U.S. Military Spending Dwarfs Rest Of World

The $682 billion spent by the U.S. in 2012, according to the Office of Management and Budget, was more than the combined military spending of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil — which spent $652 billion, according to the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database.

4 Contradictions In Obama’s New Defense Plan

By Spencer Ackerman 
January 6, 2012 | 6:30 am 
Courtesy Of "Wired Magazine"


Many of the key points in President Obama’s new blueprint for the next decade of U.S. defense strategy are straightforward. More spy gear; more special forces; fewer land wars; Asia, Asia, Asia. Whatever you think of the merits of those points, at least they’re internally consistent.

Others… not so much.

Sometimes the analysis in the strategy suggests a policy choice that the strategy actually disavows. Sometimes it walks back controversial points. Sometimes it makes pledges that sound sensible at first blush — but don’t actually make sense the more you think about them. Here are four of the most glaring contradictions within the strategy.

The Military Should Leave Europe (But Won’t). The whole point of the new plan is to build “the joint force of 2020, a force sized and shaped differently than the military of the Cold War,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta boasted Thursday. But the U.S. just can’t vacate the Cold War’s primary battlefield: Europe. In fact, the plan makes a strong case for the Army to take its brigades home. “Most European countries are now producers of security rather than consumers of it,” the strategy says, bolstered byNATO’s success in Libya.

But the Pentagon won’t take its own advice. The closest it comes is to pledge that the military’s force structure in Europe will “evolve.” Asked if that means the U.S. will pull out of Europe 20 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Panetta replied, “Not only are we going to continue our commitments there, but we are going to maintain the kind of innovative presence there that we think will make clear to Europe, and those to those who have been our strong allies in the past, that we remain committed.”

Translation: maybe there will be another shave and a haircut to the U.S. military’s nearly 70-year European expedition, but not much more than that. Even though Europe is united, safe, at peace and the U.S.’ real security interests are halfway around the world.

“Limited Counterinsurgency”. One thing critics and advocates of counterinsurgency can agree on: it requires a lot of time, cash and, especially, people. So it’s baffling for the Pentagon strategy to say that U.S. forces will remain prepared “to conduct limited counterinsurgency operations.” What are limited counterinsurgency operations?

To give the Pentagon a generous interpretation, limited counterinsurgency operations might mean training partner militaries to wage their own battles against insurgents. That’s more properly called “security force assistance,” but whatever. Less generously, the Obama administration is trying to walk away from counterinsurgency without getting bashed by critics for scrapping the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Either way, after Thursday press conference, Pentagon reporters who tried to figure out what the term actually means were unable to reach a consensus. Several of us ended up more confused the longer we debated each other.

The Army Is Getting Cut (Until We Surge It). This one is more sugar-coating than outright contradiction. But one of the major implications of the new plan is “smaller conventional ground forces,” in President Obama’s words. (Panetta didn’t cite a number for how small the Army will get, but we’re hearing around 480,000 soldiers, a drop of nearly 100,000 from current levels.) No sooner did the Pentagon announce that, however, than it said: well, for now.

Plans for shrinking the Army (and the Marine Corps) will build in “reversibility,” Panetta pledged. Should unforeseen land wars arise — you know, like the two post-9/11 wars the Army didn’t anticipate fighting — the Army will be able to “surge, regenerate and mobilize… quickly.” True, it’s a lot easier to start recruiting more soldiers than it is to, say, build more ships or planes. But it also sounds like the Obama team is afraid of taking criticism for downsizing the Army rather than confidently defending a major aspect of its new strategy.

This Is The Pentagon’s Blueprint, Until It Isn’t. Even the fundamental purpose of the strategy isn’t free from contradiction, thanks to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It’s supposed to be the cornerstone for crafting the military of 2020, as Panetta put it. But Gen. Martin Dempsey, the military’s top officer, walked that back: the strategy is merely “a waypoint” for a “continuous and deliberate process” of building that future force.

Maybe it’s Dempsey’s Army background talking, but he sounded lukewarm on the document. “It’s not perfect,” he told reporters, and it’s open to criticism for slashing the military too deeply or not reorienting it enough to meet future threats. “That probably makes it about right,” Dempsey intoned, “for today.”

