To listen to the Republican candidates’ debate last week, one
would think that President Obama had slashed the U.S. military budget
and left our country defenseless.
Nothing could be farther off the mark.
There are real weaknesses in Obama’s foreign policy, but a lack
of funding for weapons and war is not one of them. President Obama has
in fact been responsible for the largest U.S. military budget since the
Second World War, as is well documented in the U.S. Department of Defense’s annual “Green Book.”
The table below compares average annual Pentagon budgets under every
president since Truman, using
“constant dollar” figures from the FY2016
Green Book. I’ll use these same inflation-adjusted figures throughout
this article, to make sure I’m always comparing “apples to apples”.
These figures do not include additional military-related spending by the
VA, CIA, Homeland Security, Energy, Justice or State Departments, nor
interest payments on past military spending, which combine to raise the
true cost of U.S. militarism to about $1.3 trillion per year, or one thirteenth of the U.S. economy.
U.S. Military Budgets 1948-2015
Obama FY2010-15 $663.4 billion per year
Bush Jr FY2002-09* $634.9 “ ” “
Clinton FY1994-2001 $418.0 “ ” “
Bush Sr FY1990-93 $513.4 “ ” “
Reagan FY1982-89 $565.0 “ ” “
Carter FY1978-81 $428.1 ” ” “
Ford FY1976-77 $406.7 ” “ ”
Nixon FY1970-75 $441.7 ” “ ”
Johnson FY1965-69 $527.3 ” “ ”
Kennedy FY1962-64 $457.2 ” “ ”
Eisenhower FY1954-61 $416.3 ” “ “
Truman FY1948-53 $375.7 ” “ “
*Excludes $80 billion supplemental added to FY2009 under Obama.
The U.S. military receives more generous funding than the rest of the 10 largest militaries in the world combined
(China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, U.K., France, Japan, India, Germany &
South Korea). And yet, despite the chaos and violence of the past 15
years, the Republican candidates seem oblivious to the dangers of one
country wielding such massive and disproportionate military power.
On the Democratic side, even Senator Bernie Sanders has not said how
much he would cut military spending. But Sanders regularly votes against
the authorization bills for these record military budgets, condemning
this wholesale diversion of resources from real human needs and
insisting that war should be a “last resort”.
Sanders’ votes to attack Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001, while the UN Charter
prohibits such unilateral uses of force, do raise troubling questions
about exactly what he means by a “last resort.” As his aide Jeremy
Brecher asked Sanders in his resignation letter
over his Yugoslavia vote, “Is there a moral limit to the military
violence that you are willing to participate in or support? Where does
that limit lie? And when that limit has been reached, what action will
you take?” Many Americans are eager to hear Sanders flesh out a coherent
commitment to peace and disarmament to match his commitment to economic
justice.
When President Obama took office, Congressman Barney Frank immediately called for a 25% cut in military spending.
Instead, the new president obtained an $80 billion supplemental to the
FY2009 budget to fund his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and his
first full military budget (FY2010) was $761 billion, within $3.4
billion of the $764.3 billion post-WWII record set by President Bush in
FY2008.
The Sustainable Defense Task Force,
commissioned by Congressman Frank and bipartisan Members of Congress in
2010, called for $960 billion in cuts from the projected military
budget over the next 10 years. Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Partycalled
for a 50% cut in U.S. military spending in their 2012 presidential
campaigns. That seems radical at first glance, but a 50% cut in the
FY2012 budget would only have been a 13% cut from what President Clinton
spent in FY1998.
Clinton’s $399 billion FY1998 military budget was the nearest we came
to realizing the “peace dividend” promised at the end of the Cold War.
But that didn’t even breach the Cold War baseline of $393 billion set
after the Korean War (FY1954) and the Vietnam War (FY1975). The largely
unrecognized tragedy of today’s world is that we allowed the “peace
dividend” to be trumped by what Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives
calls the “power dividend”, the desire of military-industrial interests
to take advantage of the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to consolidate global
U.S. military power.
The triumph of the “power dividend” over the “peace dividend” was
driven by some of the most powerful vested interests in history. But at
each step, there were alternatives to war, weapons production and global
military expansion.
