All right, y'all, welcome back, Santel War Radio.
Next up is Chris Hellman from the National Priorities Project.
He is a senior research analyst there.
Welcome back, Chris.
How are you doing?
Oh, thanks for having me, Scott.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Well, good.
As I was telling you during the break there off the air, I mentioned you on the show at least probably once a week, oftentimes more than that because of your work at the National Priorities Project, counting up just how much the American government really spends on the national security state.
And as you've done here again in this piece, you really go through and do the math and show your work in a way that I think is highly instructive for people.
So appreciate all that.
And and for this one, this is more or less the same equation, I think, that Bob Higgs did for the Independent Institute quite a few years back now.
And then Mother Jones had their own study.
And and there are a few others coming up with the number.
It's a nice round number.
One trillion dollars a year spent by the U.S. government on the national security state.
And that's your math as well, correct?
Yeah.
And there are a lot of people who look at this in different ways.
But but the basic concept is that when you talk about the cost of security in the United States, the numbers that get floated around regarding, you know, the Department of Defense and what we spend at the Pentagon and those types of things are important numbers and they're big numbers, but they really only show you a part of the picture.
And that when you really start to think more broadly about national security, that there are a lot of other contributing factors that, you know, really run the numbers up to significantly larger.
So people are out there trying to tell the story about, you know, what what security truly cost the United States beyond just the the Pentagon sort of tip of the iceberg numbers.
And I think that this is particularly relevant right now as we're looking at, you know, annual deficits of over a trillion dollars and some pretty scary rhetoric coming out of Washington about the need to bring in our deficit spending and what kind of draconian cuts that's going to require in in in critical social programs in order to make that happen.
And at the same time, listening to the Pentagon running around, you know, claiming poverty and disaster if they're forced to cut their spending at any level.
We think it's important that that you get a look at all the numbers that are involved just beyond, you know, what what we spend on what we call the Pentagon's base budget on an annual level, which at over half a trillion dollars is nothing to sneeze at in and of itself.
Yeah, well, you know, here's the thing to a billion here, a trillion there, it's just a B and a T and whatever.
But if you think of a billion, like 999,000 million, then wait a minute, that and then even more than that, that's a lot of thousands of millions.
Wait a minute.
I mean, it's, it's like we could be living in the Jetsons future that we were all promised for the years beyond 2000.
Right now, if we weren't pissing away all this money right now, $1 million a year.
Yeah.
And again, it's a big number.
And it's been my experience in dealing with numbers over the year, over the years that people who don't think about millions, billions and trillions don't don't really spend a lot of time, you know, considering how big a number trillion is usually when I when I talk about defense budgets and that type of thing, I like to start by saying, you know, a trillion dollars, if you earned a million dollars a year, and most people think, Oh, yeah, a million dollars a year, that's pretty cool.
You'd have to work a million years to earn a trillion dollars.
And, and, you know, just by starting with that, it helps to give people some context about these numbers.
Because as you said, you know, millions, billions, trillions, what's the difference?
And the truth is, is that when you start to add them up, they do they do add up to real money.
Yeah, I mean, we, we really could have flying Corvettes and, you know, bulletproof everything.
And who knows what, I don't know, you know, in the 1990s, and especially, I guess, in the 1980s, but when the year 2000 was still ahead, and it was still that giant demarcation, that that big line, the odometer effect, the excitement of having all zeros all the way across and all of this thing flipping over and, and sort of, you know, is a chance to kind of maybe get some things right that we've been screwing up in the past, but mostly, it was supposed to be, well, I don't know, mostly, to a great degree, it was supposed to be this technological threshold crossed, where now, it's the age of R2-D2 is going to take care of all the grunt work so that we can all live happy lives and have this awesome future.
And instead, it's this stupid terror war.
And the only people get what they want are the Homeland Security cops.
Yeah, and again, you know, you're talking about a huge amount of money.
For instance, one of the things that the government is confronted with this year, because of a budget plan that they enacted last year is automatic spending cuts through something called sequestration.
And the reason they're looking to do that is because they've got to come up with about $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, and they haven't been able to find the political will to do that.
And $1.2 trillion sounds like an awful lot, but when you look at the fact that we spend almost a trillion dollars on security in a single year, and they're trying to cut that amount of money over a decade, it really pales in comparison.
And I'm not advocating for an instant zeroing out what we spend on security.
A lot of the things that we include in our tally are things like benefits for veterans and retirement pensions for former military people who, obviously, because of their service to this country, they're entitled to that type of thing.
But I think – but the point we're trying to make is that when you're talking about a $3.5 trillion annual budget, and almost a third of that goes to security, that represents a really substantial proportion of what your and my tax dollars are doing.
