The Military Budget Is a Disgrace

Well, there are some cuts that are widely considered to be good ideas. One of the most prominent ones, of course, is the F-35 jet fighter, which has been under development now for twenty years at least and is billions of dollars over budget, years behind schedule, has run into all sort of problems, having engine fires on runways — almost literally a dumpster fire of a project.

And they keep just buying more and more of them. So, that’s a project that definitely could stand to be cut and possibly eliminated entirely. That’s about $10 billion a year. Another is that funds are starting to ramp up for this nuclear modernization project that’s been talked about. It was planned under the Obama Administration. Depending on who you ask, it may cost anything up to about $2 trillion dollars over the next thirty years or so. And what it is, is reinvesting in nuclear weapons, which are something that the United Nations has said we should be moving away from.

Right now, we have Trump pulling the United States, or attempting to pull the United States, out of all kinds of nuclear weapons treaties that had helped to get the number of nuclear weapons somewhat under control. By any reasonable measure, the United States has far more nuclear weapons than we need for deterrence, which is supposed to be the rationale for nuclear weapons.

So, reinvesting in nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century, at a time when everyone sensible recognizes that we can never use these weapons — that they exist only as deterrents and that we therefore only need a few of them, if any — is really bad judgment. It’s a bad use of money, it’s going to make the world more dangerous.

There are certain parts of the nuclear modernization in particular that are seen as making the world a more dangerous place. There’s a new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that’s on the agenda. There’s so many reasons not to do this, it’s just really discouraging that it seems to be something that the military establishment in the United States has thoroughly bought into.

Luckily, the new chair of the Armed Services Committee in the House of Representatives, Adam Smith, has said that he thinks many parts of this nuclear modernization plan are a very bad idea. So, there’s someone with a position to do something about it who thinks that this should not go forward. So that’s definitely something that could use some cuts.

But, another place where the US really ought to be cutting, and it’s not getting as much attention, is in our deployments around the world, both in Afghanistan and Syria — which have gotten quite a bit of attention, especially as Trump has made possibly empty promises to pull out from those places — but also in Somalia, where we’re hearing about drone strikes, Japan and Germany and South Korea, where the United States still has tens of thousands of troops, basically hold-overs from World War II and the Korean War. And we don’t need all of those troops in all of those places. We should begin bringing them home.

And we did begin bringing them home, but we’ve stalled. I would like to think that by the time we hit the one hundredth anniversary of World War II, maybe we would have brought our troops home.