Right now, it’s a safe guess that the public has only the vaguest notion of the costs and capacities of the American military, especially in any relative sense. Most people probably understand that the United States has the most powerful military in the world, and they support that. On the other hand, they might well be horrified to learn just how expensive that military is, how ridiculously disproportionate it is to the others in the world, and how removed those costs are from any real threat facing the country. In times of plenty – or faux plenty – when your government is giving you tax money back even while it is fighting two wars simultaneously, those questions don’t need to be asked (or at least one can be so deluded into thinking). But those days will soon be gone, and – as they say – payback’s a b*tch.
It’s harder than might be imagined to track federal expenditures, because there are lots of accounting choices (and nifty tricks, if you so desire to trick people) involved. But, near as I can tell, the US is now contemplating a budget of $672 billion this year for ‘defense’. That, by the way, is up from $385 billion in 2000, measured in constant (2007) dollars. And that, of course, is nearly a doubling, from what was already a huge amount. These numbers don’t include the costs of past wars (principally debt from loans), estimated in 2006 to be about $264 billion. If you add that figure to the $572 spent last year for last year’s military, you get $837 billion spent on the military in 2006, or 41 percent of the federal budget.
How does that stack up comparatively? Social Security took $595 billion in 2006. Twelve percent of the budget went to poverty initiatives, five percent to community and economic development, and two percent to science, energy and environmental programs.
How does that stack up internationally? In 2004, while the rest of the world’s military expenditures equaled $500 billion, the US was spending $534 billion. That is to say, more than all the rest of the entire world. Combined.
Americans might even be fine with a military budget that dwarfs the sum total for entire rest of the world – nearly 200 other countries – assuming unlimited resources to provide butter as well as guns (though if they knew the relative figure was quite that big, they might choke a bit on the expenditures even with low taxes and adequate social spending). But when you reach the point where you start having to choose one or the other – a point we actually reached long ago, but have hidden from ourselves by borrowing – everything is different, hence the above alternatives for Joe Six-Pack to ponder.
What is sorely missing today, and would be even more so at the moment when our fiscal recklessness is no longer sustainable even under conditions of mass societal hallucination, is simply a rational discussion of the purposes of the United States military. Once that happens, programmatic and budgetary choices then follow in the logical order which they should in any universe where people are even remotely in touch with reality.
In fact, the current military budget could easily be slashed, because the only reason for its ridiculously bloated proportions is to pursue missions far beyond those Americans would support even during conditions of plenty, let alone when the alternative becomes giving up their expected benefits.
If we think about military priorities from the ground up, without any built-in assumptions, and without the necessity of maintaining existing programs on the basis of inertia alone, I don’t think we’d get very far before the public would shout out "enough", especially if they were faced with the choice of having their Social Security checks bounce in order to instead fund some obscure military objective on behalf of corporate interests in Burkina Faso.
What do Americans want? They want defense, in the true meaning of the word. To begin with, I have little doubt that Americans would be willing to spend whatever it takes to defend American soil from foreign attack. When it comes to state-based violence, that need could be fairly easily addressed by a nuclear deterrent force a tenth of the size of the current one, along with a moderate contingent of land and naval forces. The cost of these represent a small fraction of the current total military budget. No country is ever going to attack the United States in either a traditional operation using conventional forces or by means of non-conventional weapons, of course, because to do so would mean their instant obliteration. Whatever else one can say about nuclear weapons and all the real and potential horrors of mass annihilation, they do give pause to those who would contemplate an attack, in all but the most dire conflicts or screw-ups. (And this works both ways, of course. It is no accident that the US never attacked the Soviet Union or China, for instance, or that Bush did go into Iraq, but not North Korea.) Perhaps some day nuclear weapons can be eliminated from the planet. In the meantime, though, a small quantity of them could form part of a defense structure that permitted the US to dramatically cut military spending while allowing Americans to feel secure from external threat.
Americans would also support, I think, the military having the capability to respond to certain emergencies abroad – say, enough force for the early stages of a scenario where an ally was invaded, or US diplomats or nationals needed to be rescued from some sort of foreign incident. This means some special forces – again, a relatively small and inexpensive portion of the current military budget – and the same small to moderate land and naval forces charged with defending the national borders.
Clearly, the public would also support whatever force is necessary to effectively attack and destroy non-state actors, such as al Qaeda, who seek to harm the United States through non-conventional assaults. John Kerry of course paid the price for speaking honestly about this in 2004, back when this country was still shaking off the hangover from the Bush Binge of 9/11 and beyond, but he was right in asserting that terrorist threats are best resisted by means of intelligence and law enforcement (and sometimes small scale military action, when useful), which is also a relatively low-cost affair, comparatively speaking. (Throw in a little global justice and economic development, moreover, and you might find you’ve eliminated most such threats before they ever come to exist. What a concept, eh?)
Finally, unquestionably, there would be support in the United States for the capacity to rapidly increase US military capability in response to a major unexpected scenario. Americans will want a National Guard, Reserves, and the infrastructure necessary for a Post-Pearl Harbor-like draft and rapid militarization in the event of such an unanticipated attack. But again, maintaining this capacity – as opposed to the actual forces – is not a terribly expensive proposition.
And that, I suspect, is it. A moderate base force, a small nuclear deterrent capability, the Guard and Reserves, and the capacity to rapidly add more as needed. In sum, a vastly smaller military than today’s.
This is not World War II we’re in today, and it’s not the Cold War. There is no need for a massive military armada to be fielded or even to stand in readiness, as there is no massive implacable enemy to be vigilant against, let alone a massive implacable enemy which we would fight with conventional set-piece armies to be landed at places like Normandy, and to fight territorial struggles like the Battle of the Bulge.
What is the difference, then, between this American military that the public would support and the one we’ve got, besides of course hundreds of billions of dollars per year? The short answer is the capacity to ‘protect’ American ‘interests’ abroad. Does the American public care whether Botswana is a democracy or not? Probably a little – not that anyone would have the slightest clue where or what it is – but not enough to invest their tax dollars in it, not enough to forego the government services they want at home, and not enough to spill their children’s blood there. Turns out their government doesn’t care either, though it may well pretend to on occasion. It doesn’t even care whether Botswana – democracy or autocracy – is particularly ‘pro-American’.
What the American government cares about, above all, is that Botswana plays ball with those economic actors (who nowadays might not even necessarily be American-based) with a pipeline to power in Washington. Usually that means that a neat little dictatorship is in fact preferable to a democratically elected government, particularly one that makes the mistake of having the real interests of the local people in mind. Folks in Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua and beyond will be happy to verify this proposition, in case you have any doubt.
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