By MARK THOMPSON / WASHINGTON
You know the government's broken when, in the face of tough fiscal times, the President freezes government spending but gives the military a pass. That's because spending on the military and homeland security, following 9/11 and the launch of two wars in its wake, has become sacrosanct. But it's too bad — because there is plenty of money to be saved by lopping off the well-marbled fat that clings to the $700 billion the U.S. spends annually on national security.
The U.S. military is now spending more on defense, on average, than it did during the Cold War — even after the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are erased.
Let's repeat that: even without a superpower rival like the Soviet Union — with its arsenals of nuclear weapons, fleets of tanks and armadas of warships, all manned by 10-foot-tall Red Army troops — the U.S. is now spending more preparing for war against, well, who knows, than we spent readying to fight Moscow. And the Obama Administration has made it clear that defense spending is going to continue to increase, even as fiscal pressures — for bailouts, health care, infrastructure — inexorably mount.
As far as the eye can see, U.S. taxpayers will be spending one-third more to maintain the U.S. military than their parents and grandparents paid for the nation's Cold War force.
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