Shooting Down Arms Spending

Can Washington have an honest, intelligent discourse about something that will have real consequences for decades to come? President Clinton wants to focus on Social Security, but we should also debate his recent pledge to increase military spending $12 billion next year and $100 billion over six years. Even in a period of budget surplus, such numbers are enormous--in fact, much too high.

Already, military budgets remain at about $300 billion, nearly Cold War levels. U.S. spending is more than the next eight biggest military budgets combined, including usual “threats” like Russia, China and Iran. One suspects old-fashioned pork-barrel politics are at work. But there are other reasons for skepticism as well.

When Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan expanded military budgets after a post-Vietnam War sag in the 1970s, critics focused on two negative impacts of higher spending, reasons that may be recycled in the coming weeks.

First, it was argued, a large military is simply too powerful, thereby prone to flexing its muscles in the Third World, or even something riskier.

Second was its effect on the U.S. economy. During Reagan’s presidency, defense outlays peaked at 6.6% of GNP, the highest since the 1950s. This large expenditure soaked up capital, scientific talent and productive capacity while creating no consumer goods in return--a very bad deal. It bargained away social policy, too: The high budgets drove up the federal deficit (and interest rates) and squeezed money available for social service programs.

While both of these criticisms were persuasive in the 1980s, they no longer describe the cardinal reasons to constrain Pentagon spending.

The U.S. military, while still flush with weapons and soldiers, is an innately cautious institution. Its taste for military intervention is meager. Gen. Colin Powell’s Hamlet-like hesitancy about the use of force is now official doctrine. The worrisome nuclear arms race with Moscow is also a thing of the past.

The Pentagon’s bearing on the economy differs from recent decades too. Its share of GNP has dropped in half, down to about 3.3%. Procurement of new weapons and equipment is half of the 1990 buy and one-third of 1985 purchases. Fewer skilled workers and scientists are employed in the defense sector. In inflation-adjusted dollars, we spent 50% more on defense at its last peak in 1989. These trends comprise a big reason why the economy has been growing with low inflation since about the time the Pentagon began to shrink.

So, why oppose a still-big Pentagon?

The main reason is sheer waste. The military now argues that its Reagan-era weapons are aging and need to be replaced. But much procurement spending is going for big-ticket items--two new kinds of fighter jets, a new attack submarine, several helicopter designs, another aircraft carrier--created for the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. In many cases, weapons factories are kept open as a bridge to a new generation of technology that may be ready for production a decade hence. This is extravagant now, and it nourishes political constituencies (unions and defense firms) that pressure Congress to keep the lines “warm,” costing tens of billions in the 1990s and much more later.

The desire to keep factories warm also creates pressure to export more arms, which includes new forms of federal subsidies. This is bad foreign policy and bad economics. Building the new F-22 fighter jet, for example, is deemed “necessary” because so many countries now have our F-16. The new ones, by the way, will cost ten times more per aircraft.

These choices also perpetuate the wrong armed forces. The military needs of American globalism are increasingly in peacekeeping and small bursts of activity, like preventing genocide in Bosnia or mounting credible threats to the likes of Iraq. These operations require technologies and training different from the “twilight struggle” against Soviet communism.

But the extent to which the military can be compressed will disappoint many critics of Pentagon spending. Multilateral peacekeeping alone does not come cheap. Some savings can be earned by ending procurement of large, old systems, reducing active-duty personnel from 1.4 million to 1 million and closing more unneeded bases. Those measures could reduce the defense budget by about one-fifth. Even new funding to replace some weapons, then, would not expand the current budget levels and thereby not raid important human service programs to pay for unnecessary Pentagon increases.

The inertia of the old ways of the Cold War is sustaining an overly expensive and ill-prepared military. As a result of the political pressure to squeeze out more money for glitzy new aircraft and ships, we may forfeit the economic benefits of lowered spending and undermine the new shape of a 21st century military.