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EDITORIAL

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Belief in the permanent need for a massive military has evolved into an American article of faith over 60 years. With a war on terror now as deeply entrenched as the Cold War was, that faith seems unshakable. Year after year, ballooning military budgets draw scarcely a critical glance from citizens spellbound by a culture of war and fear.

The most staggering fact about the newly released $515 billion U.S. military budget proposal for 2009 is that it equals — or exceeds, depending on who crunches the numbers — the rest of the world’s military spending combined.

And, amazingly, that leaves out a lot of what the United States actually pays for “defense.”

First, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are separate from the Pentagon’s basic spending plan. The 2009 proposed federal budget includes $70 billion for these wars, which have already cost $691 billion. That $70 billion will cover only a few months of war costs. Observers say that number will double or even triple.

Other military costs fall in various categories. For example, the Department of Energy expects to spend $17.1 billion to maintain the nuclear arsenal. All told, the Office of Management and Budget calculates the military budget at $608.6 billion. And that leaves out the share of interest on the national debt that can be attributed to military spending (estimated at $54.5 billion), and other items.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation calculated that in 2006 military spending and the cost of past wars consumed $735 billion, or 41 percent of the federal budget. Since 2001, military spending has risen 35 percent in real terms.

On top of all that, “government auditors still rate the Defense Department as one of the most wasteful spenders of taxpayer dollars,” according to The Christian Science Monitor.

Nevertheless, the military budget escapes the scrutiny applied to other federal programs. Fred Kaplan, author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (Wiley, 2008), writes on Slate.com that military expenditures have “very little to do with what the nation needs.” He observes that in every year since the 1960s, the Army, Navy and Air Force have gotten equal shares of funding, never deviating more than 2 percent from an exact three-way split.

“Is it remotely conceivable that our national-security needs coincide so precisely — and so consistently over the span of a half century — with the bureaucratic imperatives of giving the Army, Air Force and Navy an even share of the money?” Kaplan asks. “It would be a miracle if this didn’t sire a lot of waste and extravagance.”

Americans have accepted this profligacy for decades. In Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (Knopf, 2007), Richard Rhodes writes: “Across the Cold War, nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs alone had cost the nation at least $5.5 trillion. . . . What we bought for a waste of treasure unprecedented in human history was not peace nor even safety but a pervasive decline in the capacity and clemency of American life” as education, health care, infrastructure and other needs went underfunded.

Unchecked military spending today feeds on a new version of Cold War fear. Then and now, the false inflation of enemy threats has kept Americans fearful. Throughout the Cold War, Rhodes writes, the United States held nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. Yet U.S. officials claimed at various times that the Soviets led the arms race and would strike first if not deterred. In the current decade, U.S. officials exaggerated Saddam Hussein’s military prowess to justify war in Iraq. Today, radical Islamist terrorism serves the same purpose Communism once did — maintaining public support for wars without end and arms budgets without limits.

Rhodes quotes activist-scholar Richard J. Barnet describing a mindset that applies as well today as 50 years ago: “The American people were socialized to accept the idea that the only peace possible is a form of permanent war. . . . A threat of one sort or another to justify the continuous flow of resources to the military was now a fixture of American life.”

Removing the fixture of fear requires new ways of thinking about national security and defense. A critical look at military spending would be a start. — Paul Schrag