Well, I don't know.
I guess it wouldn't have really made a difference, but you listen here how they're – now they're coming out talking about, oh, we've got to cut all this money from welfare for mothers with – single mothers and meals on wheels and all these kinds of things.
And I guess TV would have to make it clear to the people that this is the choice that you're making here, is you're going to give up all of these services that – for me, I don't believe in any of them at all.
I think they should all be abolished anyway, but – and the whole government with them, but that's just me.
I know people don't think – they're not being told that this is the choice you're making is to give up all of this neat stuff that you want in order that you can have this world empire instead because they would not choose the world empire.
And Ron Paul gave them a choice, but the media didn't say, like, he's really got a point.
It really is one or the other.
Yeah, and I think in part that's because up until recently, the federal government has been able to borrow money with impunity.
There hasn't been any political cost to running an annual deficit, mainly because the deficits themselves have been, by today's standards, fairly modest.
But two things have happened.
One is the economy has tanked and we're broke, and you and I are looking for value for our dollars in ways that we haven't even a decade ago.
And that's number one.
And number two is that the government is waking up to what this really means as stewards of our taxpayers' dollars, and they're looking at making some very, very fundamental changes in what the role of government is, some of which you and I would agree with, others we would not.
But this is an important moment in time as far as the way government is going to provide services for this country, if they are going to provide them at all.
And it's a fundamental discussion that's going on around the upcoming presidential elections with the Tea Party movement and Occupy and then the rest of us.
And it's a discussion that we really haven't entered into, at least in my lifetime, in the way that we are now.
So I think this is a time where a greater understanding of the choices that are being discussed is really, really critical.
We at MPP believe that as citizens, it's partially our responsibility to educate ourselves as to what's being done by our government in our name and to make sure that whatever that is coincides to the best, greatest degree possible with what our true wishes are.
Well, it's just all so out of proportion.
It's ridiculous, too, where, you know, there was a poll the other day that said the American people consider Iran as much of a threat as they thought the Soviet Union was a threat in 1985, and as severe of one.
You know, where it was like the height of Reagan's brinksmanship with the Soviet Union was armed with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
And, well, that's just one example.
But anyway, we'll hold it right there.
We'll come right back with Chris Hellman from the National Priorities Project after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we're talking with Chris Hellman from the National Priorities Project.
He's got this piece at Tom Dispatch.
It'll be running on Antiwar.com probably tomorrow.
It is called War Pay.
And also, how much does Washington spend on defense, and as you were saying, a trillion dollars a year.
And then the heartbreak interrupted, but I was going to try to make some kind of case about the discrepancy between any alleged threat and how far this thing goes.
Like I was saying, the polls say people fear Iran the same way they feared the Soviet Union in 1985 when they actually had the ability to literally wipe us off the face of the earth where Iran has absolutely nothing.
Except perhaps a little bit of the ability to defend themselves from attack, but that's about it.
And we just talked with Bob Murphy in the previous segment about how it's a total economic fallacy on the part of conservative war supporters who justify it or liberal war opponents who complain about it.
That we need war for oil at all.
Only from the Pentagon's point of view to control that oil, or maybe Exxon's point of view because they want to be the ones doing the pumping and getting the profits for themselves.
But our society as a whole does not need the military to secure these resources for us.
We waste way more on defense and so-called securing these resources than we even spend on oil every year.
The whole thing is completely ridiculous.
And so not only is it a trillion dollars a year blown, it's a trillion dollars a year blown when there's no Soviet Union to buy a bunch of MX missiles in a big game of brinksmanship and bankruptcy games and whatever to play like Reagan did in the 1980s.
It's not even there.
They're resorting now to going back to war against the cocaine traffickers of South America.
They ran out of continents to fight on.
Going against the snow monsters in Antarctica next, I guess.
Yeah, I think you raise a really interesting point, which is that there's an establishment out there that's existence is predicated on finding what the next threat is going to be.
And right now U.S. security concerns are focused primarily on the war on terror or however you want to describe it.
But it's interesting to point out, I think, that prior to the 9-11 attacks, in that period of time between the fall of the Soviet Union and the 9-11 attacks that were sort of the catalyst for our shift in strategic thinking, there was a growing school of thought looking out on the, quote-unquote, what the military refers to as the threat horizon about, okay, now that we've won the Cold War, where are we going to go next?
And the place that a lot of people's attention was drawn very quickly was China and their growing economic power in Asia and globally.
And for a couple of years, they were sort of at the forefront of strategic thinking.
Then the war on terror became public enemy number one, and it shifted away.
