North Korea’s latest act
of war underscores the need for a much
bigger and modernized U.S. Army and Marine Corps. This to occupy
and rebuild North Korea when it implodes, as inevitably it
will.
This is not some farfetched notion. North Korea is an
economic basket case armed with nuclear weapons. And its unprovoked
attack yesterday on a South Korea island underscores just how
dangerous and unpredictable the North Korean regime is.
And so, sooner or later, the U.S. military is going to
have to deal with North Korea. And, when we do, we likely will have
to occupy and rebuild the country just as we have done in Iraq and
are now doing in Afghanistan. And that will require a lot of boots
on the ground.
Problem is our ground forces are overextended already,
with Soldiers and Marines doing multiple deployments with too
little rest and too little time to decompress from
battle.
Yet the emerging consensus in Washington is that, far from
modernizing and expanding the U.S. military, we must instead cut
the defense budget!
And even those who want to rebuild America’s defenses
typically give short shrift to our ground forces. These defense
hawks are stuck in a
Cold War mindset. To them, aircraft,
ships and missiles, not Soldiers and Marines, are the key weapons
of choice in the 21st century.
Of course, cutting the defense budget makes absolutely no
strategic or economic sense. After all, as Frederick W. Kagan and
Kimberly Kagan (of the American Enterprise Institute and the
Institute for the Study of War, respectively) observe in the
Washington Post.
There is no basis either in the present global security
situation or in trends looking forward to suggest that the
requirements for the U.S. military will diminish
significantly.
Cutting defense, therefore, can be justified only on the
grounds that there are greater priorities than safeguarding the
nation from visible threats. [But] protecting the American people
from external attack is one of the few indisputable core functions
of the federal government.
That’s exactly right. As the Heritage Foundation’s
Mackenzie Eaglen explains:
Most advocating reductions in defense spending typically
seek either to:
• pull back on what America does with its defense (‘stop
being a global policeman,’ ‘bring the troops home’); or
• balance the federal checkbook using the haircut method
(cut a little from everywhere to spread the pain).
Both positions have serious flaws.
I’ll say! American withdrawal from the world would be a
grave and serious mistake. The U.S. military is a force for good
internationally. It helps to deter and defeat our enemies, reassure
and embolden our friends and maintain relative peace and stability
in a dangerous world.
Why, in the name of fiscal discipline, would we forfeit
this crucial geostrategic advantage — an advantage that redounds
to our commercial and economic benefit?
Economic Illogic. The
economics of cutting the defense budget are also nonsensical.
“Defense spending now accounts for around 19% of the federal budget
and more than half of all U.S. discretionary spending,” laments the
left-wing Center for American Progress.
True, but that doesn’t tell us much. In fact, defense
spending accounts for not even five percent of the Gross Domestic
Product (!) versus nine or ten percent of the GDP under President
Kennedy.
Moreover, as the Heritage Foundation and the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) point out:
The idea that defense cuts will restore fiscal health
simply does not add up: suppose Pentagon spending for 2011 — $720
billion — were eliminated entirely. This would only halve this
year’s federal deficit of $1.5 trillion.
And defense spending is a drop in the ocean of today’s
$13.3 trillion of government debt. From the Korean War to the
collapse of the Soviet Union, total U.S. defense spending was about
$4.7 trillion. So had there been no military spending at all during
the Cold War, the savings would not equal even half our current
national debt.
Actually, less than 20% of all new spending from 2001 to
2009 went to defense — and this figure doesn’t even include the
mammoth $787-billion “stimulus,” which essentially bypassed the
defense budget.
The bottom line: the core defense budget — that is, the
defense budget not allocated to the current wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan — accounts for less than 3.5% of the GDP, says AEI
military analyst
Tom Donnelly.
“Defense spending constitutes a fifth of federal spending;
projected deficits over the next decade are similar” explains
Washington Post columnist
Robert J. Samuelson. “We won’t shut
the Pentagon.”
Thus, to reduce the crushing burden of debt, policymakers
must look elsewhere. Cutting the defense budget won’t do the trick,
Samuelson says.
What, then, must be cut, or at least reformed along
market-oriented lines? Simple: entitlements: Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid and now “Comprehensive National Health
Insurance” aka Obamacare. Unlike defense, after all, none of these
entitlement programs are constitutionally prescribed or required.
And yet they are fast consuming the federal budget.
“Entitlements now account for around 65 percent of all
federal spending and a record 18 percent of GDP,” notes
Eaglen.
The three largest entitlements — Social Security,
Medicare, and Medicaid — eclipsed defense spending in 1976 and
have been growing ever since.
If future taxes are held at the historical average, these
three entitlements will consume all tax revenues by 2052, leaving
no money for the government’s primary constitutional obligation:
providing for the common defense.
In a world filled with rogue states and terrorist networks
intent on our destruction, that simply won’t do. North Korea’s
latest act of war should be a wakeup call for policymakers and the
American people: Don’t cut and gut defense.
