America’s Staggering Defense Budget, in Charts

America’s Staggering Defense Budget, in Charts

 (Charles Dharapak/AP)

 By Brad Plumer

 

The United States spends far more than any other country on defense and [in]security. Since 2001, the base defense budget has soared from $287 billion to $530 billion — and that's before accounting for the primary costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But now that those wars are ending and austerity is back in vogue, the Pentagon will have to start tightening its belt in 2013 and beyond. If Hagel gets confirmed as secretary of defense, he'll have to figure out how best to do that.

Below, we've provided an overview of the U.S. defense budget — to get a better sense for what we spend on, and where Hagel might have to cut:

1) The United States spent 20 percent of the federal budget on defense in 2011.

All told, the U.S. government spent about $718 billion on defense and international security assistance in 2011 — more than it spent on Medicare. That includes all of the Pentagon's underlying costs as well as the price tag for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which came to $159 billion in 2011. It also includes arms transfers to foreign governments.

(Note that this figure does not, however, include benefits for veterans, which came to $127 billion in 2011, or about 3.5 percent of the federal budget. If you count those benefits as "defense spending," then the number goes up significantly.)

U.S. defense spending is expected to have risen in 2012, to about $729 billion, and then is set to fall in 2013 to $716 billion, as spending caps start kicking in.

2) Defense spending has risen dramatically since 9/11.

Here's a historical chart of U.S. defense spending since World War II in inflation-adjusted dollars. There's a big spike for the Korean and Vietnam wars. There's another big ramp-up during the 1980s under President Reagan. Then defense spending got cut significantly during the Clinton years until soaring to historically unprecedented levels after 9/11.

U.S. defense spending is set to fall again in 2013, though it will still be as high in real terms as it was at the height of the Reagan build-up for the foreseeable future.

3) The Pentagon's budget mostly consists of personnel pay, weapons procurement, and operations.

Source: Office of Management and Budget, Graph: Dylan Matthews

In 2011, the Pentagon spent about $161 billion on personnel pay and housing, $128 billion on weapons procurement, and $291 billion on operations and maintenance— the last largely in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those three items made up the bulk of the budget. Smaller amounts also were spent on R&D (about $74 billion) and nuclear programs ($20 billion), as well as construction, family housing and other programs ($22 billion).

My colleague Dylan Matthews created the graph above to show how these portions have changed over time. Personnel spending has stayed constant over the years, even as the number of soldiers in the U.S. military has shrunk (pay and benefits have increased). Weapons procurement can vary wildly. And operations spending has soared during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

4) The United States spent more on its military than the next 13 nations combined in 2011.

Needless to say, the United States remains the world's dominant military power. The graph above comes from the Pete G. Peterson Foundation, which compiled data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

5) The U.S. defense budget is poised to shrink in 2013 and beyond, although this won't be the biggest downsizing it has ever faced.

Two big things are about to happen to military spending. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down. And, thanks to the 2011 Budget Control Act, the Pentagon is facing both hard budget caps and a looming sequester that would cut defense spending by about $1 trillion over the next decade (compared to what was expected).

That's a serious cut. Although, as the graph above from the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows, even if the sequester is fully implemented, which no one expects, the drawdowns after Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War were far more drastic in inflation-adjusted dollars.

6) Sequester or no sequester, the 2011 Budget Control Act is expected to rein in the Pentagon's base budget over the next decade:

The chart above comes from the Congressional Budget Office,* which points out that the spending caps in the Budget Control Act of 2011 are likely to force the Pentagon's "base" budget to stay virtually flat in the next decade, adjusting for inflation (that's the light-blue dashed line). If Congress fails to avert the sequester, then funding levels will drop to an even lower level (that's the light-blue solid line).

These numbers don't include any additional war funding that Congress might approve over the next decade. Still, sequester or no sequester, the Pentagon's base budget will be well below the dark blue solid line, which is the CBO's projection of what the Department of Defense's budget would look like if costs remained "consistent with DoD’s recent experience."

