Project 2025: Our Massive Military & Influence

One of the many troubling recommendations that the Heritage Foundation makes for our collective future is a large increase in spending on our military. It fails the logic test on at least three grounds. First, we already spend far more than any of our supposed adversaries. Second, spending on bombs requires money that could be used for more useful purposes. Third, it focuses all our options and actions in foreign affairs on force.

HOW MUCH WE SPEND

We spend more on the military that the next nine countries combined. Six of those nine other countries—Saudi Arabia, The UK, Germany, Ukraine, France, and Japan—are our allies. China and Russia are the two countries that concern Heritage the most. We spend well over twice what they spend together.

This military expenditure includes personnel, ships, planes, and bombs. The US has the third largest number of military personnel in the world, behind China and India, and virtually tied with Russia. Since both China and India have roughly three times the population of the US, these numbers make sense.

The relative size of navies is a little more complex. The usual way to compare countries is simply by the number of ships. By this measure, the US is third behind both China and Russia. But a ship could be an aircraft carrier or a patrol boat. Total tonnage provides a more even comparison. In this measure, the US is far ahead of both China and Russia. 

Another measure of relative might is number of aircraft. The US has far more than either China or Russia. As with ships, this is simply a count. A plane could be the most sophisticated stealth bomber or it could be a survailance craft.

Finally, we must consider the big bombs—nuclear. This remains an important, but fairly useless, measure. It’s useless since nine countries now possess enough bombs to kill the planet. But we are still near the top. These numbers are deployed weapons. Both Russia and the US have huge stockpiles that could be deployed beyond these numbers.

A final argument that the Heritage folks and others make is that we need to spend more because our weapons are dated and must be refreshed. Since countries each organize themselves differently and have different priorities, it’s impossible to prove or disprove this assertion. What we can point to is the relative expenditures on research and development.

This should be a proxy for a country's efforts to find new technologies and tools. According to the World Bank, the US, from all sources, public and private, has historically spent much more on R&D relative to its GDP than either China or Russia.

Couple this with the fact that the US has historically and continues to have the largest economy, it’s clear that the US devotes more resources to R&D.  Therefore, it should have the latest technologies and tools.

All of this leads to the basic question: Why would we want to increase our military spending?

• We already spend more than the next nine countries. We spend more than twice what Russia and China spend together. If our allies’ spending is added to ours, that combination totals more than three times the spending of our supposed advisaries.

• We have a comparable number of personel.

• We may have fewer ships, but ours must be much larger since our tonnage is more than twice that of China and Russia combined.

• We have nearly as many aircraft as China and Russia combined.

• And we have enough big bombs, as do another eight countries, to blow the planet apart.

THE REAL COST OF MORE MILITARY

Deciding how to use public money is really an exercise in deciding what is most important to the nation and its people. It’s worth considering a few of the obvious other uses to which those funds might be put.

The first is the annual deficit and the total national debt. Each year the federal government spends more than it collects in revenue. The gap between spending and revenues is the deficit. The deficit is filled by borrowing. Borrowing adds to the total accumulated debt. Since the founding, the US has run up debt that now totals nearly $35 trillion. On that, we pay interest to the holders of that debt. Reducing or eliminating the annual deficit would slow the growth of the total debt and at least stabilize the interest required.  The net interest—total interest on the debt ($450 billion) less interest earned on various trust accounts ($174 billion) equals the amount usually reported by the Treasury. Even this more modest number leaves it as the fourth largest spending category in the total budget. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), interest rate changes, increased debt, and smaller offsetting interest earnings will combine to more than double the net interest total by 2030. Stabilizing the debt seems preferable to adding to it.

Another very broad set of opportunities can be called investing in our nation and our people. Public infrastructure is the first category in this group:

1. Our passenger rail system is, with a couple exceptions, an excursion train network. As a result, we rely on short hop air service to commute between cities, a much less environmentally benign option. The US is way behind every other advanced nation in this area.

2. Mass transit is comparable to passenger rail in too many places. I live next to one of the biggest cities in the country. Like most of its peers, without an automobile it’s nearly impossible to get to work, shopping or doctor’s appointments. Again, this is not an environmentally friendly travel option.

3. Clean water is a luxury in some cities and rural areas. Recent revelations in cities as far spread as Michigan and Mississippi point to the need for more investment in water infrastructure.
   

4. Our electrical grid is weak in too many ways and in too many places. It’s subject to cyber-attacks and it lacks sufficient capacity.

