The anti-state answer is that the amount should be determined in free markets. What’s the pro-state answer? That depends on whom you consult. The existing budgeted number provided by the Department of Defense for military spending is something like $600 billion. This excludes certain large areas of spending such as veterans’ affairs and international affairs. By one account, the total is more like $1,000 billion.
This huge discrepancy makes no difference to the answer we get in another way. Let’s look back to a time, June 1932, when America’s military spending was deemed enough by the then Assistant Secretary of War, the Honorable Frederick H. Payne, to keep the country safe. He penned an article titled “What Constitutes Adequate National Defense” that appeared in the journal World Affairs. He wrote “The annual appropriations for the military activities of the War Department amount to about $330,000,000 a year. This is truly a vast sum.” Applying an inflation calculator to that amount, the equivalent sum today in current dollars is $5,789,473,684, or about $6 billion. Military spending today is anywhere from 100x to 170x what it was in 1932, at a time when it was adequate.
To generations of Americans brought up on huge military expenditures and huge costs of maintaining huge forces, it will seem unbelievable that $330,000,000 could ever have been regarded as enough. How could such a seemingly low figure be? How could Mr. Payne have possibly regarded this as adequate?
The answer has several parts. Let’s examine Payne’s words first and then see what has changed. “Subsequent to the World War, Congress considered our whole defense problem and in 1920 passed the National Defense Act. That law was a charter which validated the defense system just described — the three components of the Army, their interlocking missions and the study of industrial mobilization. Thanks to that Act, we are insured great trained armies in time of need but only in time of need; we have erected a true system of national defense, impotent for aggression but potentially mighty in the protection of our rights and liberties.” [His emphasis.]
The U.S. no longer restricts itself to America’s national defense; it’s now engaged in widespread international military activity. The U.S. no longer is engaged in defense only; it now engages in aggression. When it does not engage in aggression, it maintains potent aggressive potential that awaits the command to fire. The U.S. no longer has a doctrine of mobilization in time of need. Now it has standing armed forces constantly mobilized (and used). The doctrine of “great trained armies in time of need but only in time of need” has been scuttled. That’s three major differences right there: international replacing national, aggression added to and replacing defense, and standing forces replacing mobilization in time of need.
Concerning mobilization, the idea in 1932 was to have relatively small standing armed forces and to rely on mobilization if it were needed. “Second, we must make and keep up-to-date comprehensive plans for the formation of great citizen armies which would have to be summoned into existence in the event that a major military effort is required.” This was American tradition: “It has been our national policy since the days of Washington to rely on the citizen-soldier for our national security. We have always held that when the citizens of a country are not willing to undertake its defense, then that country is not worth defending.” He observed that “virile, fearless soldiers have always been forthcoming in our hours of need.” The U.S. has scuttled this policy and tradition in favor of huge standing forces.
Concerning aggression, the attitude was different: “In the first place, any national policy involving armed aggression has always been abhorrent to the spirit of our people. We do not and cannot countenance the idea of military adventure. We have placed ourselves on record as solemnly renouncing any resort to aggressive war.” This spirit was clearly not honored in important cases, but its presence as myth or belief or goal did deter military spending and wars.
Payne wrote “… we have at the present time no probable enemies against whose attack we should prepare specifically. We are at peace with the whole world. We have honest occasions for difference with many nations, but in no case does there exist even an intimation that our difficulties may entail a resort to arms.” However, what seems like low defense spending was not conditioned on the then lack of enemies. Payne and the War Department were cognizant of the possibilities: “He would be bold indeed who would predict the future travails of our planet and would venture to guarantee that America will not be involved in some future catastrophe of war.” The difference between now and then was that demobilization took place when war did not loom on the horizon. The threat of American mobilization was sufficient to deter some threats; actual mobilization was enough to act against actual ones.
Another important difference between 1932 and the era that started after World War 2 is in the U.S. attitude toward external enemies, real, potential and imagined. At present, Payne’s statement still largely holds true. There are no enemies in the form of states likely to attack America, but now the U.S. concocts such threats and sees its national security endangered in all sorts of instances in which no such threats exist. There are no frictions or differences that cannot be settled without resort to attacks and warfare, and yet the U.S. has forces stationed and engaged in all sorts of far off places. The U.S. intrusions overseas create enemies and threats.
The U.S. now expresses abstract goals that aim at a “good” or “better” world, goals that attempt to wrap themselves in a blanket of some sort of morality or that stress American exceptionalism or that assume that the American State is the engine of world progression to peace, order and prosperity. The U.S. now imagines itself uplifting less fortunate nations. The concept of the role of the military has been vastly expanded and extended.
The U.S. leadership now looks for trouble by viewing itself as policeman of the world, guarantor of stability, and extender of democracy, truth, justice and the American way. The U.S. has scuttled the idea of setting an example to the world and embraced the idea of pro-actively making its influence felt, holding foes and potential foes in check, and stamping out a range of evils.
For defense (war) spending to have risen by such a huge factor, much has had to change. The ideas that guided military expenditures in 1932 have all been scuttled. They’ve all been replaced by ideas that conveniently, too conveniently, cater to the interests of the military-industrial complex, Congressmen who like to announce military contracts, neocon intellectuals who view the U.S. as exceptional and promote an agenda of unitary superpower, bureaucrats and intelligence operatives, politicians who cannot withstand the forces brought to bear upon their decisions, and lobbyists for many foreign countries.
However American democracy functioned in 1932, it now functions much worse. Once-functional policies and ideas that held military spending in check, deterred threats and kept America out of wars have been trashed, replaced by much worse policies and ideas.
2:20 pm on May 26, 2016
