The national debt increased by over four trillion dollars under President Bush. Nevertheless, many conservatives have recently voiced opposition to Obama’s policies, citing the national debt as the primary reason for their concern. As fiscally responsible as this opposition may sound, the money is being squandered in other areas the conservatives do not want to cut. If the government is going to cut spending, they should examine the military budget, where many of the most egregious wastes of taxpayer dollars are taking place.
America is going to spend about $534 billion in 2010 alone on the military, almost as much as the rest of the world combined. Now consider the fact that Obama’s healthcare plan would cost around $90 billion a year. It seems a bit unusual that there is so much outrage about spending $90 billion to keep people healthy, but $534 billion is a perfectly acceptable military expenditure. Many analysts have agreed that America could cut its military budget by 25 percent and be just as safe.
Obama thus far has made two high-profile moves in reducing military expenditures. In 2005, a new high tech fighter aircraft called the F-22 Raptor was designed. Each F-22 Raptor, the most expensive aircraft ever produced, costs about $143 million. The United States military has not and will not use this aircraft in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and any situation in which such a craft would be properly utilized is highly improbable. Obama wisely ended the production of F-22’s this year, saving the country about two billion dollars. Opponents of this argued that citizens who worked on F 22’s would lose their jobs. I would argue that if the government is going to create jobs, there is no reason why those jobs cannot serve a purpose.
The second high-profile move Obama made was recently scrapping a missile defense system planned for Eastern Europe. The move saved about $12 billion dollars. Russia, in response, said it will scrap a plan to deploy missiles near Poland since Obama dumped the planned missile shield in Eastern Europe. Republicans claimed Obama endangered the country; however, the Secretary of Defense and all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff think otherwise.
Combined, America and Russia have 95 percent of all the nuclear weapons in the world. The United States currently has troops stationed in over 70 percent of the world’s countries. In the past 50 years, 54 different countries have hosted 1,000 or more U.S. troops at one point. America currently has 50,000 troops in Germany and 30,000 in Japan because of World War II. This probably strikes everyone as difficult to believe because it is so extraordinarily asinine. America has taken on the role of policing the world, but one can only wonder why this doesn’t translate into assistance to the victims of genocides such as Rwanda and Darfur.
Modern warfare is dramatically different than warfare of years past. With nuclear deterrents taken into consideration, a conflict on the scale of the World Wars will probably never occur again. Any unprovoked aggression against a developed nation would be suicidal. The only real military threats today are misguided dictators who might get their hands on a bomb. Violence in general has been in decline throughout human history, and we are in all likelihood living in the most peaceful time ever known to humanity. If anything will cause violence to erupt, it will be climate change or resource shortages (such scenarios have been predicted by the Pentagon). Therefore, perhaps by investing in green technologies, America can act preemptively against possible large-scale warfare as opposed to stockpiling and just waiting for an inevitable catastrophe.
The message here is simple: Gargantuan quantities of money are being thrown away on superfluous military expenditures. The federal government would be wise to dramatically cut military waste.
—Hudson Todd is a freshman in the College of Arts and Science. He can be reached at hudson.o.todd@vanderbilt.edu.