At a Senate Budget Committee hearing
in December 1989, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and
Assistant Secretary Lawrence Korb, a Democrat and a Republican,
testified that the FY1990 $542 billion Pentagon budget could be cut by
half over the next 10 years to leave us with a new post-Cold War
baseline military budget of $270 billion, 60% less than President Obama
has spent and 20% below what even Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson called
for.
There was significant opposition to the First Gulf War – 22 Senators and 183 Reps
voted against it, including Sanders – but not enough to stop the march
to war. The war became a model for future U.S.-led wars and served as a
marketing display for a new generation of U.S. weapons. After treating
the public to endless bombsight videos of “smart bombs” making “surgical
strikes”, U.S. officials eventually admitted that such “precision”
weapons were only 7% of the bombs and missiles
raining down on Iraq. The rest were good old-fashioned carpet-bombing,
but the mass slaughter of Iraqis was not part of the marketing campaign.
When the bombing stopped, U.S. pilots were ordered to fly straight from
Kuwait to the Paris Air Show, and the next three years set new records for U.S. weapons exports.
Presidents Bush and Clinton made significant cuts in military
spending between 1992 and 1994, but the reductions shrank to 1-3% per
year between 1995 and 1998 and the budget started rising again in 1999.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials crafted new rationalizations for the use of
U.S. military force to lay the ideological groundwork for future wars.
Untested and highly questionable claims that more aggressive U.S. use of
force could have prevented the genocide in Rwanda or civil war in Yugoslavia have served to justify the use of force elsewhere ever since, with universally catastrophic results. Neoconservatives
went even further and claimed that seizing the post-Cold War power
dividend was essential to U.S. security and prosperity in the 21st
century.
The claims of both the humanitarian interventionists and the
neoconservatives were emotional appeals to different strains in the
American psyche, driven and promoted by powerful people and institutions
whose careers and interests were bound up in the growth of the military
industrial complex. The humanitarian interventionists appealed to
Americans’ desire to be a force for good in the world. As Madeleine Albright asked Colin Powell,
“What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always
talking about if we can’t use it?” On the other hand, the neocons played
on the insularity and insecurity of many Americans to claim that the
world must be dominated by U.S. military power if we are to preserve our
way of life.
The Clinton administration wove many of these claims into a blueprint for global U.S. military expansion in its 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review.
The QDR threatened the unilateral use of U.S. military force, in clear
violation of the UN Charter, to defend “vital” U.S. interests all over
the world, including “preventing the emergence of a hostile regional
coalition,” and “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy
supplies and strategic resources.”
To the extent that they are aware of the huge increase in military
spending since 1998, most Americans would connect it with the U.S. wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ill-defined “war on terror.” But Carl
Conetta’s research established that, between 1998 and 2010, only 20% of
U.S. military procurement and RDT&E (research, development, testing
& evaluation) spending and only half the total increase in military
spending was related to ongoing military operations. In his 2010 paper, An Undisciplined Defense,
Conetta found that our government had spent an extra 1.15 trillion
dollars above and beyond Clinton’s FY1998 baseline on expenses that were
unrelated to to its current wars.
Most of the additional funds, $640 billion, were spent on new weapons
and equipment (Procurement + RDT&E in the Green Book). Incredibly,
this was more than double the $290 billion the military spent on new
weapons and equipment for the wars it was actually fighting. And the
lion’s share was not for the Army, but for the Air Force and Navy.
There has been political opposition to the F-35 warplane, which activists have dubbed “the plane that ate the budget” and whose eventual cost has been estimated at $1.5 trillion for 2,400 planes. But the Navy’s procurement and RDT&E budgets rival the Air Force’s.
Former General Dynamics CEO Lester Crown’s political patronage
of a young politician named Barack Obama, whom he first met in 1989 at
the Chicago law firm where Obama was an intern, has worked out very well
for the family firm. Since Obama won the Presidency, with Lester’s son
James and daughter-in-law Paula as his Illinois fundraising chairs and
4th largest bundlers nationwide, General Dynamics stock price has gained 170% and its latest annual report hailed
2014 as its most profitable year ever, despite an overall 30% reduction
in Pentagon procurement and RDT&E spending since FY2009.
