Terrible swift sword

It was never supposed to fall on the Defence Department itself

See article

Readers' comments



When having a good military comes at the expense of having a good country, it is the military that must follow through on its commitment and take the hit for the country.


I is highly worth noting the hyperbole within Panetta's comments: the US *already* has the smallest navy since 1917, with something like 219 ships.

That includes nuclear submarines, nine aircraft carrier battlegroups (more aircraft carriers than the entire rest of the world combined, mind you), and a considerable force of smaller craft.

If these spending cuts ultimately do cause America's military to become "hollowed out," it will be the fault of military leadership - not Congress.


And I would like to add that even if the cuts do get close to be implemented in full, there's still the option for the US would manufacture another war, say, an invasion of Iran, to justify maintaining the defense funding.


I see potential cut or delays to small programs in the beginning stages, but no cuts to programs like the F-35 or NGB, overall the amount of cuts would be insignificant (if any). They will properly wiggle their way out by stretching the cuts out over a longer period, say, 50 years, and/or change it so it cuts only the growth of defense spending (which is already the case in some regards), that leaves them with the option of just asking for larger defense budget every year to offset the cuts and leave nothing changed in the end.

Let's not kid ourselves and think there's any remote chance defense will take any meaningful hit, this is a country that would cut education to fund the military, the only thing they see as more important in that country is their support for Israel, everything else are secondary priorities.

Moran ya Simba

"America is not about to throw away its military pre-eminence, either by accident or design."

I propose a conjecture that the biggest economic power will always have the biggest military potential. I would motivate this by stating that military power is proportional to military capability, i.e. the more you build or train, the more you can do. But economic power is integral to military capability, i.e. the bigger economy you have the more you can build in any unit of time. This means that the effect integrates ("sums up") over time.
A theorem of control theory states that an integral controller can always override a proportional controller. I believe this to be the case here. If China overtakes the US economically, as it seems likely to do, it will have the biggest military potential. I think the US should plan accordingly. This means better economic planning, including an industrial policy and finding allies.


Does the USA still need large contigent of armies to fight an invisible enemy? A few drones, and proxy armies would do.
Biggest threat to the USA is actually bad politics, not spending cuts. Spending cuts come because bad politics cannot allow rejuvenation of the economy.

In the end, as Antony Toynbee said "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."

USA also need to realise that its not military might that got USA to the top, but hardwork and some luck. Being far away from germany, they were not closely involved in the wars, and they became the global factory as an alternative during and as a consequence of the two wars.


Spending is a poor measure of combat effectiveness. The US Navy has 11 carrier groups, the rest of the world has 10 -- should America build a couple more? Why build the F-35 when the other air forces in the world can't compete with what the US already has in the air?

And don't get me started on cost plus contracts and their no-bid cousins.


It's about time the debate on Defense spending begins overtly and the American people can get the true picture. Graham and McCain will continue to use fear of future disaster, but no longer is there a united Republican front of fear mongering and future calmity. Defense contractors beware!


It wouldn't be such a bad thing. The US spends more than the rest of the world combined in Defense, much of it supporting repressive regimes, supporting insurgences against inconvenient countries, or directly invading other nations and committing Human Rights abuses. A world with a more restrained US would be a more peaceful world.

Eulogio B.

I understand the US military budget is presently comparable (or bigger) to the ones of all the other nations combined.
I just can't figure out how slashing that spending would be such a tragedy for an indebted nation in mostly peaceful times -as they in fact are, as there´s no Hitler nor communists-.
The thing of trying to "keep up with China at whatever cost" is plainly historical non-sense: 300M people overspending to trying to set the rules to 1,200M that had just thrown away the communist stone that was stopping their prosperity. What if future income per head in China happens to be reminiscent of a Japanese/Hong Kong one? Spend whatever of american wealth you want in military, 50%, 70%, 100%, it won't keep up.
The smart -and thrifthy- thing for the US is to promote enforcement of international law from now, promote trade, international cooperation and so on. Of course, that requires a commitment -and obedience- with such international laws and bodies, a requirement for having the moral authority for standing up besides China.
But you know, overmilking the wallet is such a temptation for evading the correct, hard, behavior while one can do it.

Yingnam Fong

US should not shoulder the world's responsibility too much at a time while her nationals want the reallocation of $1 trillion over a decade to lessen the financial crisis that is threathening the livelihood of so many people at home.

US has achieved so much in reshaping the world in terms of security, technology, connectivity, and so on. US should not expect perfection as the cost to gain the marginal benefit would be unreasonably high. Given a reduced funding, US can still out-power so many countries combined together. Just referring to data available, there is definitely room for US to scale down a little on the military expenditure and benefit a large group of people.

The present world order should allow more than one super power to exist. The leaders of the great powers should have mutual trust coz the nowadays people know that wars can be devastating to all. A little military scale-down of US wont easily induce any large scale conflict. On the contrary, the ebb of the hegemony would abate undue tension arising from US's dense deployment.

At any rate, Pentagon should not stone-stall the intended trimming. Taking one little step backward or sideward, the world would have a sigh of relief. I dont know if the cut is equivalent to a haircut or a tatoo removal for a marine. But, it will have many grateful thanks in return.


This is simple; TOO MUCH $ SPENT BY DoD. They have to move from the kid-in-a-candy-store model, to a good-enough model. Spending HALF of the discretionary income tax revenue on the DoD is absolutely unacceptable! After this country fails due to an economic collapse, that's how many fail by the way, it won't matter how wonderful our military preparations have been. It will all go on the chopping block for pennies on the dollar.