7) The Pentagon and Congress are already rejiggering the military budget in response to austerity.

Photo: Raytheon

Back in January, the Department of Defense unveiled its proposed budget for fiscal year 2013 — a look at how it would deal with new budget constraints. As Wired's Spencer Ackerman reported, the Pentagon wanted to downsize about 100,000 human soldiers and ramp up advanced weapons programs, including drones, bombers and missiles.

Of course, the Pentagon doesn't have the final say. Congress eventually passed its own $631 billion defense appropriations bill in December that made some changes to the Pentagon's vision. Many of the weapons systems that the Obama administration wanted to retire — such as three Navy cruisers — were kept in. The final did, however, make plans to reduce civilian and contractor personnel by 5 percent over the next five years.

8) The next secretary of defense will have to make further tough choices about the Pentagon's budget.

The chart above comes from a recent report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which asked seven teams of experts to come up with ways to meet the Pentagon's new spending constraints in the coming decades. It shows what areas different teams would cut — some experts advised heavily slashing the civilian workforce, others advocated cutting aircraft inventory. (There were some areas of consensus, though: surface ships were generally cut more than submarines, for instance.)

The cuts weren't always painless. For instance: "Five of seven teams agreed that they could not fully resource their strategies under the assumed fiscal guidance unless they accepted near-term risk by reducing current readiness programs." These are trade-offs Hagel will have to navigate.

9) Ordinary Americans want to cut defense spending far more than is already on the table,

Back in May, the Stimson Center unveiled the results of a new survey asking U.S. voters about their views on defense spending. As it turns out, Democratic, Republican and independent voters all want to cut military spending far more severely than the sequester would and far, far more severely than either party has proposed. Congress isn't likely to pay much attention here, but it's a reminder that defense cuts tend to be extremely popular.

* Correction: I replaced the original graph in #6 with a better chart from the Congressional Budget Office, which shows military spending shrinking over the next decade under the 2011 Budget Control Act (after adjusting for inflation), not growing as originally stated. Apologies for the error.


From The Washington Post @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/everything-chuck-hagel-needs-to-know-about-the-defense-budget-in-charts/


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The United States of Fear

The National Security State Cops a Feel: Taking Off the Gloves (and Then Everything Else)

by Tom Engelhardt

It's finally coming into focus, and it's not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your "safety" will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.
Just ask Rolando Negrin, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener who passed through one of those new "whole body image" scanners last May as part of his training for airport security. His co-workers claimed to have gotten a look at his "junk" and mocked him mercilessly, evidently repeatedly asking, "What size are you?" and referring to him as "little angry man." In the end, calling it "psychological torture," he insisted that he snapped, which in his case meant that he went after a co-worker, baton first, demanding an apology.
Consider that a little parable about just how low this country has sunk, how psychologically insecure we've become while supposedly guarding ourselves against global danger.
There is no question that, at the height of Cold War hysteria, when superpower nuclear arsenals were out of this world and the planet seemed a hair-trigger from destruction, big and small penises were in play, symbolically speaking. Only now, however, facing a ragtag set of fanatics and terrorists – not a mighty nation but a puny crew – are those penises perfectly real and, potentially, completely humiliating.

