PRESS ROOM

Donald Trump isn’t the first president to try to parlay Pentagon funding into political support, but he’s been more aggressive and systematic in his efforts than any president in memory. That doesn’t necessarily mean the ploy will work. Admittedly, there are high profile weapons projects in key swing states like Ohio (tanks), Pennsylvania (artillery), and Wisconsin (combat ships and armored vehicles). Still, in 2020, many voters are visibly looking for more than just business as usual, as evidenced by significant support for initiatives like the Green New Deal.

President Trump likes to brag about how much he’s spending to help the US military — all part of his “tough guy persona” and the image he’s formulating that says he alone deserves credit for restoring the military to its former greatness after it was allowed to falter under President Obama. But as William D. Hartung points out in a piece published at TomDispatch.com, “Washington has ‘only’ spent about one-third of his claimed $2 trillion on military equipment since he took office and that Pentagon spending reached a post-World War II record high in the Obama years.”

Bill Hartung and Ben Freeman at the Center for International Policy, for example, are questioning the gospel that threats from Russia and China require greater defense dollars. “The principal culprit for this overspending isn’t the actual threats we face, it’s the threats foreign policy elites imagine,” they argue in a new piece out in DefenseOne. “The Pentagon’s misguided National Defense Strategy, for example, never met a threat it couldn’t inflate or a challenge it didn’t see as requiring a military solution.”

According to White House budget documents released today, the Pentagon and related programs like nuclear warhead work at the Department of Energy are pegged at $740 billion for fiscal year 2021. Speaking last week in advance of the budget rollout, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper suggested that following this path risked undermining his department’s ability to build a force consistent with the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy (NDS), arguing that “we need to get back to 3 to 5 percent real [inflation-adjusted] growth annually.” Only at the Pentagon could a budget approaching three-quarters of a trillion dollars per year be viewed as tight, or possibly even insufficient.

For those who hoped 2020 would offer an opportunity to set a gentler course in U.S. foreign policy, it took just three days for President Trump to shatter those aspirations. The targeted killing of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassim Soleimani on January 3 injected global panic into the New Year, with actors on all sides scrambling to avert the prospect of a full-scale war.

We spend far more on the military than the countries we most fear, while shorting the things that would actually help us compete.

Another take, from William Hartung and Ben Freeman: “We spend far more on the military than the countries we most fear, while shorting the things that would actually help us compete,” such as “education and the economy, with a particular focus on investments in science and technology.”

“The initial costs of setting up the Space Force are likely a small down payment on an undertaking that could cost tens of billions of dollars in the years to come,” says William D. Hartung, director of the arms and security project at the Center for International Policy. “The last thing we need is more bureaucracy at the Pentagon, but that’s exactly what the Space Force is likely to give us. Creating a separate branch of the armed forces for space also risks militarizing U.S. space policy and promoting ill-advised and dangerous projects that could involve deploying weapons in space.”

“The last thing we need is more bureaucracy at the Pentagon, but that’s exactly what the Space Force is likely to give us. Creating a separate branch of the armed forces for space also risks militarizing U.S. space policy and promoting ill-advised and dangerous projects that could involve deploying weapons in space,” Hartung added.

Temi talks CGTN's Rachelle Akuffo spoke with about the implications of the Trump Administration's latest travel ban.

For a town already predisposed to playing Super Man, overspending can be just as dangerous as underspending. As Ben Freeman and William Hartung write, “The principal culprit for this overspending isn’t the actual threats we face, it’s the threats foreign policy elites imagine.”

The United States almost immediately accused the Iran-backed Ketaib Hizbullah (KH) militia of responsibility. But Rubin quotes by name Brig. General Ahmed Adnan, the chief of intelligence for the Iraqi federal police at the same base, as saying, “All the indications are that it was Daesh” — that is, ISIS.