The disaster that is the F-35

Yikes:

Total taxpayer losses in the failed Solyndra solar-energy program might come, at their most dire estimate, to some $800 million. Total cost overruns, losses through fraud, and other damage to the taxpayer from the F-35 project are perhaps 100 times that great, yet the “Solyndra scandal” is known to probably 100 times as many people as the travails of the F-35. Here’s another yardstick: the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire Iraq War.

Even Paul Krugman thinks Max Boot sounds like Paul Krugman

I've poked fun at conservative defense writer Max Boot lately because of Boot's recent assertions that cutting defense spending would end up cutting American jobs in a soft economy. I noted that Boot sounded like liberal columnist Paul Krugman, and suggested that "mainstream conservative Republicans—whatever their fiscal rhetoric—have long favored the soft socialism of big defense spending."

Krugman sounds the same theme this morning, not mentioning Boot specifically, but otherwise making the same point. He calls this crowd "weaponized Keynesians," a term borrowed from Barney Frank.

First things first: Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs.

Beyond that, there’s a point made long ago by the Polish economist Michael Kalecki: to admit that the government can create jobs is to reduce the perceived importance of business confidence.

Appeals to confidence have always been a key debating point for opponents of taxes and regulation; Wall Street’s whining about President Obama is part of a long tradition in which wealthy businessmen and their flacks argue that any hint of populism on the part of politicians will upset people like them, and that this is bad for the economy. Once you concede that the government can act directly to create jobs, however, that whining loses much of its persuasive power — so Keynesian economics must be rejected, except in those cases where it’s being used to defend lucrative contracts.

Right. I don't mind that Boot and his fellow hawks are making an economic argument for defense spending. I just wish they'd apply that same logic to the rest of government.

Does terrorism justify exempting the Defense Department from budget cuts?

That's what Bentley Rayburn suggests at National Review today:

Congress should remember that we are still facing very real threats. Today, we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fighting al-Qaeda across the globe using intelligence and special-operations forces backed up with Predator drones and other modern technologies. We’re also protecting the nascent democratic movements in Libya and elsewhere, expanding operations to hot spots like Yemen, and rotating home a fighting force worn down by a decade of repeated, extended combat deployments.

Terror attacks are on the rise as the threat spreads around the globe — according to the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 2,534 terror attacks worldwide in 2010, nearly triple the 945 recorded five years ago.

I found that last paragraph interesting, so I went to the National Counterterrorism Center website. I couldn't verify Rayburn's numbers, but I did find a couple of other very interesting charts in the NTC's report on 2010 activity.

Like this one:

And this one:

So: Barely any non-military Americans were killed in terrorist incidents around the world in 2010—and 13 of the 15 who did die, died in Afghanistan. (One in Iraq, one in Uganda.) No private-citizen Americans were kidnapped.

Which is to say: It sure doesn't look like Americans are the targets of all this rising terroristic activity.

That's not to say that the United States doesn't have a legitimate concern with this trend. And these numbers don't include uniformed U.S. personnel who died in terror attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the charts above raise the question of whether rising terroristic activity "worldwide" is an actual threat to American security. That's the metric that should determine defense spending priorities: A civil war in the Congo—tragic as that is—doesn't necessarily count.

But the arguments by Rayburn and Max Boot and other hawks rest on the presumption that the United States military should remain a globe-spanning colossus. That's an issue that should be on the table. Our interests—and our security—doesn't stop at our borders. But neither are they infinite. Certainly our resources aren't. Nor should the defense budget be.

The next big discrimination barrier to fall in the armed forces: Letting women fight

Under the law, American women are not allowed to serve in combat roles in the military. In practice, of course, wartime necessity has meant something different. Officially, though, the discrimination still exists—and with good reason, defenders say: Women tend to be smaller and weaker, and changing combat-ready standards to include them would diminish the readiness and roughness of our armed forces.

My response has always been: Don't change the physical standards. Just change the discrimination. And now I see that's what is happening in Australia:

In a landmark move for the Australian military, women will be allowed to risk their lives alongside male soldiers and serve on the frontline. In a move described as "a significant and major cultural change" the Australian army will remove all gender barriers over the next five years and women will be able to take up roles that previously were considered too dangerous.

Women who met the same stringent physical and psychological criteria required of men would be able to work in the most dangerous of roles after the Australian cabinet approved the measure, said the defence minister, Stephen Smith.

