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eAction Report
March, 2009

the Elephant
Sitting on the Economy

While the United States economy falters, a variety of ideas to secure workers and businesses have been put forward. Yet, the issue of the U.S. military, specifically missile defense spending, has received very little attention as a government sector ripe for spending reform. This is no surprise; defense spending has often been seen as a sacred cow in U.S. politics. Weapons lobbyists spend heavily to influence congress people, falsely claiming their industry is the only industry equipped to provide good high tech jobs. War hawks continuously invoke fear of a threatening menace on the horizon that our country is never strong enough to defend against. Where does it stop?

Currently, U.S. military spending constitutes 48% of the world’s total, more than the next 45 countries combined. Domestically, not including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military spending requests for 2009 constitute 54% of the discretionary budget that is voted on by Congress. When including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military spending jumps to 57% of the discretionary budget.

In the past eight years U.S. military spending has more than doubled from $333 billion to a staggering $700 billion when the cost of war is added; and that’s not including nuclear weapons.  Much of this spending is unnecessary and does not provide real security, $60 billion alone goes to obsolete Cold War weapons spending and over $100 billion is devoted to maintaining more than 700 foreign military bases world-wide.

Missile defense may be the most egregious ill-spending of all the non-nuclear weapons systems. Ostensibly, missile defense is said to provide a shield against a nuclear Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) attack from the countries that have them, namely Russia. But, there are serious problems with this security strategy, Russia and others see missile defense as a part of a U.S. first-strike nuclear capability.
Russia is emerging from the Cold War as a powerful and influential country.  Alone, Russian control of natural gas flows to the whole of Europe should be enough of a motivation for the U.S. to maintain good diplomatic relations.   Russia has the potential to be a great ally or to become a great enemy.   Setting up missile defense forces on Russia’s southern border is a provocative measure that has cost the American tax payer handsomely.  

According to the Pentagon, since its inception in 1983, missile defense has cost $150 billion. Twenty years after proponents of the system could no longer justify its purpose by the Cold War, missile defense still does not work.  It is the single most expensive weapons program, (after nuclear weapons) and has never yielded a significant result.  It is the military equivalent of throwing money, in tens of billions of dollars, down the toilet.

The program provides a case study in political corruption. A story by the New York Times, “Insider’s Projects Drained Missile-Defense Millions” revealed that missile defense spending has been driven by insider lobbying with the sole intention of making money, at times even at odds with actual Department of Defense procurement objectives. In 2007 Mike Cantrell and Doug Ennis, two mid-level Department of Defense engineers working on missile defense, were convicted of corruption linked to $1.6 million in kickbacks “Thanks to important allies in Congress, he (sic) extracted nearly $350 million for projects the Pentagon did not want; wasting taxpayer money on what would become dead-end ventures….”