How are things going with the US military budget? Adam Tooze has an update

Adam Tooze has a sobering analysis of the current state of the US military budget and the foreign and policies it is designed to promote. Short version: the Pentagon is massively preparing for the possibility of a conventional and nuclear war with China. And nuclear arms control seems to be at best an afterthought in this grand scheme.

Tooze's analysis is The new age of American power New Statesman 09/08/2021. The Pentagon budget which he describes as follows really should be a central focus of American political debates year in and year out. It actually gets treated more like an aftherthought.

If the war on terror was big business, once you get to the Pentagon budget proper, the numbers are even more impressive. In 2001 the US defence budget stood at $311bn. By 2010 driven by the war on terror it had more than doubled to $690bn. Then, under the budget cap imposed by the deadlock between the Obama White House and the Republican Congress, spending fell to $560bn in 2015. Trump reversed that decline with a defence budget of above $700bn. Biden’s latest proposal continues the increase, with $753bn requested for 2022. Military expenditure accounts for roughly half of all discretionary spending (as opposed to ongoing entitlements) by the federal government. Defining militarised spending more generally to include Homeland Security, the share rises to two thirds or more. What is so radical about proposals such as the Green New Deal, or Biden’s infrastructure and welfare programmes, is that they propose civilian spending on a scale that the Pentagon takes for granted. [my emphasis]

Paul Krugman likes to say that modern governments are essentially An Insurance Company With An Army (New York Times 04/27/2012). Social insurance ("entitlements" (which is actually a preferred Republican word to indicate disparagement) - health insurance, old-age pensions, unemployment and disability insurance, and the military along with domestic "homeland" security and intelligence functions, are by far the biggest portions of the US federal budget.

As Krugman puts it, "When you talk about federal spending, you’re overwhelmingly talking about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. And the bulk of the insurance — all of Social Security and Medicare, about 2/3 of Medicaid — is for the elderly and disabled."

During the Cold War, major new weapons systems were big topics of political discussion and debate in US politics. Things are different now:

Since large surface vessels are vulnerable to attack, one answer – in keeping with the high-tech third offset – is to make them unmanned. Another solution is to go underwater. The super-advanced Next-Generation Attack Submarine, which begins procurement in ten years’ time, will refocus the undersea fleet away from supporting land wars – by firing cruise missiles into places such as Iraq – in favour of fighting the Chinese fleet both above and below the waves.

But the US navy’s top priority is the procurement of a new fleet of giant Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. The ultimate weapons of mass destruction, designed to deliver a world-destroying second strike in the event that the US is subject to nuclear attack, the Columbia-class ICBM submarines were first projected in 2013. Procurement of the first in class began in 2021 and the navy hopes to build 12 at a cost of $109bn. The submarine-based missiles are one part of the US’s triad of nuclear weapons – alongside heavy bombers from the air and the land-based ICBMs – which began to be modernised under Obama. Analysts put the projected costs of the 30-year programme at $1.5trn. Russia is the only power with anything like the US’s nuclear strength, but the recent detection of new Chinese missile silos has set Washington abuzz.

And, oh yeah, "The Pentagon’s spending programmes are notorious for their cost overruns and dubious results."

Yes, they are. It would be a good idea for the Democratic Party to start challenging some of this stuff. We really need a larger and much more active peace movement in the US.