Last summer, when the impasse over raising the debt ceiling had the world on edge, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta agreed that the defense budget could be cut by $450 billion over the next decade, an 8 percent reduction. He will show how to do the trimming without putting the nation in danger when he submits his department budget soon.
The screaming will begin when the details are put in writing. The military itself will strongly resist any cuts in salaries, pensions or health care benefits. Hawks will fight against reductions in the size of the military. Every state with military bases, such as Kansas, will strive to keep them and, if at all possible, keep them growing as Fort Riley has grown to the enormous benefit of Junction City and the area.
One of the budget-cutters’ targets is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The Pentagon plans to spend $400 billion to buy 2,500 of them between now and 2035. They are wanted because their radar-evading qualities make them harder to shoot down.
But killing the program would save hundreds of billions — and blast a huge hole in defense industry profits and employment.
And that’s the rub. Every dollar cut from defense spending — or from government spending of any kind — is a dollar taken out of somebody’s pocket. And that is the primary reason why budget-cutting is so difficult to do.
Congress, for example, routinely appropriates more for weapons programs and military wages and benefits than the Pentagon requests. They do so, to be bald about it, to win voter approval and make “friends” of the industrial complex that feeds on Pentagon contracts.
If deeper reductions in military spending than the 8 percent cut already agreed to do win approval it will be because Democrats and some Republicans decide that it is more important to spend more on domestic programs than to maintain the overwhelming military advantage over other nations that the U.S. maintains.
SEC. PANETTA AGREES that America can no longer maintain the ability to fight two major wars simultaneously. The next significant step toward a smaller military will come when Congress decides that the country can’t afford to give retired military families health care far below cost, that the F-35 must go, that a smaller army, navy, air force and marine corps can still defend the nation against attack and fight terrorism effectively.
Our nation can trim back its military by 10 to 15 percent without becoming Ron Paul isolationist or putting the nation at risk.
But doing so will shrink parts of the U.S. economy, increase patches of unemployment and reduce war industry profits.
We should be willing to accept that temporary pain as part of the cost of learning to live within our income.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
