Session Three:The Hidden Costs of War
A Report commissioned by Howard S. Brembeck and the Fourth Freedom Forum

War Without End? The Costs of the New Military Buildup
14 February 2003
by William D. Hartung

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The Bush administration's war on terrorism and its proposed military intervention in Iraq have sparked the steepest increases in military and security spending in two decades:

If the administration's strategy of using force and the threat of force as its primary tools for dealing with terrorists and tyrants is fully implemented, these new expenditures may be just the down payment on a long-term buildup that will push U.S. military spending to Cold War levels and beyond. Based on current Pentagon spending projections, U.S. military spending will total $4.3 trillion during this decade, with annual spending on national defense topping $500 billion per year by 2009 (see Table I).

But even the huge sums displayed in Table I are likely to understate the true costs of our military establishment, since the Pentagon's budget projections only cover the costs of routine, peacetime operations. The costs of going to war are generally financed out of emergency or supplemental appropriations, as has been done with the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and as will be done with any conflict in Iraq.

Given the Bush administration's expansive military strategy, the costs of war could become the biggest "wild card" in the federal budget over the next decade. In less than one and one-half years, the Bush administration's objectives have expanded from a post-9/11 pledge to act against "terror networks of global reach," to a threat to use force to disarm and displace regional tyrants like Saddam Hussein, to a commitment to use American military might to promote "democracy and free markets" throughout the world.(2)

Table I: U.S. Military Spending, Actual and Projected,
Fiscal Year 2001 to Fiscal Year 2010
(in billions of U.S. dollars)

Source: U.S. Department of Defense, Fiscal Year 2004 Budget Request, February 2003, as analyzed by Christopher Hellman, Center for Defense Information, available at Center for Defense Information (February 12, 2003). Figures are for budget category 050, National Defense, which includes spending on the Pentagon and military activities of the Department of Energy. The figure for 2010 is a projection based on the assumption of a 3 percent growth rate per year for each of those three years.

This open-ended definition of U.S. strategic priorities goes far beyond anything the United States committed itself to during the Cold War, when the stated mission was containing the Soviet Union. Unlike that earlier period, when the United States was engaged in an arms race with a rival superpower, in this new era, the United States is in an arms race with itself, seeking a wide range of new missions and capabilities that go well beyond what is required to deal with Al Qaeda and related global terror organizations. As a recent analysis by Steven M. Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has demonstrated, only about one-third of the Pentagon's increased funding between FY 2001 and FY 2003 has been devoted to homeland security and combating terrorism, and only 5 to 10 percent of the Pentagon's total budget for Fiscal Year 2003 is being set aside for these purposes.(3)

Even before the increases of the past two years, United States military spending far outpaced spending by potential adversaries (see Table II). As Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives has pointed out, as of 2001 the United States was spending two and one-half times as much as all of its potential adversaries combined, whereas in 1985, at the height of the Reagan buildup, U.S. military spending was only 80 percent as much as the combined spending of the adversary group. The United States and its closest allies now account for 73 percent of global military spending, compared to 57 percent in 1985.(4)

Table II: U.S. Military Spending
Versus Actual or Potential Adversaries, 2001
(in billions of constant 2000 dollars)

Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2002-2003 (London: IISS and Oxford University Press, 2002), Table 26, pp. 332-37. The "All Other" category includes the combined military budgets of Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Cuba, and Vietnam.

This growing gap between U.S. military spending and capabilities and the military budgets and forces of all other countries in the world has led some analysts to suggest that the United States now acts as a de facto imperial power. Human rights advocate Michael Ignatieff provided a provocative synopsis of what he views as America's new imperial role in a recent front page article in the New York Times magazine entitled, "The American Empire (Get Used to It)":
Being an imperial power . . . means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants . . . while exempting itself from other rules that go against its interest. . . . It also means carrying out imperial functions in places America has inherited from the failed empires of the 20th century-Ottoman, British, and Soviet. In the 21st Century, America rules alone, struggling to manage the insurgent zones-Palestine and the Northwest Frontier of Palestine, to name but two-that have proved the nemeses of empires past. [emphasis added] (5)
This vision of the United States as a unilateralist global policeman is a far cry from the vision that motivated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to promote the creation of the United Nations as World War II drew to a close. While most Americans agree that standing up to the Axis powers in World War II was necessary regardless of the price, the human and economic costs of that conflict spurred world leaders to seek mechanisms to prevent future wars in the wake of what proved to be the most devastating conflict in human history.

One of the greatest potential costs of relying on war and preparations for war as a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy is the danger of distorting the U.S. role in the world from that of a vibrant democracy that is ready to defend itself and its allies when necessary, to that of a garrison state that uses force to get its way on a wide range of issues that have little to do with self-defense. As the great American writer and anti-imperialist Mark Twain wrote in the early part of the last century, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems look like nails." In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States needs to expand its foreign policy tool box so that when crises arise, resorting to military force is the last option, not the first. The enormous human, financial, and security costs of major conflicts engaged in by U.S. forces over the past half century underscore the importance of developing policy alternatives to war.

Notes
1 For further details on data cited in this section, see Michelle Ciarrocca and William D. Hartung, "Increases in Military Spending and Security Assistance Since 9/11/01," October 4, 2002; estimates of the costs of the war in Afghanistan and the possible conflict in Iraq will be dealt with in more detail later in this analysis.Return to Text
2 The most expansive statement of the Bush military strategy is contained in "The National Security Strategy of the United States," released in September 2002 and available online at the White House, http://www.whitehouse.Gov (12 February 2003). Return to Text
3 Steven M. Kosiak, Director, Budget Studies, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, "Funding for Defense, Homeland Security, and Combating Terrorism Since 9/11: Where Has All the Money Gone? " in Marcus Corbin, editor, Security After 9/11: Strategy Choices and Budget Tradeoffs (Washington, D.C., Center for Defense Information, 2003), p. 7-11., available at Center for Defense Information, http://www.cdi.org/spwg (February 12, 2003). Return to Text
4 Carl Conetta, co-director, Project on Defense Alternatives, "9-11 and the Meaning of Military Transformation," in Corbin, Security After 9/11, op. cit., 25-30. Conetta's statistics on military spending are derived from International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 editions, (Oxford: IISS and Oxford University Press, 2000 and 2002). His category for actual and potential U.S. adversaries during the Cold War includes the Soviet Union and the other members of the Warsaw Pact alliance, plus China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Cuba. For the 2001 comparison, the adversary category includes Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus plus all the other members included in the 1985 comparison. Other former Warsaw pact members and other former Soviet Republics, many of whom are now U.S. military aid recipients, are excluded from the 2001 comparison. Return to Text
5 Michael Ignatieff, "The American Empire (Get Used to It)," New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, p. 24.

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William Hartung is the Director of the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center. www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/

Last Updated May 15, 2003