5. Many prisons would look familiar to an inmate from 1850. Yet, we lock up more people than any country in the world.

6. Schools, hospitals, roads and bridges, etc. The list is long because we’ve been living on the investments made by our forebearers.

Our people make up the second part of this category. An objective observer, visiting from Mars, might correctly conclude that our country doesn’t really like the people who live here. Some things to consider fixing:

• We spend more per capita on healthcare than any peer country. Unfortunately, we don’t spend it very well. Even with the Affordable Care Act, way too many people lack access to routine care, and too many are still trapped with unmanageable healthcare bills. What is worse, our health outcomes are not comparable to our peer countries. Any number of measures confirm this, but the most basic is life expectancy. We are 34th in the world in life expectancy. The typical Japanese can expect to live five more years than the typical resident of the US. We need to spend enough effort to turn this around—and probably save some money.

• Public education is lagging. As the PEW Research Center put it: “…U.S. students continue to rank around the middle of the pack, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.” The following chart captures the facts. Clearly more funding is not the complete answer to this problem, but paying teachers enough to attract the best and brightest to the field would be a start, as would investing in some of the physical infrastructure of our schools and ensuring that all have adequate equipment. 

• Higher education is also in need of help. Over the last 50 years state governments have reduced their financial commitments to higher ed, placing more and more of the burden on students. The result is some are priced out of university or even technical school educations. Others graduate with terrible levels of debt and have difficulty becoming full member of our economy.  This is particularly concerning as we go deeper into an economy that requires some education beyond high school for success, and as our competitors in the world are making strides in their efforts to have a highly educated workforce.
  

• Heat will also require investment. As I write, much of the nation has been experiencing very high temperatures. Here in Texas late May and early June have given us many 100-degree days. July, August, and September promise more. Subsidies for air conditioners or cooling stations are needed or people will die. Similarly, some efforts to cool our cities are needed. More green spaces and tree cover will help to reduce the impact of souring temperatures.

• Our social safety net is not a hammock. Those who think it is need to spend some time listening to elderly people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves living on Social Security. It’s not pretty. Our senior citizen and disadvantaged people deserve to live with some security and dignity.

Obviously, this list could be made much longer, but the challenge is: Do we want to buy more weapons and employ a larger share of our population to use them, or do we want to tackle at least some of the other needs that exist?

SHOULD WE CONSIDER OTHER TOOLS?

The last question is: Do we want to put all of our ability to influence the direction of the world in the military bucket? A very old saying tells us that if your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. For too much of our history, every issue with other nations seems to have looked like a target. That’s how we approached the war on terror at the start of this century, Vietnam and Korea in the last. That’s how we’ve dealt with the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and many places in Africa, South and Central America, and the Caribbean. It would be nice if we could argue that our all-purpose tool has been successful. It has not.

Some other tools that we could use include:

• The moral high-ground is something we once had. People around the world looked up to us as the oldest surviving example of self-rule, as technical innovators, as people who got things done, and as a country that could be trusted. In short, they bought into the American Dream that we so often love to discuss. Now, for a bunch of reasons, we have lost much of that high-ground. Many of those reasons can be summarized by acknowledging that we started not caring what other nations thought. As the single remaining superpower, we developed a swagger that told the rest of the world we could do what we want because we had the biggest stick. We need to try to regain that high-ground by acting on the principles that we espouse and by looking into the mirror to see what others see.

• We have much economic power, but how do we use it? Do we help other nations improve the lives of their people by investing in infrastructure, clean water, clean power sources, healthcare. Or do we use our clout to hold down wages and prices so our own companies can reap higher profits. A very good case can be made for the second option. Our primary rival in the future, China, has made an effort to help many struggling nations with investments, loans, and construction projects. To be sure they are not all that benevolent, but their softer approach seems to be yielding better results increasing their influence.

• Diplomacy is something that we could rely more heavily upon. It requires that we be seen as an even broker. The first Roosevelt was able to do that when he helped to end the Russo-Japanese War. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were able to bring the leaders of the competing factions together to try to solve the Palestinian disputes in the 1970s and 1990s. But, like the moral high-ground, we seem to have lost much our even broker image.

CONCLUSION

As I said at the start, spending more on the military is just one of the very bad ideas that the Heritage folks would have us implement in the future. Given our current condition, it would be a complete overkill. Given our recent success, or lack of success, in the use of our big stick, it seems ill-advised. And given the many unmet needs in our country, it would be a terrible waste.