As the government's annual budget deficit increases -- most forecasts expect it to top $1 trillion next year, thanks in part to the Trump tax reform bill and Congress's gift to the Pentagon budget that, over the next two years, is likely to total $1.4 trillion -- key domestic programs will take big hits in the name of belt-tightening. Military spending, of course, will only continue to grow. If you want to get a sense of where we're heading, just take a look at Trump's 2019 budget proposal (which projects a cumulative deficit of $7.1 trillion over the next decade). It urges big cuts in areas ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the Environmental Protection Agency and Amtrak. By contrast, it champions a Pentagon budget increase of $80 billion (13.2% over 2017) to $716 billion, with $24 billion allotted to upgrading the nuclear triad.
And keep in mind that military cost estimates are only likely to rise. There is a persistent pattern of massive cost overruns for weapons systems ordered through the government's Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP). These ballooned from $295 billion in 2008 to $468 billion in 2015. Consider just two recent examples: the first of the new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers, delivered last May after long delays, came in at $13 billion, an overrun of $2.3 billion, while the program to produce the F-35 jet, already the most expensive weapons system of all time, could reach $406.5 billion, a seven percent overrun since the last estimate.
Flexibility Follies
If the Pentagon turns its Nuclear Posture Review into reality, the first president who will have some of those more "flexible" nuclear options at his command will be none other than Donald Trump. We're talking, of course, about the man who, in his debut speech to the United Nations last September, threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea and later, as the crisis on the Korean peninsula heated up, delighted in boasting on Twitter about the size of his "nuclear button." He has shown himself to be impulsive, ill informed, impervious to advice, certain about his instincts, and infatuated with demonstrating his toughness, as well as reportedly fascinated by nuclear weapons and keen to see the U.S. build more of them. Should a leader with such traits be given yet more nuclear "flexibility"? The answer is obvious enough, except evidently to the authors of the NPR, who are determined to provide him with more "options" and "flexibility."
At least three more years of a Donald Trump presidency are on the horizon. Of this we can be sure: other international crises will erupt, and one of them could pit the United States not just against a nuclear-armed North Korea but also against China or Russia. Making it easier for Trump to use nuclear weapons isn't, as the Nuclear Posture Review would have you believe, a savvy strategic innovation. It's insanity.
Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.
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Copyright 2018 Rajan Menon
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