Why not cut a $100 billion program and then establish a counterinsurgency school for $30 billion? Why, instead, are the proposed cuts always outweighed by proposed increases?

Our military spending isn’t geared toward the last war; it’s aimed at wars fought in the middle of the last century. We need to spend much, much less and we need to spend it much, much smarter. Huge twentieth century programs are not the answer.

That, and “arbitary” implies that the current levels are sensible and rational.

We’re adding $$ the DoD doesn’t even want.

http://firedoglake.com/2009/05…..uantanamo/

Congress added $9 billion for planes Gates specifically did not want, because one plant was in Long Beach and Barbara Boxer wanted it, and the other was in Georgia and because Lockheed Martin wanted it.

US defense spending is the biggest, non-touchable pool of reliable pork in the world. Rather than making a knee-jerk defense of the total, Richard Smith should be drilling down into the details of how all this stuff gets settled out and asking if it’s the best way to keep the nation secure.

Because that is almost never the first thing that anyone considers when these decisions are made.

Having 12 carriers means that we will routinely have 4 on station. Considering that we have become the policemen of the world’s shipping lanes….

I figure maybe we need 15 carriers. After all, we have all the money in the world, and as many enemies as we need to generate.

As a veteran and a socialist/anarchist I say that damned near every dollar shoveled at what’s called defense is wasted. Start there and make some rational choices.

Bacevich’s book is really excellent. I loved the way he put quotes around “defense” — as though that’s what it really is. It’s not “defense” — it’s the projection of a US empire by military means. It’s offense, not defense.

Last I heard we have a whole new line of aircraft carriers, the first one to roll off the logs in a few years. The debate is nil.

And I guarantee that the way the contracts are drawn up, it will be more expensive to slow down production, after it starts, then to continue apace. (Why, if you were smart, wouldn’t you set up the contracts that way?)

Aircraft Carriers are dead.

And counter-insurgency implies insurgency which makes me ask the question “Who are we invading and why?” and if you ask me, as if I was some sort of leader of the Conservative Party in Britain (who said this a week or two ago) the existence of foreign troops in Afghanistan is the problem.

Rooting out the “Taleban” (as the DoD calls it) in Afghanistan is sorta like trying to root out the “Democrats” in America, or the Viet Cong sympthatizers in Viet Nam.

You are stupid for trying!

Maybe if Americans stopped being imperial pigs around the planet, then we would not have acts of “terror” against us. We were attacked by fifteen Saudi dupes on 11 September 2009, with the connivance of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush. So in response we attacked and invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq? The Afghan “detainees” kept in cages in Gitmo in Cuba are no threat to these United States. They should be compensated for seven years of torture and illegal isolation and returned home. The US should withdraw totally and immediately from Afghanistan and Iraq. We should stop murdering Pakistanis with drones and missiles.

By today’s standards and today’s language, Americans who resisted British occupation and British imperialism in 1776 were terrorists. But now we are the imperialists and the colonial occupiers.

Each of the Nimitz and improved Nimitz class carriers is more powerful than all of the rest of the aircraft carriers on the planet combined. Additionally, we also currently have about seven Wasp class LHD (Landing/Helicopter/Dock), two Tarawa class LHA (Landing/Helicopter/Assault), with the new America class LHAs beginning to come on line in 2012. Each of those nine or ten units is equal to any other country’s carriers, especially when combined with the other units in its assault group.

So, in reality, we have nine or ten carriers equal or better than any in the world, and a further dozen far and beyond anything anyone else has ever crafted in terms of destructive power and potential for abuse.

Our Air Force and Naval and USMC air forces refuel in the air more often every week than the entire rest of the planet does in a year.

This surplus of incredibly flexible (in some situations) power gets us in so much trouble. That danger – and evil – far exceeds any benefit from having such power.

