How much military spending is enough?

As discussions continue about the federal budget and how to reduce spending, we hear little about the so-called defense budget. And if we do, some congressional leader often bemoans even considering cuts in the military.

In “The Force” (The New Yorker, Jan. 28), Jill Lepore asks, How much military is enough? She reports on the House Armed Services Committee, whose chair, Howard P. McKeon (R-Calif.), though he has never served in the military, “believes that it’s his job to protect the Pentagon from budget cuts.”

Lepore points out that “the United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined” and that “between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than $700 billion a year.”

She then reviews the history of U.S. military spending. “Early Americans,” she writes, “considered a standing army—a permanent army kept even in times of peace—to be a form of tyranny.” And in fact, the United States did not establish a standing army until World War II. And the Armed Services Committee was formed in 1946.

With the onset of the Cold War, military spending ballooned, and in the 1950s it “made up close to three-quarters of the federal budget.” Much of that increase was also pushed by military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, who “argued not only for military expansion but also for federal subsidies.”

At a hearing on the future of the military on Sept. 8, 2011, John Garamendi (D-Calif.) read aloud from a speech by President Eisenhower from 1953 in which he said, “This world in arms … is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. … This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.”

Eisenhower, Lepore notes, was “the son of pacifist Mennonites who considered war a sin.” In his farewell address in 1961, he said “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

“If any arms manufacturer today holds what Eisenhower called ‘unwarranted influence,’ it is Lockheed Martin,” writes Lepore. Its contracts with the Pentagon amount to about “$30 billion each year, and it “spends $15 million a year on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions.”

Lepore quotes from soldier-critics who oppose the endless warmaking and excessive military spending that has occured in the past decade. The most persuasive of these, she writes, is Andrew J. Bacevich, a career Army officer and now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

Bacevich argues that Americans “have fallen prey to militarism,” which “defines the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.”

He blames much of this on intellectuals, both conservative and liberal. “The resort to force,” Lepore writes, “is a product of political failure” and a failure of political culture.

She notes that Bacevich has lost patience with “CNN loudmouths, neocon opinion-page columnists, retired generals who run for office, Hollywood action-film directors, Jerry Falwell, Wesley Clark, Tom Clancy, Bill Clinton.” Bacevich, she writes, “deplores their ego-driven mythmaking, their love of glory, their indifference to brutality.”

As Bacevich notes, militarism is like an illness that romanticizes what is barbarous. Our government needs a dose of sanity as it considers the exorbitant amount being spent to feed this illness.