In his speech before The Citadel on October 7, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney unveiled a plan to increase non-combat defense expenditures to four percent of GDP, while upping the level of active military personnel by 100,000. His goals epitomize the contemporary shift in dialogue over American military appropriations from policy to ideology. Whereas social programs and other government outlays are proposed as solutions to tangible problems, military expenditures have apparently become virtues in and of themselves.
In contrast, while it wouldn’t be unexpected to hear a candidate pledge to reduce poverty or to cut carbon emissions, it would be highly unorthodox and even politically unacceptable to set as a goal an increase in welfare payments or environmental enforcement by an arbitrary percentage of GDP. These programs, like most government expenditures in the contemporary political climate, are seen as necessary evils, whose increasing size would be nothing to brag about. Military spending not only breaks this mold, but apparently inverts it.
There’s something ideologically implicit about the modern stance on defense spending: as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon asserts, “A defense budget in decline portends an America in decline.” Thus, from the viewpoint of the Republican establishment, the inverse is true as well. In this way, cuts in defense spending have transformed from a component of policy aimed at reining in the government’s mushrooming expenditures to a concession of America’s fallibility and a blow to the doctrine of exceptionalism.
That said, perceived necessity, in addition to pure ideology, may be promoting the idea of inherent military virtue. As noted by republican senator Tom Coburn, “the Pentagon is one of the few agencies in the federal government that cannot produce auditable financial statements in accordance with the law.” Thus, legislators’ knowledge of where government outlays on defense are specifically being allocated is fuzzy at best. The inability or ambivalence of the Department of Defense to perform these audits on its own expenses caused another member of the House Armed Services Committee, Randy Forbes, to denounce the Department as unqualified to comment on its own efficiency.
Left to mill about in a state of ambiguity, any legislators with a touch of hawkishness or paranoia can rely on nothing for analysis but the apocalyptic claims of military officials. As an example, when confronted with the possibility of $450 billion in cuts over the next ten years, the Army’s chief of staff, General Raymond Odierno claimed that the military would not be able to
fight two wars simultaneously. I’ll try not to make any subjective claims on the validity of this comment, but will state some facts: the US army currently has several thousand more active-duty soldiers stationed in Germany than it does in Iraq, more soldiers stationed in Alaska and Hawaii than in Afghanistan, and currently composes over 40% of the world’s defense forces. Thus, what amounts to about a 7% cut likely won’t lead to a national security Armageddon. Such asymmetry of information reminds us of why we don’t write the Department of Transportation or the Department of Agriculture blank checks, taking their secretaries’ word for when a vital public good is at a breaking point.
Many legislators see past this funding façade created by armed forces officials, but in the modern era, when most politicians see the military as a values-based topic rather than a policy-based topic, lawmakers are predisposed to accepting the words of military leaders. Thus, as the words of Romney implicitly illustrate, it is this military-ideological fusion that keeps defense spending from being scathed, analyzed, and combed as finely as it must be in an era of American austerity.
To be sure, elements of this fusion are not new: Captain America never dabbled in social work; the acronym in GI Joe doesn’t refer to Greenpeace International. Still, the rhetoric and actions of our politicians are not helping to bring the defense sector of the government back into the realm of policy. Only if our legislators are once again able to examine military expenditures in a context of analytic realism rather than ideological romance can we hope to economize our government in an efficient and just fashion.