Is Obama getting the army back in the business of cooking its own food, building its own homes and showers, no more KBR electric specials?
Because if Obama were to do that the army would grow because somebody has to do the work. plus the army can do the job cheaper than KBR can so if done right they should save money
This might explain why Cheney is so angry lately.

Thanks for pointing others to Andrew Bacevich; a ‘conservative’ who actually exhibits critical reasoning (tho I don’t agree with him on several issues).

IMO, it is also necessary to point out to people how the government changes words to fit it’s purposes, such as ‘War Department’ morphing into ‘Defense Department’; It’s not a ‘Defense Department’ but a ‘War Department’ and should be called such.

The need for 12 carriers is compelling and obvious. You can not fill a 12 month calendar with pictures of only 11 carriers. Do the math, people!

Cut Star Wars cold, Cut all new weapons systems end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan just blame Bush and walk away.
Tell WallStreet and the GOP we need the money for the next bank bailout let the GOP argue against the banks needing more money. Nobody will believe them, The majority of People want the wars over. A move like this will surprise financial markets the Dollar will move up in value.

Congress added $9 billion for planes Gates specifically did not want, because one plant was in Long Beach and Barbara Boxer wanted it, and the other was in Georgia and because Lockheed Martin wanted it

Pork trumps ideology. This is a point that has always irritated me. Every time I hear some super-hawk beating their chest, invoking patriotism to defend stupid or wasteful Pentagon spending, I want to throw something. There can be nothing more cynical and unpatriotic than to wrap pork up in the flag.

But that a “liberal” like Boxer does it, in my book is even worse.

*G*

All this, and the US still can’t win the wars it starts. (I’ll merrily skip over the question of whether the US should have started those wars….)

My own experiences in the defense industry suggest that there is plenty of money to cut, and that Congress just won’t cut it. As Teddy P. says, there’s no reason that you can’t cut more money than you want to spend on new programs. Do we need as many combat brigades as the Army has, as many CVs and LCDs as the Navy has, or as many aircraft?

The obvious answer would seem to be that if we weren’t occupying two countries, we could do with a smaller active Army. The other questions are ones that I’d like to hear military strategists answer, but I suspect the answer is “no”. We’re not at war, and I don’t see that we are likely to be for some time. There is a danger of losing that industrial base if we allow the aerospace and shipbuilding industries to whither, but better economic policy might be more effective means of addressing that issue than useless defense spending.

Power Play

As for defending sealanes, how has having 12 carriers (and their battle groups) helped against Somali and Indonesian pirates?

At an average of about 80 aircraft per floating runway at an approximate cost per of $38 million then the cost of the crew etc.etc.etc. and pretty soon an aircraft thingy becomes pretty expensive to run.

Barney is wrong, by the way, we should cut the military budget by at least half.

How is that an argument against having the need for carriers?

Best book on how U.S. got here: House of War by James Carroll.

Norfolk has not seen a pirate in at least a hundred years.

If they can’t do the job they are advertised to do, what’s the point of building more?

If at first you don’t succeed………

We need all of this military because we may have to invade Grenada again…just any minute now. s/

Let’s be clear about what “defense” is created by continuing to build aircraft carriers and other Navy vessels.

Military construction is the only business keeping US shipyards in business. Having operating shipyards in times of national emergency is a strategic priority. Similar arguments can be made for a number of items in the defense budget; it’s not letting the industrial capacity disappear in an economy that has de-industrialized.

That said, let’s look at what the composition of the budget is.

Around $200 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan operations.

