On Friday’s episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., offered a ridiculous rationale for why Congress spends so much more on certain U.S. military programs than the Pentagon actually requests it to spend.
Maher asked Hunter “Isn’t that socialism when you’re just making things just to give jobs to people?”
Even if Hunter has a point in terms of the Air Force’s resistance to drones (an issue that persists today), it’s a poor analogy with which to defend the current defense budget. Consider, for example, that the current defense budget includes more than half a billion dollars in satellites that the Air Force doesn’t want and $623 million for a slow moving radar aircraft the Air Force doesn’t want (but China almost certainly does want us to buy so that they can kill it in a war).
The new defense budget also includes more more money to expedite the construction of a new Ford-class aircraft carrier which makes 6,000 folks highly vulnerable to Chinese ship-killer missiles, and hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) for two littoral combat ships which would struggle in action against near-peer competitors such as China and Russia.
But it’s worse than that.
The issue here is not simply that these above-request appropriations deny the Defense Department money that could be better spent elsewhere or not spent at all (the deficit/debt is a slight problem), but that they burden the Pentagon with long-term outlays. After all, the maintenance costs in crewing and keeping operational a littoral combat ship reach into tens of millions of dollars each year. That actually reduces the military’s flexibility and readiness.
So why does Congress actually do this? Simple. Because members of Congress know that the more jets or tanks or destroyers they can pay contractors to build, the more money those contractors will have to spend on generous campaign donations. Don’t get me wrong, we must spend a lot of on our military. Yet we must also ensure that taxpayer money is spent on what the military actually needs to fight and win wars. Too often today the military is treated as a national jobs program or a useful facility for political-corporate cronyism and patronage. That’s the essence of the Washington swamp.
It’s sad to see Hunter – a decorated Marine who joined the Corps after 9/11 and served two combat tours – failing to stand up for effective military spending.
