Glenn Greenwald has a post up today on military spending. The peg is a new chart on world wide military expenditures released by globalsecurity.org. Greenwald, of course, looks at the numbers and expresses shock and bewilderment at the size of the U.S. defense budget relative to our competitors:
Our military spending exceeds the rest of the world's spending combined, and we spend almost 10 times what the second-place country, China, spends. "Only" about $150 billion of the total U.S. amount is attributable to the two active wars we're fighting, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, even if one wants to excludes those amounts, the basic picture remains the same. Nor do these amounts include the billions of dollars in military aid we give to fund the armies of other countries, such as Israel and Egypt, which alone comprise substantial portions of those countries' defense budgets.
And this gap between us and the rest of the world has widened considerably over the last 10 years. That's true because our own military spending, in absolute terms, has increased wildly during that time...
Greenwald takes at face value the $65 billion figure for China's annual defense spending despite the fact that the number is for 2004 and includes this caveat: "The officially announced figure is $24.6 billion, but actual defense spending more likely ranges from $45 billion to $85 billion for 2004." Still, anyone who is vaguely familiar with Chinese defense spending would know that determining its precise level is, as John Pike, the director of globalsecurity.org told me today, a "fiendishly complex problem...[that] approaches not even being a meaningful question."
Estimates at the globalsecurity.org website from 2003, when the official Chinese budget was just over $22.3 billion, range as high as $140 billion when purchasing power parity (PPP) is taken into account. (For any lefties who have stumbled over here--you know, ones who act like they understand military spending but find themselves flummoxed over terms like "purchasing power parity"--PPP accounts for the fact that goods and services are far cheaper in China than they are here. For example, it costs the Chinese considerably less to house, feed, and pay their soldiers.) For 2008, that number is likely to be significantly higher. But the idea that U.S. defense spending is ten times that of China's is ridiculous on its face--and as Pike said, "the more you study these numbers, the less you understand them...anybody who thinks there's a meaningful number for China's defense budget has not studied it for very long." Which explains why Greenwald thinks he's stumbled upon a meaningful number.
Pike went on:
"If somebody wants to say that the United States is spending ten times as much as China, I don't know what point is being made. We're a superpower, they aren't. And I think we'd like to keep it that way. They are not a military competitor of ours, they have no hope at this point of becoming a military competitor of ours. I think the world is a happier place that we do not face a near peer military competitor like we did with the Soviets. I went through that and it was not a happy time. And if the cost of maintaining a world in which our biggest fear of the Chinese is to be found down at Wal-Mart, if that's our biggest worry about the Chinese, if the cost of doing that is spending half a trillion dollars a year, well I guess we're going to do that, aren't we? That would be my view. It is not a view I've always had, but I've come around to it."
Greenwald also uses the mid-1990s as some kind of benchmark for military spending in an effort to show that "the explosion in our military spending over the last 10 years has far outpaced the rest of the world." I'm not sure what the point here is either. Defense spending was cut dramatically after the Cold War--and then we found ourselves at war. It stands to reason that defense spending would rise dramatically. From this, though, Greenwald deduces that "We're the most militarized country in the world by far." That's asinine, and prompts one to wonder whether Greenwald knows what "militarized" means. (Hint: Greenwald would be putting his considerable talents to use for the Department of Defense if this statement were true.)
Greenwald's larger point is that the defense budget should be a bigger issue in the campaign, and he complains that instead there is a broad, bipartisan consensus that defense spending should continue to rise. The more sober candidates argue only over how much and how fast. Greenwald laments that "Those who try to [propose major cuts] are quickly and widely dismissed as fringe, insane, angry, deranged 'crazies.'" Not at all Glenn, they just don't understand the issues. And they shouldn't pretend to.