Here is the actual detail of budget authority proposed:

050 National defense: 2010
Discretionary:
Department of Defense–Military:
Military personnel 149,602
Operation and maintenance 276,018
Procurement 131,157
Research, development, test and evaluation 78,945
Military construction 22,394
Family housing 1,959
Revolving, management, and trust funds and other 3,517
Placeholder for outyear overseas contingency operations -0–
————-
Total, Department of Defense–Military 663,592
————-
Atomic energy defense activities:
Department of Energy 16,397
Formerly utilized sites remedial action 134
Defense nuclear facilities safety board 26
————-
Total, Atomic energy defense activities 16,557
————-
Defense-related activities:
Federal Bureau of Investigation 4,520
Other discretionary programs 2,574
————-
Total, Defense-related activities 7,094
————-
Total, Discretionary 687,243
————-
Mandatory:
Department of Defense–Military:
Concurrent receipt accrual payments to the Military Retirement Fund 4,693
Proposed Legislation (non-PAYGO) 370
Subtotal, Concurrent receipt accrual payments to the Military Retirement Fund 5,063
Procurement -0–
Revolving, trust and other DoD mandatory 787
Offsetting receipts -1,749
————-
Total, Department of Defense–Military 4,101
————-
Atomic energy defense activities:
Energy employees occupational illness compensation program and other 1,114
Defense-related activities:
Radiation exposure compensation trust fund 31
Interfunds -0–
Proposed Legislation (non-PAYGO) -402
Proposed Legislation (PAYGO) 402
Subtotal, Interfunds -0–
Payment to CIA retirement fund and other 291
————-
Total, Defense-related activities 322
————-
Total, Mandatory 5,537
————-
Total, National defense 692,780

I think I’d be less concerned about 12 carrier battle groups than with the network of some 400 overseas military bases and listening posts. If the 12 carriers are needed to project force, than why do we also need literally scores of airfields leased from foreign countries, all over the world. These days only two countries seem serious about maintaining (or creating) large networks of foreign military bases – the US and, in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, China.

China wants its “String of Pearls” network of bases to protect its oil and raw material shipments from the Gulf to its southern port cities.

A similar argument may be made of US bases between the Gulf and the Mediterranean, and also of US bases in and around the Atlantic, but why do we need them everywhere else as well? Who do we plan to attack from Diego Garcia? Sri Lanka? How about from our bases in Greenland and Antarctica?

Well let’s see. If one of the core missions of the US Navy is to protect sealanes and it can’t, then either it has the wrong kind of Navy or it isn’t using it effectively. No matter how many carriers we have will not change that basic fact.

Of course. It’s just a simple example, illustrative of the larger problem.

Hi, Teddy. (loved the STFU last night).

Carrier groups aren’t primarily tasked with stopping low-level piracy. They’re designed to resist bigger threats.

And how many of these “bigger threats” exist…?

My suspicion is that the airbases are a much bigger issue – many of them are a throwback to the Cold War, when military planners wanted to make sure we had the ability to deploy strategic bombers to Russia and other places – in other words, that we could refuel and resuppply nukes on the way to annihilating enemy cities. Hopefully, that particular application is decisively obsolete. If that’s what our generals want to make sure we retain our ability to do, then I have a much bigger issue with them than I would over the carriers.

“it’s not letting the industrial capacity disappear in an economy that has de-industrialized.”; don’t buy it. Example, the auto companies. And there are many other avenues for ‘industrial productivity’.

Bottomline is the U.S. uses the military to try and project ‘dominance’ in it’s desire for hegemony all over the world. But ,as can be seen, such doesn’t work. What good is a dominant military when the nation is bankrupt and can’t finance it’s government because bno one is willing to finance it’s debt? War certainly won’t fix things.

At least two, at present.

FWIW, most of the air bases that had nuclear flying missions were closed during the Base Re-Alignment and Closure Commissions in the early ’90s.

And the bases with nuclear flying missions were mostly located in the upper mid-west or northeast of the US, not overseas.

The truth is by leaving off the very next paragraph in Richard Smith’s post I think you miss the whole point of what he was saying.

Back in October Barney Frank made an argument for cutting the DoD budget by 25 percent. I thought, and still think, this is a pretty ridiculous idea.

