Pentagon building. (photo: AP)
Why Almost Every Presidential Candidate Wants a Bigger
Military Budget
By
Paul Waldman, The American Prospect
22 May 15
Now that we've finally (almost) clarified who would
have invaded Iraq and who wouldn't have, it's time for a little perspective.
Yes, it's a good thing that elite Republicans are moving toward agreeing with
the rest of us that invading Iraq was a mistake, even if they base their
argument on the myth of "faulty intelligence."
But there's another consensus in Washington, one that says that our military
should never be anything short of gargantuan, ready to start more wars whenever
a future George W. Bush wants to.
At the end of last week, the House passed a defense
authorization bill worth $612 billion, a number that was possible to reach only
with some budgetary hocus-pocus involving classifying $89 billion of it as
"emergency" spending, thereby avoiding the cuts mandated by
sequestration. While the White House has objected to the way the bill moves
money around, that $612 billion number is exactly what President Obama asked
for. Even the guy who's supposedly trying to weaken America to the point where
we can be invaded and conquered by Costa Rica wants to increase military
spending.
Let's take a moment to marvel at just what a behemoth
our military is. While current levels of spending are down slightly from their
recent peak of more than $700 billion in 2011 (when Americans were fighting in
Iraq and Afghanistan), we still account for about a third of the world's military
expenditures. If you happen to peruse the latest Base Structure Report (on
the off-chance you haven't yet), you'll read that the Department of Defense
occupies a stunning 284,458 buildings around the world, totalling over 2.2
billion square feet. It also controls 24.7 million acres of land, an area about
the size of Virginia. The DoD has a presence in all 50 states, 7 U.S.
territories, and 40 countries around the world—even before they impose martial
law in Texas.
And with the exception of Bernie Sanders, all the
presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican, want our military to be as
big as it is or bigger. While Hillary Clinton hasn't yet made any campaign
statements about the military budget, she's always been known as among the most
hawkish of Democrats, so it would be shocking if she proposed defense cuts.
Even Rand Paul supports an increase in the
military budget; the only question among the other Republican candidates is who
wants to increase spending the most.
What's most alarming when hearing the Republicans talk
is how removed their guiding principles are from reality. "Having a
military equal to any threat," said Jeb Bush in a recent speech, "makes
it less likely we will have to put our men and women in uniform in harm's way.
I believe that weakness invites war." That seems to make some sense, until
you stop and think about it for a moment. Can you name me the war the United
States had to fight because our military wasn't big enough? Iraq? Afghanistan?
Panama? Grenada? Vietnam? We start wars when we want to, and nobody in this
world is going to wage war on the global hegemon because they think our defense
budget is so small they can defeat us bullet-for-bullet.
Or let's look at Marco Rubio, who has been selling
himself as the heir to the Bush Doctrine, and recently proposed a 2016 military
budget of $661 billion. As Rubio's website says (on a page entitled "Nothing matters if we aren't safe"),
"The world has never been more dangerous than it is today," an
assertion that is not merely false, it's downright bizarre. Is the world more
dangerous than it was in 1941, when Japan attacked the United States and the
Nazis were marching across Europe, in a war that ultimately killed 60 million
people? Or more dangerous than in 1962, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union came
within inches of launching a global nuclear war that could have literally
extinguished the human species?
Of course not. So let's be honest: We build our
military not to deal with threats to us, but to accommodate the myriad ways
we'd like to project American power outward. Though we've referred to our
military as "defense" since the Department of War was renamed in
1949, almost nothing our military does is about defending the United States
from direct attack. If you joined up tomorrow, the chances that you'd be
trained and deployed to stop foreign invasion would be almost nil.
You can fervently support every mission we've given
the U.S. military in the last few decades and still acknowledge that fact. Yet
for some reason, presidential candidates seem to believe that they can only
justify the military budgets they want by telling the voters that unless we
keep spending more, before you know it your kids will have to pledge allegiance
to a poster of Kim Jong Un.
So how about some honesty for a change? We spend so
much on our military not because that's what we need to avoid war, but because
that's what we need to wage war. Whether you think any one of those wars is
right or wrong, it's what we do. It's what we've done before, and it's what
we're going to do again.
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2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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