Although General Dynamics is selling fewer Abrams tanks and armored
vehicles since the U.S. withdrew most of its forces from Iraq and
Afghanistan, its Marine Systems division is doing better than ever. The
Navy increased its purchases of Virginia class submarines from one to two per year in 2012 at $2 billion each. It is buying one new Arleigh Burke class destroyer
per year through 2022 at $1.8 billion apiece (Obama reinstated that
program as part of his missile defense plan), and the FY2010 budget
handed General Dynamics a contract to build 3 new Zumwalt class destroyers
for $3.2 billion each, on top of $10 billion already spent on research
and development. That was despite a U.S. Navy spokesman calling the
Zumwalt “a ship you don’t need,” as it will be especially vulnerable to
new anti-ship missiles developed by potential enemies. General Dynamics
is also one of the largest U.S. producers of bombs and ammunition, so it
is profiting handsomely from the U.S. bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.
Carl Conetta explains the U.S.’s unilateral arms build-up as the
result of a lack of discipline and a failure of military planners to
make difficult choices about the kind of wars they are preparing to
fight or the forces and weapons they might need. But this massive
national investment is justified in the minds of U.S. officials by what
they can use these forces to do. By building the most expensive and
destructive war machine ever, designing it to be able to threaten or
attack just about anybody anywhere, and justifying its existence with a
combination of neocon and humanitarian interventionist ideology, U.S.
officials have fostered dangerous illusions about the very nature of
military force. As historian Gabriel Kolko warned in 1994,
“options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational
become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and
diplomacy that is possible in official circles.”
The use of military force is essentially destructive. Weapons of war
are designed to hurt people and break things. All nations claim to build
and buy them only to defend themselves and their people against the
aggression of others. The notion that the use of military force can ever
be a force for good may, at best, apply to a few very rare, exceptional
situations where a limited but decisive use of force has put an end to
an existing conflict and led to a restoration of peace. The more usual
result of the use or escalation of force is to cause greater death and
destruction, to fuel resistance and to cause more widespread
instability. This is what has happened wherever the U.S. has used force
since 2001, including in its proxy and covert operations in Syria and
Ukraine.
We seem to be coming full circle, to once again recognize the dangers
of militarism and the wisdom of the U.S. leaders and diplomats who
played instrumental roles in crafting the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Kellogg Briand Pact
and much of the existing framework of international law. These treaties
and conventions were based on the lived experience of our grandparents
that a world where war was permitted was no longer sustainable. So they
were dedicated, to the greatest extent possible, to prohibiting and
eliminating war and to protecting people everywhere from the horror of
war as a basic human right.
As President Carter said in his Nobel lecture
in 2002, “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how
necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.” Recent U.S. policy has
been a tragic experiment in renormalizing the evil of war. This
experiment has failed abysmally, but there remains much work to do to
restore peace, to repair the damage, and to recommit the United States
to the rule of law.
If we compare U.S. military spending with global military spending,
we can see that, as the U.S. cut its military budget by a third between
1985 and 1998, the rest of the world followed suit and global military
budgets also fell by a third between 1988 and 1998.
But as the US spent trillions of dollars on weapons and war after 2000,
boosting its share of global military spending from 38% to 48% by 2008,
both allies and potential enemies again responded in kind. The 92% rise
in the U.S. military budget by 2008 led to a 65% rise in global
military spending by 2011.
U.S. propaganda presents U.S. aggression and military expansion as a
force for security and stability. In reality, it is U.S. militarism that
has been driving global militarism, and U.S.-led wars and covert
interventions that have spawned subsidiary conflicts and deprived
millions of people of security and stability in country after country.
But just as diplomacy and peacemaking between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. led
to a 33% fall in global military spending in the 1990s, a new U.S.
commitment to peace and disarmament today would likewise set the whole
world on a more peaceful course.
In his diplomacy with Cuba and Iran and his apparent readiness to
finally respond to Russian diplomacy on Syria and Ukraine, President
Obama appears to have learned some important lessons from the violence
and chaos that he and President Bush have unleashed on the world. The
most generous patron the military industrial complex has ever known may
finally be looking for diplomatic solutions to the crises caused by his
policies.
But Obama’s awakening, if that is what it turns out to be, has come
tragically late in his presidency, for millions of victims of U.S. war
crimes and for the future of our country and the world. Whoever we elect
as our next President must therefore be ready on day one to start
dismantling this infernal war machine and building a “permanent structure of peace”, on a firm foundation of humanity, diplomacy and a renewed U.S. commitment to the rule of international law.
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