(Throughout my working years, I considered myself to be fairly
informed in general – turns out I was mostly misinformed – but now better late
than never, eh? This article is another in a series of revelations which spell
out the outrageous, but purposeful, out of control government which rules us.
The all but holy writ of our National Security State is one monstrously
expensive edifice – read and consider!
BTW - federal
government workers had the highest median earnings of all – just an incidental FYI – CL:)
As the guy whose book, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of
America, was published in 1995, not long after the implosion of
the Soviet Union and what looked like the greatest victory in history, let me
just say that I was ahead of my time. I was then taking a look at the sense of
triumphalism that had permeated the world I grew up in, which had by the end of
the Vietnam War essentially collapsed. The feeling that Americans were living
in a “victory culture,” that when the Marines advanced the enemy would
inexorably fall before them, that our wars were there only to be won -- a
sensibility that lay at the heart of the war movies of my childhood -- was
briefly reborn after 1991. The second time around, however, its shelf life
proved remarkably short.
By the time I
wrote a new preface to the book in 2007, in the wake of the disastrous invasion
of Iraq ("mission accomplished"!),
I could already conclude that, in the post-Cold-War world,
“victory
soon turned out to be a remarkably quicksilver concept, even for the leaders of
the New Rome... Perhaps when the history of this era is written, among the more
striking developments will have been the inability of a mighty empire to force
its will or its way on others in the normal fashion almost anywhere on the
planet. Since the USSR evaporated, the fact is that most previously accepted
indices of power -- military power in particular -- have been challenged and,
in the process, victory has been denied.”
Twelve years
later, what should we call the all-American culture in which we’re now
immersed? Not a “defeat culture” (not yet, anyway), but perhaps a “denial
culture” -- a sensibility that would extend from not absorbing the way the U.S.
military can’t win a genuine
military victory anywhere on the planet after almost 18 years of trying to the
all-too-literal climate-change denialism that's
captured the Oval Office and much of the rest of the
government. Or perhaps we’re now in something more like a “culture of numbness”
in which no one feels much of anything.
But when it
comes to victory culture, let me offer one caveat in the context of today’s
piece by Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger: you
could indeed still use the phrase in reference to the U.S. military and the
national security state in one specific way. When it comes to funding, no one
could prove more triumphalist, more victorious than the Pentagon. After all, in
July 2017, Hartung wrote a then-definitive piece on the size of the national
security state budget, coming up with the eye-popping, distinctly triumphalist
figure of $1.09 trillion. Now, he
and Smithberger have counted again and, almost two years later, that figure has
only soared. It’s one hell of a story of how a twenty-first-century victory
culture works for an institution that, curiously enough, can’t actually win a
war. Tom
Boondoggle, Inc.
Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget
By William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger
Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget
By William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger
In its
latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a
near-record $750 billion for
the Pentagon and related defense activities, an astonishing figure by any
measure. If passed by Congress, it will, in fact, be one of the largest
military budgets in American history, topping peak levels
reached during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And keep one thing in mind: that
$750 billion represents only part of the actual annual cost of our national
security state.
There are
at least 10 separate pots of money dedicated to fighting wars, preparing for
yet more wars, and dealing with the consequences of wars already fought. So the
next time a president, a general, a secretary of defense, or
a hawkish member of Congress insists
that the U.S. military is woefully underfunded, think twice. A careful look at
U.S. defense expenditures offers a healthy corrective to such wildly inaccurate
claims.
Now, let’s take a brief dollar-by-dollar tour of the U.S.
national security state of 2019, tallying the sums up as we go, and see just
where we finally land (or perhaps the word should be “soar”), financially
speaking.
The
Pentagon’s “Base” Budget: The
Pentagon’s regular, or “base,” budget is slated to be $544.5 billion in Fiscal
Year 2020, a healthy sum but only a modest down payment on total military
spending.
As you
might imagine, that base budget provides basic operating funds for the
Department of Defense, much of which will actually be squandered on
preparations for ongoing wars never authorized by Congress, overpriced weapons
systems that aren’t actually needed, or outright waste, an expansive category
that includes everything from cost overruns to unnecessary bureaucracy. That
$544.5 billion is the amount publicly reported by the Pentagon for its
essential expenses and includes as well $9.6 billion in mandatory spending that
goes toward items like military retirement.
Among
those basic expenses, let’s start with waste, a category even the biggest
boosters of Pentagon spending can’t defend. The Pentagon’s own Defense Business
Board found that cutting unnecessary overhead, including a bloated bureaucracy
and a startlingly large shadow workforce of private contractors, would save $125 billion
over five years. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the board’s
proposal has done little to quiet calls for more money. Instead, from the highest reaches of
the Pentagon (and thepresident himself)
came a proposal to create
a Space Force, a sixth military service that’s all but guaranteed to further
bloat its bureaucracy and duplicatework already
being done by the other services. Even Pentagon planners estimate that the
future Space Force will cost $13 billion over the next five years (and that’s
undoubtedly a low-ball figure).
