Against the grain, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) is having troubling wrapping his head around the idea that sequestration is threatening the US military and national security.
Quoting data published by the World Bank, Manchin noted, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, that while so-called US adversaries like China and Russia spend far less on their armed forces, Washington defense establishment mavens consider these countries to be “moving forward” and “doing positive things”, while the US military is retreating.
China spends 2.1% of their $9.2 trillion GDP on defense spending. In Russia, 4.2% of the nation’s $2 trillion GDP is spent on the military, according to the data from 2013.
“We’re not that far out when you look at the amount of sheer dollars—we’re way far and above everybody and a bunch of them put together,” Manchin pointed out. He highlighted the fact that the United States spends 3.8% of a whopping $17 trillion GDP on bolstering defenses.
“You would have to ask the question are we getting the best bang for our buck?” Manchin asked, prodding the witness to answer whether Congress is somehow to blame for “crippling” the armed services with “layers of bureaucracy” and “mandates.”
“Are you buying equipment you don’t need? Are you having overlaps and redundancies?” Manchin pressed.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the Chief of Staff of the US Army bluntly told the Senator from West Virginia that he’s making a false comparison, and that the demands of maintaining empire require enormous investments.
“What our military is asked to do is very different than what the Russian military and Chinese military is asked to do,” the general said. “I think our worldwide presence and our reassurances of our allies and partnerships is more expensive, so I think we have to start there.”
Manchin momentarily questioned the orthodoxy.
“When you look at the figures, if you take the additional responsibilities we have, people start saying…are we a safer world because of the things we’ve done,” he said.
“I just don’t…” Manchin started to say, before cutting himself off.
The senator brought up recent reports, which found that $500 million worth of US weapons disappeared in Yemen during that country’s most recent turmoil, and cited stories about US arms that the Islamic State seized last year, after it routed the Iraqi military.
The Pentagon maintains nearly 700 military bases around the world, as well as a US troop presence in 148 countries. It is also undertaking wildly expensive security and training missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
During a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, another lawmaker pushed back against the Beltway Consensus–that sequestration is harming the US military. As The Sentinel reported, Rep. Walter Jones said that wasteful spending in Afghanistan is the true fiscal threat to US security forces–not the spending caps imposed by the Budget Control Act.
“We will continue to put money down the rat hole and never say that its time to stop putting money down the rat hole,” Rep. Jones said, turning his attention to Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, and asking, “Why can’t people like yourself, sir, be honest with the American people?”
In response to Sen. Manchin’s questions on Thursday, Gen. Odierno did admit that the military “can be more efficient.” But the general also pinned some of the blame on Congress, claiming that the Pentagon doesn’t “make the best use of [its] budget every year” when it’s constantly relying on continuing resolutions. Since Odierno became the Army’s Chief of Staff in 2011, Congress has routinely been engaged in vicious debates over US debt and federal spending.
This wasn’t the first time that Manchin used his seat on the Armed Services Committee to rail against Pentagon bloat. In January, he bemoaned the defense budget passed by Congress late last year, and intoned that cultural and systemic problems are to blame.
“There was $5 billion in new equipment for the Department of Defense that, I understand, nobody asked for,” he said, as The Sentinel reported. “When Eisenhower said beware of the industrial military complex, man, he knew what he was talking about.”
