I read this commentary article about the news that
In early March, Taiwan’s defense minister Yen Ming estimated the island nation could resist a Chinese onslaught “at least one month”—and that’s assuming other countries aid in Taipei’s defense.
The point of the article is that Taiwan has only itself to blame for its hopelessness against a Chinese invasion because why have Taiwan not kept up their military spending with China’s ever increasing military budget.
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Stephanie Gaskell, “Pentagon Wants to Keep Controversial War Budget Beyond Afghanistan,” 5 March 2014, Defense One
… But despite the massive drawdown, Pentagon officials want to keep a comparably oversized war chest funded well into next year, quickly raising eyebrows among members of Congress.
The fiscal year 2015 budget calls for $79 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations, or OCO, which funds the war in Afghanistan and other overseas operations. Although the U.S.footprint in Afghanistan has shrunk over the past couple of years, the war budget has stayed robust. This year Congress approved $85 billion for the account.
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Tracy McVeigh, “Inequality ‘costs Britain £39bn a year’,” 16 March 2014, Guardian
The ever-increasing gulf between rich and poor in Britain is costing the economy more than £39bn a year, according to a report by the EqualityTrust thinktank. The effects of inequality can be measured in financial terms through its impact on health, wellbeing and crime rates, according to statisticians at the independent campaign group.
Researchers pointed to the fact that the 100 wealthiest people in the UK have as much money as the poorest 18 million – 30% of all people – and said that the consequences of such unusually high rates of inequality needed to be acknowledged by politicians.
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Kyle Mizokami, “The Independent Air Force Is a Mistake,” War is Boring
… In Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force, Farley argues that the Air Force is redundant. And, he claims, its existence actually hurts American national security.
Now, Farley doesn’t suggest getting rid of air power. Instead, he recommends the Pentagon dismantle the Air Force and hand its missions—and aircraft—over to the Army and Navy. …
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Richard Seymour, “Global military spending is now an integral part of capitalism,” 7 March 2014, Guardian
There are few surprises about the distribution of military spending: for all the current focus on China’s growing military outlays – and it is significant that they have embarked on a sequence of double-digit increases as a percentage of GDP – the United States still accounts for 40% of such expenditures. However, the distribution is not the only thing that matters; it’s the sheer scale of such investment – $1.756tn in 2012. The “peace dividend” from the end of the cold war has long since bitten the dust. Global military spending has returned to pre-1989 levels, undoubtedly a legacy of the war on terror and the returning salience of military competition in its context. In fact, by 2011 global military spending was higher than at any year since the end of the second world war. …
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Brenda Goh and Andrea Shalal-Esa, “Britain may order 14 F-35 jets as early as next week: sources,” Reuters, 23 January 2014
The so called ‘Main Gate 4’ order, for the F-35 B vertical take-off variant of the Joint Strike Fighter, would mark the Britain’s first firm F-35 purchase since it committed to buying 48 planes in 2012.
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There is a huge imbalance of national military spending around the world. Just the top 10 spenders alone account for 76% of the total global military spending. If we add in the next 10 top spenders, the top 20 spenders together spend 87% of the global total, that’s nearly 7 times as much as the rest of the world combined. In SIPRI’s research, they consider 170 countries out of nearly 200 independent countries in the world, no data is available for 34 countries in 2012. Nevertheless, that still leave us more than 100 countries in the rest of the world group.
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Dinah Walker, “Trends in U.S. Military Spending,” Council on Foreign Relations, 30 July 2013
The following charts present historical trends in U.S. military spending and analyze the forces that may drive it lower.
These charts draw on data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Both data sets include spending on overseas contingency operations as well as defense. This distinguishes them from data used in the U.S. budget, which separates defense spending from spending on overseas operations.
Download Trends in US Military Spending 2013 [pdf].
Dylan Matthews, “Defense spending in the U.S., in four charts,” The Washington Post, 28 August 2012
Source: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
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Brad Plumer, “America’s staggering defense budget, in charts,” The Washington Post, 7 January 2013
The United States spends far more than any other country on defense and security. Since 2001, the base defense budget has soared from $287 billion to $530 billion — and that’s before accounting for the primary costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
1) The United States spent 20 percent of the federal budget on defense in 2011.
Timothy McGrath, “7 incredible ways the Pentagon mismanages its massive budget,” GlobalPost, 19 November 2013
In November, Reuters published the second part of its series on the Pentagon’s management (or lack thereof) of its $565.8 billion budget. And it’s a doozy. …
1) The Pentagon cooks the books
The agency in charge of the Pentagon’s accounting is called the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS). It seems that a lot of what they do is make things up. The official mechanism for making things up is called an “unsubstantiated change action,” more commonly known as a “plug.” …
2) Those “plugs” add up to a lot of money
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Jonathan Turley, “Big money behind war: the military-industrial complex,” Al Jazeera, 11 January 2014
Eisenhower warned that “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” had emerged as a hidden force in US politics and that Americans “must not fail to comprehend its grave implications”. The speech may have been Eisenhower’s most courageous and prophetic moment. Fifty years and some later, Americans find themselves in what seems like perpetual war. No sooner do we draw down on operations in Iraq than leaders demand an intervention in Libya or Syria or Iran. While perpetual war constitutes perpetual losses for families, and ever expanding budgets, it also represents perpetual profits for a new and larger complex of business and government interests.
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Joe Glenton, “Reducing the defence budget is not the end of Britain. It could be part of our rebirth,” The Independent, 17 January 2014
The tantrums which are emerging from the offense camp should be ignored. Britain has one of the largest military budgets in the world. As part of our swollen offense portfolio this small nation wields a preposterously expensive standing military which lacks utility (see Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) and a nuclear arsenal which has no practical value beyond masculine prestige. There are three factors to consider.
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David Cronin, “Why is Europe obsessed with drones?,” Al Jazeera, 19 December 2013
Despite the economic crisis, the EU is facing serious lobbying to boost its defence spending.
Every time the West contemplates going to war, it’s a safe bet that “defence analysts” will pop up in the press bemoaning how Europe is militarily weaker than the United States. …
The 28-country bloc is under pressure from the arms industry to boost investment in drones. If this doesn’t occur “it’s quite inevitable that the defence base will further deteriorate,” Tom Enders, head of the Franco-German weapons producer EADS has warned. …
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Dave Gilson, “From Eggs to Explosives: The Pentagon’s Long Shopping List,” Mother Jones, 23 December 2013
The Pentagon handed out $361 billion to contractors in 2012. Some of the items on its long shopping list:
Dave Gilson, “The Venn Diagram That Explains How the Ryan-Murray Budget Deal Happened,” Mother Jones, 12 December 2013
“Japan boosts military forces to counter China,” BBC News, 17 December 2013
Japan’s cabinet has approved a new national security strategy and increased defence spending in a move widely seen as aimed at China.
Over the next five years, Japan will buy hardware including drones, stealth aircraft and amphibious vehicles. Continue reading
Juan Cole, “Solar would be Cheaper: US Pentagon has spent $8 Trillion to Guard Gulf Oil,” informed Comment, 8 December 2013
It has cost the United States $8 trillion to provide military security in the Gulf since 1976. According to Roger Stern, a Princeton economist, the US has spent as much on Gulf security as it spent on the entire Cold War with the Soviet Union! In recent years through 2010 it has been $400 billion a year, though the US withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011 and the gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan this year and next presumably means that the figure is substantially reduced. Still, we have bases in Kuwait, Qatar and elsewhere, and a Naval HQ in Bahrain, none of which is cheap. If it were $200 billion a year, that is a fair chunk of the budget deficit the Republican Party keeps complaining about. And if we could get that $8 trillion back, it would pay down half of the national debt. …
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David Cay Johnston, “The True Cost of National Security,” Columbia Journalism Review, 31 January 2013
But budget stories then and now tend to report on the base budget from the Department of Defense, leaving readers with the impression that that is the full cost of fulfilling the Constitutional mandate to “provide for the common defense.”
It isn’t. From the perspective of taxpayers who must bear the burden, total national security costs are as much as 2.5 times the base Defense budget. Reporters might want to take a look at the true costs, and not just at the way the White House prepares the budget and Pentagon spins it. Continue reading
Sophia Jones, “Here’s what $230 million in US aid bought Egypt’s military since the revolution,” GlobalPost, 25 November 2013
While the change may be largely symbolic, before Oct. 9 — no matter how bad it got, no matter how much violence or no matter who was leading the government — US companies producing and providing Egypt’s tanks, helicopters, and bullets did not flinch. Business was business.
To illustrate just how unwavering the arrangement was, GlobalPost compiled key US contracts for military aid to Egypt, held by the American defense giants that profited the most from that aid. We mapped this sample within the context of significant political moments, from the 2011 revolution that toppled a dictator to the military ousting of the president who took his place.
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