Defense Secretary Gates was talking about the defense budget last week and made a few interesting notes. Critics lambaste the current administration for the amount of money it's spending in Iraq – as hundreds of billions of dollars get spent, we're not talking chump change – and every dollar spent on the military gets scrutinized in the press. Hillary or Obama would be sure to dial the spending back dramatically (in order to spend it elsewhere).
But our defense spending is only 3.4% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). During the Korean War defense spending was 14% of the GDP and during Vietnam it was 9%.
I'm not advocating that military spending should be a blank-check issue, but a lot of that money goes to military pay and health care and housing. A lot more goes to training. I am concerned about how the big ticket items (ships and aircraft) keep getting more and more (prohibitively?) expensive. It seems the Navy can't put a ship in the water for less than a billion dollars, and consequently the raw number of US Navy ships at sea is at a 90 year low, with the total number of active commissioned ships below 250. Navy advocates such as Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) want the Navy to grow numerically, but that won't happen without buying cheaper ships, one way or the other.
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