Failed Bombs Do the Job

We live, it seems, in a national security "homeland" of little angry bureaucrats who couldn't be happier to define what "safety" means for you and big self-satisfied officials who can duck the application of those safety methods. Your government can now come up with any wacky solution to American "security" and you'll pay the price. One guy brings a failed shoe bomb on an airplane, and you're suddenly in your socks. Word has it that bombs can be mixed from liquids in airplane bathrooms, and there go your bottled drinks. A youthful idiot flies toward Detroit with an ill-constructed bomb in his underwear, and suddenly they're taking naked scans of you or threatening to grope your junk.
Two bombs don't go off in the cargo holds of two planes and all of a sudden sending things around the world threatens to become more problematic and expensive. Each time, the price of "safety" rises and some set of lucky corporations, along with the lobbyists and politicians that support them, get a windfall. In each case, the terror tactic (at least in the normal sense) failed; in each case, the already draconian standards for our security were ratcheted up, while yet more money was poured into new technology and human reinforcements, which may, in the end, cause more disruption than any successful terror attack.
Directly or indirectly, you pay for the screeners and scanners and a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy that officially wields an $80 billion budget, and all the lobbyists and shysters and pitchmen who accompany our burgeoning homeland-security complex. And by the way, no one's the slightest bit nice about it either, which isn't surprising since it's a national security state we're talking about, which means its mentality is punitive. It wants to lock you down, quietly and with full acquiescence if possible. Offer some trouble, though, or step out of line, and you'll be hit with a $10,000 fine or maybe put in cuffs. It's all for your safety, and fortunately they have a set of the most inept terror plots in history to prove their point.
By now, who hasn't written about the airport "porno-scans," the crotch gropes and breast jobs, the "don't touch my junk" uproar, the growing lines, and the exceedingly modest protests on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, not to speak of the indignity of it all?
Totally been there, completely done that; totally written about, fully read. Shouldn't we move on?

Taking Off the Gloves (and Then Everything Else)

And yet there are a few dots that still need to be connected. After all, since the beginning of George W. Bush's second term, Americans have been remarkably quiet when it comes to the national security disasters being perpetuated in their name. America's wars, its soaring Pentagon budgets, its billion-dollar military bases, its giant new citadels still called embassies but actually regional command centers, its ever-escalating CIA drone war along the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the ever-expanding surveillance at home, and the incessant "night raids" and home razings thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, not to speak of Washington's stimulus-package spending in its war zones have caused no more than the mildest ripple of protest, much less genuine indignation, in this country in years.
American "safety" has, in every case, trumped outrage. Now, for the first time in years, the oppressiveness of a national security state bent on locking down American life has actually gotten to some Americans. No flags are yet flying over mass protests with "Don't Scan on Me" emblazoned on them. Still, the idea that air travel may now mean a choice between a spritz of radiation and a sorta naked snapshot or – thrilling option B – having some overworked, overaggressive TSA agent grope you has caused outrage, at least among a minority of Americans, amid administration confusion. (If you want evidence that Hillary Clinton is considering a run for president in 2012, check out what she had to say about her lack of eagerness to be patted down at the airport.)
Local authorities have threatened to bring sexual battery charges against TSA agents who step over the line in pat-downs. Some legislators are denouncing the TSA's new security plans. Ron Paul has introduced the American Travel Dignity Act. And good for them all.
But here's the thing: in our deluded state, Americans don't tend to connect what we're doing to others abroad and what we're doing to ourselves at home. We refuse to see that the trillion or more dollars that continue to go into the Pentagon, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the national security state yearly, as well as the stalemated or losing wars Washington insists on fighting in distant lands, have anything to do with the near collapse of the American economy, job-devastation at home, or any of the other disasters of our American age.
As a result, those porno-scanners and enhanced pat-downs are indignities without a cause – except, of course, for those terrorists who keep launching their bizarre plots to take down our planes. And yet whatever inconvenience, embarrassment, or humiliation you suffer in an airport shouldn't be thought of as something the terrorists have done to us.
It's what the American national security state that we've quietly accepted demands of its subjects, based on the idea that no degree of danger from a terrorist attack, however infinitesimal, is acceptable. (When it comes to genuine safety, anything close to that principle is absent from other aspects of American life where – from eating to driving, to drinking, to working – genuine danger exists and genuine damage is regularly done.)
We now live not just with all the usual fears that life has to offer, but in something like a United States of Fear.
So think of it as an irony that, when George W. Bush and his cronies decided to sally forth and smite the Greater Middle East, they exulted that they were finally "taking the gloves off." And so they were: aggressive war, torture, abuse, secret imprisonment, souped-up surveillance, slaughter, drone wars, there was no end to it.
When those gloves came off, other people suffered first. But wasn't it predictable – since unsuccessful wars have a nasty habit of coming home – that, in the end, other things would come off, and sooner or later they would be on you: your hat, your shoes, your belt, your clothes, and of course, your job, your world?
And don't for a second think that it's going to end here. What happens when the first terrorist with a suppository bomb is found aboard one of our planes? After all, such weapons already exist. In the meantime, the imposition of more draconian safety and security methods is, of course, being considered for buses, trains, and boats. Can trucks, taxis, cars, and bikes be far behind? After all, once begun, there can, by definition, be no end to the search for perfect security.

