The Washington Post's Robert Samuelson disembowels, or attempts to, Jessica Matthews' "America's Indefensible Defense Budget," printed in The New York Review of Books," July issue.
He does so by using misleading attacks on Matthews' statement, for instance, that "Defense spending now accounts for almost 60% of the budget: everything else is accommodated in the remaining two-fifths." Says Samuelson, she arrived at this figure by writing that "The way Mathews gets to 60 percent is by ignoring entitlement spending — the largest and fastest-growing part of the budget — and comparing defense outlays only to so-called discretionary spending."
Yet Matthews makes clear in her article that the the 60 percent figure is based on "the government’s unrestricted funds to defense" — meaning outlays outside of entitlement spending (my emphasis).
"None of this warrants a blank check for the military," writes Samuelson with throat-choking compassion.."Mathews is correct that there is waste in the system, including (as she says) weapons systems and bases that are preserved mostly because they have powerful political sponsors. But there is waste in many federal programs [ho-hum] — Medicare, student loans and Amtrak [rail transportation?], as examples — and they shouldn’t be used as a pretext for stalling needed defense spending."
We can assume Samuelson means, oh, let's say, tanks, which, writes Matthews, "are a classic case" of waste. " For years, the army has tried to convince Congress to stop buying new ones. They are expensive to build, maintain, exercise, and train troops to use. The army already has more than six thousand of them — far more than it needs for any conceivable future combat. " Or, "More controversially, the navy remains wedded to new aircraft carriers, but at $13 billion each they are arguably more an outdated symbol of twentieth-century power than an effective weapon system for a future in which they will be increasingly vulnerable to attack by high-speed, maneuverable missiles that can be bought for a minuscule fraction of what a carrier costs."
But, oh well, says Samuelson, what's a little bit of waste in the [military] system"?
He's been in Washington too long.
I recall reading, as a young man, John Kenneth Galbraith's brilliant deconstruction of defense spending on items such as tanks. Once produced, they just sit there, offering no multiplier effect. They're just hunks of metal that once manufactured are simply burdens on the economy. Samuelson may want to give Galbraith a read sometime.