Several times over my 29 years in Congress I have wondered
whether there are any fiscal conservatives at the Pentagon.
It seems that the Defense
Department is just like every other gigantic bureaucracy. When it comes to
money, the refrain is always “more, more, more.”
On November 14, the House
passed what one Capitol Hill paper described as a “$700 billion compromise
defense bill.” It was $80 billion over the budget caps and many billions
more than even President Trump had requested.
I opposed almost all the
major initiatives of the Obama administration. But it was false to say that the
Defense Department was “depleted” or “eviscerated” during those years, or that
now we must “rebuild the military.”
In fact, public relations
experts in future years should conduct studies about how the Defense Department
has been able to convince the public it has been cut when it is getting more
money than ever.
Defense Department
appropriations have more than doubled since 2000. In addition, the Department
has gotten extra billions in several supplemental or emergency appropriation
bills.
The military construction
bill is a separate bill that has added another $109.5 billion over the last 10
years. It would be hard to find any U.S. military base any place in the world
that has not had several new buildings constructed over the last few years.
In fiscal year 2016, we spent
over $177 billion on new equipment, guns, tanks, etc. We have spent similar
amounts for many years. Most of this equipment does not wear out or have to be
replaced after just one year.
It is ironic that the only
President in the last 60 or 70 years who has tried to rein in defense spending
is the only President in that period who spent most of his career in the
military.
In Evan Thomas’ book, Ike’s
Bluff, when told by his top staffer that he could not reduce defense spending,
President Eisenhower said if he gave another star to every general who cut his
budget, there would be “such a rush to cut costs you’ll have to get out of the
way.”
The book also quotes
Eisenhower as saying “Heaven help us if we ever have a President who doesn’t
know as much about the military as I do.”
Therein lies an explanation
for a big part of what has caused much excessive and/or wasteful defense
spending and, the willingness, even at times eagerness, to go to war and
support permanent, never-ending wars.
Only 18% of the current
Congress has ever served in any branch of our military. Members are afraid if
they do not vote for an increase in defense spending, or if they question waste
by the military, some demagogue will accuse them of “not supporting the
troops.”
It would be a huge
understatement to say that I usually do not agree with New York Times
editorials.
But the Times Editorial Board
on Oct. 22 published an editorial entitled “America’s Forever Wars,” pointing
out that the U.S. “has been at war continuously since the attacks of 9/11” and
now has troops in “at least 172 countries.”
The Board wrote that so far
the American people have “seemed to accept” all this militarism, but “it’s a
very real question whether, in addition to endorsing these commitments,
which have cost trillions of dollars and many lives over 16 years, they will
embrace new entanglements…”
The Times added that the
Congress “has spent little time considering such issues in a comprehensive way
or debating why all these deployments are needed.”
Backing these words up was a
cartoon in the Oct. 25 issue of Politico, a Capitol Hill newspaper. The cartoon
showed six senators sitting at a hearing.
The first senator, reading a
newspaper, says “Who knew we had troops in Niger?!” The second says: “Heck, we
don’t even know how the military budget gets spent.”
Finally, the cartoon shows a
senator who looks like Sen. Ted Cruz, saying “War is hell. I say we just give
the Pentagon an extra $80 billion and call it a day.”
Washington Post columnist
Richard Cohen, himself a veteran, wrote on Oct. 23: “But there is something
else at work here: the slavish veneration now accorded the military. You can
see it every time someone in uniform testifies before Congress.”
Since now less than one
percent of the people serve in the military, it may be that many people who
never served feel, perhaps even subconsciously, that they must bend over
backwards to show their patriotism.
However, it is not
unpatriotic to oppose wasteful defense spending or very unnecessary permanent,
forever wars.
President Reagan once said
“our troops should be committed to combat abroad only as a last resort, when no
other choice is available.”
We have far too many leaders
today who seem to want to be new Winston Churchills and who are far too eager
to send people to war.
No true fiscal conservative
could ever justify spending many billions more than even President Trump
requested.
Our national debt recently
went over the $20 trillion level. A few days ago, it was reported that the
deficit for fiscal 2017 was $666 billion. This fiscal year, it may be even
higher.
Conservatives used to be
against huge deficit spending. They also used to be against massive foreign
aid. Much of what we have been doing in both Iraq and Afghanistan, training
police and farmers, repairing electrical and water systems, even making small
business loans, etc., is pure foreign aid.
Many of our foreign
interventions have been done under the auspices or authority of the United
Nations. Conservatives used to be the biggest critics of the U.N. and world
government. Most of our so-called “coalitions” have been funded almost entirely
by American taxpayers.
Most interventionists at some
point resort to a slur referring to their opponents as isolationists. This is
so false. Traditional conservatives support trade and tourism and cultural and
educational exchanges with other countries and they agree with helping during
humanitarian crises.
They just don’t believe in
dragging war out forever, primarily so defense contractors, think tanks, and
military bureaucrats can get more money.
One last point: We have far
too many officers. In Scott Berg’s biography on Woodrow Wilson, it says during
World War I, we had one officer for every 30 enlisted men. Eisenhower once said
we had too many officers when there were nine enlisted for every officer. Now
we have one officer for only four and a half to five and a half enlisted
(varies by branch).
This is very expensive, both
for active duty and retirement, but it also makes it much more likely that we
will get involved in every little conflict around the world and/or continue
basing troops in almost every country.
We simply do not have enough
money to pay for defense of so many countries other than our own nor the authority
under our Constitution to try to run the whole world.
Congressman
Duncan served honorably in both the U.S. Army Reserve and the Army National
Guard, starting as an enlisted man and rising to the rank of captain.
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