You Wanna Be Safer? Really?

You must have a friend who's extremely critical of everyone else but utterly opaque when it comes to himself. Well, that's this country, too.
Here's a singular fact to absorb: we now know that a bunch of Yemeni al-Qaeda adherents have a far better hit on just who we are, psychologically speaking, and what makes us tick than we do. Imagine that. They have a more accurate profile of us than our leading intelligence profilers undoubtedly do of them.
Recently, they released an online magazine laying out just how much the two U.S.-bound cargo-bay bombs that caused panic cost them: a mere $4,200 and the efforts of "less than six brothers" over three months. They even gave their plot a name, Operation Hemorrhage (and what they imagined hemorrhaging, it seems, was not American blood, but treasure).
Now, they're laughing at us for claiming the operation failed because – thanks reportedly to a tip from Saudi intelligence – those bombs didn't go off. "This supposedly 'foiled plot,'" they wrote, "will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures. That is what we call leverage."
They are, they claim, planning to use the "security phobia that is sweeping America" not to cause major casualties, but to blow a hole in the U.S. economy. "We knew that cargo planes are staffed by only a pilot and a co-pilot, so our objective was not to cause maximum casualties but to cause maximum losses to the American economy" via the multi-billion-dollar U.S. freight industry.
This is a new definition of asymmetrical warfare. The terrorists never have to strike an actual target. It's not even incumbent upon them to build a bomb that works. Just about anything will do. To be successful, they just have to repeatedly send things in our direction, inciting the expectable Pavlovian reaction from the U.S. national security state, causing it to further tighten its grip (grope?) at yet greater taxpayer expense.
In a sense, both the American national security state and al-Qaeda are building their strength and prestige as our lives grow more constrained and our treasure vanishes.
So you wanna be safer? I mean, actually safer? Here's a simple formula for beginning to improve American safety and security at every level. End our trillion dollar wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; set our military to defending our own borders (and no, projecting power abroad does not normally qualify as a defense of the United States); begin to shut down our global empire of bases; stop building grotesque embassy-citadels abroad (one even has a decorative moat, for god's sake!); end our overseas war stimulus packages and bring some of that money home. In short, stop going out of our way to tick off foreigners and then pouring our treasure into an American war machine intent on pursuing a generational global war against them.


Of course, the U.S. national security state has quite a different formula for engendering safety in America: fight the Afghan War until hell freezes over; keep the odd base or two in Iraq; dig into the Persian Gulf region; send U.S. Special Operations troops into any country where a terrorist might possibly lurk; and make sure the drones aren't far behind. In other words, reinforce our war state by ensuring that we're eternally in a state of war, and then scare the hell out of Americans by repeatedly insisting that we're in imminent danger, that shoe, underwear, and someday butt bombers will destroy our country, our lives, and our civilization. Insist that a single percent of risk is 1% too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively, if they won't shut up.
It's a formula for leaving you naked in airports, while increasing the oppressive power of the state. And here's the dirty, little, distinctly Orwellian secret: the national security state can't do without those Yemeni terrorists (and vice versa), as well as our homegrown variety. All of them profit from a world of war. You don't – and on that score, what happens in an airport line should be the least of your worries.
The national security state is eager to cop a feel. As long as Americans don't grasp the connections between our war state and our "safety," things will only get worse and, in the end, our world will genuinely be in danger.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His new book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s.
Copyright © 2010 Tom Engelhardt
Via Lew Rockwell.com @ http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt411.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

December 2, 2010

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Content is the King

Content is the King

* Discontent are the People

   
Many people are beginning to wake up to the uncomfortable reality that the direction our global civilization has taken is off course. A sizeable minority are coming to terms with the fact that we’re all passengers on the Titanic and an iceberg is in sight while our power-drunk captain orders ‘full steam ahead’, stoking the steam engines with more and more coal.