Absolutely, the Defense budget is bloated and needs to be reformed. Without a doubt, there are weapons systems and defense programs that we invest in that are outdated and obsolete, and those funds could be better spent on domestic social programs. But why throw out a number like 25 percent? Where did Frank get that number? Did he go line-by-line through the Defense budget to arrive at that figure? If the DoD budget could be cut 15 percent, would Barney Frank still be disappointed.

Now I won’t hazard a guess as to why that paragraph is missing from the critique but I do believe its relevant to the discussion. In reading the post I felt like Richard Smith isn’t saying he is against cutting Defense Spending. What he is against is throwing out arbitrary numbers to cut Defense Spending without examining what some of that money either is already being used for, OR could be transferred toward training to more up to date programs that train the members of the military for more current threats. So many times I have seen people say the same kinds of things in the blogosphere about cutting spending on the MIC without EVER addressing specifically what they want to cut and how much of the pie that would equal out to. Barney Franks didn’t offer any specific programs he wanted to cut and I am a fan of his just like most other liberals and progressives. The point is can we stop just speaking in generalities and start actually pinpointing what it is we object to and voicing that opinion while also focusing on those things we do need and being willing to advocate funding for that. To me its the difference between being seen as just an idealogue and being seen as someone who wants to fix the problem.

That’s just my take.

Those figures are in millions of dollars.

For the details, here is the 291-page presentation.

DoD Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Request Summary Justification

The aircraft carrier item is listed as Carrier Replacement with a budget of $1,393.7 million. That means that a carrier will be taken out of service (and probably mothballed) when this carrier is complete.

The largest navy procurement item at $4 billion is the VIRGINIA class submarine.

The largest aircraft item is the Joint Strike Fighter.

The largest of all items is $9 billion for missile defense systems.

It’s best to see the whole landscape before picking on one item as waste. And a good place to start is in the strategic assumptions part of this document.

Here’s some food for thought. The US has 59 million males fit and of the right age for military service. We maintain a volunteer military of 1,454,500 active enlisted or commissioned personnel, with reserves of 848,000 – totalling about 1/120 Americans. The annual expenditure is about $713 billion.

China, the only thing in the world we have approaching a strategic military competitor, has 313 million males fit for and of the right age for miltary service. They maintain a volunteer military (which, unlike the US, includes virtually all of their civil defense capabilities) of 2,250,000 with reserves of 850,000 – totalling a mere 2/1000 Chinese. The annual expenditure is about $230 billion (officially only $100 billion).

The EU/EC maintains a combined military (all member states) of 2,703,000 with 5.7 million reseves, a sixth of which are the Turks.. a bloated number because almost ubiquitous conscription, and also, as with the Chinese, with their civil defense functions built. Their annual expenditure is about $311 billion.

(source CIA Yearbook)

One has to wonder what the US is doing with all that money.

But mac, where are those bigger threats, and are there ever going to be twelve of them at once?

Teddy, again 12 carriers means 4 carriers are out working.

A lot of that money is spent investigating, persecuting, and discharging lesbian and gay servicemembers.

You mean 12 Radioactive Copies of the USS Arizona Memorial once we get into a real shooting war with anybody more sophisticated than the Somali Pirates:
This Is How the Carriers Will Die

U Sank My Carrier!

Paging the War Nerd …

hehe.. took a look at some numbers. I guess it could be worse. North Korea has a spectacular 260 of every 1,000 people under arms. Iran, 172 out of every 1,000. I guess the Axis of Evil is different ;P Russia, 25 out of every 1,000.

Most of Europe (even with conscription) hovers at or higher than the US proportion. East Asia varies. South Korea is high, at 75 per 1,000, probably because the North scares ‘em to death, and tiny Taiwan (population 25 million) is at 86 per 1,000, which means that its standing army is the same size as China’s (population 1.3 billion) – I guess China won’t be invading Taiwan anytime soon ;P. Despite their vaunted military sizes, China and India have extremely compact all-volunteer armies given the size of their populations (2 and 3 per 1,000 respectively). Japan is the same as China.