Should that change, the military would simply “adjust” what the strategy says, and it’ll have an opportunity to do so every year when it issues its budget, Dempsey said. Maybe that would be a mere tune-up; maybe it would be something more drastic. After all, the strategy effectively scraps the Pentagon’s last four-year plan, after only two years. It’s ironic that the Pentagon’s blueprint for the future might not be built to last.

The Real National Security Budget

The Figure No One Wants You To See

By CHRISTOPHER HELLMAN
March 1, 2011
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.

Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that's barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.

Take that in for a moment. It's true; you won't find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it's no misprint. It may even be an underestimate. In any case, it's the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for "security" is to go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up.

So, here we go. Buckle your seat belt: it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Fortunately for us, on February 14th the Obama administration officially released its Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 budget request. Of course, it hasn't been passed by Congress -- even the 2011 budget hasn't made it through that august body yet -- but at least we have the most recent figures available for our calculations.

For 2012, the White House has requested $558 billion for the Pentagon's annual "base" budget, plus an additional $118 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At $676 billion, that's already nothing to sneeze at, but it's just the barest of beginnings when it comes to what American taxpayers will actually spend on national security. Think of it as the gigantic tip of a humongous iceberg.

To get closer to a real figure, it's necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away.

Missing from the Pentagon's budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them. 

That money, however, officially falls in the province of the Department of Energy. And then, don't forget an additional $7.8 billion that the Pentagon lumps into a "miscellaneous" category -- a kind of department of chump change -- that is included in neither its base budget nor those war-fighting funds.

So, even though we're barely started, we've already hit a total official FY 2012 Pentagon budget request of:

$703.1 Billion Dollars.

Not usually included in national security spending are hundreds of billions of dollars that American taxpayers are asked to spend to pay for past wars, and to support our current and future national security strategy.

For starters, that $117.8 billion war-funding request for the Department of Defense doesn't include certain actual "war-related fighting" costs. Take, for instance, the counterterrorism activities of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the first time, just as with the Pentagon budget, the FY 2012 request divides what's called "International Affairs" in two: that is, into an annual "base" budget as well as funding for "Overseas Contingency Operations" related to Iraq and Afghanistan. (In the Bush years, these used to be called the Global War on Terror.) The State Department's contribution? $8.7 billion. That brings the grand but very partial total so far to: $711.8 billion.

The White House has also requested $71.6 billion for a post-2001 category called "homeland security" -- of which $18.1 billion is funded through the Department of Defense. The remaining $53.5 billion goes through various other federal accounts, including the Department of Homeland Security ($37 billion), the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion), and the Department of Justice ($4.6 billion). All of it is, however, national security funding which brings our total to: $765.3 billion.

The U.S. intelligence budget was technically classified prior to 2007, although at roughly $40 billion annually, it was considered one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. Since then, as a result of recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, Congress has required that the government reveal the total amount spent on intelligence work related to the National Intelligence Program (NIP).

This work done by federal agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency consists of keeping an eye on and trying to understand what other nations are doing and thinking, as well as a broad range of "covert operations" such as those being conducted in Pakistan. In this area, we won't have figures until FY 2012 ends. The latest NIP funding figure we do have is $53.1 billion for FY 2010. There's little question that the FY 2012 figure will be higher, but let's be safe and stick with what we know. (Keep in mind that the government spends plenty more on "intelligence." 

Additional funds for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), however, are already included in the Pentagon's 2012 base budget and war-fighting supplemental, though we don't know what they are. The FY 2010 funding for MIP, again the latest figure available, was $27 billion.) In any case, add that $53.1 billion and we're at:

$818.4 Billion.

Veterans programs are an important part of the national security budget with the projected funding figure for 2012 being $129.3 billion. Of this, $59 billion is for veterans' hospital and medical care, $70.3 billion for disability pensions and education programs. This category of national security funding has been growing rapidly in recent years because of the soaring medical-care needs of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, by 2020 total funding for health-care services for veterans will have risen another 45%-75%. In the meantime, for 2012 we've reached:

$947.7 Billion.

If you include the part of the foreign affairs budget not directly related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other counterterrorism operations, you have an additional $18 billion in direct security spending. Of this, $6.6 billion is for military aid to foreign countries, while almost $2 billion goes for "international peacekeeping" operations. A further $709 million has been designated for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, and clearing landmines planted in regional conflicts around the globe. This leaves us at:

$965.7 Billion.

