The Joint Chiefs of Staff have been doing their tours of duty before the armed services committees in Congress. In addition to selling committee members on a $623 billion military budget, the largest in real terms since the end of World War II, they are pitching a long-term expansion of the military, with even larger budgets to pay for it.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's dreams of a nimble, high-tech force relying on fewer troops have faded from view. The new dream involves adding nearly 100,000 troops and boosting procurement spending on high-tech weapons. Neither is necessary, and neither will make us safer.
It's true that the debacle in Iraq has put severe strains on U.S. combat forces. But the additional troops the Pentagon says it wants would not relieve that strain, since they would take years to recruit and train. The only way to take the strain off current forces is to bring them home.
The Bush administration's defense plan for future years in fact projects lower troop levels in Iraq and lower levels of spending on the war. So why the plan for additional troops and permanent increases in military spending?
There are two answers: First, the administration's national security strategy commits us to an expansive, global policing role that even our current military budget can't support. Our current military footprint includes a global network of nearly 800 bases and 2.5 million active-duty- and reserve troops. Many of them are stationed in places such as Europe, Japan and South Korea, guarding a Cold War world that no longer exists.
As our country seeks to extricate itself from a disastrous attempt to export democracy to the Middle East by means of military force, this is the moment for a serious debate on the long-term direction of our foreign policy. Will the expansive, global role for the military laid out in last year's Quadrennial Defense Review really make us safer?
Outside the Beltway, polls show that most Americans question the costs -- beyond the financial ones -- of appointing ourselves to a permanent role as the world's policeman. In an October 2006 poll conducted by the University of Maryland's Project on International Public Attitudes, a strong majority of respondents expressed the belief that our current aggressive, unilateral foreign policy has eroded our standing around the world and made terrorist attacks more likely.
The second principal driver of the plan for expanded forces and budgets is the federal commitment to a set of weapons systems, many of them conceived to fight the Soviet Union, whose capabilities have little to do with fighting terrorists. The budget the service chiefs are defending requests an increase in spending for nearly every major weapons system. Total weapons spending in the budget amounts to $176.8 billion.
A large proportion of the procurement budget, which has doubled in the past decade, derives not from the need to replace and upgrade overused military equipment. Instead, it reflects decisions, some made during the Cold War, to embark on technologically complicated weapons programs, whose future costs are set to grow as many of them move from development to production phases.
Their champions are hard-pressed to explain their connection to the amorphous "global war on terror." But their large and enduring place in the budget is depleting the funds we need to begin repairing the damage of our Iraq adventure by turning a different, less militarized and less autocratic face to the world.
By foregoing the planned increase of $600 million provided in next year's proposed budget for the F-22 fighter jet, one of the most troubled and strategically questionable weapons program in the arsenal, we could increase by 50 percent planned U.S. contributions to international peacekeeping operations. Or we could triple the amount designated for canceling debt that's crippling development in the poorest countries in the world.
The world faces huge challenges including climate change, disease and growing poverty and inequality. These challenges have security implications for us, but they are poorly served by a U.S. foreign policy that currently devotes 90 percent of its dollars to its military forces.
The debate over this highly militarized form of international engagement is long overdue.
Miriam Pemberton is a research fellow with the Foreign Policy In Focus project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.
