The Pentagon's budget equals half of the world's defense spending. Why is the United States spending so much on its military?
Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told a RIA correspondent that at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s the U.S. spent about 10% of its GDP on military programs. Another peak in military spending was during Ronald Reagan's presidency, 6.5% of GDP in 1985. When the Cold War ended, U.S. military expenditure dropped to 3% of GDP. It is now 4% and growing.
By 1998, the Pentagon budget had declined by 30% in real terms, and resumed growth when NATO and the U.S. started the war in Kosovo. The trend was boosted when George W. Bush came to power.
Rogov said the main U.S. strategic objective after the Cold War had been to strengthen the country's status as the world's only superpower, the only pole in a unipolar world. This strategy rests on the power factor, which includes military might and non-military elements, primarily economic might.
The Untied States accounts for more than 20% of the world's GDP in terms of purchasing parity power (PPP), and for about 33% in terms of the exchange rate.
A closer look at the Pentagon budget shows that decisions to increase military spending were based on the assumption that the U.S. should exploit the situation created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union to surge ahead of the rest of the world in military terms, and to make rivalry with it impossible in the 21st century. The U.S. views China as its prime rival.
The right-wing hardliners in the Bush administration, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, argue that the U.S. could easily resume the heavy military spending of the Cold War period to maintain the country's position as the world's only superpower.
Two-thirds of the U.S. budget consists of so-called mandatory items, such as social security, healthcare and education, where spending is indexed to inflation. Congress does not vote on appropriations to these programs because money is appropriated automatically. Therefore, only one-third of the American budget is annually redistributed. This part is divided almost equally between military and non-military spending.
To keep raising defense spending, the administration will have to cut the protected items. But American society is not prepared for this. Attempts made toward this end provoked the protests of the opposition and the ruling Republican Party, who know that the loss of traditional services would cost them votes in the congressional elections in the fall of 2006 and the 2008 presidential election.
Rogov said U.S. military spending included the budget of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the military part of expenditures of the Department of Energy (DoE). There is also the Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides patient care and federal benefits to veterans and their dependents, and pays about half of military pensions. In all, its expenses add about $50 billion to the defense budget.
In addition, the government has to repay debts which are mostly connected with deficit financing (a planned excess of expenditure over income) of military spending in the past.
Congress has approved the appropriation of $512 billion for the DoD. The military part of the DoE's budget should add $15-20$ billion, plus $50 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs and more than $40 billion in allocations for internal security and the part of the national debt that is associated not with social programs but with Vietnam and other wars.
Taken together, total U.S. military spending amounts to $650 billion or more, which is why the federal budget deficit amounts to 3-4% of GDP, to be paid for by future generations.
The Bush administration allocated huge sums towards military programs, though the money was spent not on the planned acquisition of arms, but on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and on other similar operations. This means that the DoD's budget remained the same in fixed prices as under President Reagan, but spending on acquisitions has been cut to a third.
To implement the armaments programs that are currently at the R&D stage, the U.S. needs to double or triple its acquisition budget, which is virtually impossible.
The point is that the bulk of spending goes not to defense as such but to overseas operations. Only a tiny percentage of the budget is spent on the defense of the national territory (3.7% in 2005). This is logical, as who would threaten the United States? Mexico, or Canada? In contrast, nearly 50% of allocations are spent on expeditionary forces. This makes the policy of a global military presence extremely expensive.
On the one hand, the United States is the world's only country to have started buying fifth-generation weapons, despite budgetary, political and economic limitations. They include a new generation of fighters and bombers, unmanned combat air vehicles that use modern precision weapons, and new strike, command, control, communications and reconnaissance systems.
No other country in the world is aspiring to this goal. Russia, China and some Western European countries may be creating or trying to buy pilot new-generation systems, but the U.S. is the only country that is buying them in large batches.
On the other hand, the country needs to increase military spending by another 1-2% of GDP to implement these programs. When Bush came to power, Rumsfeld set the priority goal of "military transformation," a theory of warfare that envisioned lighter, faster, more agile, yet also more lethal combat forces. In short, he announced the accelerated conversion to fifth-generation weapons and modernization of the military. Half a year later, New York and Washington were hit by a lethal terrorist attack, and the army Bush inherited was sent overseas. Therefore, the Pentagon's spending on transforming the military accounts for less than 1% of the defense budget.
The reason is simple: the monthly maintenance of the overseas expeditionary forces costs $9 billion. Moreover, arms and military equipment, which have been operating in extremely difficult conditions for three years, are quickly becoming worn out. This spurs the need for rearmament, but the budgetary bottleneck has not become wider.
Though the U.S. will remain the undisputed military leader in the next 10-20 years, the new round of the arms race planned by the Pentagon will not become a reality. The trouble is that the United States has also involved the leading Western and Asian players, including Russia, in this race.
What should Russia do in this situation?
Sergei Rogov said Russia should avoid deeper involvement in a race it cannot win. It still has reliable strategic nuclear deterrence forces, and need not fear suicidal attacks by the nuclear states. The U.S.'s current priorities are overseas operations, but Russian security interests do not require Russian military presence abroad.
There is a shadow hanging over the arms control regime, and Russia should use the experience it acquired during the Cold War to initiate new agreements that would not be limited to Russian-U.S. interaction but would also involve other centers of power. This is one of the huge untapped potentials of Russian foreign policy.