As with all federal retirees, U.S. military retirees and former civilian Department of Defense employees receive pension benefits from the government. The 2012 figure is $48.5 billion for military personnel, $20 billion for those civilian employees, which means we've now hit:

$1,034.2 Billion. (Yes, That's $1.03 Trillion!)

When the federal government lacks sufficient funds to pay all of its obligations, it borrows. Each year, it must pay the interest on this debt which, for FY 2012, is projected at $474.1 billion. The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending.

Add it all together and the grand total for the known national security budget of the United States is:

$1,219.2 Billion. (That's More Than $1.2 Trillion.)

A country with a gross domestic product of $1.2 trillion would have the 15th largest economy in the world, ranking between Canada and Indonesia, and ahead of Australia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia. Still, don't for a second think that $1.2 trillion is the actual grand total for what the U.S. government spends on national security. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously spoke of the world's "known unknowns." Explaining the phrase this way: "That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know." It's a concept that couldn't apply better to the budget he once oversaw. When it comes to U.S. national security spending, there are some relevant numbers we know are out there, even if we simply can't calculate them.

To take one example, how much of NASA's proposed $18.7 billion budget falls under national security spending? We know that the agency works closely with the Pentagon. NASA satellite launches often occur from the Air Force's facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Air Force has its own satellite launch capability, but how much of that comes as a result of NASA technology and support? In dollars terms, we just don't know.

Other "known unknowns" would include portions of the State Department budget. One assumes that at least some of its diplomatic initiatives promote our security interests. Similarly, we have no figure for the pensions of non-Pentagon federal retirees who worked on security issues for the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, or the Departments of Justice and Treasury. Nor do we have figures for the interest on moneys borrowed to fund veterans' benefits, among other national security-related matters. The bill for such known unknowns could easily run into the tens of billions of dollars annually, putting the full national security budget over the $1.3 trillion mark or even higher.

There's a simple principle here. American taxpayers should know just what they are paying for. In a restaurant, a customer would be outraged to receive a check almost twice as high as the menu promised. We have no idea whether the same would be true in the world of national security spending, because Americans are never told what national security actually means at the cash register.

Christopher Hellman is communications liaison at the National Priorities Project in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was previously a military policy analyst for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Defense Information, and spent 10 years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues.

This article was originally published by TomDispatch.

Undisciplined Spending In The Name Of Defense

By Gregg Easterbrook
JAN 20, 2011 06:00 EST
Courtesy Of "Reuters News"

Defense Secretary Robert Gates just proposed cutting the military and security budget  by $78 billion over five years — perhaps only a downpayment on coming further reductions. Secretary Gates’s list of proposed cuts includes high-profile projects and weapons. But he does not mention the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an exemplar of undisciplined spending in the name of defense.

Never heard of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency? You’re not alone. A fair guess is that nine of 10 Washington pundits and political insiders don’t know the NGA exists, while perhaps one in 100 can describe its function.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has 16,000 employees — nearly as many as Google  — and a “black” budget thought to be at least $5 billion per year. The NGA is building a new headquarters complex with the stunning price of $1.8 billion, nearly the cost of the Freedom Tower rising in Manhattan. That new headquarters, near Fort Belvoir, Virginia, will be the third-largest structure in the Washington area, nearly rivaling the Pentagon in size.

The NGA has current touches, possessing a marketing slogan — “Know the Earth, Show the Way” — calling the Defense Department and CIA bureaus that receive its work product “customers” or “partners,” and posting photos of staff receptions on Flickr. But what the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency does for the most is part classified. About all the agency will say is that it supplies “geospatial intelligence support for global world events” and “can create highly accurate terrain visualization,” phrases that don’t explain much.

This is what the NGA does: take detailed aerial pictures of the Earth’s surface — mainly of cities, including America cities — then overlay them with other forms of data, such as maps of streets and power lines. Think there are drone aircraft only in the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan? Drone aircraft controlled by the NGA have been crisscrossing the skies of the United States for several years, photographing minute details of roads, houses and campuses. Supposedly this is a counter-terrorism measure: good luck explaining how extremely detailed images of individual homes will deter terrorists. If you were sunbathing nude when an NGA drone passed above your backyard, agency files contain a photo you’ll hope not to see on Flickr.

