion. But as Dean Baker points out, if U.S. military spending were to return to its pre-2001 percentage of GDP over that decade, it would clock in at $5.4 trillion.
The highest level of cuts would only trim 13 percent off the projected military budget for the next 10 years. As Gordon Adams, professor of U.S. foreign policy at American University’s School of International Service, reminds us, between 1985 and 1998, there was a 36 percent decrease in military spending. And “we ended up in 1998 with the force that used Saddam Hussein as a speed bump.”
As Larry Korb of the Center for American Progress has explained, we are now spending $250 billion more per year than during the Cold War. Getting back to the levels under presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton would require reductions of $250 billion to $300 billion annually. That's at least three times the maximum amount of cuts being proposed even if the Super Congress trigger goes into effect.
Critics who complain that the U.S. military needs overhauling because it's worn out—literally—after 10 years of war have a point. Certainly, despite caricatures of those of who seek far deeper long-term cuts in our bloated military, nobody wants the United States to have an obsolete, unprepared armed forces that makes our citizens vulnerable to attack.
But we've had a decade of ramped-up expenditures that now mean the United States spends 42.8 percent of the world total in military spending. And that's helping to kill our economy. National security is about a lot more than how much gets poured into the Pentagon.
Managers in the civilian side of America have long been told by their bosses and have passed onto their subordinates that they must do more with less. When it comes to the Pentagon, it's time to do less with less. Our military is overstretched because the mission is overstretched. Dealing with that, of course, requires a shift in the hegemonic foreign policy the United States has pursued since 1945. Ultimately, we're going to have that discussion, despite all the outcry from military-spending lobbyists inside and outside our government.