Looks Like Ike Was Right After All

I found it interesting that two recent articles about our military establishment recently leaned heavily on the thoughts of former President Dwight David Eisenhower. As many of your should know, one of Ike's lasting catch phrases was the "military-industrial complex." His fear was that the military and the industries that support the military may grow in power and statue over time, and predicted (correctly) that these entities would cause the nation to spend more on defense than was actually necessary.

The first article was written by Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria. He described the modest reform goals that Defense Secretary Gates is trying to put in place in order to streamline and make the armed forces more efficient. Unfortunately, he has been opposed by a whole spectrum of parties including politicians whose home districts/states may lose the support of Pentagon dollars, defense contractors, the military establishment, and lobbyists. Why is Gates looking to make these moves? Consider some of the statistics from Mr. Zakaria's article:

• Military hardware costs are spiraling out of control with the cost of one new Navy destroyer costing between $2 and $3 billion a piece to build while the cost of just one new bomber costs $2 billion per plane.
• While the private sector of the economy has stripped away levels of management to become more efficient and responsive, the Pentagon management levels have grown considerably, from seventeen layers a decade ago to about thirty levels of redundant management today.
• We now have almost 1,000 general and admirals in our armed forces, up 13% in the past 15 years, even though the number of people in our armed forces has shrunk over the time period.
• Every management layer at the Pentagon is larger than it was during the height of the Cod War. As an example, the article cites a study from Professor Paul Light of NYU where he estimated that there were 78 deputy assistant secretaries of defense in 1960 and there are 530 today.
• There are more military musicians in the military's marching bands than there are members in the State Department's Foreign Service.
• The Pentagon has ten times as many accountants than the State Department has Foreign Service officers.
• In a recent speech Gates questioned whether or not we needed to spend the money for an additional 100 fighter jets when we already have over three thousand such aircraft, do we really need to build more multi-billion dollar Navy ships when we already have a navy that is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which are navies of our allies, and whether we need to build more billion dollar stealth fighters when by 2020 we will still have 20 times as many such fighters as China.

Now consider an article by Boston Globe writer Peter Canellos, that was summarized in The Week magazine in the August 27, 2010 edition:

• Our current defense budget of $700 billion is six times larger than our nearest competitor.
• Our current defense budget is more than the next 18 largest defense budgets of other nations.
• More than $130 million of lobbyist money is spent ever year in an attempt to maintain and grow the country's spending on military hardware and other expenses.

Looks like Ike was right after all. We have allowed ourselves as a nation to build and maintain defense capabilities, and the resulting bureaucracy that goes with it, far beyond what is essential for our national defense. Just look at the numbers: a navy bigger than most of the rest of the world's navies combined, twenty times more fighters than our next nearest competitor, a bureaucracy that is bigger and more bloated than any time in our past, a $700 billion defense budget that costs each American household almost $7,000 a year to maintain, etc. The household income of the vast majority of the world's households is less than $7,000 a year whereas we spend almost $7,000 per household just for the Pentagon. It is out of control.

Think about how much better off we would be as a nation if we could cut that Pentagon budget in half. We would immediately inject $350 billion into the consumer economy if we could get half of that $7,000 per household expense back into the hands of our citizens. And this would not be a one time, ill-fated Obama stimulus-like plan, this would be an annual, ongoing $350 billion back into the economy that citizens could spend as they see fit, increasing our freedom of personal choice.

How could we attain this 50% reduction? The following steps, many of which are described in detail in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," would be a great start:

• We need to realize that current, major U.S. troop deployments around the world are from another era and another time, and that these deployments are not longer strategic to our defense and should be terminated immediately. South Korea is now a very strong, democratic nation. Let them fight their battles with North Korea without the 30,000 or so U.S. troops presently stationed there. We no longer need 50,000 troops stationed in Japan, bring them home since 1) Japan is unlikely to attack Pearl Harbor again and 2) 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan would be no match for the 2,000,000 million Chinese troops if anything should happen in the Far East. There is no longer an Iron Curtain so stationing upwards of 60,000 U.S. troops in western Europe is no longer needed.
• Once these troops were returned home, all armed services recruiting would be stopped and the military vacancies and needs would be filled by the returning troops from Japan, South Korea, and Europe.
• The remaining 50,000 troops in Iraq need to be pulled back home also, as promised by the current President in his campaign rhetoric.
• We need to immediately stop producing hardware that we have no use for. The current size of our navy and our air forces needs to be frozen at current levels and that production be done for replacement of existing hardware, not the expansion of existing hardware volumes. A longer term plans needs to be implemented that starts reducing the hardware needs over time for only what is needed.
• A five year plan, as proposed in Step One of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," would also be implemented in the Pentagon bureaucracy where the size of every Pentagon organization is reduced 10% a year for each of five years in order to get the military's management streamlined and more efficient.

This type of reduction in spending for defense will be very difficult to do. It has been fifty years since Ike issued his military industrial complex warning and since then, President after President has followed John F. Kennedy's lead, where in his inaugural speech he promised to "pay any price, beat any burden, meet any hardship" in defense of freedom. Unfortunately, based on this type of sentiment, the price has gotten very high, the burden on our economy has gotten very onerous, and the hardships continue to mount for no reason than to feed the interests of the military establishment and the politicians that support them. We have gotten to the silly stage now where we just waste money for the sake of tradition, i.e. we have always wasted money in this area.

It is time for the silly season to end and for our civilian military leadership to take back control of the Pentagon budget. We cannot afford this unwarranted military spending any more (remember how the same problem caused the collapse of the Soviet Union). The real question is whether our political class has the gumption to do their duty relative to the Constitution and civilian control of the military or they will fold their cards, as usual, in order to protect their re-election chances.



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http://www.flipcongress2010.com/