The NGA also merges pictures with satellite imagery from the National Reconnaissance Office, itself a little-known agency; the NGA is in the process of acquiring imaging satellites under its own control. The goal is a kind of ultimate TomTom for much, perhaps eventually all, of Earth’s surface.

NGA topography could help during natural disasters. More to the point, it could direct soldiers down the correct street during battle, or cause GPS-guided bombs to hit the correct building, or allow a cruise missile to fly underneath bridges before striking not just the right building but the right part of the right building. The agency’s super-maps could also be used to invade privacy. Put a tarp or tent above anything you do outdoors that you don’t want to run the risk of this agency having photos of, because there’s no privacy-protection cross-check.

Like many agencies in military, security or counter-terrorism roles, the NGA has a growing budget never subject to public scrutiny and rarely questioned by Congress.  Even subtracting for the costs of the war in Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan, and adjusting to current dollars, U.S. military and security spending has increased 68 percent in the past decade. Within this runaway spending is a tremendous amount of pure waste, coupled to many programs and agencies with valid missions but no cost discipline.

On the same day last August that Defense Secretary Gates led the nation’s newscasts by announcing an initiative to “reduce excess overhead” in defense and security spending, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency quietly signed two contracts that increase defense overhead. The NGA will pay nearly $1 billion each year to GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, start-up firms, for more spy photos of cities, taken from satellites the companies own or will launch.

Given the National Reconnaissance Office already has numerous imaging satellites, why does the country need spy satellites under a duplicative agency? Given the NGA already has 16,000 employees, why does it need to spend billions of dollars on contractors? Since this is all stamped SECRET, there is no discipline or accountability.

Here is the kicker: most of the photography and topographic information generated by the NGA at great expense to taxpayers is very similar to what Google and Microsoft give away for free.

This Google view of the current headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, available free, differs only a little from what the NGA produces at fantastic expense. Zoom in: the image is good enough to count the cars in the NGA headquarters lot, inspect the small wood to the west where employees stroll, determine that NGA communication and power cables are buried. (No satellite dishes or utility poles.) There is ample resolution to select which of the four current NGA structures a targeting planner wants the cruise missile to hit. Here is the Microsoft Bing view, which even shows condensate rising from the HVAC station.

Google and Microsoft are doing nothing wrong by posting these images — unless it’s wrong to take aerial views, in which case the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is in the wrong, too.

The key point is that Google and Microsoft are able to give away topographic information, or sell it at low cost — for $399, Google Earth Pro offers better resolution — while a defense agency spends billions of dollars to do the same. As free-market entities, Google and Microsoft are concerned with cost-effectiveness. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, exempt from cost controls and public scrutiny, wants to run up the price: its bureaucrats benefit from empire-building.

This is everything that’s wrong with defense spending in a nutshell.

Good reading: This excerpt of the important new book “Unwarranted Influence,” by James Ledbetter, describes how President Dwight Eisenhower, a former five-star general, became wary of the military-industrial complex.

Photos, Top: NASA satellites image of the Australian wildfires in southeastern Australia taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on February 9, 2009. The red boxes indicate the location of the fires. REUTERS/NASA/Handout

Bottom: This satellite image, taken February 26, 2009 and released March 9, 2009, shows the North Korean missile facility at Musudan. REUTERS/GeoEye Satellite Image/Handout (KOREA)

What's A "Strong" Defense?

By Christopher A. Preble

July 13, 2010

Courtesy Of "Budget Insight"

It has been one month since the Sustainable Defense Task Force released its report, Debt, Deficits, & Defense: A Way Forward. My fellow task force member Laura Peterson posted an excellent discussion of the substance of the report here last month, so there is no need to repeat that here.

Of more interest is the reaction that the report has elicited. There have been a number of interesting analyses in the media and the blogosphere, including Foreign Policy’s “Reality Check” and on the op-ed pages of the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. There have also been some ridiculous commentaries that have mischaracterized the report or otherwise misread its core arguments.

