The New York Times Editorial Staff - Military Spending

An F-35B Lightning fighter jet outside a maintenance hangar between test flights at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Patuxent, Md., April 19, 2012. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, still plagued by technological troubles after more than a decade of development, will ultimately cost taxpayers $396 billion if the Pentagon sticks to its plan.

Put simply, what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex that loose partnership between government defense programs and private defense contractors is enormously influential in American politics and policy, and its influence is difficult to counter given its intractable complexity. But when taxpayers agree to allow their tax contributions to fund such a lucrative trade, scrutiny is inevitable. Almost from the beginning, politicians and the general public have held military budgets in skeptical regard, suspecting that behind the veil of secrecy is an inefficient and perhaps even wasteful system. Added to this is the ironic truth that even if the system is efficient, the result of its efficiency is violence.

The articles and opinions in this book take a critical but not necessarily oppositional look at military spending in the United States, its intricacies and difficulties, its secrecy and necessity and the ways it is enmeshed in the politics and economics of the country. The recent case of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and its many budgetary overages highlights how complex it can be to balance the needs of defense, the temptations to profit from arms sales, the demands of taxpayers and their political representatives, and the special interests of military branches with their own incentives and goals.

CHAPTER 1

Fighting Against Waste and Inefficiency

The debate over military spending in the United States is often framed like this: On the one hand, national security concerns require research, development and manufacture of large numbers of advanced (and expensive) weapons; on the other hand, fiscal responsibility and the need to fund social programs requires military budget cuts. Attempts to audit the military and make it more efficient run into a different problem: secrecy. As the need for secret weapons increases, especially after the advent of nuclear weapons, making military budgets fully public is problematic. Nonetheless, the debate rages on, as these articles illustrate.

Pentagon Profligacy

EDITORIAL | BY THE NEW YORK TIMES | JAN. 9, 1970

WHEN SENATOR PROXMIRE of Wisconsin suggested recently that military spending could be cut by $10 billion, some members of his House-Senate Economy subcommittee scoffed. But when the subcommittee resumed its probe of Pentagon profligacy last month, Mr. Proxmire demonstrated he was not just pulling figures out of thin air, as his critics had charged.

A General Accounting Office official told the subcommittee that the cost of 38 major weapons systems has increased by more than $20 billion, a rise of nearly 50 per cent over initial estimates. Particularly shocking was the case of a deep-diving rescue craft for the Navy. Originally to cost $36 million for twelve vessels, the bill is now put at $63 million for only six.

A civilian cost expert for the Navy told of escalating costs, misplaced equipment, delayed delivery and poor performance in a new destroyer program. Such disclosures of Pentagon waste are by no means new. Senator Proxmire helped jolt Congress into making substantial cuts in the defense budget early in 1969 with his revelations of vast overruns in the cost of the C-5A cargo planes and other major procurement items. But there still has been little effective action to reform military procurement practices.

An amendment to the defense appropriation bill that would have required regular review and reporting on defense contracts by the G.A.O. was killed in conference. One witness testified that there is still no central official or agency within the Department of Defense keeping track of weapons development. Indeed, the Pentagon has demonstrated its contempt for economy by firing A. Ernest Fitzgerald, the courageous cost expert who first exposed the C-5A overrun.