              Most assume that our elected functionaries and captains of industry are just a little slow on the uptake and that the SNAFU principle (situation normal – all fucked up) is the reason why no-one’s slowing our doomed vessel or doing more than discussing the tentative possibility of changing course. Most well-meaning souls believe that it’s some kind of accident that we’re destroying the ecosystem as quickly as we can - ripping up the earth, crapping in its rivers, smoking up its atmosphere and tearing down its forests like the planet was going out of style. Other more world-weary witnesses put it all down to simple greed.

             The unfortunate reality is far more pernicious. We live in a world where those who ‘own’ and control all of our real resources believe that their fellow humans are a problem that can only be dealt with by ‘final solutions’. They fail to admit that their iniquitous elitism is responsible for the parlous current state of Humanity and the unnecessary destruction of our global environment.

          Their vast host of captivated wage-slaves is trained to believe that they are beholden to their economic, religious and political masters (of whatever stripe or hue) for the few freedoms they imagine they enjoy. 



       In fact, our grandparents fought, wheedled and struggled for these rights and freedoms, forcibly dragging ownership of themselves from those same masters – inbred megalomaniacs who still believe they’re ‘entitled’ to control the lives and dreams of all others. Their forebears literally owned the rest of us as slaves (until our forebears threw off their yokes in bloody revolutions and painful reformations) and the current crop of self-styled princesses and princes would like to bring back those good old days.  Their parents told them they were ‘born to rule’ when they were kiddies, so it must be true.              


       This was all normal in feudal societies – and is still the norm in many hidebound nation states that still haven’t recognised certain fundamentals – that all humans have equal rights, for instance, or that women have the same rights as men, or that children have the same rights as adults. Or that all humans have rights to privacy, access to shelter, unobstructed passage, free speech, fair and honest legal, judicial and police systems, an adequate social security safety net, the right to vote, equal access to adequate public utilities, free universal healthcare and free education – all already paid for by the generations of citizens whose labours created civilization.


              If you don’t believe these rights are guaranteed to you, have a look at the International Bill of Rights (U.N.) – that your government almost certainly signed and ratified on your behalf – without telling you. You are entitled to far more than these basics – take a look for yourself.


              And our leaders have the unmitigated gall to call us all consumers – suckers – to our faces, when we produce everything they vampirise, taking the cream from the top for themselves. The feudal monarchic infancy of our global civilization is an outworn cloak we have yet to discard, even though it strangles our growth, awareness, compassion and evolution. Now that the globe is full of relatively free, prosperous and educated people it’s time to introduce the concept that we can have something better than the same old pyramid money scam. We can stop competing with each other and scrambling over each other’s backs in pursuit of crumbs offered to us by glorified prison guards – when we all made the bread (and circuses).


          The internet can be a fulcral part of the dawn of a new, real global democracy – but only if enough of us discover and demand the collectively agreed upon rights and responsibilities that we already abide by. The articles that our grandparents created to protect us all are worth defending and fully implementing, now that the world is finally wealthy and free enough to do so.  Our current outmoded civilization(s) can only survive in a state of an endless feeding frenzy of growth. In any living organism endless growth is known as cancer. Our crazy doctrine of untrammeled economic growth is an unaffordable illusion on this finite planet.


         What living things really thrive on is equilibrium – a balanced, harmonious environment that allows diversity to thrive. Growth cycles naturally come and go in fits and starts, with plateaus of peaceful assimilation in between. Equilibrium is easily achievable. It’s much easier to sustain and more pleasant than greed or competitive flailing about. Why compete when we can all share and trade and intermingle – when we are one people surviving together in the same capacious boat? We need to cooperate to survive – to stop those who are tearing out the ship’s superstructure to build themselves temporary doomed palaces, to pull together and turn away from the evitable iceberg. We can cast off the beliefs and fears that got us here in the first place and turn away from the path of the dinosaurs while the time is still ripe.


