Stop Spending over 50% of the World’s Defense Budget
Both sides of the political party line can argue that the debt our country has been building is out of this world and each side can point blame at the other side for the cause of it. If we want the most basic and simple cause of our tremendous government debt and the reason we have to borrow billions of dollars each year from other countries, we need to look at what takes such a ridiculous amount of money from our budget: the military. We’re not talking billions of dollars spent on the military. What we’re talking about is a gross amount of money spent each year on some programs that are unnecessary. How much do we spend?
In 2008, we spent $623 billion on our military. Want to know how much the rest of the world together paid on their military? $500 billion. As you can see, we spend so much money on the military that could be used for so many other programs out there. What could six hundred and twenty three billion dollars buy? First, if you like these bail outs, that’s almost equal to the amount of money that President Bush used when he created TARP. Or, it could go to education or stem cell research. In reality, though, it could go to a tremendous amount of programs.
We have a severe problem here and quite frankly, we’re not doing enough to stop it.
I can agree that it is important to have a strong military. However, when our next potential “enemy,” China, only spends $65 billion, it’s important to question just why we need to spend this much. The problem lies in our government and the mentality that they’re in. We come from an age where it was always important to have the biggest…gun. If my gun was bigger than Russia’s gun, I was safe. So, we naturally invested in programs that were preparing us for a war with Russia which would have been a confrontation that would need state of the art equipment and weaponry so that we could win.
That war obviously never came. Despite that, though, we’re continuing to spend an atrocious amount of money on programs we just don’t need. Take, for example, the great and stealthy F-22 Raptor. This plane was first put into thought during one of the peaks of the Cold War when President Reagan was spending a ton of money on the military. The cost of one these jets is over a hundred million a pop. Considering the size of our navy and air force, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to create a new, strong force of these jets. And what for? Another example of the atrocious amount of money being spent is the USS Zumwalt (see picture). The cost of one of these destroyers is over $5 billion. That’s out of this world. What for?
We’re fighting insurgents! We’re fighting people in a style of warfare Americans are not used to. We go from building to building sneaking in and trying to find where the enemy is.
The mentality of America needs to change. We can rest a little easy with the fact that our Secretary of Defense is starting to cut programs that are unnecessary and dedicate more money to the type of war that we’re currently fighting: an insurgency. Now, I’m very skeptical of this change. It’s not because we don’t need it (because we do). What you’ll find about me is that I like balance. I don’t like one thing or the other. Currently, we’re way too focused on a conventional war that just won’t come for a long time. My concern is that we’ll flip and focus so much money on insurgency that when a conventional war comes, we won’t be prepared.
The secret here lies in a balance. The United States military needs to do two things. First, cut some of the budget out. We don’t need to spend six hundred billion dollars. That’s just crazy. Secondly, cut back on ridiculous programs. The F-35, albeit is not as perfect as the F-22, but it is still an effective jet and costs about $50 million less. So, I can get three F-35s for the cost of about two F-22s. We need to get the best for our buck, not simply the best. The same goes for our destroyers. We don’t need to spend five billion on a destroyer when all of our enemies are inside houses. Have strong destroyers, but they don’t need to be as perfect as the USS Zumwalt.
My hope is that we can try and cut the defense budget. It would be a great thing to see our military budget cut in half so that we could use that money on other programs or to potentially cut our debt. What’s most important, though, is that America gets out of the mentality of spending a ton of money on their military and start focusing on what’s necessary, not what we think is cool. The F-22 is cool…The Zumwalt is cool. Are they necessary?
The problem with defense spending, as you noted, is that it is the only thing that all parties with any level of strength in a government, can agree on. After all, before WWI, all the major players in world affairs before that war found their governments not doing a damn bit of good on the home front, but they could all agree that they needed to spend an excessive amount of money on readying a new army and navy.
However, in this modern era, the real problem we have to look at with military spending in the U.S. is this: private contractors control our weapons. Because we have to buy weapons from a company, instead of the government owning and making the weapons themselves, the organizations fighting the war (army, navy, air force, marines) have to buy their weapons off someone. Now, in every other civilized nation, that isn’t the situation.
Because our government has been too weak, or too afraid perhaps, of nationalizing defense and ending war profiteering, a very lucrative industry, the military budget of the U.S. will continue to suffer. Until steps are taken to crush the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned us about, or the government strips private contractors of the right to make and sell arms to the military, we will forever lag behind the world in terms of cost effectiveness in the military, just like everything else the U.S. has allowed itself, in our complacency, to fall behind in.
I don’t think that it has to be something as extreme as nationalizing defense, but instead, really playing competitive. The reason certain weaponry costs so much is because they can get away with charging that much. Instead of allowing them to get away with it, threaten to go elsewhere. If you’re a gun manufacturer, do you honestly want to lose the United States as a buyer?
Sure, it might be beneficial to nationalize defense; however, it makes me uncomfortable to talk about nationalizing anything. Giving the government any more control worries me. Then again, though, would this be giving the government more control or just start saving the tax payers a considerable sum of money? Who knows?