List all the good things that would happen if our military budget were shrunk in a planned sort of way down to $300 billion.
What are the counterarguments? What disasters are supposed to happen if the US military budget shrinks in a world without an existential threat, or even a nearest military competitor? What are the re-rebuttals?
If the argument is substantially different for $400 billion, what are the biggest differences?
…lack of need for conscription? 
Think of the military budget like the WPA–a government run employment project that’s now deeply embedded in the American economy.
Now cut $100,000,000,000+ in wages out of the economy, and ask yourself what the consequences would be.
$100,000,000,000 to contribute toward doing something more useful?
Actually that’s an argument for massively cutting the defense budget, since military spending really sucks as a method for boosting the economy. If the goal is to boost the economy with government spending, then spend that money on something actually useful like rebuilding the infrastructure.
The 100 billion largely comes from taking taxes out of peoples wages, though. So the net effect of ending it would be zero.
Plus, as a make-work program, the military is kinda crappy. If you spend 100 billion to build infrastructure projects like roads or power-plants or whatever, then ideally those things will then facilitate more economic activity. They’re an investment.
The military is sort of an investment to, since it keeps people from invading us, and presumably being invaded (or even the possibility of being invaded) is bad for th economy. But once you have enough tanks to keep Canada from rolling across the border, the extra investment in one more tank is kinda worthless. A tank doesn’t really do anything when its not fighting, it doesn’t generate any extra economic activity.
My point isn’t that the $100 billion is best spent where it is–it’s obviously better spent elsewhere, or simply left in people’s pockets. It’s that reducing the military budget will always be painful, and doing so radically could be fatal to the American economy. Aside from the fact that the military-industrial complex is a massive lobby, the economic dislocations would be huge: towns supported by military bases shut down; tens or hundeds of thousands of high paying military tech jobs ended. Huge numbers of people adding to the unemployment numbers.
The U.S. military budget will need winding down over a long period of time. A large part of the case for continued levels of military spending is simply the inertia of past spending and its effect on the country.
The 1.5 trillion dollar deficit would be a 1.1 trillion dollar deficit.
The military budget should be reduced, but it’s not the big problem.
As to what effect it would have, that depends on how its being reduced. I assume it would require an immediate pullout from Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places.
I would like to point out one fallacy, though - it does not follow that a military is too big if there are no perceivable systemic threats. It’s entirely possible that the reason there are no systemic threats is because of that big military.
For example, you have to ask yourself what would happen if the U.S. withdrew from the world, leaving a power vacuum. Who would fill it? What despots out there today are constrained in carrying out horrible things because the U.S. threat stops them? How much benefit does the U.S. derive from putting other countries under its defensive umbrella, which then gives the U.S. leverage over those countries?
We can think of some obvious examples - if the U.S. withdrew from the far east, you can bet that Japan would start building its own nuclear weapons almost immediately. Withdrawal of all U.S. troops could destabilize the situation in North Korea and South Korea. U.S. military aid to Pakistan has given it access to the Pakistani nuclear program and helped it to ensure that the Pakistani nukes are secure. U.S. military aid to Egypt has created an officer corps in the Egyptian army that is more favorable to the west, and has given the U.S. bargaining leverage over Egyptian policy.
Whether all these things should be done is an open question - my point is that the details matter. It’s easy to just say that the U.S. military budget is too big, it’s a lot harder to propose specific cuts that don’t have negative consequences - the same is true with the the government budget overall, which is why it keeps growing.
I’m not quite seeing the “fallacy” here. The idea that a world free of warmongering will be a more peaceful one than a world constantly torn asunder by colonialism seems pretty common-sensical and intuitive to me. What are your reasons for believing otherwise?
A “power vacuum?” Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears to me that the US is hardly the only government in the world. Its withdrawal from international meddling would likely result in a world ruled by free nation states. That hardly seems like a tragic travesty to me.
Sure, some things would change. For one, the tyrannical Saudi dictatorship might finally fall before the onslaught of the will of its people. The horror!
