Congress is about to approve an $858 billion military budget, which is $45 billion more than President Biden asked for, as well as billions more than even the Pentagon requested. The initial figure omits another $18 billion of planned weapons deliveries to Taiwan.
But it's Taiwan — and Ukraine, of course, plus inflation— driving the defense department increases. Said National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan last week: "[The United States must] support Ukraine and be able to deal with contingencies elsewhere in the world." Observed defense contractor Raytheon's chief executive, "We went through six years of Stingers" — shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles — "in 10 months." having sent 1.600 of them to Ukraine.
As the opening sentence suggests, there's another player involved in jacking up the Pentagon's budget: Congress. It's at the trough again. Duly elected members of both houses and defense contractors themselves spread arms manufacturing throughout the country, making the Pentagon a vested political interest. It's no accident that suppliers in 48 states contribute to the building of a malfunctioning F-35 aircraft.
Defense spending might even top the $858 billion figure, since Congress is pondering another $22 billion in resupplies to Ukraine. The war there, NATO's needs, China's saber-rattling and inflation are pushing defense spending higher, plus the U.S. must maintain an adequate level of its own war matériel. Even if reluctantly, one must admit that greater defense spending is temporarily necessary. If one persists in wondering why, see Putin and Xi for answers.
What rankles is when Congress insists on spending that the Joint Chiefs want stopped. For example the Senate's military authorization bill prevented "the Air Force and Navy from retiring aging weapons systems that the military would like to take out of service, including certain C-130 transport planes or F-22 fighter jets," reports The NY Times. "At the same time, it includes billions of dollars in extra money to build even more new ships and planes than the Pentagon itself asked for."
But things that fly, float and go boom are made in Democratic as well as Republican districts. Hence, as Politico reported last summer, the House Armed Services Committee preferred an additional $37 billion to the Biden administration's request. The final committee vote: a sizably lopsided 42-17 in favor of the excess cash. More out of balance was the Senate's counterpart committee, which wanted $45 billion more, and which the 7-1 vote approved.
All of this has congressional progressives up in arms, so to speak. For virtue never tires, even when one free, democratic nation is getting the poop kicked out of it by an invading, authoritarian neighbor, and another one — an island — is ultimately facing the same fate. Nor do several trillion dollars laid out on alleviating the pandemic's economic pain muffle progressives' cries of discretionary spending ignored in favor of defense.
More reasonable is the voice of former assistant secretary of defense (Reagan administration) Lawrence Korb, now at the progressive Center for American Progress. Writing for The National Interest, he sees three spending priorities that should go the way of the Studebaker, beginning with Trump's "proposed modernizing [of] all three legs of the nuclear triad and building two new tactical nuclear weapons." Except for wanting to cancel one of the two tactical nukes, the Biden administration has agreed with its predecessor. Korb sensibly says there's no harm in canceling all of it, saving about $300 billion over the next several years.
"Second," writes Korb, "the president should retire irrelevant and old Navy ships such as the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and use the savings to build new, modern ships.... In addition, the Navy should stop building large aircraft carriers such as the $13 billion Ford-class carrier. And given the Marines’ new strategy of abandoning amphibious landings, the Navy could reduce the number of large deck amphibious ships." Third are those pesky F-35 fighter jets, whose production — because of "cost overruns and technical problems" — should be reduced.
The world is more dangerous today than it was yesterday. There is no way around that simple, straightforward, immensely unpleasant fact. Thus however disagreeable increased defense spending is, it's also necessary — authoritarian brutes such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping made it so.
Another nettlesome fact is bipartisan piling on, although the upside is that U.S. presidents are not dictators who could unilaterally cut defense fat. The end would be nice, but not the means.