The Record U.S. Military Budget

o listen to the Republican candidates’ debate last week, one would think that President Obama had slashed the U.S. military budget and left our country defenseless. Nothing could be farther off the mark. There are real weaknesses in Obama’s foreign policy, but a lack of funding for weapons and war is not one of them. President Obama has in fact been responsible for the largest U.S. military budget since the Second World War, as is well documented in the U.S. Department of Defense’s annual “Green Book.”

The table below compares average annual Pentagon budgets under every president since Truman, using “constant dollar” figures from the FY2016 Green Book. I’ll use these same inflation-adjusted figures throughout this article, to make sure I’m always comparing “apples to apples”. These figures do not include additional military-related spending by the VA, CIA, Homeland Security, Energy, Justice or State Departments, nor interest payments on past military spending, which combine to raise the true cost of U.S. militarism to about $1.3 trillion per year, or one thirteenth of the U.S. economy.

The U.S. military receives more generous funding than the rest of the 10 largest militaries in the world combined (China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, U.K., France, Japan, India, Germany & South Korea). And yet, despite the chaos and violence of the past 15 years, the Republican candidates seem oblivious to the dangers of one country wielding such massive and disproportionate military power.

When President Obama took office, Congressman Barney Frank immediately called for a 25% cut in military spending. Instead, the new president obtained an $80 billion supplemental to the FY2009 budget to fund his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and his first full military budget (FY2010) was $761 billion, within $3.4 billion of the $764.3 billion post-WWII record set by President Bush in FY2008.

Clinton’s $399 billion FY1998 military budget was the nearest we came to realizing the “peace dividend” promised at the end of the Cold War. But that didn’t even breach the Cold War baseline of $393 billion set after the Korean War (FY1954) and the Vietnam War (FY1975). The largely unrecognized tragedy of today’s world is that we allowed the “peace dividend” to be trumped by what Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives calls the “power dividend”, the desire of military-industrial interests to take advantage of the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to consolidate global U.S. military power.

The triumph of the “power dividend” over the “peace dividend” was driven by some of the most powerful vested interests in history. But at each step, there were alternatives to war, weapons production and global military expansion.

Presidents Bush and Clinton made significant cuts in military spending between 1992 and 1994, but the reductions shrank to 1-3% per year between 1995 and 1998 and the budget started rising again in 1999.

he claims of both the humanitarian interventionists and the neoconservatives were emotional appeals to different strains in the American psyche, driven and promoted by powerful people and institutions whose careers and interests were bound up in the military industrial complex.

o the extent that they are aware of the huge increase in military spending since 1998, most Americans would connect it with the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ill-defined “war on terror.” But Carl Conetta’s research established that, between 1998 and 2010, only 20% of U.S. military procurement and RDT&E (research, development, testing & evaluation) spending and only half the total increase in military spending was related to ongoing military operations. In his 2010 paper, An Undisciplined Defense, Conetta found that our government had spent an extra $1.15 trillion above and beyond Clinton’s FY1998 baseline on expenses that were unrelated to to its current wars.

Most of the additional funds, $640 billion, were spent on new weapons and equipment (Procurement + RDT&E in the Green Book). Incredibly, this was more than double the $290 billion the military spent on new weapons and equipment for the wars it was actually fighting. And the lion’s share was not for the Army, but for the Air Force and Navy.

The use of military force is essentially destructive. Weapons of war are designed to hurt people and break things. All nations claim to build and buy them only to defend themselves and their people against the aggression of others. The notion that the use of military force can ever be a force for good may, at best, apply to a few very rare, exceptional situations where a limited but decisive use of force has put an end to an existing conflict and led to a restoration of peace.

We seem to be coming full circle, to once again recognize the dangers of militarism and the wisdom of the U.S. leaders and diplomats who played instrumental roles in crafting the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Kellogg Briand Pact and much of the existing framework of international law.

U.S. propaganda presents U.S. aggression and military expansion as a force for security and stability. In reality, it is U.S. militarism that has been driving global militarism, and U.S.-led wars and covert interventions that have spawned subsidiary conflicts and deprived millions of people of security and stability in country after country.

In his diplomacy with Cuba and Iran and his apparent readiness to finally respond to Russian diplomacy on Syria and Ukraine, President Obama appears to have learned some important lessons from the violence and chaos that he and President Bush have unleashed on the world. The most generous patron the military industrial complex has ever known may finally be looking for diplomatic solutions to the crises caused by his policies.

Whoever we elect as our next President must therefore be ready on day one to start dismantling this infernal war machine and building a “permanent structure of peace”, on a firm foundation of humanity, diplomacy and a renewed U.S. commitment to the rule of international law.

More From The Huffington Post: