Last week Arizona Senator Jon Kyl delivered the Heritage Foundation’s Jesse Helms Lecture, appealling to conservatives to support a “strong naitonal defense.” For commentary on the speech and a rebuttal of Heritage’s infatuation with war and militarism, see my latest piece at the Tenth Amendment Center.
To hear an audio version of the essay, read by TAC founder Michael Bolden, click here.
Yesterday Tom Woods posted a comment from a reader who was upset about Woods’ commentary on the $17,000 drip pans the army bought recently. The reader, Greg, made a big deal about the criticism and wrote: “If that drip pan can be gotten for cheaper then either someone in the army made an honest mistake or that drip pan is really needed.” He went on to argue that “[I] think its (sic) best if you leave it to the command structure (who know a thing or two about helicopters) to decide what the army needs or doesn’t.”
As it happened, and as Woods noted, Greg got Marshall McLuhaned by another reader. After providing a robust enough resume in aircraft maintenance, he noted that a drip pan is “a large pan you slide under an aircraft while it’s parked to keep oil or hydraulic fluid from ‘dripping’ on the hangar floor.”
However, the biggest problem with Greg’s statement was his admonition to “leave it to the command structure.” Like a good sheep, Greg is perfectly content to let someone else make all the decisions, and pays no mind to what is done with his money. Not only that, but he instinctively jumps to defend the planners without even understanding the subject matter.
As a veteran of the latest chapter in the war on Iraq, I can say that almost without exception, the “command structure” is probably the last group of people who should be consulted about what “the army needs or doesn’t.” These guys have no idea what goes on in the army, what works, what doesn’t. The military is perhaps the single greatest bureaucratic nightmare that any central planning board could ever devise.
There is so much waste in the military it’s hard to explain it to someone lacking firsthand experience. Just looking at a soldier’s personal equipment and the bureaucratic regulations that go along with it is bewildering enough, let alone getting into weapon systems development and equipment procurement.
For my first deployment we were all issued plain black fleece jackets, clearly meant for outerwear. But, because the uniform regulations hadn’t been updated to prescribe proper wear of a jacket, we weren’t allowed to wear them, except as “undergarments.” They were required items on the packing list, we had to take them with us, wash them, and bring them home, but we were never allowed to wear them.
By the time of my second deployment the army had updated the uniform regulations and soldiers who were issued green fleece jackets could wear them. The thing was, only the new soldiers were issued green jackets, and all the older soldiers had to take their black fleece, again, but could not wear them, again. It’s completely insane.
And this is the group Greg wants to be in charge of everything, and you’d better not dare to question them.
Hawker Beechcraft announced this morning they would begin additional furloughs for employees producing several models of their business jets. Employees producing one of their smaller aircraft have already been furloughed. The reason for temporarily suspending operations is a shortage in composite material used in aircraft design. The shortage was due in part to increased military production, which bid away the material.
This highlights so well the destructive impact on an economy that military spending has. Any capital that is consumed by the military necessarily cannot be employed by the productive sector. The process is referred to as crowding out, where government consumption pushes up higher prices or leads to shortages that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Another way of looking at things is by considering the opportunity costs.
President Dwight Eisenhower put military spending in this way when he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
We know that Hawker Beechcraft is a productive firm because consumers willingly pay for their products; we cannot say the same for the military, which collects its revenue by force. Similar to Bastiat’s broken window fallacy, what is ‘seen’ are the military jets produced and the people employed building them. What is ‘unseen’ are the aircraft that go un-built and the workers who sit idle, waiting for supplies.
So Mitt Romney has been harping on the defense budget, particularly for the navy and the air force. He says that both are so underfunded that the navy is the smallest it’s been since 1917 and the air force hasn’t been so small since 1947. Politifact ran the numbers and found that both claims are essentially true, but the statistics are absolutely meaningless given the context.
They note that while technically the navy has fewer vessels, the current inventory is far more powerful than it was ninety years ago. There are eleven nuclear powered aircraft carriers and more than a dozen submarines capable of launching nuclear warheads. Neither of these ships existed then, so it’s pointless even to bring the issue up.
The same goes for the air force, which in 1947 had rather crude technology compared with the weapon systems now in existence. Gun sights were so primitive that carpet bombing was necessary to destroy single targets. Fighter escorts were a necessity to ensure enough bombers made it to the objective. Today, precision-guided bombs are far more accurate, resulting in potentially fewer civilian deaths. Stealth aircraft can fly in and out of the target areas without the need for even defense weapons. Also, those planes have much heavier payloads.
Even if we take Romney’s claim at face value, and the implication that we just don’t spend enough on war, the numbers belie his demagoguery. The 2012 defense budget included a request for $161 billion for the navy. Contrast this with the $240 million budget of 1917 and we see that, even after adjusting for inflation, the current outlays are forty times higher.
What about the air force? In 2012 they requested $166 billion. By comparison the budget for FY 1950 called for the air force to receive $4.6 billion. Adjusted for inflation, we find that the pentagon is still spending almost four times the amount on the air force.
Such arbitrary statistics mean nothing and only serve to drum up fear in the minds of voters. While factually correct, they are nevertheless hollow figures. If journalists really did what they claim to, they would rightly ask Romney and his ilk to explain the significance of such numbers. A moderator worth his salt would make note of nuclear submarines and stealth bombers, challenging any candidate who used such tactics to defend their (obvious) attempts at manipulating viewers.
What all this means is that the American people need much less spending on the war machine and instead reduce military spending. This cannot be maintained indefinitely, as it is bankrupting us.
Sort of belies the idea the U.S. government can’t afford make any cuts to military spending….
The U.S. spends more than all other nations combined;
More than five times the next two highest-spending nations;
Twice as many as the top ten;
And, one hundred times the Iranian government.
h/t Antiwar.com
