Under fire: US's misguided
defense budget By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - With Congress on the verge of
approving yet another record Pentagon budget, a
task force of nearly two dozen progressive policy
analysts is calling for major changes in the way
the United States allocates money for its common
defense.
Noting that Washington currently
spends $6 on its military for every dollar it
spends on homeland security, diplomacy, foreign
aid and non-proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, the group argues that a three-to-one
ratio is more reasonable and well within reach.
The Task Force on a Unified Security
Budget for the United States, 2007, calls in
particular for shaving US$62 billion from the
pending 2007 defense budget
of nearly $440 billion, with most of the cuts
coming from advanced weapons systems that have
little relevance to threats faced by Washington
today.
Of those savings, $52 billion
should be added to homeland security, particularly
to upgrade port inspections, and to diplomatic
accounts, such as foreign aid, that are designed
to reduce or preempt discontent or hostility
toward the US before it develops into an actual
military threat, according to the task force
report, which was sponsored by the Center for
Defense Information, the Security Policy Working
Group and Foreign Policy in Focus.
In
particular, the 45-page report argues in favor of
using a new framework for Congress to consider in
allocating national security spending - a "unified
security budget" that would divide the main
components into "offence" consisting primarily of
military forces; "defense" for homeland security;
and "prevention", which would include diplomacy,
weapons non-proliferation and foreign aid.
"This budget would give Congress a look at
the big picture and provide the basis for a better
debate over this nation's security priorities,"
according to the report, which also pointed out
that it echoes recommendations made nearly two
years ago by the bipartisan 9-11 Commission.
The commission report, which became an
overnight best-seller, called for the adoption of
"a preventive strategy that is as much, or more,
political as it is military" and urged the
president and Congress to adequately fund the
"full range" of non-military, as well as military,
security tools to effectively fight the "global
war on terrorism".
That view has recently
received additional support from a growing number
of conservative commentators, such the former
chief of the US Central Command, General Anthony
Zinni, and foreign policy intellectual Francis
Fukuyama who, in his recent book, America at
the Crossroads, criticized US policy as
over-militarized.
At some $440 billion for
2007, the Pentagon's defense budget would exceed
the combined military budgets of the world's 25
next most-powerful nations, according to recent
estimates.
In fact, the Pentagon's budget
substantially understates the amount Washington
spends on the military. Nuclear weapons
activities, on which the George W Bush
administration hopes to spend nearly $22 billion
next year, for example, are allocated to the
Energy Department.
In addition, the
regular Pentagon budget does not include the costs
of US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,
which currently are running at nearly $10 billion
a month.
"When these costs are added in,
military spending for the coming year will exceed
$600 billion - a figure that would exceed both the
heights of the [president Ronald] Reagan military
buildup [in the early 1980s] and the Vietnam War,
in inflation-adjusted terms," said Miriam
Pemberton, the report's co-author based at the
Institute for Policy Studies.
That trend
cannot be sustained, particularly given the huge
budget deficits - more than $400 billion this year
- Washington has incurred under Bush's presidency
and the projected growth in Pentagon spending as
laid out in its Quadrennial Defense Review
released earlier this year, according to the
report.
At the same time that Pentagon
spending continues to grow, however, the Bush
administration has recommended some cuts to the
homeland security budget.
Thus, even while
the Central Intelligence Agency has warned that
weapons of mass destruction are mostly likely to
enter the US through its ports, the administration
intends to spend "four times more deploying a
missile defense system that has failed most of its
tests than [it] will spend on port security".
Those priorities should change, according
to the report, which calls above all for major
cuts in weapons systems that, like the missile
defense system, are either unproven or that are
designed to counter conventional threats that,
given Washington's current military dominance, are
very unlikely to materialize over the next decade
or beyond.
National missile defense
programs, for example, should be cut from a
proposed $10.4 billion in 2007 to $2.4 billion;
similarly, $14 billion could be saved by reducing
the US nuclear arsenal to 1,000 weapons and
eliminating the Trident II nuclear missile.
Nearly $20 billion could be cut from
several major weapons programs, including the
Virginia-Class submarine, the DD(X) destroyer, the
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the troubled V-22
Osprey rotor-aircraft and C-130 transport
programs, and offensive space-based weapons
systems, according to the report.
"We need
to stop spending money on those weapons systems
that do not advance national security," said
co-author Lawrence Korb, a senior Reagan Pentagon
official who is now based at the Center for
American Progress.
Some $7 billion could
be saved by deactivating two air force wings and
one navy carrier battle force, as well, according
to the report. The resulting savings should be
reallocated to key diplomatic and homeland
security programs, the report urged.
In
particular, State Department programs to curb the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
should be increased from a proposed $1.3 billion
to nearly $6 billion; US contributions to
international organizations and peacekeeping
should be increased from $2.8 billion to more than
$5 billion; and development assistance to poor
countries, currently a little more than $3
billion, should be increased by $10 billion.
On homeland security, the report calls for
increasing spending on public health
infrastructure and "first responders", such as
police and firefighters, from $5.5 billion to $14
billion. Spending on container and port security
should increase from a proposed $2.4 billion to $5
billion.
The report also calls for
increasing the budget to develop alternative
energy sources - an initiative that Bush himself
touted in his state of the union address - from a
proposed $1.2 billion to $10 billion in 2007.