The most common response has been some sympathy for our argument that military spending should be subjected to the same scrutiny that should be applied to other government spending. There are still a fair number of people, however, who share our concern about the deficit, but who counter “But I want a strong defense.”

Who doesn’t?

The task force report was written with a single consideration in mind: in what ways, and where, could we make cuts in military spending that would not undermine U.S. security? It is our contention that much of what we call “defense” spending isn’t really essential to U.S. defense, and that unnecessary or wasteful spending is also harmful to U.S. security.

This is hardly a new concept. Dwight David Eisenhower warned about the burdens of excessive military spending on the wider economy. Robert Gates, channeling Ike, has said “The United States should spend as much as necessary on national defense, but not one penny more.”

A leading conservative in the Senate, Tom Coburn (R-OK) wrote that deficit reduction commission “affords us an opportunity to start some very late due diligence on national defense spending… [as well as] reduce wasteful, unnecessary, and duplicative defense spending that does nothing to make our nation safe.”

The subjective matter is what constitutes “excessive.” “Unnecessary” is a similarly elusive concept. Entire books are written on such questions (shameless plug). I’m not going to resolve them in a blog post.
But, suffice it to say, and paraphrasing Gates here, if we “can’t figure out a way to defend the United States on a budget of more than half a trillion dollars a year,” then we have some pretty big problems.

In real terms, the United States spends more on its military than at any time since World War II. More than during Korea, more than during Vietnam, more than during the Reagan-era buildup in the early 1980s.  National security spending, which includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has grown 86 percent in real terms since 1998.

We are spending this much on our military at a time when our primary national security threat ostensibly comes from a terrorist organization – not a nation state in possession of a massive army, a massive navy, and thousands of nuclear weapons.

At some level, it seems utterly absurd to be spending so much money to counter such a threat.

So I’ll close on one final note, respecting shares of global military spending today relative to where we were during the Cold War: “In 1986, US military spending was only 60% as high as that of its adversaries (taken as a group). Today, America spends more than two and one-half times as much as does the group of potential adversary states, including Russia and China. This means that if the United States were to cut it’s spending in half today, it would still be spending more than its current and potential adversaries – and the balance would still be twice as favorable as during the Cold War.” (SDTF Report; emphasis in original.)
The SDTF report’s savings, totaling nearly $1 trillion over ten years, constitute just under 16 percent of projected military spending over that same period. In the unlikely event that we manage to cut military spending at all, we will obviously be very strong militarily.

What all that military strength actually contributes to our security is still an open question.

---

Dr. Christopher A. Preble is the Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute and a member of the Sustainable Defense Task Force.  He and Benjamin Friedman authored the “Strategy of Restraint” chapter of SDTF’s report.

Is Military Spending Saving Or Enslaving?

By Michael Edwards

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Courtesy Of "The Activist Post"

The latest announcement that the Pentagon's military research division, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), has created shape-shifting robots sounds like another Terminator sequel, but this is mainstream news.  Sure, this is still theoretical, as these robots are just half a millimeter thick, but it portends a future where, "it will be used to create full-sized cars and aircraft that morph as they move, or robots that can 'flow' like mercury into small openings, or multipurpose military uniforms that can adapt to different environments."  There is no discussion in the article about the benefits to mankind, only the military applications.

Whether or not the categories listed below were conceived of by individuals who had a desire to contribute to Humanity's progress, the fact remains that  between 45%-90% of American taxpayer money now goes to military spending.  The U.S. has set the stage, but many other governments certainly have received their marching orders.  The relationship between the foreign battlefield and civilian life at home can be traced back to the advent of world wars, as private research and development was often subsumed into the military mission.  In our modern era of perpetual war on nebulous terror, it might be worthwhile to ask:  Is our support of military spending helping humanity or enslaving us?  

Surveillance -- Spy technology was naturally a military creation.  One could certainly argue that every country has real enemies, and it would be profoundly naive not to conduct surveillance against potential saboteurs.  However, the citizens of the world who have paid the bill for this technology have clearly had it turned upon us.  The ways we are being tracked, traced, and databased certainly makes it seem like we the people are the enemy.

