From the Council on Foreign Relations: Trends in U.S. Military Spending

This is simply offered to augment the section on budgeting - as well as foreign policy. I stumbled across it and it helps address issues associated with military spending, so I offer it as a general resource.

- Click here for the article.

Some handy charts from the article:

From the Guardian: The Pentagon's slush fund is arming a War Zone on Main Street. Let's end the local-cop addiction to backyard battle

This picks up a bit on the previous post since it concerns police behavior.

But in this case it focuses on the increased use of military weapons by local police forces. The weaponry has been made available by the military that has lots of it to sell.

- Click here for the article.

A few years ago, the police chief in Keene, New Hampshire (population: 23,000) announced plans to patrol the hamlet's "Pumpkin Festival and other dangerous situations" with a 19,000-pound armored vehicle called the BearCat (price tag: $285,933, courtesy of a federal Homeland Security grant).

The cops in nearby Nashua had already purchased one of the so-called "rescue vehicles" – typically reserved for Swat missions and, you know, IEDs – with hundreds of thousands in drug forfeiture money, but given that the town of Keene has had just three homicides in the last 11 years, some locals thought the gun ports, rotating hatch, battering ram and tear-gas deployment nozzle all might just be a little much.

"The police are already pretty brutal," said one resident. "The last thing they need is this big piece of military equipment to make them think they're soldiers."

What many other communities across America have learned since is that we're living in what the writer Radley Balko calls the age of the "warrior cop". And when warrior cops want a straight-outta-Baghdad toy, it's increasingly and unnecessarily simple for them to use a federally enabled slush-fund to wreak havoc – particularly against minorities, and even at a pumpkin festival. It's also pretty simple to start accounting for all the high-tech violence.

"Before another small town's police force gets a $700,000 gift from the Defense Department that it can't maintain or manage," Rep Hank Johnson of Georgia told me this week, "we need to press pause and revisit the merits of a militarized America."

Military spending in the US

The Economist reports that we still spend more than any other country, and almost as much as the rest of the developed world combined.

A nice source for data on federal spending

There are a few places to go but Andrew Sullivan flags usgovernmentspending.com as the source for this nicely drawn graph - though it would be better if the left hand column went to 100%, but that is a very minor quibble.

As you can tell from the title, this is federal spending on defense as a percentage of GDP. It would be helpful to compare this to spending as a percentage of the entire federal budget as a contrast - but that's another - less minor - quibble.

There's plenty more, so we'll take advantage of it as we proceed.

US military spending in two handy graphs

Both come courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, who stole them from other people.

Here's a description of spending over time - adjusted for inflation.



We are spending more now than we have in at least 50 years - it would be nice if the graph went back through WW2 at least. Believe it or not, after the end of the Cold War, people spoke of the peace dividend since a large military was no longer needed - but notice the impact of 9-11.

This graphs shows US military spending compared to that in the next nine nations in the top ten:



We spend considerably more than the next nine combined, and likely more than the rest of the world along with it. The question is whether this is necessary to secure the nation, or just pork. A reward for well connected military contractors and jobs for people in key congressional districts.

One argument in favor of having the dominant military in the world is that it helps cement the US's economic dominance as well. We own both the seas and space. That does contain dividends.