The need for carrier task forces is part of the “we won WW Second” paradigm that the Navy has used to justify its existence since around 1945… not that the USN has not done some good occasionally, but there have been very limited opportunities to project seapower globally since St Ronnie killed off the Kommies and their Evil Way of Life singlehandedly.

I’ll grant you that as a former carrier aviator there is an intrinsic value in having a flat-top or two deployed in some “hot spot” to be able to project force if needed as a last resort, but those have been less and less as our geo-political realities change.

Thirteen or twenty carriers will not make us any safer, unless there is an actual threat from the last superpower, China, which might credibly challege us for dominance of the “high seas”. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the Chinese are going to win any war with us by sinking our carriers and their task groups but by simply sinking our economy; and for that we have George Bush and his “credit card war”… which was a bigger threat to the long-term security of this Nation than any group of 15 half-witted Wahhabi adherents with pilots licenses.

So now we get to pay for carriers we don’t need with money we don’t have provided by Congresscriminals we don’t control. Lovely.

Hell, 25% is too low. Cut it by 50% and there’d still be no country that could touch the US. Cut it by 90% and I GUARANTEE the US could not be succesfully invaded.

cut it by 150% and we can all have ponies.

Unserious.

[/village]

thanks bt great post.

let’s ask chuck spinney to come back from retirement and put him in charge of the pentagon budget process.

Seconded.

A 50% cut (then we’ll only spend 7 times, not the present 14x what #2–China–spends on defense) is in order.

…but it will not happen under Obama.
I don’t think He’ll cut 5%.

He’s made it clear again and again he’s unwilling to dismantle the industrial military complex. The only candidates who said they would were Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.

The foreign fighters in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area who are causing trouble are Al Qaeda (mostly from Saudi Arabia). How are you going to get them out of there except by force?

The others, the Taliban, are indigenous, but they are not numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The violent ones are possibly in the tens of thousands, but even that’s not entirely clear.

In the current Pakistani-Taliban fighting it’s been written that there are about 15,000 Pak and only 4,000 Taliban (at the start). Now they think it’s more like 2,000 Taliban. How many have been killed or escaped the battlefield isn’t entirely known.

The Pakistanis have more military, but they don’t feel they need to devote them to this fight. The Taliban militant insurgents are not insurmountable. They are not ghosts in the night. They are not all-powerful.

As for Afghanistan and our presence there: the dangerous foreigners there would be the drug buyers. Our efforts to break that trade doesn’t require the same kind of violence as we’re seeing in Pakistan, but it does require some force.

Lastly, our Afghanistan fight against the Taliban is cooperative with the Pakistanis. Our aim is to defeat that Taliban element which have gone into Pakistan (again they are the foreign militants) to try and impose Sharia law and possibly take over the country and it’s nukes. That’s unacceptable.

We’re trying to protect Pakistan and defend the west against the drug trade.

So, how are we the dangerous foreign element again? Who exactly did we unilaterally decide to attack because of our bloodlust? Remember 9/11?

A cut of 25% is unreasonable

Anything less than 95% is base accommodationism. We don’t need any standing military forces, merely the skeleton crew that serves as a basis for mobilization in time of war that we always had in this country until we failed to disband our forces after WWII. The problem isn’t just that this massive expenditure is money ill spent that could be better spent, it’s that this much money forces people to hallucinate ever more vacuous rationales, in the form of ever less rational wars, to justify the expense. Having 12 carriers forces us to be at war at all times, if only to defend the 12 carrier force structure from its real enemies. No, these not any foreign navy or any terrorists, but the people who pay for the whole charade, you and me.

I’m sitting here on Memorial Day wondering how we “honor” the war dead by glorifying war.

He’s not cutting it, he’s increased the budget. Which, to be fair, is what he said he’d do.

People should have listened to what he said. Sure, he lied about a bunch of things, but there was a lot he told the truth about, and military spending was one of those things.