Published: October 14, 2009 09:22 am      

WE THE PEOPLE: Good times continue to roll for the defense industry

Almost two million dollars ($1.9 million) every minute. That is what the defense department spent in 2008. With an economic crisis and scarce resources, it seems we would re-order our priorities. But defense continues to be the big winner with 57 percent of the budget while first runners-up, health and human services and transportation, are awarded a whopping 6 percent each.

President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have promised to root out waste and abuse at the Pentagon, but that undertaking has defeated many of their predecessors. There are four obstacles: the Pentagon, the defense industry, Congress and the voters.

The Pentagon will never advise the president to stop engaging in costly military action. They have a vested interest in seeking out new conflicts and keeping old ones going, all for dubious reasons and uncertain goals. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “We have become a national security state, a country mobilized for war on a permanent basis, and we got into the business by saying everything is secret.”

Lawmakers, too, have a vested interest. Members of both parties fight to keep military bases open in their states, and there’s no way they will oppose a new military weapon if it is going to be built in their own backyard. Some may hate the bloated defense budget, but they love their jobs, and one way to keep those jobs is to bring home the bacon.

The F-22, the most expensive jet fighter ever built, is a classic example of how the system works. It was conceived in 1981 at the height of the cold war to fight the Soviet Union. A quarter of a century later at the end of 2005, after massive cost over-runs, the first operational F-22 rolled onto a runway. It has never been used in combat. The cold war was long over, and the Soviet Union no longer existed, but the F-22 lingered on.

Lockheed Martin shrewdly spread F-22 plants and vendors across 44 states (that’s 88 senators and a goodly number of representatives) and claimed the F-22 was responsible for 95,000 jobs, a possible exaggeration. (Contrary to defense industry claims, a study based on the Bureau of Economic Analysis data finds that other forms of public spending all create more jobs that military spending.)

In July, under pressure from the president, both the Senate and the House voted to kill the F-22. But a funny thing happened on the way to the cost cutting. Lawmakers added $1.7 billion to the bill for an extra destroyer the Defense Department did not request and $2.5 billion for ten C-17 cargo planes it did not want. This was done ― surprise, surprise ― at the behest of lawmakers representing the states where those items would be built.

The Government Accountability Office calculates that other major weapons commitments will ultimately cost $1.6 trillion. Some $296 billion of that is cost over-runs that have already accumulated and will likely increase. Just the $296 billion in over-runs is more than the annual military budget of any other nation on earth. For the defense industry, the good times continue to roll.