         We can give up the idea that we need to struggle or suffer to survive. It’s our struggles that produce suffering – they don’t make life easier, and an easier life is what we all really want. Living just to keep working is only a fraction worse than continually working in order to live. Either existence is an indication of an utterly inefficient slave society whose members don’t know (or care) they can improve their lot. Remember the concept of leisure time? Do you know what freedom means? It isn’t something you can put off until later, when it’s more convenient. But it is something most people have to relearn, after having their individuality drummed or beaten out of them as children - to prepare them for the ‘real world’.


         The human world is what we make it. Could it be that it’s not merely the direction of our global civilization that’s off course, but its very underpinnings and structure?    

By now we’ve all begun to understand that things won’t continue in a state of ‘steady as she goes’, as they did for our war-torn, shell-shocked parents and grandparents. Everything’s changing now. The task facing us all is to ensure that we don’t throw out the baby or the bathwater as our ships of state begin to go down the gurgler. We have to do a lot more than rearrange the deckchairs (and there aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone). We can’t abandon ship.


               But we still don’t have to sink, even though we've already cut up most of the decking even though we deserve to for being so stupid and gullible. The first step is to realise that our Captain and the ship’s Owner don’t have our interests at heart. They’re of the view that they have to reduce the number of passengers to a manageable complement. They view their fellow humans as too unruly and uncontrollable – in fact, they call Humanity ‘vermin in their warrens’ among themselves - and besides, they can abandon ship, and have been preparing to do so for quite some time. They’re all quite ready to bunker down and emerge after the conflagration – remember?

               Wrecking the ship is, in fact, their plan. Sinking most of the world’s population (or encouraging it to sink) is the only way their limited minds can conceive of maintaining control - which is, after all, the only reality they believe in. In their isolated, dispassionately fearful minds, sinking the ship is their insurance policy.

            If you understand this you’ll understand what’s really going on; you’re living inside the ranks of a grand Millennial battle between semi-living feudal fossils with self-fulfilling apocalyptic notions and the new generations of awakening people, for whom anything is possible – if we seize the day. It’s time to decide which side you’re on. Now is the only time to change course. Now is the only time we have to change our lives and transform our selves. We all know there’s no putting it off; it’s way past time for a reality check. It’s time for a radical and unexpected change – it’s time to smell the roses. It’s time to forget the past and future and concentrate on the priceless, unrepeatable gift of the present.


              It’s time to step back from the brink, take a look at your life and find something to do with your time that fits the new paradigm – time to see if what you do is actually worth doing for its own sake – not for the money or reputation you derive from it. A chance for change will arrive if you want to take it; it’s that kind of time.  

             Equilibrium means learning to live with yourself. It means learning how to be content. Content is the king or queen who knows they already have all they need for a good and meaningful life. Discontent are those who can’t control their appetites; they don’t even know what they’ve lost when it’s gone down their open gullet. Greed is the basis of most conflict. 

            The most important task we have to achieve right about now is to give up the outmoded notion of war. We’ll all have the chance to actively oppose war very soon. You can even start today! It can only be achieved with a mindset of non-violence and peace, of course. The best place to transform the world is within your own heart and mind.
 
              In this beautiful unified world no-one can be secure until everyone is secure – and you don’t get security with armies, police forces and surveillance. You get it by sharing and ensuring that your children and other people’s children all get a fair share – and by learning to appreciate what you already have. Count your blessings! There’s more than enough for everyone. Wanting more than enough will just ensure you lose your life and freedom trying to hoard the ever-changing present. 
 

            You can have so much more than that!

  

  

Have you never wondered why you have to pay someone for the right to live somewhere? Have you never wondered why access to land for the purpose of simply living isn’t a right that all the world’s citizens enjoy, but an entitled privilege that has to be granted by invested interest?

Why is it so?  -          

- R. Ayana

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