"This is simply about putting into the frontline those people who are best-placed to do the job, irrespective of your sex," he said. "In the future your role in the Defence Force will be determined on your ability, not on the basis of your sex," said Smith.

Conservatives have other objections, of course—the co-mingling of female and male soldiers, the ability of Americans to deal with seeing women soldiers come home in body bags. In truth we've been dealing with both situations for years. And yes, there have been some horrific bumps along the way. But there's no reason the country should deprive itself of the service of the people best prepared and most willing to serve it—no matter their gender.

Max Boot still sounds like Paul Krugman

I noted recently that conservative hawk Max Boot was starting to sound like Paul Krugman. Today, he again makes the economic case for leaving the military budget untouched:

If the Pentagon is forced to slash a trillion dollars during the next decade—which would amount to an 18 percent reduction from the Obama budget projections released earlier this year—the Committee staff projects the total size of the Army and Marine Corps could fall from 771,400 personnel today to just 571,000, a 25 percent reduction that would make it impossible to respond to a range of different contingencies around the world. Some 200,000 soldiers and Marines who signed up to serve their country will be fired—and many of them will be hard put to find work at a time when the national unemployment rate is over 9 percent and the unemployment rate for young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is believed to be over 20 percent. (For wounded veterans the rate is said to be over 40 percent.) We would not only be breaking faith with these heroes but also jeopardizing our security—and that of our allies—in the process.

Again, that's the Krugman argument against recession austerity—that reduced budgets kicks thousands and thousands of public employees off the payroll into an unwelcoming job market. Soldiers, sailors, and marines are to be exempt from this process because they provide us security. Police and firefighters, apparently, don't.

But wait. There's also our security. What valuable security interests do we have that require 771,400 soldiers and Marines that 571,000 won't? Boot doesn't answer that question—there's always danger out there, nebulous though it may be. Instead, he relies ever-more-heavily on the economics argument, even noting that cutting a number of weapons programs will result in private-sector layoffs:

Cutting all these programs will result in even more job losses—the report projects at least 25 percent of the civilian defense workforce will have to be furloughed, resulting in the elimination of 200,000 jobs.

Again: The argument applies just as well to non-defense sectors of government spending.

Do we owe our veterans something more than unfettered capitalism? Maybe. Do we need to have a rough-and-ready defense force ready to protect our country? Sure. But the government is tightening its belt. We have to live within our means—and maybe that means giving up the ability to invade countries on the other side of the planet.  But if the primary argument against defense cuts is that it will harm the economy, and the unemployment rate, then that argument applies to the rest of government as well. Our military is special—but it's not that special.

Time To Slash Defense Spending?

As politicians promise to start cutting spending in Washington after this fall's elections, there's growing talk -- even among some Republicans -- that it's perhaps time to cut defense spending. That has, predictably, generated a backlash within the GOP. Ben and I tackle the topic in our column for Scripps Howard this week. Here's my take:

Yes, America can and should significantly cut its military budget.

Our military isn't built just to defend America and its interests, but to bestride the world like a colossus: There are significant deployments of U.S. troops and personnel in Europe and Asia, and commands charged with readiness to project American military power on the remaining inhabited continents. This has had benefits -- we've helped keep the peace in Europe, by and large, for more than 60 years, which is an extraordinary accomplishment.

But American taxpayers continue to pay dearly for the privilege of maintaining the most awesome military in world history: the base defense budget for 2010 is $533.8 billion -- and that's before costs for "overseas contingency operations" in Iraq and Afghanistan are added to the bottom line.

The result? The United States on its own spends about half the world's total defense budget -- 46.5 percent of the planetary total. The next closest competitor, China, spends 6.6 percent. We're overdoing it.

This moment of history -- a "unipolar" moment with a single dominant military power in the world -- is an aberration. It is already passing, with the rise of China. We cannot afford to sustain it, which is what defense hawks would have us do.

And it hasn't necessarily made us safer: Osama bin Laden went to war against the United States in part because of U.S. troop deployments to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Sometimes being the biggest just makes you the biggest target.

Even Republicans -- some of them, anyway -- are starting to recognize the dangers. We should not bankrupt this and future generations in pursuit of unsustainable world dominance. If it is time to start cutting government spending, the Pentagon's budget should be on the chopping block along with everybody else's.

