During my career in the military, one of my major responsibilities was managing the operating budget for my battalion- in a two-year span I spent $12.3 million. The most important lesson I learned in all of my time in the military was that in order to wisely spend your budget, you must appropriately match your dollars to the current high priority missions and future operational needs.

The White House has released the FY 2009 Department of Defense budget request and despite my experience with military spending, I can't tell what the national priorities are. Furthermore, presidential candidate Sen. McCain has said he intends to increase military spending to 4% of our budget if elected. Military spending requests focused on dollar amounts instead of actual objectives and on spending instead of doing are worthless. To explain what I mean, let’s get into the numbers.

When talking about any government budget, a certain amount of fudge factor must be taken into account- numbers presented in one report often differ from the bottom line in another. For the sake of clarity I’ll use the DoD number of $515.4 billion (with the understanding that the realistic number will fluctuate over the next year.) The breakdown of the DoD budget is as follows:

After sifting through the supporting documentation for the budget I had two questions. First, does this $515.4 billion cover the entire cost of national defense? Second, is this money well matched to our current priority missions and future operational needs?

The answer to the first question is “no”. The Office of Management and Budget, and Fred Kaplan from Slate.com break down the National Defense budget as such:

However, I believe in order to get a true idea of what we are spending on National Defense you must also include the (unfunded) FY 2008 Global War on Terror (GWOT) Supplement request of $102.5 billion as well as the Department of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs Budget requests. Throwing these numbers into the mix, the budget looks like this:

Given a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $13.86 trillion, the initial DoD figure of $515.4 billion represents 3.7% of the US GDP, and hawks seem bent on bumping this figure up to 4% in the coming years. However, if you take the total of $857.7 billion that we’ve tallied above, the percentage of GDP that we are trying to spend on our national defense is already 5.9%. This brings me to my second question, and ultimately to question the idea of pegging our national defense expenditures to an arbitrary percentage of our GDP. Why spend the money at all if the budget does not match our current and future defense needs?

Congress needs to take a hard look at these proposed budgets because spending tax dollars on arbitrary military programs doesn’t make us safer if they’re not needed or effective. Money spent on unlikely adversaries or threats is money wasted. Here are some of the specified requests:

Within the defense budget there is $16.9 billion tagged for joint maritime capabilities such as the CVN-21 Supercarrier, DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer, and a new Virginia class submarine. The DoD budget also allocates $45.6 billion for joint air capabilities, including money for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and V-22 Osprey. It has taken over 25 years for the Osprey to get into the fight, and it has been an albatross around the Marine Corps’ neck with falsified maintenance reports and Marines killed during testing. The JSF represents one of the largest contracts ever awarded to the defense industry (one airplane for three services’ diverse missions) and has been a huge gamble in an area of warfare where generalization has usually been punished by specialization. On the ground side, $20.5 billion has been set aside to increase the strengths of the Army and Marine Corps by 65,000 and 27,000 by 2011.

Will these additional troops enable us to fight our two-front war successfully or better protect Americans at home? Will these high-tech air assets really multiply our force capabilities safely or will they just be the next generation of B-1 bombers? Are the new ships to protect our overseas oil interests from growing competitors like China which has no comparable naval capability yet but will be demanding more of the foreign oil we currently control militarily? Would this money be better spent on diplomatic and deterrent efforts abroad? I don’t have the inside scoop on all these programs and the policies that are calling for them, but given our government’s bias for buying weapons and its proven ability to completely mis-estimate the threat posed by a “rogue” nation, I think they’re worth asking. We cannot let politicians use the Global War on Terror as an excuse to flood the military industrial complex with cash. It is up to American taxpayers to demand accountability in our spending, and deny members of congress and their lobbies the ability to profit from war.


I am not advocating a smaller defense budget- I am advocating a smarter defense budget. Congress and the American people need to understand where this money is being spent and how it correlates to the defense of our nation. For the past eight years we have been asked to trust the President with our national defense and we are now mired in a fight that is mortgaging our future. By blindly signing checks, congress is not supporting the troops; they are enabling an agenda of the few.

All American troops expect is a paycheck, a little vacation, and the right equipment for the mission. If this means spending 10% of GDP on defense then I am in support of it. But our Department of Defense and our government owe it to the American taxpayer to fully prioritize these expenditures and ensure the money is spent on the right mission, and not just spent. Simply saying you spend four cents of every dollar on the military doesn’t make your country safe.


Further Reading: DoD FY 09 Budget Homeland Security Budget VA Budget OMB Slate