by David Axe
For 2007, the Pentagon got $432 billion plus $170 billion in supplementals. (All figures in this article ignore around $150 billion in annual spending by the energy and homeland security departments and the Veterans Administration - spending often counted, by many observers, as contributing to national security.)
A graph of annual military spending since 1947 plods along at $360 billion (in constant 2006 dollars) but shows spikes to over $500 billion for the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. Beginning in 2002, the graph skyrockets to well above even the most expensive year of the Korean War. U.S. military spending now exceeds all other nations combined, according to Winslow Wheeler of the Security Policy Working Group. "And our rate of growth [in military spending] is far in excess of the rest of the world."
But Wheeler concedes that even today's record constant-dollar spending accounts for just 3.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product, versus nearly 11 percent at the height of the Vietnam War, 6 percent during the 1970s and 4.1 percent during the early 1990s. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Peter W. Huggins, a professor at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, says that decline should be reversed. "Increasing the size of the pie, the overall defense budget, would allow all our nation's military services to fill pressing needs such as expanding the ranks, rebuilding and modernizing the force and preparing for the challenges that the future holds."
Others say the United States spends too much, and on the wrong priorities, with too little long-term planning. Dr. Cindy Williams, also of the Security Policy Working Group, says that expenses totaling as much as a trillion dollars over the next six years aren't included in current planning but will mean even bigger defense budgets in the future. Around $60 billion of that trillion pays for adding 92,000 soldiers and Marines, an initiative President George W. Bush announced during his January State of the Union Address.
"If the Administration were realistic about the true cost of the war … Americans would have questions about whether this war is affordable at all," Williams says.
That expense is unnecessary, according to Carl Conetta from the Project on Defense Alternatives. "What has been lacking in recent years is strategic wisdom, not military personnel. Any perceived shortfall in the latter derives from the former. It would be better to correct the error."
Conetta advises less reliance on military force for national security. Retired British Army General Rupert Smith in his new book The Utility of Force makes the same point, saying that today's "confrontations" call less for military solutions than for economic and diplomatic ones.
Wheeler concurs. Defense spending, he says, "is not saving us."