Three Myths About the Defense Budget

[unhappycamper]

http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/03/three-myths-about-defense-budget/80557/

Three Myths About the Defense Budget
Ben Freeman
March 14, 2014

The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2015 budget request has been savaged by Republicans and even some Democrats. Critics argue it’s “a skeleton defense budget,” that will “dramatically reduce the size of the Army to pre-World War II levels,” and all of this “will embolden America’s foes to take aggressive acts.” All of these critiques have one thing in common: they’re not true. Here’s why:

The first myth of the defense budget debate—that it’s a small or “skeleton” budget—is belied by the simple fact that President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2015 budget gives the military more money than Ronald Reagan ever did, as a recent Third Way memo reported. The president’s budget sets the military’s base budget at $495.6 billion, just under the cap set by Congress in the Bipartisan Budget Act, with an additional $79.4 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), for a grand total of $575 billion in funding for the military. The most funding the military ever received under President Reagan was approximately $560 billion in today’s dollars, according to Office of Management and Budget data.

~snip~

The second myth of the defense budget debate—that the Army will be reduced to “pre-World War II levels”—doesn’t hold up either, given the simple fact that the Pentagon’s plan to have a 440,000-450,000 person Army provides America with 180,000 more soldiers than we had prior to World War II, and approximately 5% fewer than we had prior to the war in Afghanistan.

~snip~

The third myth of the defense budget debate—that the budget “will embolden America’s foes”—is contradicted by the simple fact that the U.S. will still have the greatest military in the world, by far. We’ll still be spending nearly as much on the military as the next eight countries combined, including spending more than three times as much as China and five times as much as Russia.

[Squinch]

1. "We'll still be spending...as much...as the next eight countries combined" and still they whine.