And now as you see the sort of winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you see a renewed interest in our concerns about the Pacific region and the growing economic power of China.
So I think there's a case to be made for this idea that there will always be a segment of the American establishment that's looking for the next great battle.
Yeah.
Well, and to spend so much money on it that, again, it's unbelievable.
A million times a million.
That's a lot.
Every year.
All right.
Now, I wanted to ask you about maybe if you could give us a little bit of insight about that whole top secret America thing, as the Washington Post put it, where so much of the national security state has been outsourced to these private companies that really are just run by former government employees.
Mostly former intelligence people or high level appointee types who then have these kind of privatized intelligence agencies and carrying out all of this different work from combat to intelligence and everything in between all over the place.
How big is it really?
How much is really spent on that?
And how big of a change is that in the way the D.C. operates in the last 10 years?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
And the hard part to answer is, how big is it really?
Because so much of it is – I won't say it's hidden, but the bookkeeping on that type of work isn't done the same way as the way we count what the government is spending on services it provides itself.
But what's intriguing about that is an awful lot of this outsourcing of fundamental government functions, whether they be in the world of security or elsewhere, occurred in the name of cutting costs and reducing the size of government.
That if you decide that something is no longer a vital government function, something that you can farm out to the highest bidder, you can make government look smaller on paper.
The irony, of course, is that when these services are actually required and you hire these people back up, in many cases, particularly in the world of security, you hire them back at costs that were higher than it was when they were on the federal payroll.
So in the short term, it makes government look smaller, but in the long term, it actually represents a greater burden on the American taxpayer than it did initially.
So it's sort of a paradox of the way federal budgeting is done, that the things that were done in the name of deficit reduction actually in the long term can end up costing us more money.
And to take it one step further, in addition to being more expensive to the taxpayer, we give up, through outsourcing of government services, our ability to regulate how they perform these services.
In the world of security, that's particularly daunting, because as you point out, you're talking about people who have a very high degree of training in strategy, tactics, and combat that they received through the U.S. government, which they're now applying their wares to the U.S. government in many cases, but also to the highest bidder in other cases, where we lose control to monitor their activities and regulate their behavior.
So it has not just a financial component, it also has a legal and a moral component as to what these former government employees who are now effectively free agents are doing in the name of the almighty dollar.
Well, and it's a great way, as you said, it threatens the law, it seems like it's a great way for the government agencies to get around any laws that might have restricted their ability to gather intelligence on us or persecute us, like the CIA, supposedly anyway, is barred from messing around with the American people, they're only for overseas or whatever.
But they can just set up a little front company and outsource a couple of things to them, and that quote-unquote private company can do all different kinds of intelligence gathering on American citizens and then sell it to the CIA, and then that's perfectly fine, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think that that happens, I think it happens domestically a lot less frequently than one might expect, mainly because those are, even as work where it's being farmed out, they are subject to at least some regulation.
But where I think it's even more intriguing is where people who are effectively agents of the US government are operating overseas as free agents because they're viewed as less intimidating than having US service personnel in uniform, particularly in places like Central and South America, where our legacy of the use of force is so negative amongst the local population that the idea of having US security people there, they couldn't tolerate it.
But you see these free agents who are working at the behest and at the expense of the US government, but not wearing US uniforms, in addition to being sort of more innocuous locally.
As I pointed out earlier, we lose the ability to regulate what their activities are, and that's particularly true in foreign countries where the domestic laws are not vigorous enough to protect them independent of government regulation.
All right, and then, so we have the, I guess, well, we don't really have time to go through the whole calculation here, but you really break it down in this great article at Tom Dispatch about how much money is spent on the wars versus the Pentagon's base budget.
Then, as you say, you have to add in another, what, $11.5 billion for nukes?
But then I was surprised at this.
I don't know why.
I guess I just didn't know.
$6.5 billion for cleaning up after the production of nuclear weapons.
I did not realize it was so messy to make a nuclear weapon.
$6.5 billion a year just spent on containing the effects of the production of these things, huh?
And that number is frighteningly small.
Part of the problem is, is that… As in, if they were going to do a good job, they'd spend a hell of a lot more than that?
Much, much more.
Much, much more.
Well, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
What were you going to say?
I was going to say, you know, the problem with nuclear waste is that radioactive stuff stays radioactive, not just for years, but for decades.
So stuff that, you know, 50 years ago we buried in the ground is still a threat, and it's still a health hazard.
So we don't have the luxury of just sort of digging a hole and ignoring it.
We do at some point have to go back and dig it up and deal with it.
And we produced not just hundreds, not just thousands, but millions of tons of this radioactive waste over the last 50 years.
So that's a number where, you may say $6.5 billion, that's a lot of money.