Kristol, Fuelner and Brooks' Somewhat Misleading Op-Ed On Defense Spending

Arthur Brooks, Edwin Fuelner and Bill Kristol have an op-ed in today's WSJ, warning fiscal conservatives not to rein in Pentagon spending because, well, defense spending isn't really the reason America is in its current debt-laden state. They make some of the usual arguments -- that defense spending as a share of GDP is actually lower now than it was during the Cold War -- that are fine as far as they go.

The problem is that in making the case that domestic entitlements are the real cause of the deficit, the trio pulls a bit of apples-and-oranges sleight of hand. Here's the offending bit:

Defense spending has increased at a much lower rate than domestic spending in recent years and is not the cause of soaring deficits. Even as the United States has fought two wars, the core defense budget has increased by approximately $220 billion since 2001, about a tenth as much as the government devotes each year to "mandatory" spending: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, lesser entitlements such as food stamps and cash assistance, and interest payments on the debt. These expenditures continue automatically, year after year, without congressional debate.

The comparison here is confusing to the point of misleading. The Trio (as I'll refer to the collective) has to make it seem as though the defense budget is somehow relatively anemic so they compare just the increases in defense spending to the total yearly budgets of the entitlement programs. That's a comparison that makes no sense.*

*And without footnotes, it's hard to be sure what comparison they're making, but it's worth noting that the "core defense budget" has generally not included Afghanistan and Iraq war expenses, which have largely been appropriated through supplemental bills.

It's not easy to track down easy-for-a-layman-such-as-myself-to-understand budget information over time; the best I can find is this Congressional Budget Office table (PDF). What it shows:

* Defense spending more than doubled between 2001 and 2009 -- from $306 billion to $655 billion. (Best I can interpret the CBO data, this includes war-fighting expenses.)The defense budget as a share of GDP rose from 3 percent to 4.6 percent.

* "Mandatory" spending -- including entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. -- also doubled during this time, from $1.007 trillion to $2.093 trillion. As a collective group, the percentage of the GDP rose from 9.9 percent of GDP to 14.7 percent. That sounds much bigger, but when you break it down by program, you see the increases are generally in line with the Pentagon's: Social Security's share of GDP rose by just 0.6 percent; Medicare rose by 1.2 percent of the GDP; Medicaid rose by 0.5 percent of GDP.

Now you can argue that the costs of those entitlements is still going to prove a drag, and I won't try to counter-argue in this post. But it's clear that -- despite the picture painted by The Trio -- Pentagon spending has been growing, along with the rest of government over the last decade, in robust fashion. It might not be the source of America's deficit issues, but it is certainly a source.

Plus, there's always this chart:

The United States spends 46.5 percent of the world's total military spending. The next closest competitor, China, spends 6.6 percent.

Now, depending on your vision of America's role in the world, maybe that's entirely appropriate. (I'm ... dubious.) Our military bestrides the world; China, at this point, seems to want to dominate the Pacific. What that chart suggests, however, is that the American defense establishment is hardly underresourced. Let's figure out the proper balance of America's defense needs and America's resources and go from there.

Marc Thiessen lies about defense spending "cuts"

This is a theme that gets repeated a lot, but I'll pick on Marc Thiessen for repeating it. Here he is at The Corner today:

The New York Times has a front-page story today on the growing momentum on Capitol Hill to cut defense spending. It is not surprising that in an age when the Democrats are showering money on almost every domestic initiative known to man, the one area they would seek spending cuts is the defense budget.

But Thiessen is lying. Let's look at the New York Times story for an explaination:

Mr. Gates is calling for the Pentagon’s budget to keep growing in the long run at 1 percent a year after inflation, plus the costs of the war. It has averaged an inflation-adjusted growth rate of 7 percent a year over the last decade (nearly 12 percent a year without adjusting for inflation), including the costs of the wars. So far, Mr. Obama has asked Congress for an increase in total spending next year of 2.2 percent, to $708 billion — 6.1 percent higher than the peak under the Bush administration.

Get that: The Pentagon budget isn't going down. It's just not going to go up much, much faster than the rate of inflation. Instead, if the president and Robert Gates have their way, the budget will grow only slightly faster than the rate of inflation. That's still growth. And given that the United States is still spending as much as the rest of the world, combined, on its military -- well, that hardly represents a shirking of the "common defense" that Thiessen makes it out to be.