David Obey’s proposal of a “war tax” to pay for escalation in Afghanistan was a nice way of dramatizing the point that military commitments have real costs. But as a way of paying for the war, it’s a bit undesirable. Rather than devote additional net resources to the military, it makes more sense as CAP’s Lawrence J. Korb, Sean Duggan, Laura Conley, and Jacob Stokes argue to identify offsetting decreases in baseline defense spending. Specifically, they suggest the following areas have room for cuts:
- Ballistic Missile Defense
- The Virginia-Class Submarine
- The DDG-1000 Destroyer
- The V-22 Osprey
- The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle
- The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
- Offensive Space-based Weapons
- Future Combat Systems
- Scaling back the number of our nation’s nuclear forces
- Scaling back Research, Development, Test and Evaluation funding
The point isn’t that these systems don’t have some utility. Nor would I argue that what General McChrystal is trying to do in Afghanistan is futile or pointless. But we do live in a world of limited resources, and it doesn’t make sense to build every weapons platform that it might be nice to have or to engage and costly and lengthy efforts to stabilize every nation that it might be nice to stabilize. The country’s not going to get out of its long-term fiscal jam until we stop pretending that magical “war bonds,” rather than real resources, pay for these military commitments.
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