It’s not often that the end of something means you spend even more money on it, but U.S. defense spending has long defied most rational parameters. With the United States formally out of wars for the first time in about two decades, the Pentagon’s budget increased 5% over last year to a staggering $768 billion in the annual National Defense Authorization Act alone, with an additional $10 billion in non-NDAA defense spending. The package was passed by the House and is expected to pass the Senate.
While lawmakers spent months in protracted negotiations whittling down the infrastructure package and President Joe Biden’s social spending bill, there was no such inhibition when it came to the defense package, with legislators tossing in $25 billion more than what Biden had requested. Despite being a spending measure of roughly half the size of the controversial infrastructure bill in just one year, it is remarkably difficult to find much robust public conversation about what its components even are.
We’re not peaceniks. We support a robust, state-of-the-art military. Still, it should give politicians ostensibly worried about spending pause that a total of $28 billion is going to some 400 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. There is lots more money for tanks, armored vehicles, small arms and all sorts of other implements mainly useful for ground invasions of the type we just ended. Again: Some of the weapons systems and programs are worthwhile, and others are not, but it’s unconscionable that policymakers barely feel the need to justify this fire hose of public dollars.
Meantime, one thing that is missing from the massive bill is a provision to move the investigation of serious crimes within the armed forces, including sexual assault, out of the chain of command and into the hands of trained and impartial military prosecutors. That important measure backed by New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand failed despite the backing of bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress. It seems like there’s plenty of money, but not so much room for justice.