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The projected annual cost of maintaining 100,000 troops in Afghanistan is a whole lot of money but it is only the tip of a massive military spending iceberg.
During the August townhall meetings on health care reform, many persons lamented the estimated $1 trillion ten-year cost of proposed health care reform legislation. They said it would impose an intolerable taxation burden on their children and grandchildren in order to pay down the debt. I became interested in determining how much spending these reform opponents would tolerate in a category that is virtually sacrosanct from criticism: the military budget.
Metaphorically speaking, comparing the projected ten-year cost of health care reform to the accumulated cost of military spending is like a householder devoting all of his/her attention to a single mouse in the house while totally ignoring the elephant rampaging through the house.
A good starting point to measure multi-year spending increases is to take the first military budget Bush II was fully responsible for (FY 2002) and compare it to the last military budget he submitted (FY 2009). Bush II's base military budget for FY 2002 was $343.2 billion -- including $14.2 billion for Department of Energy nuclear weapons maintenance. The FY 2009 base military budget was $541 billion -- including $18.2 billion for Department of Energy nuclear weapons maintenance.
This 57.6 percentage increase over eight years works out to be a 8.23 percentage average annual increase. This percentage increase is very close to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) calculation that military spending rose nearly 74 percent in FY 2000-2009.
Since President Barack Obama supported the bill to increase the U.S. armed forces by about 92,000 over a five-year period and has not articulated a plan for significant armed forces spending cuts during his time in office, it is fair to assume that base military spending increases will continue at about the eight percent level over the next decade. If we therefore apply an eight percent annual increase to the FY 2009 base, over the following ten years we will have spent well over eight trillion dollars.
Two major items have been left out of the calculations above: 1.) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- financed by supplementals through FY 2009, at least; and 2.) a category called defense-related spending. We are on a schedule in Iraq in which there will be an undetermined number of troops there until the end of 2011 and there is no guarantee that all of the troops will be out by January 2012. Based on a rough estimate of 1,000 troops in Afghanistan bearing an annual cost of $1 billion, 100,000 troops will cost $100 billion annually.
The second category of defense-related spending is very tricky to quantify, as analysts differ widely as to what should be considered to be defense-related spending. Wikipedia has a chart of defense-related budget costs broken down by category. Some of the categories have a range from low to high depending on how analysts split out the defense-related costs. The major differences revolve around Homeland Security, the State Department and annual interest on the debt. The low range is $410 billion and the high range is $629 billion. Combining FY 2009 base military and defense-related spending yields a low of $925 billion and a high of $1.114 trillion. Using the eight percent average annual increase in spending as above, the accumulated ten-year spending ranges from over $14.5 trillion to about $19 trillion.
It doesn't take a mathematical genius to recognize that once you add in all the costs that could reasonably be included in what presently passes for "national security" spending, we are spending more and more to protect less and less. What we will end up with is an approximation of that famed Herblock cartoon in which a devastated landscape is framed by a magnificently equipped U.S. military force.
