The idea that defense spending should somehow be a consistent percentage of GDP is as fallacious as it is wasteful.
Consider a recent Washington Post editorial. It oddly asserted that “Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. consistently spent more than 5 percent of GDP on its military.” The editorial’s point, and also lament, was that defense spending “hasn’t reached that level in decades, hovering around 3 percent in recent years.”
Without getting into what an impressively awful number GDP is as a measure of anything, that defense spending as a percentage of GDP would have declined since the Cold War should be a statement of the obvious in consideration of the fact that GDP in 1990 was $5.9 trillion versus over $30 trillion today. This is particularly true when it’s remembered that right or wrong, during the Cold War we were in a Cold War with the now-defunct Soviet Union.
Some will respond that China has emerged as a much more insurmountable foe in the ensuing decades, but the China reply ignores that with U.S. defense spending at around 3 percent of GDP, U.S. defense outlays are greater than the next nine or ten biggest country spenders (including China) combined. 3 percent of $30 trillion is a lot of defense spending contra the Post’s implied comment that the U.S. military has endured a long-term funding decline.
Which brings us to the possibility of extraordinary waste within the Department of Defense. Implied in what you’ve just read isn’t an expression of defense expertise, but it is an expression of wonderment that China, despite spending roughly a quarter of what the U.S. does annually on defense, elicits so much expressed fear among U.S. defense hawks.
What is U.S. defense spending covering if China is truly catching up to us militarily? It calls for a serious look into outlays, and the very real possibility that a variation of Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the amount of time available for completion) has dangerously infected national defense whereby the cost associated with maintaining a capable military expands as the amount of dollars allotted to the military grows.
In the commercial world the cost of everything is generally in decline, and particularly so when it’s remembered how much better most products and services are today relative to say, the Cold War era. Why would arms be different, and if the answer is that we can’t hold the military or defense contractors up to market standards, well...
It’s a long way of saying that a focus on defense outlays as a measure of GDP isn’t just fallacious and wasteful, it’s also possibly a signal of creeping sclerosis within an arm of the federal government that would ideally be most unlike government. Put another way, China’s rising military effectiveness despite much less military spending arguably makes a case for substantial reductions in military spending as a way of paradoxically improving the overall product.
Notable about the Post editorial was that a few days after its publication, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal lamented that “The U.S. isn’t meeting the 5% of GDP standard for defense that Mr. Trump demanded for NATO.” Somewhat parallel to the Post, the Journal editorial views sub 5% spending as a “national liability” without acknowledging that 5% of anything U.S. GDP is another century relative to other countries.
And it’s also not the point. Conservatives have long argued that government spending is not just frequently wasteful, but that it drives enervating inefficiencies within its recipients. Unknown is why what’s true for every other governmental branch isn’t true for the military.
