New spending bill squanders billions on dysfunctional weapons programs
The increase alone from last year is more than what some of the world’s biggest countries spend on their own defense budgets.
DECEMBER 9, 2022
Written by
William Hartung
Sometimes more is less. So it is with the House and Senate’s compromise version of the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that was made public this week and was passed by the House on Thursday.
The bill calls for near record levels of Pentagon spending, but it chooses to devote much of the funding to costly, dysfunctional weapons systems that are ill-suited to addressing current challenges, largely because many of the weapons boosted in the NDAA were chosen based on where they are built, not whether they are the best systems for defending the United States and its allies. Pork barrel politics ruled the day to an extent not seen in recent memory, and we may all pay for it for years to come — in burgeoning expenditures and reduced security.
First, there’s the sheer size of the funds authorized for the “national defense” category of the budget, which includes Pentagon spending as well as work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. The bill calls for $858 billion in such spending, far more than the levels reached at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or the peak year of the Cold War.
Just the increase over last year’s level — $80 billion — is higher than the entire military budget of almost every country in the world, including major powers like Germany, Japan, France, and the United Kingdom. This year’s increase is also substantially higher than Russia’s spending for 2021, the most recent year for which full statistics are available. That has no doubt changed since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but the comparison is telling nonetheless. The only country with a military budget higher than the U.S. increase from Fiscal Year 2022 to Fiscal Year 2023 was China, at $293 billion, according to estimates by the Stockhholm International Peace Research Institute.
Unfortunately, much of the $858 billion authorized in the FY 2023 NDAA will be wasted. Well over $10 billion will go towards the F-35 combat aircraft, which the Project on Government Oversight has determined may never be fully ready for combat, even as it represents the most expensive weapons program in the history of the Pentagon, at a projected $1.5 trillion over the lifetime of approximately 2,400 of the planes.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/09/new-pentagon-bill-squanders-opportunity-to-rein-in-the-military-industrial-complex/