In
addition, the Defense Department employs an army of private contractors
-- more than 600,000 of
them -- many doing jobs that could be done far more cheaply by civilian
government employees. Cutting the private contractor work force by 15% to
a mere half-million people would promptly save more
than $20 billion per year.
And don’t forget the cost overruns on
major weapons programs like the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent -- the
Pentagon’s unwieldy name for the Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic
missile -- and routine overpayments for even minor spare parts (like $8,000for a helicopter
gear worth less than $500, a markup of more than 1,500%).
Then there
are the overpriced weapons systems the military can’t even afford to operate
like the $13-billion aircraft
carrier, 200 nuclear bombers at $564 million a pop, and the F-35 combat
aircraft, the most expensive weapons system in history, at a price tag of at
least $1.4 trillion over
the lifetime of the program. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO)
has found -- and the
Government Accountability Office recently substantiated -- that, despite years of
work and staggering costs, the F-35 may never perform as advertised.
And don’t
forget the Pentagon’s recent push for long-range
strike weapons and new reconnaissance systems designed for future wars with a
nuclear-armed Russia or China, the kind of conflicts that could easily escalate
into World War III, where such weaponry would be beside the point. Imagine if
any of that money were devoted to figuring out how to prevent such conflicts,
rather than hatching yet more schemes for how to fight them.
Base
Budget total: $554.1 billion
The
War Budget: As if its regular
budget weren’t enough, the Pentagon also maintains its very own slush fund,
formally known as the Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO. In
theory, the fund is meant to pay for the war on terror -- that is, the U.S.
wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere across the Middle East
and Africa. In practice, it does that and so much more.
After a
fight over shutting down the government led to the formation of a bipartisan
commission on deficit reduction -- known as Simpson-Bowles after its co-chairs,
former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senator Alan
Simpson -- Congress passed the Budget Control Actof
2011. It officially put caps on both military and domestic spending that were
supposed to save a total of $2 trillion over 10 years. Half of that
figure was to come from the Pentagon, as well as from nuclear weapons spending
at the Department of Energy. As it happened, though, there was a huge loophole:
that war budget was exempt from the caps. The Pentagon promptly began to
put tens of billions of dollars into it for
pet projects that had nothing whatsoever to do with current wars (and the process
has never stopped). The level of abuse of this fund remained largely secret for
years, with the Pentagon admitting only in
2016 that just half of the money in the OCO went to actual wars, prompting
critics and numerous members of Congress -- including then-Congressman Mick
Mulvaney, now President Trump’s latest chief of staff -- to dub it a “slush
fund.”
This
year’s budget proposal supersizes the slush in that fund to a figure that would
likely be considered absurd if it weren’t part of the Pentagon budget. Of the
nearly $174 billion proposed for the war budget and “emergency” funding, only a
little more than $25 billion is
meant to directly pay for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The
rest will be set aside for what’s termed “enduring” activities that would
continue even if those wars ended, or to pay for routine Pentagon activities
that couldn’t be funded within the constraints of the budget caps. The
Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is expected to work to alter
this arrangement. Even if the House leadership were to have its way, however,
most of its reductions in the war budget would be offset by lifting
caps on the regular Pentagon budget by corresponding amounts. (It’s worth
noting that President Trump’s budget calls for someday eliminating the slush
fund.)
The 2020
OCO also includes $9.2 billion in
“emergency” spending for building Trump’s beloved wall on the U.S.-Mexico
border, among other things. Talk about a slush fund!
There is no emergency, of course. The executive branch is just seizing taxpayer
dollars that Congress refused to provide. Even supporters of the president’s
wall should be troubled by this money grab. As 36 former Republican members of
Congress recently argued, “What
powers are ceded to a president whose policies you support may also be used by
presidents whose policies you abhor.” Of all of Trump’s “security”-related
proposals, this is undoubtedly the most likely to be eliminated, or at least
scaled back, given the congressional Democrats against it.
War
Budget total: $173.8 billion
Running
tally: $727.9 billion
The
Department of Energy/Nuclear Budget: It
may surprise you to know that work on the deadliest weapons in the U.S.
arsenal, nuclear warheads, ishoused in the
Department of Energy (DOE), not the Pentagon. The DOE’s National Nuclear Security
Administration runs a nationwide research, development, and
production network for nuclear warheads and naval nuclear reactors that stretches from Livermore, California, to
Albuquerque and Los Alamos, New Mexico, to Kansas City, Missouri, to Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, to Savannah River, South Carolina. Its laboratories also have
a long history of
program mismanagement, with some projects coming in at nearly eight times the
initial estimates.
Nuclear
Budget total: $24.8 billion
Running
tally: $752.7 billion
“Defense
Related Activities”: This category
covers the $9 billion that annually goes to agencies other than the Pentagon,
the bulk of it to the FBI for homeland security-related activities.
Defense
Related Activities total: $9 billion
Running
tally: $761.7 billion
The five
categories outlined above make up the budget of what’s officially known as
“national defense.” Under the Budget Control Act, this spending should have
been capped at $630 billion. The $761.7 billion proposed for the 2020 budget
is, however, only the beginning of the story.
