それでも国防費は減らない

Don't Bet on Obama Reining in Defense Spending

BENJAMIN H. FRIEDMAN | 18 FEB 2009
WORLD POLITICS REVIEW

Many Americans believe that Barack Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress will lower defense spending and restrain the militaristic foreign policy it underwrites. The coming years should destroy that myth. America's overly aggressive and fiscally reckless defense policy will survive the Democratic majority.

The Obama administration inherits runaway defense spending and leadership of a military that wants more. Non-war or base defense spending will be more than $515 billion in fiscal year 2009. Adjusting for inflation, that's 40 percent higher than the defense budget when George W. Bush took office. Add the wars, nuclear weapons research, veterans, and homeland security, and you get about $750 billion. That is more than six times what China spends, 10 times what Russia spends and 70 times what Iran, North Korea and Syria spend combined.

This explosion in spending comes despite a historically benign threat environment. Invasion and civil war, which traditionally justified militaries, are unthinkable here. North Korea and Iran trouble their citizens and neighbors, but with decaying economies, shoddy militaries, and aversion to suicidal behavior, they pose little threat to the United States. Russia and China are incapable of territorial expansion that should worry Americans, unless we put our troops on their frontiers. And unlike us, they are out of the revolution export business. Terrorism is chiefly an intelligence problem arising from a Muslim civil war. Our military has little to do with it.

A military posture of restraint -- one focused on U.S. defense rather than quixotic efforts to promote social transformation and dampen all instability -- would allow us to spend half what we do on defense. We'd be safer for it, because lower spending would discourage us from meddling in others' conflicts.

The Pentagon doesn't see things that way, of course. True, Obama's principle defense advisers, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have recently spoken about hard choices ahead. But they support budgets that avoid those choices. Both claim that the United States should devote a minimum of 4 percent of gross domestic product to defense, even in peacetime. Because GDP generally rises, this would ensure an annual increase in defense spending, liberating it from old-fashioned considerations like enemies. Base defense spending is about 3.3 percent of GDP. Getting to 4 percent would require a $94 billion a year increase.