The Pros And Cons Of US Defense Spending

During the 2016 presidential race, Trump promised a massive buildup in the size of the military, with tens of thousands more troops, a 350-ship Navy and at least a hundred more combat aircraft. As of late, he has boasted of the $700 billion defense budget the Pentagon will soon reap to start the buildup in fiscal 2018. But the commander in chief has neglected to add in the crucial details while Congress has indeed authorized a nearly $700 billion defense bill, appropriators have yet to agree on how much of that will actually be funded. The White House also needs Congress to lift the caps that currently rein in defense spending. All of this is complicated by the administration’s yet unseen National Defense Strategy. The strategy is needed to

David Petraeus, who under former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama not only commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan but also headed the U.S. Central Command and the CIA. In articles that he co-wrote with Brookings Institution national security expert Michael E. O’Hanlon for The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs, the general pointed out that even with the slowdown in the growth of the defense budget since passage of the BCA, the Pentagon does not have a readiness problem. Indeed, Petraeus and O’Hanlon argued that the U.S. military is “awesome” and therefore does not need a massive increase in defense spending, particularly since the government already spends more than the next eight countries in the world combined and spends significantly more than its strategic competitors—including three times more than China and 10 times more than Russia. The exaggerated claims of the poor state of the U.S. military were demonstrated by a chart in the Nuclear Posture Review, which Defense Secretary Jim Mattis referenced during his testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on February 6, 2018. According to Secretary Mattis, the chart demonstrates that during the Obama administration, America’s nuclear adversaries developed 34 new nuclear systems while it developed only one, the

If spent correctly, this should enable the United States to continue to maintain its competitive edge against strategic competitors. However, even with the increase in the defense share of federal R&D, the overall federal R&D budget declines because the nondefense portion is slashed by 19.2 percent. Similarly, while the FY 2019 budget increases total cyber funding for the Pentagon by 4.2 percent to $8.5 billion, it cuts the R&D budget of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which creates cybersecurity standards for the government and private sector, by 18 percent. Reducing R&D and cyber funding for nondefense agencies in order to allow the government to pay for increases in the defense budget will not enhance America’s overall security. Meanwhile, the budget asks for $9.2 billion for the Missile Defense Agency an increase that is about $1.9 billion more than what was previously planned even though these programs are so plagued with problems that there are serious doubts as to their effectiveness. In fact, a Pentagon report from last year claimed that the missile defense program demonstrates a limited capability to defend the U.S. homeland from small numbers of medium-range missiles launched from North Korea or Iran. While the budget gives the military a 2.6 percent pay raise, it does not provide any raise for the nearly