Transcript
Julia Gledhill, Research Associate: The United States spends well over a trillion dollars on national security throughout the federal budget. The Department of Defense accounts for 850 billion, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
The United States spends more than the next nine countries combined on national security. By some estimates, we spend some two to three times as much as China spends. And so it’s really difficult to understate just how powerful the arms lobby is in shaping our defense policy process and the Pentagon Budget top line.
The incentive structure in the military brass is to start new exquisite, expensive weapon programs on the cutting edge of technology so we can keep pace with our adversaries and the rate of innovation, so they say. The problem with that mindset is that laws, budgets, regulations are always going to develop slower than technology. This is something that military leaders have struggled with since the fifties, since the onset of the Cold War.
Some of the biggest acquisition failures in the pentagon’s past, like the Littoral combat ship, for example, are a product of manufactured complexity. It’s the same thing with the F-35. When you design a weapon program to do multiple things, it doesn’t really do any particular thing well.
The United States could save hundreds of billions of dollars if it adopted a grand strategy of restraint and abandoned primacy, or the never-ending pursuit of global military dominance.
In my report with my colleagues Bill Hartung and Gabe Murphy, we conservatively estimate about 60 billion in savings, mainly by doing things like cutting bureaucracy and dysfunctional or unnecessary weapon programs.
Cutting the military budget actually strengthens national security because it enables the military to focus on ruthlessly prioritize on its most important priorities, and in the process actually increases military readiness because the military is doing a lot more with a lot less money.
