Apparently it is, despite warnings from Dwight Eisenhower:
Today we are living Ike’s nightmare. Defense spending is
not just one of the most sacrosanct parts of the budget but also
one of the largest and most inscrutable. Adjusting for inflation,
military spending has grown for an unprecedented 13 consecutive
years and is now higher than at any time since World War II. Even
excluding war costs, the military baseline budget has grown by
about 50 percent during the last decade.
Yet the faintest suggestion of a plan to reduce the rate of the
defense budget’s growth inevitably triggers dire warnings that
Americans will soon be speaking Russian, Chinese, Arabic, or the
mother tongue of whoever is deemed the most powerful adversary of
the moment.
This is a lesson in the difficulty of shrinking spending in the US.
For information about global spending on the military click here.
