Necessary Cuts

In 2001, the United States spent $287 billion on defense spending. By 2012, defense spending had skyrocketed to $689 billion. Much of the increase in spending comes from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Having spent almos $2 trillion over the past 10 years on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has more ships, more tanks, and more aircraft than any other country. The U.S. military retains better global logistics, infrastructure, communications, and intelligence than any other military. America owns the only truly global military force and no other country is even attempting to build a global force to rival that of the U.S.

In the past, spending has gone down after times of war—the Pentagon’s budget decreased by 43 percent after the Korean War, by 33 percent after Vietnam, and by 36 percent after the fall of the Soviet Union. But there has been no such drawdown, even as American troops have begun returning from the Middle East. Although sequestration originally mandated cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 10 percent, the new budget deal will reduce the cuts in half, to a more modest five percent. Altogether, defense spending by the United States will still constitute about 40 percent of the world’s total.

But instead of cutting defense spending, the budget deal has shifted the cuts from the Pentagon to military and federal workers’ pensions; this will greatly harm both veterans and civilians in their later years. The new budget deal also comes at the expense of federal research in a number of key areas, such as work being done on fossil fuels. It is clear then that the current levels of defense spending are harming the government’s ability to properly appropriate funds for its other responsibilities.

We are faced today with the issues of a gaping deficit, a burdensome debt, and the lingering effects of a severe recession. According to Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “The single, biggest threat to our national security is our debt”—more than military dangers from any nation or terrorist group. The national debt represents a burden, a liability, and a problem that has the potential to crash the global financial system. To reduce the threat of defaulting on the debt, the U.S. government must reduce its budget deficit. And that entails cutting defense spending.

Reducing the funds given to the Pentagon will also allow the government to be more flexible with its spending. The country has other problems that desperately need increased funding. Public school education in the U.S. has been lagging behind other developed countries for many years and requires widespread reforms and improvements. Transportation infrastructure also requires additional investment; there are numerous areas in need of change, ranging from increased train, tram, and bus networks to airport improvements and bridge maintenance. Cutting defense spending would free up funds to spend in these areas.

Opponents of cuts to the defense budget argue that such cuts will limit the country’s military capabilities. But this belief is misguided. Defense spending can be reduced without threatening the military’s power. Eliminating some of the many bureaucratic problems within the Department of Defense could save billions of dollars, without limiting our ability to defend the nation’s borders.

One issue is that the Department of Defense ovelaps the work of other government departments. The Pentagon spends about $600 million per year on research focused on non-military related diseases also combatted by the National Institutes of Health.

The biggest wastes of duplication, though, can be seen in the Pentagon’s massive back-office, which contains 800,000 civil servants, 536,000 active duty military personnel who are never deployed, and 700,000 contractors. This leads to overhead costs that accounted for 42 percent of the defense budget as of 2008. Cutting the overhead costs for defense to a rather reasonable 25 percent (an average from 25 major industries) would save $80 billion a year.

Other issues, primarily surrounding contractors and weapons manufacturers, exist as well. A report in 2011 suggested that defense firms have swindled $1.1 trillion from the Pentagon over the past decade. Moreover, Congressional interference drives up the cost of manufacturing weapons, leading to $18,000 oil pans and $300 million fighter jets.

All of these factors suggest that defense spending can easily be cut by sizable amounts without ever comprising the military’s ability to defend the nation. Eliminating some of the inefficiencies within the Pentagon can save tens, perhaps hundreds, of billions of dollar each year, helping to reduce the debt and allowing more of the government budget to be spent in other problem areas.

For the sake of the nation, defense spending must be cut.

Franklin R. Li ’17 is a Crimson editorial writer in Canaday Hall.