The
Veterans Affairs Budget: The wars
of this century have created a new generation of veterans. In all, over 2.7 million U.S. military personnel have
cycled through the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Many of them
remain in need of substantial support to deal with the physical and mental
wounds of war. As a result, the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs
has gone through the roof, more than tripling in this century to a
proposed $216 billion. And this
massive figure may not even prove enough to provide the necessary services.
More
than 6,900 U.S. military
personnel have died in Washington’s post-9/11 wars, with more than 30,000 wounded in
Iraq and Afghanistan alone. These casualties are, however, just the tip of the
iceberg. Hundreds of thousands of
returning troops suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), illnesses
created by exposure to toxic burn pits, or traumatic brain injuries. The U.S.
government is committed to providing care for these veterans for the rest of
their lives. An analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University has
determined that obligations to veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars alone will
total more than $1 trillion in
the years to come. This cost of war is rarely considered when leaders in
Washington decide to send U.S. troops into combat.
Veterans
Affairs total: $216 billion
Running
tally: $977.7 billion
The
Homeland Security Budget: The
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a mega-agency created after the 9/11
attacks. At the time, it swallowed 22 then-existing
government organizations, creating a massive department that currently has
nearly a quarter of a million employees. Agencies that are now part of DHS include
the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Customs and
Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Citizenship and
Immigration Services, the Secret Service, the Federal Law Enforcement Training
Center, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, and the Office of Intelligence
and Analysis.
While some
of DHS’s activities -- such as airport security and defense against the smuggling of a
nuclear weapon or “dirty bomb” into our midst -- have a clear security
rationale, many others do not. ICE -- America’s deportation force -- has done
far more to cause suffering among
innocent people than to thwart criminals or terrorists. Other questionable DHS
activities include grants to local law enforcement agencies to help them
buy military-gradeequipment.
Homeland
Security total: $69.2 billion
Running
tally: $1.0469 trillion
The
International Affairs Budget: This
includes the budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID). Diplomacy is one of the most effective ways
to make the United States and the world more secure, but it has been under
assault in the Trump years. The Fiscal Year 2020 budget calls for a one-third cut in
international affairs spending, leaving it at about one-fifteenth of the amount
allocated for the Pentagon and related agencies grouped under the category of
“national defense.” And that doesn’t even account for the fact that more
than 10% of the
international affairs budget supports military aid efforts, most notably
the $5.4 billion Foreign
Military Financing (FMF) program. The bulk of FMF goes to Israel and Egypt, but
in all over a dozen countries receive funding under it, including Jordan,
Lebanon, Djibouti, Tunisia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, the
Philippines, and Vietnam.
International
Affairs total: $51 billion
Running
tally: $1.0979 trillion
The
Intelligence Budget: The United
States has 17 separate
intelligence agencies. In addition to the DHS Office of Intelligence and
Analysis and the FBI, mentioned above, they are the CIA; the National Security
Agency; the Defense Intelligence Agency; the State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research; the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Office of National
Security Intelligence; the Treasury Department’s Office of Intelligence and
Analysis; the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence; the National Reconnaissance Office; the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance; the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command; the Office of
Naval Intelligence; Marine Corps Intelligence; and Coast Guard Intelligence.
And then there’s that 17th one, the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, set up to coordinate the activities of the other 16.
We know
remarkably little about the nature of the nation’s intelligence spending, other
than its supposed total, released in a report every year. By now, it’s more than $80 billion. The bulk of this
funding, including for the CIA and NSA, is believed to be hidden under obscure
line items in the Pentagon budget. Since intelligence spending is not a
separate funding stream, it’s not counted in our tally below (though, for all
we know, some of it should be).
Intelligence
Budget total: $80 billion
Running
tally (still): $1.0979 trillion
Defense
Share of Interest on the National Debt: The
interest on the national debt is well on its way to becoming one of the most
expensive items in the federal budget. Within a decade, it is projected to
exceed the Pentagon’s regular budget in size. For now, of the more than $500
billion in interest taxpayers fork over to service the government’s debt each
year, about $156 billion can be
attributed to Pentagon spending.
Defense
Share of National Debt total: $156.3 billion
Final
tally: $1.2542 trillion
So, our
final annual tally for war, preparations for war, and the impact of war comes
to more than $1.25 trillion -- more than double the Pentagon’s base budget. If
the average taxpayer were aware that this amount was being spent in the name of
national defense -- with much of it wasted, misguided, or simply
counterproductive -- it might be far harder for the national security state to
consume ever-growing sums with minimal public pushback. For now, however, the
gravy train is running full speed ahead and its main beneficiaries --
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop
Grumman, and their cohorts -- are laughing all the way to the bank.
William
D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular,
is the director of the Arms and
Security Project at the Center for International Policy and
the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin
and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Mandy
Smithberger, a TomDispatch regular,
is the director of the Center for
Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books,
John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in
the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly
Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and
Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War,
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John
Dower's The Violent American Century: War
and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright
2019 William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger
