Republicans are gearing up for a new push to increase military spending, one that will be justified on the basis that America's military has been "hollowed out," what with us spending a mere half-trillion dollars a year on wars and preparing for wars. Is there any truth to that argument? To help answer that question, I've created some charts using the Office of Management and Budget's glorious historical tables.
Our first chart tells a story, in part, of America's wars: an explosion of spending in World War II, followed by a dramatic drop, then rising again for the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Then there was a If we look at just the money we've spent on defense, it looks like spending shot up in the 1980s, followed by the "peace dividend" of the 1990s, followed by the large increases of the 2000s associated with the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars:
Even with the decline since the recent peak of 2011, we're still spending more in inflation-adjusted terms than we have since World War II. But maybe that doesn't tell the whole story. Let's try another measure, the proportion of the federal budget that went to defense:
That's a very different picture. It may not surprise you that during World War II almost the entire budget was going to the military, but even during Vietnam we were spending almost half the federal budget on defense.
That number has its limitations, too. Over time the federal government hasn't just gotten bigger, it's doing more things. For instance, before 1965 there was no Medicare; the program has since grown to around 14 percent of the federal budget. So the fact that the military is getting smaller as a proportion of the budget reflects the increasing responsibilities of the government as a whole, not a reduction in our commitment to buying lots of guns and planes and tanks.
So perhaps it would be better to look at military spending as a proportion of GDP:
That looks like it's gone to nothing! Which of course is a function of the scale created by the presence of World War II, when spending on the military accounted for over a third of the entire economy. So let's look just at the last 35 years:
Has it come down during Barack Obama's time in office? Yes it has, for two reasons: the end of the Iraq War, and sequestration. But none of this actually tells us what military spending should be. Should it be pegged to a certain percentage of GDP? Although that has been proposed by some in the past, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If we have a year of great economic growth, that doesn't necessarily mean we should spend more on weapons, any more than going into a recession necessarily means we should cut military spending.
A better question might be: what do we want to use our military for? If the answer is, "We'd like to be ready to invade and occupy a country like Iran, in a war that could last for a decade"-and we've actually agreed that that's what we want to do - then we should spend what's necessary to do that. On the other hand, if we're just going to say "The world is on fire!" and therefore we need to spend as much as we possibly can, then we haven't exactly made a reasoned judgment.