Communications --  High-tech surveillance is at its core pure communications.  The military enhanced telephone, radio and TV technologies long ago.  A joint working relationship with communications companies led to the eyes in the skies of satellite technology, which initially was designed to communicate with military units.  It eventually had wide applications in the early space program.  Radar is ubiquitous; another military application.  And, yes, the Internet was conceived in a DARPA think-tank; it became a vehicle for secure communications between universities and military research sites in the early '60s.  Since then, the Internet has positively affected the lives of billions of people, offering freedom to communicate to anyone, anywhere in the world.  However, the new Cybersecurity Act calls for government oversight of not only the infrastructure, but of citizen-created content as well (noted in the bill as "data").  

Transportation --  The military academy, West Point, was the first engineering school in the United States.  It was denounced early on as being incompatible with democracy, as its graduates became key civil engineers and educators in every part of society.  Those four-lane highways that we all love, as we cruise down them in cars that have come to signify American independence, were created by an Eisenhower directive in 1956 to accommodate military transport and escape from atomic attack.  Naval passage has had wonderful uses, but funding by taxpayers has still led to "stealth, speed, and firepower"  as an enduring submarine slogan.  The first practical helicopters were used by the Germans in WWII.  The Wright Brothers are American legends, but they had their military connections as well.  We need only to compare the flight technology used in commercial travel vs. what was announced the other day by the British military: Taranis.  Taranis (pronounced: Tyrannis, of course) is an unmanned stealth fighter that can hit any continent in the world and, "is built to carry out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance on enemy territory using onboard sensors."  The cost is £143 million during the worst economic crisis of modern times.

Weapons and Security -- Tasers and sound cannons, are just two of the myriad weapons of modern war.  And, yet, these torture technologies are now routinely appearing where citizens attempt to peaceably assemble.  This militarization of domestic security functions can create an adversarial relationship between law enforcement and the people they are sworn to protect.  One only has to walk through a naked body scanner at the airport, under the auspices of the abusive TSA, to learn what it feels like to live in a war zone.

Science -- Scientific research has always been the thread that binds all of the disciplines of modern warfare.  The history is a byzantine one, but had its official origins in the Council of National Defense, 1916, which coordinated industry for national defense.  This mindset led eventually to The Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941.  Vannevar Bush, the director of The Carnegie Institution at the time, was bothered by the "lack of cooperation between civilian scientists and the military."  He was an early computer genius, a proponent of technocracy, and he advocated a system of connectedness called The Memex that was an absolute blueprint for the functions of the Internet that we see today.  In short, a scientific dictatorship has been imagined, beta tested, improved upon again, and activated.  Consider this quote from Bush in 1945:

  

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. 

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk. 
      - Vannevar Bush; As We May Think; Atlantic Monthly; July 1945.

This is how behind the times we are as recipients of information from the elite circles.  Perhaps, when we hear that terrahertz surveillance blimps are hovering above us; or that nanotech particles can control our minds from a distance; or there is a military-UFO connection in China; or weather modification arrays can ignite the atmosphere, we might do well not to immediately laugh at such "crazy" claims, but to investigate them.

Dwight Eisenhower succinctly warned us 50 years ago of a "Military-Industrial Complex."



Do we in fact have a military-industrial complex today?  This list of companies fulfilling military contracts certainly is indicative.  Maybe the question shouldn't be:  Is military spending enslaving us, but are we enslaving ourselves when we support the concept of war itself?

War On The Military-Industrial Complex

By Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
May 28, 2010
Courtesy Of "The Washington Examiner"

If your family spent a majority of its disposable income on groceries, and you were looking to tighten your belt, you might start by taking a scalpel to your grocery budget.

If Republicans are serious about reining in our out-of-control federal spending, they ought to start with the spending item that takes up 56 percent of our discretionary spending -- defense. Conservatives, in their much-needed attacks on federal overspending, too often give the Pentagon a pass. For the budget of fiscal 2011, taxpayers are spending $708 billion on defense.

Maybe it seems unpatriotic to criticize our military spending. Maybe it seems like you're not supporting the troops to look for defense cuts. But as a tribute to our soldiers, sailors and airmen this Memorial Day weekend, let's start dismantling the military-industrial complex that saps our wealth without helping our troops.

This week, conservative Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., encouraged the president's fiscal responsibility commission to freeze defense spending and institute other reforms aimed at eventually cutting the military budget.