Obviously. Because any nation that has a conflict with China will automatically start mass-producing nukes unless the American Empire is on its side. Indeed, this is why Vietnam quickly acquired a nuclear stockpile following its armed conflict with China. Oh, wait…
Somehow, I doubt that very much. Were the Empire to withdraw from the most heavily militarized border in the world, I doubt that things would change for the worse. Indeed, I predict the opposite. The South would perhaps feel compelled to cease instigating the North by conducting relentless near-DMZ war games. Who knows?
I hate to break it to you, but there have recently been some minor strains in US-Pakistan relations. Sorry. Apparently, not only did you fail to buy access to their nuclear weapons, you couldn’t even manage to get them to arrest your most wanted man for a decade. If this is the payoff for your military aid, I would perhaps consider alternative investment strategies.
Um… See above. You paid the Egyptian dictatorship quite a bit of money to do things your way. Unfortunately, you forgot to pay off the Egyptian people, and they appear to have gotten sick and tired of you and swept your petty tyrants out of power. Hardly a success story, if you ask me…
Yes, if you see the U.S. as an evil empire, I’m sure your perspective is a lot different from those who think the U.S. is generally a force for good.
If you asked me if it would have been good for the Soviet Union to drastically reduce its military budget in the 1970’s, I would have said, “Oh, absolutely”. Your mileage may have varied.
Where else would we get high technology?
Heh.
Not unless the entire rest of the world is just waiting to attack, given how grotesquely oversized our military is. And even that would require that our nuclear weapons suddenly vanish for there to be some “systemic threat”.
Few; we tend to be pretty pro-despot as a rule.
Almost certainly nowhere near 100 billion dollars worth. There’s a reason the rest of the world isn’t even trying to match us, and isn’t because they can’t. It’s because our militarism is self destructive; a vast amount of resources spent for little return.
I agree wholeheartedly-the US defense budget is enormous and out of all proportion to our needs. What amazes me-the tremendous duplication of efforts in all branches of the military-the AF has the AF Lab (Kirtland AFB, New Mexico)-which is duplicated by the Navy (NWSC Indiana), the Army (Ft. Monmouth, NJ), and the other labs scattered around the country.
All of these jobs are protected by the local congress criiters-and any attempt to cut them will meeet with big resistance. As for why we still have bases in Europe-we are stuck in a post WWII mode.
Eventually, the defense budget will become unsustainable-that is the only way it will be cut.
While it’s a reasonably small portion of the budget, don’t forget that the Military R&D *does *create infrastructure spinoffs that help grow the US economy. The Internet is the most obvious example, but there’s also GPS, mobile technologies (especially batteries), ruggedization, etc.
Seems like a rather roundabout way of doing things, though… If your objective is really to benefit the economy through research and development, why not invest the money directly into research and development? You can get a lot more research done once you’re no longer converting most of the money into ludicrously expensive cruise missiles and dropping them on the heads of Arab civilians for the sheer hell of it.
The objective is not to benefit the economy, of course; the R&D spilloff’s are merely happy side effects. The objective is to protect the nation’s interests. And as long as our allies are free-riding, then the budget we have probably isn’t high enough, let alone could stand being cut.
The argument that the US’s war budget (let’s not mince words by calling it “defense”) is so big because it needs to be is a complete nonstarter. We spend as much on our military as the rest of the world combined. If our high level of spending were actually necessary, then it’d be necessary for all the other countries of the world, too: The only adequate world would be one where every country outspent the rest of the world combined, which is patently absurd.
Sure, if by “the nation’s”, you mean “the military-industrial complex’s”. But some of us have a more expansive definition.
Because without military necessity it would never occur to people to do it. You may feel free to disagree (as you surely do), but a considerable amount of R&D is done with something in mind. We didn’t just wake up one day and say “hey, it would be a good idea to build and orbit satellites that tell us precisely where we are”. The military necessity was the minimization of generalized death and destruction by being able to precisely target a location rather than carpet bombing a city. The useful offshoots that you take for granted are nothing more than ancillary benefits. And satellites? They are nothing more than delivered payloads made practical by ICBM research, with communications capabilities imagined, designed and implemented via military necessity.
Do you really think any of the technologies that we have would have been developed so soon, if ever, without someone coming up with it in the pursuit of a more efficient way to kill the enemy? World War II in particular is easily the most innovative period in human history.
We could spend the money in positive projects like developing non fossil energy sources. Green jobs would prepare America for the future.