Editor’s note: This commentary is by Nicholas Chlumecky, of Hinesburg, who graduated last year from the University of Victoria with a master’s in Pacific and Asian Studies.
[T]he 2020 budget landed on the 11th, and many departments found themselves on the losing end of the fiscal stick. The Department of Justice: 2 percent decrease. The Department of Education: 12 percent decrease. The Environmental Protection Agency: 31 percent decrease. But absent from the list of government agencies seeing their belt tightened is, once again, the Department of Defense, with a requested 5 percent increase from 2019.
Reluctance to touch the Department of Defense is nothing new; the average person could tell you, whether convinced or not, that cutting the defense budget ranges from reckless endangerment to an obvious lack of patriotism. As a result, the amount of military spending quietly continues to dwarf that of other departments, while shielding itself from any investigation into whether that money is well spent.
Compared to the rest of the world, American defense spending is massive. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that 35 percent of the world’s total defense spending was accounted for by the United States. In second place? China, with 13 percent, followed by Saudi Arabia with 4 percent. The U.S. now spends more than the next seven countries combined. Which is why when the budget says that increased funding is helping to “[restore and rebuild] military readiness,” it rings hollow. How can the military be unprepared when it’s been given such high priority for funding since the Reagan administration?
What should rankle observers even more is that much of this spending goes to projects that Americans will never see benefit from, or worse, to governments with dismal human rights records. Projects like GMD and THAAD, the present-day equivalent of Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, constantly get billions of dollars in extensions while frequently falling short of expectations. Raytheon’s Sea Based X-Radar (SBX), for instance, was advertised as an integral part of the early warning shield for a possible attack on the West Coast. $2.2 billion later, its understood that not only can SBX not adjust fast enough to track oncoming missiles, but the system was unable to tell the difference between an active missile and pieces of debris in testing. The system now spends most of its time mothballed but has received upgrades and additional funding as recent as 2017.
Meanwhile, operational systems such as THAAD are being sold, with government approval, to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which restrict freedom of expression, abuse migrant labor, and discriminate based on gender and sexual identity. Most Americans would find such practices reprehensible at best. Regardless, the government has negotiated a $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, including $15 billion going to Lockheed for their assistance in installing missile defense systems.
The 2020 budget also pledges to “strengthen the defense industrial base,” amounting to a subsidy for defense industries to help them build more manufacturing. For an industry that, like Lockheed, is already gaining billion-dollar contracts based on their current output, it seems inconceivable that they would also be struggling enough to require government assistance to compete in the market.
Perhaps the most concerning is the budget’s advocacy to “Modernize the nuclear deterrent.” Rationalizing that “great power competition” has returned (without specifying who the competition is), the budget seeks to invest in “nuclear ballistic missile submarines, strategic bombers, nuclear air-launched cruise missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the associated nuclear command, control, and communications systems.” Of course, the great power competition that the budget needs nuclear arms for does not mention that the Trump administration has been the primary instigator, by withdrawing from nuclear arms treaties with Russia and beginning a modernization program estimated to cost $400 billion by 2026.
In total, the defense budget as it stands requests slightly over $700 billion for 2020. Compare, again, to the departments mentioned previously: Justice – $29.2 billion. Education – $62 billion. EPA – $6.1 billion. The Department of Defense dwarfs them in size, and yet is still finding itself handed more funds, with minimal questions. Isaac Newton first law of motion declares: An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by another force. The Department of Defense clearly has the budgetary inertia needed to balloon. The question is, who is willing to act?
