Making Sense of Defense: Defense Spending Sophistries
April 4, 2001
Contact: Dan Koslofsky - 202.543.4100 ×100 Luke Warren - 202.546.0795 ×127
In the attempt to artificially inflate the need for increased military spending, Bush Administration officials have used spurious statistics and logic to support their agenda. The following are some excerpts from a chapter debunking these myths in the Council for a Livable World Education Fund’s upcoming military spending briefing book.
Declining Military - “The next president will inherit a military in decline.” -Gov. George W. Bush (8/21/00)
While the military power of our Cold War adversary has precipitously declined, U.S. military spending is currently 95 percent of the Cold War average. No other country has the prospect of equaling the U.S. in military power for decades, and that assumes we do not improve our military in that time.. China, the only potential U.S. enemy with a significant military, is decades behind the U.S. in military technology. Today, our military spending is greater than the combined defense budgets of the next 12 countries, including Russia, China and Germany, and the total spending of the U.S., NATO, Japan and South Korea is greater than the rest of the world combined.
GDP Comparison Fallacy - “Defense spending today is lower as a percentage of GNP than at any time since 1940 — the year before the attack on Pearl Harbor.” Vice Presidential Candidate Richard Cheney (8/30/00)
With his reference to Pearl Harbor, the Vice-President implies that America’s military today is no better funded than it was in 1940, when the armed forces were small and designed around an isolationist foreign policy. This is patently false. Defense spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has fallen because our economy is strong, not because our defenses our weak. Our GDP in 1980 was approximately $2.7 trillion. In 2000 our GDP had increased more than three-fold to $9.5 trillion.
Inflated Estimates - “But we do know that the Congressional Budget Office as a nonpartisan group has indicated they felt a significant increase was necessary just to maintain current level of capability.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2/14/01)
Actually, the CBO report assumes that new weaponry will be no more capable than the equipment it replaces, thus necessitating replacing current equipment with the newest technology on a one-for-one basis. In other words, each $50 million F-15 fighter jet would be replaced by a new $200 million F-22. However, even the Pentagon claimed that was an shoddy logic. “Nobody is proposing that we purchase new versions of the equipment that we are using today on a one-for-one basis,” said Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman. “That is in no one’s budget proposal that I’ve ever seen.” This one-for-one replacement senselessly drives up the CBO’s estimates. Citing the CBO report as evidence for further defense spending is therefore disingenuous.