A $1 trillion defense budget would be madness — Beyond Nuclear International

And more than half of it will go to weapons manufacturers

https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/03/26/a-1-trillion-defense-budget-would-be-madness/

Biden has requested an obscene $886 billion for defense, but it could go higher

By William Hartung, 26 Mar 23

The Pentagon has released its budget request for Fiscal Year 2024. The figure for the Pentagon alone is a hefty $842 billion. That’s $69 billion more than the $773 billion the department requested for Fiscal Year 2023

Total spending on national defense — including work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy — comes in at $886 billion. Adding in likely emergency military aid packages for Ukraine later this year plus the potential tens of billions of dollars in Congressional add-ons could push total spending for national defense to as much as $950 billion or more for FY 2024. The result could be the highest military budget since World War II, far higher than at the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or the height of the Cold War. 

The proposed budget is far more than is needed to provide an effective defense of the United States and its allies.

If past experience is any guide, more than half of the new Pentagon budget will go to contractors, with the biggest share going to the top five — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — to build everything from howitzers and tanks to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Much of the funding for contractors will come from spending on buying, researching, and developing weapons, which accounts for $315 billion of the new budget request.

he National Priorities Project gives us a look at the imbalance of government spending for 2021 with the military consuming almost half.

As suggested above, Congress will probably add a substantial amount to the Pentagon’s request, largely for systems and facilities located in the states and districts of key members. That’s no way to craft a budget — or defend a country. When it comes to defense, Congress should engage in careful oversight, not special interest politics. 

Unfortunately, in recent years the House and Senate have accelerated the practice of jacking up the Pentagon’s budget request, adding $25 billion in FY 2022 and $45 billion in FY 2023. Given threat inflation with respect to China and the ongoing war in Ukraine, there is a danger that the $45 billion added for FY2023 could be the floor for what might be added by Congress in the course of this year’s budget debate.

Exceptions to the rush to throw more money at the Pentagon may come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Representatives Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) have introduced the “People Over Pentagon Act,” which calls for a $100 billion annual cut in the DoD budget. A group of conservative lawmakers centered around the Freedom Caucus have called for a freeze on the discretionary budget at FY2022 levels. But different members have given different views on how Pentagon spending would fit into a budget freeze, from assertions that it will be “on the table” to a denial by one at least one member, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), that Pentagon cuts should come into play at all.

It has been reported that President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that we should spend all we need for national defense and not one penny more. But the new motto of the Pentagon and the Congress appears to be “spend now and ask questions later.” Rather than matching funding to a viable national security strategy, the Pentagon and the Congress are pushing for whatever the political market will bear. The notion that tradeoffs need to be made against other urgent national priorities is a foreign concept to most members of the House and Senate, as they have routinely raised the Pentagon budget at the expense of other urgent national needs. 

There is more than money at stake. An open-ended strategy that seeks to develop capabilities to win a war with Russia or China, fight regional wars against Iran or North Korea, and sustain a global war on terror that includes operations in at least 85 countries is a recipe for endless conflict.

We can make America and its allies safer for far less money if we adopt a more realistic, restrained strategy and drive a harder bargain with weapons contractors that too often engage in price gouging and cost overruns while delivering dysfunctional systems that aren’t appropriate for addressing the biggest threats to our security.

The Congressional Budget Office has crafted three illustrative options that could ensure our security while spending $1 trillion less over the next decade. A strategy that incorporates aspects of these plans and streamlines the Pentagon budget in other areas could be sustained at roughly $150 billion per year less than current levels. 

A new approach would take a more objective, evidence-based view of the military challenges posed by Russia and China, rely more on allies to provide security in their own regions, reduce the U.S. global military footprint, and scale back the Pentagon’s $2 trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons. Cutting wasteful spending practices and slowing or replacing spending on unworkable or outmoded systems like the F-35 and a new $13 billion aircraft carrier could save billions more. And reducing spending on the half a million-plus private contractors employed by the Pentagon could save hundreds of billions over the next decade.

The Pentagon doesn’t need more spending. It needs more spending discipline, tied to a realistic strategy that sets clear priorities and acknowledges that some of the greatest risks we face are not military in nature. Today’s announcement is just the opening gambit in this year’s debate over the Pentagon budget. Hopefully critics of runaway spending will have more traction this year than has been the case for the past several years. If not, $1 trillion in annual military spending may be just around the corner, at great cost to taxpayers and to the safety and security of the country as a whole.

William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget. He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center’s Sustainable Defense Task Force.

March 26, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Where the $1.3 Trillion Per Year U.S. Military Budget Goes

The Duran, by Eric Zuesse, March 24, 2023

Nobody can give a precise dollar-number to U.S. ‘Defense’ spending because the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department has never been able to pass an audit, and is by far the most corrupt of all federal Departments (and is the ONLY Department that has never passed an audit), and also because much of America’s military spending is being paid out from other federal Departments in order to keep down the published annual U.S. Government ‘Defense’ expenditure numbers (which come from ONLY the “U.S. ‘Defense’ Department). 

Those are expenditures for America’s privatized and overwhelmingly profit-driven Military-Industrial Complex. (By contrast: Russia and China require, by law, that their armaments-firms be majority-owned by the Government itself.)

According to the best available estimates, the U.S. Government has been spending, in total, for over a decade now, around $1.3T to $1.5T annually on ‘defense’, and this is around half of all military spending worldwide by all 200-or-so nations, and is more than half (around 53%) of all of the U.S. federal Government’s ‘discretionary’ (or congressionally voted for) annual expenditures.

Unlike regular manufacturers, which sell entirely or mainly to consumers and to businesses, not to their Government, armament-firms need to control their Government in order to control their markets (which are their Government and its ‘allied’ Governments — including NATO), and so they (in purely capitalist countries such as the U.S.) do control their Government. This is why the armaments-business (except in countries whose armaments-sector is socialized) is infamously corrupt. In order to hide the extent of that corruption (and to promote ever-higher military spending), the ‘news’-media need — in those countries — to be likewise effectively controlled by the investors in those firms.

Consequently, America, which has no national-security threat from any country (so, these astronomical ‘defense’-expenditures are blatantly inappropriate), spends annually around half of all of the money that the entire world spends on the military. And most of that money gets paid to its armaments-firms. Or, as Stephen Semler, an expert on these matters, put it regarding last year’s numbers, “How much of the $858 billion authorized by the FY2023 NDAA will be transferred to military contractors? I estimate $452 billion.”  ………………………………

If this had not been happening each year after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, then the current U.S. federal debt would be far less, if any at all — but, in any case, that expense (which went, and is going, to exceptionally rich individuals) will be paid by future generations of Americans, by means of both increased taxes and reduced services from the U.S. Government. What pays for bombs (and funds the purchase of yachts) today will be taken from everyone’s infants tomorrow. And it is taking millions of lives in the targeted lands, and has been doing so for decades now. A psychopathic U.S. Government is producing these results………………………………………………………………………………………………

The presumption is that the voters don’t care, and that the ‘news’-media won’t enlighten the voters about this matter, and about how it impacts, for example, which nations the US will categorize as being an “ally,” to sell weapons to, and which nations it will categorize as being an “enemy,” to target for conquest………………………………………………….. more https://theduran.com/where-the-1-3-trillion-per-year-u-s-military-budget-goes/

March 26, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment