technological dominance even against the likes of China. They should buy modest numbers of the most sophisticated and most expensive equipment to ensure U.S. Rather than buy large numbers of new weapons typically costing twice as much as their predecessors?the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter, the Crusader artillery system, a new Virginia-class submarine, the V-22 Osprey?the military services should adopt a “silver bullet” approach to modernization. But given the ample money now being offered them, they are failing to prioritize. The military services are not so irresponsible as to request money for weapons that are truly pointless. That holiday must now end as systems age and require refurbishing or replacing. military took a “procurement holiday” of sorts during the 1990s, because money was tight and it had so much modern weaponry already on hand after the Reagan buildup. Whether it is the price of weaponry, the burden of providing military health care to active-duty troops and their families as well as retirees, or the price of paying good people enough to keep them, most defense costs rise faster than inflation. Instead, the administration claims that it is fully funding only the force structure and weapons-procurement agenda that was laid out in the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, as well as the immediate exigencies of the war on terrorism.įor those who doubt the need for added defense spending, it is true that a military of a given size costs more to maintain each year. Moreover, with the exception of missile defense, which will cost $7.8 billion this year, Bush administration officials have not yet added any major weapons systems to the modernization plan they inherited from their predecessors. Why does Bush wish to restore defense spending to such high levels? He does not plan to increase the size of the military, which remains one-third smaller than in Cold War times (2.1 million active-duty personnel during the 1980s, compared with 1.4 million now). Yet this year, the annual costs of the war on terrorism are less than $30 billion. The budget would continue to grow to $470 billion by 2007.Įven factoring out inflation, the annual defense budget will have grown by more than $100 billion between 20. 11 and the war in Afghanistan, President Bush’s budgets are now as follows: $329 billion in 2001, $351 billion for 2002 and $396 billion proposed for the next fiscal year.
The Clinton administration’s defense budget had grown to about $300 billion annually by the end of eight years, including about $15 billion in annual funding for nuclear weapons activities at the Department of Energy. Now, we have the bill for this defense plan. The review was silent, however, on costs. Rumsfeld’s plan also added a few programs like a large-scale missile defense, but for the most part it simply blessed what its predecessors had bequeathed it. 30, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld released a defense plan that largely preserved the basic size and composition of the military and weapons modernization agenda endorsed by President Clinton. Will throwing money at the military help us or hurt us in the long run if it removes the pressure for the military to make tough choices?especially if defense budgets subsequently wind up insufficient in future years to fund all the weapons and forces we have retained? And are we learning enough from the war in Afghanistan, a war that clearly shows the promise of some relatively inexpensive, high-tech weapons? The question is whether we need to spend this much more. There is no question that we need to spend more on the military, especially given the new challenges made clear Sept.
Next year alone, if the president’s proposals were adopted, the national security budget would hit $396 billion. The $48 billion increase would also push spending above the average we spent during the Cold War, when the threat was an even higher-stakes global war against a superpower rival. Instead, the 2003 budget gave the military a spending increase so huge that it will help tip the country into deficit spending and hamstring national debates on other priorities ranging from expanding health care to improving our diplomacy and foreign-aid programs also needed to stop terrorism. But last week, the administration proposed a budget for the Pentagon that made no mention of retiring any weapons systems and no mention of forcing the military to prioritize its needs. When the Bush administration took office a year ago, leaders boldly promised to reform the military?to shift it from one ready to fight the Cold War to one ready to fight the kinds of battles envisioned in the 21st century and to do so with fiscal restraint.
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