In 1983, Chuck Spinney, a thirty-seven-year-old analyst in the Pentagon’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, testified to Congress that the cost of the ever-more complex weapons that the military insisted on buying always grew many times faster than the overall defense budget. In consequence, planes, ships, and tanks were never replaced on a one-to-one basis, which in turn ensured that the armed forces got smaller and older. Planes, for instance, were kept in service for longer periods of time and were maintained in poor states of repair owing to their increasing complexity. As to be expected, the high command did not react favorably to these home truths. They allowed Spinney to keep his job but stopped assigning him anything of importance. He spent the rest of his career ensconced in a Pentagon office at the heart of the military-industrial machine, pondering and probing its institutional personality. Retiring in 2003, he maintained a steady output of pungent analyses of its workings. In a 2011 essay, “The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War,” he discussed the pattern of “military belief systems and distorted financial incentives” that produced “a voracious appetite for money that is sustained by a self-serving flood of ideological propaganda.” Delving deep into the historical details of Pentagon spending, Spinney illustrated his analyses in the form of intricate charts that not only tracked the actual dollar amounts expended but also showed how the projected budgets for various ambitious weapons-buying plans had never materialized, at least never to the degree necessary to buy the projected number of weapons systems—hence the shrinking forces.
Late in 2018, Spinney’s longtime friend Pierre Sprey, a former Pentagon “whiz kid” revered for codesigning the highly successful A-10 and F-16 warplanes, and a trenchant critic of defense orthodoxy, suggested to Spinney that he add a novel tweak to his work by depicting budget changes from year to year in terms of percentages rather than dollar amounts. The analysis that Spinney produced at Sprey’s suggestion revealed something intriguing: although the U.S. defense budget clearly increased and decreased over the sixty years following the end of the Korean War, the decreases never dipped below where the budget would have been if it had simply grown at 5 percent per year from 1954 on (with one minor exception in the 1960s). “Amazingly,” emphasized Spinney,
this behavior even held true for the large budget reductions that occurred after the end of the Vietnam War and, more significantly, after the end of the Cold War. It is as if there is a rising floor of resistance, below which the defense budget does not penetrate.
Only during Obama’s second term did it first dip below this level with any degree of significance. Even more interestingly, every single time the growth rate had bumped against that floor, there had been an immediate and forceful reaction in the form of high-volume public outcry regarding a supposedly imminent military threat. Such bouts of threat inflation invariably induced a prompt remedial increase in budget growth, regardless of whether the proclaimed threat actually existed. As General Douglas MacArthur remarked, as far back as 1957: “Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters never seem to have happened, never seem to have been quite real.”
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/
Granted, soldiers get housing and food paid for, mostly. So, a solider can save money if they are diligent but the money in the budget ain't going to them. Tony Stark is rolling in his grave at the waste here.
