Bush pushes to increase defense spending
Jump of 7% would top rest of world's military budgets

Washington -- It isn't cheap being the world's only superpower.

President Bush last week said he wants to spend $439 billion next year on national defense, a 7 percent increase above current spending.

Adding the costs of ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and of maintaining the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal, the United States will spend a whopping $513 billion for defense for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, assuming Congress approves Bush's spending plan.

That sum dwarfs the combined defense budgets of U.S. allies and potential U.S. enemies alike. Put another way, the U.S. defense budget is at least equal to, and by some estimates greater than, defense spending for the rest of the world.

"The United States spends several times more on its military than any conceivable adversary, and together with its allies accounts for more than two-thirds of total worldwide defense spending," said a report by the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress.

U.S. defense spending has surged since the late 1990s. U.S. defense budgets increased by more than 41 percent between 1999 and 2004, with most of the increase coming after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The only other epochs when the United States spent as much on national defense in constant 2006 dollars was during World War II and the Korean War. Adjusted for inflation, defense spending now is far above the annual average of $366 billion spent during the Cold War-era when the United States faced the threat of nuclear annihilation or a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

That amount of money pays for, among other things:

-- The world's 12 largest aircraft carriers;

-- The only stealth aircraft fleet in the world;

-- Long-range bombers and precision missiles capable of striking anywhere on the globe;

-- A massive air cargo force that can carry crack troops worldwide on short notice;

-- Prepositioned weaponry around the globe in storage for U.S. forces when needed;

-- And a deadly arsenal of nuclear bombs.

At the same time, the number of men and women in uniform has drastically declined.

"For the Korean War, we fielded a force of about half a million. For World War II, we deployed about 18 million troops," said Winslow Wheeler, a former defense specialist with the Senate Budget Committee's Republican staff. "Our gigantic defense budget is supporting a fairly minor war of about 138,000 troops fighting 20,000 bad guys."

Part of the surge in defense spending can be attributed to pricey new weapons systems.

Some examples:

-- The Air Force's fleet of 179 new F-22 fighters will cost more than $300 million each.

-- The Navy's 12 new destroyers cost about $3 billion each.

-- The Navy wants to build 30 new submarines costing $2.6 billion apiece.

-- The Army wants $161 billion for a fleet of manned and robot-controlled weapons systems.

-- The Joint Strike Fighter that will be flown by Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force pilots will cost $256 billion for the planned 2,400-plane fleet.

"We have a declining number of forces for an ever-increasing amount of money," said Wheeler, currently a budget analyst at the Center for Defense Information, an organization that tracks defense spending. "We are getting to the giggle stage of this trend" when a single fighter jet costs $300 million.

The Bush administration argues that the huge U.S. defense budget isn't just for fighting insurgents in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld urged Americans to look upon the Pentagon's spending request as a down payment for "the long war" against terrorism, which he likened to the decades-long struggle against communism.

Rumsfeld, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, used the term "long war" nine times in their testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That didn't mollify Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., a committee member. "This is a mind-boggling sum of money for defense. The American taxpayers deserve to know whether this is in fact money well spent," he told the defense officials.

Chris Edwards, a budget analyst with the conservative Cato Institute, is aghast at what he sees as runaway defense spending.

"It seems that any sort of fiscal restraint has been pushed aside" for the sake of defense spending, he said.

Analysts believe the surge in spending is designed in large part to counter China, whose defense budgets have grown at double-digit rates in recent years.

"Much of the spending has little to do with fighting the war on terrorism," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent research group that tracks trends in worldwide militaries. Rather, argues Pike, the spending for new ships, jets, missiles and other armaments is "aimed at the threat that dare not speak its name: China."