Romney defense plan throws money at Pentagon
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney holds a town-hall campaign meeting on the campus of Bradley University March 19, 2012, in Peoria, Ill. / Getty Images
(TomDispatch) If you've been fretting about faltering math education and falling test scores here in the United States, you should be worried based on this campaign season of Republican math. When it comes to the American military, the leading Republican presidential candidates evidently only learned to add and multiply, never subtract or divide.
Advocates of Pentagon reform have criticized President Obama for his timid approach to reducing military spending. Despite current Pentagon budgets that have hovered at the highest levels since World War II and 13 years of steady growth, the administration's latest plans would only reduce spending at the Department of Defense by 1.6% in inflation-adjusted dollars over the next five years.
Still, compared to his main Republican opponents, Obama is a T. rex of budget slashers. After all, despite their stated commitment to reducing the deficit (while cutting taxes on the rich yet more), the Republican contenders are intent on raising Pentagon spending dramatically. Mitt Romney has staked out the "high ground" in the latest round of Republican math with a proposal to set Pentagon spending at 4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That would, in fact add up to an astonishing $8.3 trillion dollars over the next decade, one-third more than current, already bloated Pentagon plans.
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Nathan Hodge of the Wall Street Journal engaged in polite understatement when he described the Romney plan as "the most optimistic forecast U.S. defense manufacturers have heard in months."
In fact, Romney's proposal implies that the Pentagon is essentially an entitlement program that should receive a set share of our total economic resources regardless of what's happening here at home or elsewhere on the planet. In Romney World, the Pentagon's only role would be to engorge itself. If the GDP were to drop, it's unlikely that, as president, he would reduce Pentagon spending accordingly.
Rick Santorum has spent far less time describing his military spending plans, but a remark at a Republican presidential debate in Arizona suggests that he is at least on the same page with Romney. In 1958, the year he was born, Santorum pointed out, Pentagon spending was 60% of the federal budget, and now it's "only" 17%. In other words, why cut military spending when it's so comparatively low?
Of course, this is a classic bait-and-switch case of cherry-picking numbers, since the federal budget of 1958 didn't include Medicare, Medicaid, the Environmental Protection Agency, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The population was 100 million less than it is now, resulting in lower spending across the board, most notably for Social Security. In fact, Americans now pay out nearly twice as much for military purposes as in 1958, a sum well in excess of the combined military budgets of the next 10 largest spending nations.
Of course, in a field of innumerates, Santorum's claim undoubtedly falls into the category of rhetorical flourish. It's unlikely that even he was suggesting we more than triple Pentagon spending -- the only way to return it to the share of the budget it consumed in the halcyon days of his youth. (Keep in mind that profligate Pentagon spending in that era ultimately prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to coin the term "military-industrial complex.") Still, Santorum clearly believes that there's plenty of room to hike military spending, if we just slash genuine entitlement programs deeply enough. He would undoubtedly support a Pentagon budget at Romney-esque levels, as would Newt Gingrich based on his absurd claim that the Obama administration's modest adjustments to the Pentagon's record budgets would result in a "hollowing out" of the U.S. military.
Mitt Romney at Sea
But let's stick with the Republican frontrunner (or stumbler). What exactly would Romney spend all this money on?
For starters, he's a humongous fan of building big ships, generally the most expensive items in the Pentagon budget. He has pledged to up Navy ship purchases from 9 to 15 per year, a rise of 50%. These things add up. A new aircraft carrier costs more than $10 billion; a ballistic missile submarine weighs in at $7 billion or more; and a destroyer comes with a -- by comparison -- piddling price tag of $2 billion-plus. The rationale for such a naval spending spree is, of course, that all-purpose threat cited these days by builders of every sort of big-ticket military hardware: China.
As Romney put it late last year, if the U.S. doesn't pump up its shipbuilding budget, China will soon be "brushing aside an inferior American Navy in the Pacific." This must be news to former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who noted in a May 2010 speech to the Navy League that the fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined -- 11 of which, by the way, belong to U.S. allies. As for the Chinese challenge, much has been made of China's new aircraft carrier, which actually turns out to be a refurbished vessel purchased from Ukraine in 1998 and originally intended to be a floating casino. It would leave the U.S. with only an 11 to 1 advantage in this category.
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William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of "Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex". (To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hartung discusses how to manipulate Pentagon budgets, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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Our only mistake is letting them have ANY say in our society. We must work to marginalize them and keep them away from elected office. We must study them more to see if we can help cure some of them.
Whatever happened to fiscal conservatives in the republican party?
It has also been shown by independent studies to not be that efficient at creating jobs. Every billion dollars the Defense Department gets generates 11,600 jobs, whereas that same investment would produce 17,100 in clean energy jobs, 19,600 in health care jobs and 29,100 in education jobs. Even a $1 billion tax cut would produce significantly more jobs than money spent at the Defense Department.
So, don't buy any tired old rhetoric about increasing defense spending. It won't fix our nations economic woes.
Millions of americans are cutting cost, why not the DOF?
Vested interests are behind this madness.
1. We now outspend China 9 dollars to 1 dollar annually. Are the Chinese that much more efficient?
2. We now have over 800 military installations overseas. Most to protect our "allies". Why do we not cut back on these and let our "allies" defend themselves? BTW, these include England, Germany and France.
Everyone has to suffer but the military industrial complex and rich corporations.
Typical W Bush Style Republican