The Defense Budget: Runaway Horse or Plodding Draft Animal?

Continuing our look at the defense budget...

In popular perception, the U.S. defense budget is a behemoth. It's thought to be so huge that it defies quantification. It routinely is described as a "runaway" or "rampaging" beast. Just last month, Cato wonk Benjamin H. Friedman (again) dragged out the overworked image of the stampeding horse, insisting that American defense spending must be reined in.

In truth, the defense budget is less like a runaway Mustang and more like a plodding draft horse. A goodly portion goes toward routine items. For example: the paltry paychecks we dole out to our hardworking troops. Also health care, clothing, child care, and the like. Recently the Marine Corps bought $7 million worth of motor oil. The Air Force bought jet fuel. The Army spent $30 million on training equipment.

And yes, we do have big ticket items. Do these items come with cost overruns and wasteful spending? Yep. Sometimes. But we also have contracts completed on time and on budget.

The important thing to remember, though, is that we need to spend money in order to defend ourselves.

Are we in fact spending enough?

My former editor at the Washington Times, Ken McIntyre, who now is at the prestigious Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., suggests that we are not. In a February blog post at a Heritage site, The Foundry, Ken writes that the U.S. spends more than twice as much for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as for the military.

Ken quotes Heritage defense expert Kim Holmes: “The question facing Mr. Obama is not whether to trim a few expensive and unnecessary weapons systems, but whether he is willing to forgo America’s military edge by skipping or delaying construction of the next generation of modern weapons.”

See the entire post at The Foundry. It's a much needed counter to the myth of defense budget as runaway horse.