Huge Pentagon Spending Indefensible

The debate about how to balance the federal budget is distorted by a singular phenomenon. Both sides, president and congressional Republicans, treat as untouchable one of the biggest spending categories: defense.

At around $265 billion, defense accounts for nearly half of what is called “discretionary” federal spending. But Congress and the president are doing all their cutting in the other half: domestic and international programs.

Military spending has not been made sacrosanct because it is unchallengeable in policy terms. Nor can anyone believe that fraud and waste are unknown there.

The reasons for excluding the Pentagon and defense contractors from the budget-cutting exercise are, in fact, political.

The United States accounts for 37 percent of the world’s annual military spending. And we spent more in 1995, discounted for inflation, than we did at the peak of the Cold War in 1980. Why?

The policy answer, formulated in the Clinton administration, is that we must be able to fight two major regional wars simultaneously. But even on that premise, it does not follow that we need such huge forces and such massive spending on weapons systems.

So Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, showed in a devastating analysis he wrote for the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs.

For example, Korb noted, the Pentagon figured it would take 400,000 American troops to counter a North Korean invasion of South Korea. But that is more than we deployed in the Korean War, when the North was being supported by Chinese forces, which is highly unlikely to happen now. Moreover, South Korea’s army has grown from nothing to a professional force of 650,000. The Pentagon’s estimated requirement is grossly inflated.

As for waste, the amount is literally incalculable because financial managers in the Defense Department cannot produce auditable books. So testified the director of its accounting service to a congressional committee in November. And Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said last March that the Pentagon had $33 billion in “problem disbursements.”

The finagling of figures threatens something worse than unauditable accounts. The military services are embarked on enormous acquisitions of weapons, and before long, the costs are going to run way beyond what budget forecasts have calculated.

Franklin Spinney, a Defense Department program analyst who has irritated the Pentagon for years with his candor, describes the situation as a “time bomb being fueled by the Pentagon’s corrupt budget numbers.” The bomb, he says, will explode “early in the next century.”

Why have both Congress and the White House been so lavish with the Defense Department and so inattentive to inflated requirements and waste?

The first answer is that looking “tough” on defense is regarded as good politics - even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the great adversary whose menace led us to build up our forces after 1950.

But an even more powerful factor has developed in recent years. That is the belief, shrewdly encouraged by arms manufacturers, that cutting military spending will cost jobs in the various congressional districts.

Korb put it this way:

“Both the administration and Congress increasingly view defense as a federal jobs program. Weapons programs such as the B-2 bomber, the Seawolf submarine and the V-22 Osprey, designed to combat the Soviet threat, live on because of the temporary economic problems that taking them out of production would cause.”

The B-2 is an extreme case in point. After 14 years of work on it, the so-called Stealth bomber still fails crucial tests; its radar cannot distinguish a mountain from rain. Yet, Congress just voted to buy more of them at $2.2 billion a plane, and President Clinton agreed.

The House Budget Committee chairman, John Kasich, made a big effort to stop that increase but was beaten down by lawmakers who wanted work to continue in their districts.

Weapons make-work is a highly inefficient way to provide jobs in this country. But it will go on until we have leadership courageous enough to take on the politics of defense.

It probably will take another Eisenhower - a president who knows the military and who cannot be attacked as soft on defense.

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