Industrial Military? Complex!
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has raised the hackles of many lawmakers for daring to suggest that we cut our defense budget. Specifically, he wants to reduce spending on our amorphous missile defense systems, the president’s new helicopter, and the F-22 Raptor, inter alia.
Naturally, the immediate reaction from the (ostensibly) small-government conservatives is to point out how Obama is leaving us completely defenseless. Before your mind can register the inanity of this idea, they go on to point out the disparity between the reduction in defense spending to the monstrous domestic spending that the Obama administration is trying to push through for next year. I agree that Obama is spending way to much money as it is; but, they are implying that it’s not fair that he gets to spend all this money on what he wants. Their goal is not to reduce spending overall, it is to limit increases to only what they want.
There is a big brouhaha over the Raptor cuts. Gates doesn’t want any more because he says it “has not performed a single mission in either [Afghanistan and Iraq].” Makes sense, right? We’re not using the 190 or so we have now, why buy more? Well, the warplane is made primarily in Georgia and cutting the order will most likely lead to job losses in the Peach State factories. It’s ridiculous, so the argument goes, to allow these jobs to disappear when the nation’s overall unemployment rate is climbing.
But this logic does not justify buying a whole new set of F-22s. At $65 billion a pop, this is simply corporate welfare. There is a direct correlation between buying jets we do not need and handing cash to GM and Chrysler. Just because the dollars are marked in the Defense column doesn’t make it legitimate. If the only way your business can survive is if the Federal government pumps money into it, you probably should not be playing in the open market.
I was agog when our defense budget hit $601 billion (that’s $601,000 million). Last year it was up nearly 27% to $762 billion. We spend more on defense than every other nation combined. We have had only one attack on our soil since World War II and all the military spending in the world could not and did not stop it. But one suggestion (from the guy Bush hired to fix Iraq, no less) that we stop spending billions of dollars on essentially useless war toys and suddenly we’re naked to the world. Let me tell you, we’ve been naked for a long time; no size budget will fix that.
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Tags: defense, government, obama