Is more military spending really necessary?
This spring, President Joe Biden is poised to ask Congress for the largest defense budget in history. These budget increases would be on top of an already historically high defense budget.
At the end of 2022, Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law. The bipartisan bill, passed overwhelmingly by the Democrat-controlled Congress, appropriated $858 billion in defense spending. That $858 billion was $45 billion more than Biden requested and $90 billion more than last year’s defense spending bill.
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In every election cycle, voters, politicians and pundits are quick to question how we are going to pay for programs like Medicaid and Social Security. Budget hawks, however, rarely ask how, in 2022, we can afford a $90 billion increase in defense spending, or the $858 billion total price tag. Now, Biden wants to increase defense spending even more.
Progressive members of Congress like Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., have spoken out against these absurd increases, but it is not enough. Voters need to start paying attention to foreign policy and defense spending when they cast their votes. Foreign policy is not often a top priority for voters, yet we are spending nearly $1 trillion per year on our military and we have virtually no evidence to suggest that military operations abroad are successful.
This is not just about absurd military spending, it is about where we spend our money and why; what our priorities are as a country; what we value and what we want to achieve. There are, for example, several domestic and international issues that could be addressed if we prioritized them over military spending.
The United States consistently spends more on its military than the next nine highest-spending countries combined. Is that really necessary? Is the U.S. military actually effective at solving international issues? I suspect the answer to both is “no.”
To respond effectively to today’s challenges, the United States must invest more money in conflict prevention, good governance and civil society support. It is long past time to cut military spending and increase funding for the diplomatic and development arms of U.S. foreign policy.
The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development operate with a small fraction of the military’s budget. For fiscal year 2023, the State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act was funded at $59.85 billion plus an additional $16.57 billion in assistance to Ukraine and Ukraine-related assistance. That combined $76.42 billion has to pay for all of the United States’ embassies around the world, all of our development programs, all humanitarian response and U.S. contributions to international organizations, among other things.
The U.S. spends less than 10% of the military’s budget on all of that, and we wonder why we are not seeing the results we want to see.
The global challenges we face today are not ones that our military can solve. The United States is not sending our military into countries around the world to resolve conflicts, protect people from human rights abuses or respond to famines and droughts. In cases when our military is deployed, it is not clear that it actually results in a positive outcome.
On a more tangible level, the military can throw more money and more bombs at a problem without ever assessing if their efforts are working. We’ve seen this with the “war on terror,” bombings in Somalia, bungled efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and countless other places.