"Total Pentagon spending is higher today in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any time during the last 60 years," Coburn wrote. More poignantly, he added: "America's defenses have been decaying, despite -- perhaps even because of--- increasing budgets."

More military spending might be yielding a weaker military. This may sound absurd, but it shouldn't -- not to conservative ears, at least.

Conservatives understand that big government is, very often, the problem. Bloated bureaucracies are counterproductive. You don't solve problems by throwing money at them. Government spending attracts waste, fraud and abuse. And when you put fallible humans in charge of spending huge amounts of other people's money, cronyism and corruption ensue.

Conservatives and libertarians don't oppose welfare because they resent helping poor people or resist foreign aid out of disregard for the world's poor. We want a smaller Health and Human Services budget in part because we think it will yield better health and leave humans better served.

These arguments also apply to defense spending.

We are spending more and getting less. Coburn writes: "As the defense budget has grown over time, our forces have shrunk. Secretary Gates noted in a recent speech that current submarines and amphibious ships are three times as expensive as their equivalents during the 1980s and we have fewer of them."

Part of the problem is the ballooning bureaucracy. "The Department of Defense," Coburn writes, "has far too many headquarters, staff, and bureaucracy that merely create more work for subordinate units."

Another part of the problem is the military-industrial complex. Conservatives now realize how the big banks gave us the bailouts, Big Pharma gave us health care "reform," and a gang of green bandits is angling to rip us off through a climate change boondoggle. Well, the defense contractors have been playing this game for decades.

Huge corporations, headquartered in Northern Virginia, depend mostly or entirely on the U.S. military for their profits. Bureaucrats and congressional staffers spend other people's money while protected from strict scrutiny by the veil of national security.

Defense contractors have spent more than half a billion dollars on lobbying since 2006. Former New York Sen. Al D'Amato represents United Technologies as does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's, D-Calif., former chief of staff. Linda Daschle, wife of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., lobbies for Boeing, General Electric and Lockheed Martin. Jim Dyer, former chief of staff for the House Appropriations Committee, claims Lockheed, GE and General Dynamics as clients.

To the staffers and politicians, these wealthy lobbyists serve as a walking reminder: If you play ball, you can get the sort of cushy job I have in a few years.

Politicians also use defense contracts as job programs -- as pork. This robs from taxpayers, but it also robs from our troops.

We need a military, and we're at war, so we can't completely avoid opportunities for corruption in defense. But we can minimize them. Coburn proposes some procurement reforms, but conservatives know that the best reform is often a pay cut. Republicans ought to call for some retrenchment at the Pentagon.

Timothy P. Carney is The Washington Examiner's Lobbying Editor. His K Street column appears on Wednesdays.

Defense Spending Is Much Greater Than You Think

By Robert Higgs
On Apr 17, 2010
Courtesy of The Independent Institute

When President Obama presented his budget recently for fiscal year 2011, he proposed that the Pentagon’s outlays be increased by about 4.5 percent beyond its estimated outlays in fiscal 2010, to a total of almost $719 billion. Although many Americans regard this enormous sum as excessive, few appreciate that the total amount of all defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amount budgeted for the Department of Defense.

In fiscal year 2009, which ended last September, the Pentagon spent $636.5 billion. Lodged elsewhere in the budget, however, other lines identify funding that serves defense purposes just as surely as—sometimes even more surely than—the money allocated to the Department of Defense. On occasion, commentators take note of some of these additional defense-related budget items, such as the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons program, but many such items, including some extremely large ones, remain generally unrecognized.

Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, many observers probably would agree that its budget ought to be included in any complete accounting of defense costs. After all, the homeland is what most of us want the government to defend in the first place.

Other agencies also spend money in pursuit of homeland security. The Justice Department, for example, includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which devotes substantial resources to an anti-terrorist program. The Department of the Treasury claims to have “worked closely with the Departments of State and Justice and the intelligence community to disrupt targets related to al Qaeda, Hizballah, Jemaah Islamiyah, as well as to disrupt state sponsorship of terror.”

