Anyone who’s been in the military knows what happens as the end of a fiscal year approaches: wild spending. Any money that’s left in your budget must be spent, if only to justify next year’s budgetary appropriation. Woe to any unit with leftover money! Not only is there no incentive to economize at the Pentagon: there’s a negative incentive to save money, and a positive one to spend as much as possible within your yearly allotment, while complaining to anyone within earshot that you never have enough.
Trump has already promised to enlarge Pentagon funding by 10% next year, or roughly $54 billion. According to Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump’s budget is all about “hard-power,” a signal to “our allies and our potential adversaries that this is a strong-power administration.” At $54 billion, that is indeed a very expensive signal.
Forget about the global fight against ISIS: The big focus at the Pentagon is now going to be on spending that windfall of taxpayers’ dollars. And, unlike the ISIS fight, which is expected to last for at least another generation, the “fight” to spend lots of money quickly is one that the Pentagon will surely win. Believe me, the military-industrial-Congressional complex knows how to spend.
Want to make the Pentagon a better, more effective, place? Cut its budget by 10%. And keep cutting, year by year, while downsizing its mission. Force it to economize – force it to think.
Let me give you a few examples. How does the stealthy, super-expensive, F-35 jet fighter contribute to the war on terror? It doesn’t. Does the U.S. Navy really need more super-expensive aircraft carriers? No, it doesn’t. Do USnuclear forces really need to be modernized and expanded at a cost of nearly a trillion dollars over the next few decades? No, they don’t. More F-35s, more carriers, and more nukes are not going “to make America great again.” What they will do is consume enormous amounts of money for little real gain.
Throwing cash at the Pentagon is not the way to greater security: it’s a guarantee of frivolous military wish lists and “more of the same, only more” thinking. In case you haven’t noticed, the Pentagon’s record since 9/11/2001 is more than a little mixed; some would say it’s been piss-poor. Why is this? One thing is certain: shortage of money hasn’t been the problem.
Want to send a signal about “hard-power,” President Trump? Go hard on the Pentagon by cutting its budget. Spend the savings on alternative energy development and similar investments in American infrastructure. That’s the best way to put America first.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views. He can be reached at wastore@pct.edu. Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
The masses aren’t concerned about spending money when they have been convinced that it’s a worthy cause, and it’s their party’s guy who’s doing it.
Trump’s spending money is his way of “making America great” again by military force. In the short time which Trump has taken over from Obama, he’s made it pretty obvious that is his plan.
Raimondo can only save Trump’s reputation for a while, not forever. There will be no improvement in US/Russia relations. Both political parties are firmly onside with Russia being the enemy and Trump hasn’t said a word about any peaceful relations with Russia since his campaign speeches.
In the time of Obama, all the blame would have been firmly fixed on the president. This one continues to be the great white hope!
Hm, the trickle down economy of sitting on a huge pile of money and distributing it downwards to everyone you want to keep befriended is pretty stable, whether it’s the Saudi state structure or the american military complex.
If someone has the power to cut the budget, fine, but against such a powerful structure it will be very hard. I would think that the way to proceed is to convert the cut into an alternative budget that can win the participants over one by one. The participants still would be able to get their part but it would no longer pass through the military system.
This is roughly 100% true – about the race by the departments to wolf down anything on the table. Craziness.
Should get on the alternative energy bandwagon only if it means Nuclear, bigly. Yeah solar and wind are nice but..
… but the Energy companies don’t own the Sun and can’t stop it from radiating huge amounts of energy which also drives the wind, which they can’t keep from blowing….
They really don’t own the land on which coal, uranium and oil are situated. That’s one point of Donald’s agenda, take all the Native lands in america, or at least control the “resources” therein, the same way it’s been done for 525 years come October, and the foreign and domestic official policy for hmmm… when was the first U.S. budget published and enacted? Yeah, ever since then. Vietnam was and still is a “strategic resource” because Michelin has the world’s largest rubber plantations. When the French Vichy government ceded control to the Axis powers it made a really huge impact in America. No rational excuse for the takeover of the Middle East from Turkey and their allies in World War 1 and continued to the present and apparently the future.