Our Overstuffed Armed Forces: Reasons to Cut More

Lawrence J. Korb

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1995

Article preview: first 500 of 4,452 words total.

Summary:  President Clinton and the Republican Congress do not agree on much, but both want to give the Pentagon more than it dared hope for in the post--Cold War era: some $260 billion a year. The Joint Chiefs say the United States should be ready to fight two wars at once, but would this really take as many troops as they claim, and is it even reasonable to plan for it? Look around at what allies and enemies are spending. Election time, however, is almost here, and politics in the defense debate has seldom run higher. What makes no strategic sense is good on the hustings.

Lawrence J. Korb is a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Despite their differences, President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress have agreed on two things. The first is that the federal deficit should be eliminated by slashing federal spending rather than increasing taxes; indeed, both sides want to cut taxes. They have also agreed that projected levels of defense spending will not be part of any deficit reduction package. In fact, both the administration and Congress have called for increases for defense for the rest of the decade. In 1996 and 1997 alone Congress wants to add $20 billion to what the Pentagon requested, and it has established firewalls between defense and nondefense areas of the budget so that funds cannot be shifted to cushion cuts in social programs. Under the terms of the joint budget resolution Congress adopted in June, between 1995 and 2002 domestic discretionary funding will fall from $248 billion to $218 billion while military expenditures will rise from $262 billion to $281 billion.

With the demise of the Soviet threat and the emerging consensus on the need to deal with the deficit, one might have expected defense spending to bear some portion of the reductions, or at least not be increased. In the budget reduction plans of 1990 and 1993--both of which were much less severe than the current version--defense cuts played a major role. Moreover, by about a 2-to-1 margin Americans support reducing defense to bring down the deficit and oppose the Clinton-Republican plan to boost spending on the armed forces.

Proponents of a larger defense budget are quick to point out that military spending has declined for a decade and is now about 35 percent lower in real terms than in 1985. Or that the share of GDP consumed by defense (4.0 percent) is at a 70-year low. Or that the proportion of the federal budget that goes to defense is at its lowest level since Pearl Harbor. Or that the active force is smaller than at any time since the eve of the Korean War.

While all these statements are true and historically interesting, they are meaningless as a guide for policy. Defense spending should be measured against the efforts of potential adversaries and allies, not past U.S. administrations. According to figures from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the United States will spend on national security this year more than three times what any other country on the face of the earth spends, and more than all its prospective enemies and neutral nations combined. Its $262 billion defense budget accounts for about 37 percent of global military expenditures; its NATO allies, along with Japan, Israel, and South Korea, account for 30 percent. The 15 other NATO nations will spend some $150 billion on defense in 1995. Russia, the second-biggest spender, will lay out about $80 billion, Japan about $42 billion, and China about $7 billion (though this last is subject to more than the usual debate over defense figures). The world's six rogue states--Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba--have a ...

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