One of the oddest things about American politics, and given all of its quirks that’s a pretty bold statement, is the way dollars spent on the military are denominated differently that dollars spent on everything else. Oh sure, we use the word “dollars” for both, but we conceive of them very differently. A swing of just fifty billion dollars over ten years is considered of huge political importance to the various health care reform packages floating around Congress at the moment. Yet numbers like those would hardly count as a rounding error on the annual defense budget and no one bats an eye.
With that in mind, it was both encouraging and saddening to see Barack Obama put his John Hancock on a $680 billion dollar military budget this week. On the encouraging front Obama and War Secretary Gates managed to score almost unprecedented victories against some of our stupider defense spending grotesqueries. On the saddening front those victories consisted mostly of political symbolism rather than any actual decrease in our inconceivably swollen and wasteful budget. The always reliable Armchair Generalist has some of the disheartening details, but the real tell is that in all 744 words of that rather fawning New York Times article there was never a dollar figure put on the savings.
As TomDispatch routinely chronicles, spending this much coin on what we laughably refer to as “defense” is literally killing us. Those are dollars we could be spending on things like health care, infrastructure, police, economic development, technological innovation, etcetera. Jo Comerford laid it out there recently:
According to the Office of Management and Budget, what that actually means is this: 55% of next year’s discretionary spending — that is, the spending negotiated by the President and Congress — will go to the military just to keep it chugging along.
The 14 million American children in poverty, the millions of citizens who will remain without health insurance (even if some version of the Baucus plan is passed), the 7.6 million people who have lost jobs since 2007, all of them will have to take a number. The same is true of the kinds of projects needed to improve the country’s disintegrating infrastructure, including the 25% of U.S. drinking water that was given a barely passing “D” by the American Society of Civil Engineers in a 2009 study.
But these are military dollars we’re talking about, and enumerating what else we could be buying with them always seems to fall flat rhetorically. We’ve grown so accustomed to treating them like a wholly separate part of the budget that they no longer feel like the same thing; and in a country that loves any excuse to go shopping that is a damning indictment.
How did things get like this? The short and extremely accurate answer was provided almost fifty years ago by outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower. It’s been cited so often over the last few decades that it’s become unfashionably trite, but that doesn’t make it any less true:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual –is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
We have failed – totally – to heed Eisenhower’s warning. Over the intervening years the nearly ruinous results of that failure have become so common as to be unremarkable. Consider that the Times article linked above, an article about the military budget, a budget that has very few restrictions placed upon it because it is considered a matter of life and death, is not in the “News” section of the paper. It’s in the “Business” section. That’s a dead giveaway and it tells you all you really need to know.
The Obama Administration has done admirable things with the defense budget, most notably putting the costs of our sophomoric imperialism right up front along with the rest of the numbers instead of hiding them behind transparent euphemisms (“emergency funding”) like his wretched predecessor. It’s a step in the right direction, toward treating military dollars just like the regular kind. But in this case correcting the mistakes of Bush the Younger alone won’t be enough; this beast has been gorging for five decades and it cannot be tamed in nine months. Obama and Gates had to wage an intense, albeit relatively low key, political campaign to win even modest victories this year. Let’s hope they’re prepared for more, because only serious and sustained presidential attention has any chance of staving off war induced bankruptcy.