Much, if not all, of the budget for the Department of State and for international assistance programs ought to be classified as defense-related, too. In this case, the money serves to buy off potential enemies and to reward friendly governments who assist U.S. efforts to abate perceived threats. About $5 billion of annual U.S. foreign aid currently takes the form of “foreign military financing,” and even funds placed under the rubric of economic development may serve defense-related purposes indirectly. Money is fungible, and the receipt of foreign assistance for economic-development projects allows allied governments to divert other funds to police, intelligence, and military purposes.

Two big budget items represent the current cost of defense goods and services obtained in the past. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which is authorized to spend about $124 billion in the current fiscal year, falls in this category. Likewise, a great deal of the government’s interest expense on publicly held debt represents the current cost of defense outlays financed in the past by borrowing from the public.

To estimate the size of the entire de facto defense budget, I gathered data for fiscal 2009, the most recently completed fiscal year, for which data on actual outlays are now available. In that year, the Department of Defense itself spent $636.5 billion. Defense-related parts of the Department of Energy budget added $16.7 billion. The Department of Homeland Security spent $51.7 billion. The Department of State and international assistance programs laid out $36.3 billion for activities arguably related to defense purposes either directly or indirectly. The Department of Veterans Affairs had outlays of $95.5 billion. The Department of the Treasury, which funds the lion’s share of military retirement costs through its support of the little-known Military Retirement Fund, added $54.9 billion. A large part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s outlays ought to be regarded as defense-related, if only indirectly so. When all of these other parts of the budget are added to the budget for the Pentagon itself, they increase the fiscal 2009 total by nearly half again, to $901.5 billion.

Finding out how much of the government’s net interest payments on the publicly held national debt ought to be attributed to past debt-funded defense spending requires a considerable amount of calculation. I added up all past deficits (minus surpluses) since 1916 (when the debt was nearly zero), prorated according to each year’s ratio of narrowly defined national security spending—military, veterans, and international affairs—to total federal spending, expressing everything in dollars of constant purchasing power. This sum is equal to 67.6 percent of the value of the national debt held by the public at the end of 2009. Therefore, I attribute that same percentage of the government’s net interest outlays in that year to past debt-financed defense spending. The total amount so attributed comes to $126.3 billion.

Adding this interest component to the previous all-agency total, the grand total comes to $1,027.8 billion, which is 61.5 percent greater than the Pentagon’s outlays alone.

In similar analyses I conducted previously for fiscal 2002 and for fiscal 2006, total defense-related spending was even greater relative to Pentagon spending alone – it was 73 percent greater in fiscal 2002 and 87 percent greater in fiscal 2006. In fiscal 2009, the ratio was held down in large part by the reduced cost of servicing the government’s debt, owing to the extremely low interest rates that prevailed on government securities. This situation cannot last much longer. As interest rates on the Treasury’s securities rise, so will the government’s cost of servicing the debt attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays.

For fiscal 2010, which is still in progress, the president’s budget estimates that the Pentagon’s spending will run more than $50 billion above the previous year’s total. Any supplemental appropriations made before September 30 will push the total for fiscal 2010 even farther above the trillion-dollar mark.

Although I have arrived at my conclusions honestly and carefully, I may have left out items that should have been included—the federal budget is a gargantuan, complex, and confusing collection of documents. If I have done so, however, the left-out items are not likely to be relatively large ones. (I have deliberately ignored some minor items, such as outlays for the Selective Service System, the National Defense Stockpile, and the anti-terrorist activities conducted by the FBI and the Treasury.

For now, however, the conclusion seems inescapable: the government is currently spending at a rate well in excess of $1 trillion per year for all defense-related purposes. Owing to the financial debacle and the ongoing recession, millions are out of work, millions are losing their homes, and private earnings remain well below their previous peak, but in the military-industrial complex, the gravy train speeds along the track faster and faster.

National Security Outlays in Fiscal Year 2009 (billions of dollars)
Department of Defense	636.5
Department of Energy (nuclear weapons & environ. cleanup)	16.7
Department of State (plus intern. assistance)	36.3
Department of Veterans Affairs	95.5
Department of Homeland Security	51.7
Department of the Treasury (for Military Retirement Fund)	54.9
National Aeronautics & Space Administration (1/2 of total)	9.6
Net interest attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays	126.3
Total	1,027.5
Source: Author’s classifications and calculations; basic data from U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2011 and U.S. Bureau of the Census,Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970.