Why U.S. is fighting two wars against terrorists for 10+ years, spent 5+ trillion dollars and Taliban is winning? Nobody is investigated or in jail for these wars or waste? How much money our defense contractors made from these wars? Is 450 US dollar for a ash tray enough? the list of questions goes on and on.....


TE wrote: Great nations decline in different ways: by losing wars, overreaching, collapsing internally


Losing wars: though not losing wars in the conventional senses, the Iraq and Afghan wars can hardly been considered wins

Overreaching: deployed in more than 150 countries around the world, with more than 369,000 troops abroad. For godsake, they are even in Canada which we all know is the greatest military threat to the survival of the US.

Interanl Collapse: No one can doubt the American people's patriotism; but the political class has been bickering over God and other non-sense issues. I am just waiting for the day the GOP to propose to outlaw gravity because it is just a "theory".

WT Economist

With Generation Greed having bankrupted the country, the question is who will become worse off in what ways. Until someone is willing to admit the former point, the latter process is unlikely to be fair or reasonable.


As someone who has worked in numerous capacities inside, outside, and in proximity to the US Defense Department, let me point out that the government could, in theory, cut the Defense budget dramatically, yet leave the actual *capabilities* of the military, now and into the future, practically unchanged. Leaders fret so much about the quantity of dollars rolling in the front door of the Pentagon, but spend little time worrying about how to use each and every one of those dollars efficiently. The top brass and DoD bureaucrats should look more closely at how the money is actually spent: we could save billions of taxpayer dollars without cutting an ounce of "Defense".

Missionpeak in reply to philk13


True statement....

A friend of mine is ranked O-6, quite high rank in the military. He told me some of the wastes:

When he served in Iraq, they installed 3 pieces of steel on his Hummer, one piece in the back, on the left side and right side each. The total cost is 150,000 US dollar.... a mask you can buy three from a '99 cents' store costs 23 US dollar...... a ash tray costs 450 US dollar......

Any military personet served in Vietnam while 'agent orange' sprayed over their bases are eligible to collect disability pay..... I met several veteran on disability and they have nothing wrong with them......

Entitlement mindset in military is not different than the general society......May be worse.....


I asked my good friend the Internet, and she helped me to get the numbers, some people in here are confused about:

The US spend less than $700 billion on "Defence" which is less than 5% of their $15,000 billion GDP. If you look at the Federal Budget, this amounts to about 20%. However, for the great Majority of developed Countries, military spending in terms of GDP is less than 2%. Only Saudi-Arabia(!) spends more: Over ten percent (I think we allknow, why... - Should anybody aspire to that?)

I think the outrage in some of the comments is very intuitive and desireable - military spending should always be as low as possible. NO military spending should be the default. Wars only destroy, the broken-window-idea was a bad one, that should be clear by now. Every dime that is spend on building guns and tanks does not only use up precious productive capacity without any added utility for anybody, but will probably destroy lives and value all over the world!

Mr. Heimpel wishes you a nice weekend from Germany!


Let's see, so the number one threat to our defense is the debt. Okay, I can accept that, especially when our number one economic (and growing military) threat happens to be the same country we owe the most money to.

But now lets look at the real cause and the obviouse solution. Imagine if after Pearl Harbor in WW2 the Republican Party (the anti military, anti draft, anti-shared sacrafice, isolationist party of the time)proposed a tax cut for the ealthiest Americans and corporations. What do you think would have happened? More then likely they would have been called treasonous and tared and feathered.

Yet today - beginning with GWBush (but actually with Regan) giving tax cuts to the wealthy in times of war and military stress, as in Regan's military buuild up and Bush's unfunded war in Iraq tax cuts for the wealthy even in times of war and crisis is a policy and even a pledge of the Republican/Tparty.

Once again we find those who scream loudest about war in the Republican/Party are lease willing to pay for it. As we find - and if you listened to the Republican/Tparty debate all of the chicken hawk candidates - especially Romney and Gingrich - refused to raise taxes on the wealthy even if it was necessery to get a budget agreement to avoid cuts in defense.

What this says to me is first the Republican/Tparty is a party of hypocrits and idiots who are incapable of leading.. If debt and defense are so important to them why won't they compromise even when their so called most sacrade cows are at stake?

Let us be very clear: the leading cause of the current economic problems are almost entirely due to the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afgan; a failure to regulate the financial and mortgage markets; a lax trade policy that sent millions of jobs and technology to China (as a means to bust unions and control inflation); an unfunded idiotic donut hole drug plan in which Medicare was unable to even negotiate drug prices; and the collapse of the the economy that began in 2006 due to the overall Republican policies.

By what bit of insane reasoning does it make sense to do more of the same as what is generally proposed by the current Republican/Tparty? If that is not insanity, what is?

Meanwhile, President Obama has demonstrated pure brilliance in dealing with the most idiotic and intransient Republican Party in generations. He has managed through brilliant politics to save the nation when the Republican/Tparty held held the nation hostage over the debt with his super committee deal that put them in check.

In fact he has been able to get nearly 4 trillion dollars in savings while saving Social Security and Medicare: think about it, 1.2 trillion from the sequester; 2 trillion from the end of the bush tax cuts, one trillion from bringing the troops home. Meanwhile he has shown the Republican'Tparty to be the intransient, incompetent idiots and hypocrits they are who only care about tax cuts for the wealthy and not about the debt or defense.



Products and events