That would be one where I would argue we could increase that significantly and still not address the problem.
Well, the only way to address it is to recycle it all until it's inert, right?
You can't just dump it in the ground when it's got a half-life of however many thousand years.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the problem.
So it's got to be recycled.
I don't know whether they can yet or not.
It seems like they could.
Yeah.
For me, the science on that one, I don't know the answer.
Hopefully better minds are thinking about it than I do.
But it is a serious problem, and it's one of the, as you point out, little-known components of what we spend on security every year.
And then, of course, you mentioned all the benefits for all the veterans and all of that.
The cost of homeland security, $35.5 billion, you say, but there's a lot more than that.
You say another, what, almost $14 billion.
Also, you could count as homeland security just spread around.
Right.
So another, really, what, $50 billion?
Yeah, and probably even more than that.
But the $35 billion figure is what goes just to the Department of Homeland Security.
Because when you say homeland security, you're really talking about a couple of different things.
One is the federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security.
But the other is what the government spends on homeland security overall.
For instance, not included in those numbers is the roughly $18 billion a year that the Department of Defense spends on homeland security.
And then other agencies spend money that adds into the homeland security total.
The Department of Agriculture, for instance, spends about $1 billion a year promoting the safety of our food supply.
Those types of things.
So there's money for homeland security spread out all over the government.
And if you were to total it all up and include DOD and the Department of Homeland Security and all the other federal agencies, it's actually closer to about $70 billion a year.
Amazing.
Yeah, you know, we were talking about the F-22 with Dina Razor on the show yesterday.
And I'm forgetting now.
I think she was saying they're right around $400 million and change apiece for the F-22s, which, of course, are poisonous and don't really work well.
And sometimes the cockpit gets stuck.
Yeah, and she's written a couple of really great articles lately exposing the latest problem in the F-22 program, and as I said, it's just the latest in a string of problems that have plagued this program since its inception in the 1980s.
That was part of Reagan's arms buildup against the Soviet Union that hasn't existed for a generation now.
Exactly.
It's what we refer to as one of the Cold War legacy weapons that we've been in the process of buying and developing over the last 20 years.
And over that period of time, the threat for which it was designed has basically evaporated.
We're stuck with these staggeringly expensive weapons with very little left on their to-do list.
And guess what?
That's probably a good thing because they don't work terribly well.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, in a way, you've got to admit, that one's kind of funny.
I mean, to me, it's so easy to imagine the Air Force planners going, Wow, you know, the Soviet MiGs in the second decade of the 21st century are going to be badass.
We'd better develop some really good fighter jets for coming up against them then.
And yet, they're, yeah, not so good at anticipating that.
But then once the Soviet Union fell, what happened to the plans for the F-22?
Nothing.
Yeah, they just kept moving ahead.
They just kept on going.
Yeah.
And the 35s too, right?
Yeah.
And Norm Augustine, who used to be the head of Lockheed Martin, which is the world's largest defense contractor.
So, no dove on defense.
The guy who understood security.
One of his warnings was the problem with the way we buy and develop weapons is that we end up with a product that's so expensive that there will come a day when the entire Air Force budget will be required to develop a single aircraft.
And they'll have to use it on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
And the Navy will use it on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
Because we won't be able to afford to buy enough of these things to do any sort of meaningful work with them.
And the F-22 is an example of another step down that path.
We've spent $70 billion on 180 aircraft, and we can't get them to work.
Yeah.
Well, and as Dina was saying on the show yesterday, as everybody already knows, what it really comes down to is flight time.
Those guys in their F-15 Eagles, which already have a nose jam-packed with electronics, that means that they can shoot missiles and kill you from way, way, way over the horizon anyway.
But you just give them the hours training in their F-15s, and they can beat any Air Force in the world for the next decades out.
And that's the important thing to remember is that, obviously, American technology and know-how is a great force multiplier.
Our technological prowess is pretty much second to none.
But at the end of the day, it's less about the technology and more about the quality of the people who do this work for us.
And you can't put a price tag on that, true enough.
But it also tends to be a lot less expensive than the equipment that we're buying.
And as you point out, you give them good stuff and good training, and they can do good work.
And that has been the truth throughout our history, not just in the military.
All right, well, we're way over time.
Thanks so much for your time.
I really appreciate it, Chris.
It's always a pleasure.
Have me back again soon.
I will.
All right.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That is Chris Hellman from the National Priorities Project.
Look him up.
Just type in $8 trillion, and you'll just find there he is, Chris Hellman, National Priorities Project.
Trillion dollars a year.
It's at TomDispatch.com right now, and it'll be at AntiWar.com probably tomorrow.
