Defense Expenditure Lunacy

Spencer Ackerman:

In March 2012, the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative agency, took a look at the 96 highest-priority defense programs in the Pentagon acquisitions system. The watchdog organization found that the acquisition programs represented an estimated total cost of $1.58 trillion, and had actually “grown by over $74 billion or 5 percent in the past year.” (.PDF) The sources of that increase were everything from changes in the per-unit costs of all the planes, guns, trucks and ships; upticks in R&D expenses; or plain “production inefficiencies.”
$74 billion is a lot of money. To put it in context, if all that hardware cost growth were a sovereign nation, it would spend more money on its defense sector in a year than Russia does. ($64 billion in 2012, although in Putin’s Russia, defense money spends you.) It would laugh at India’s $44 billion effort in 2012 at becoming a rising military power. It would pen op-eds in British newspapers about the paltry $57.8 billion that once-imperial London spent on defense last year. The only countries’ defense sectors that would eclipse it are China and the U.S. itself.

And remember, $74 billion is not the cost of the gear itself. It’s just the growth in the cost of the hardware. In Washington, the rising prices of defense programs happens so routinely that it seems normal, like a natural cost of doing business, rather than an indicator of money being mismanaged.
On a much smaller scale, Jonathan Rue and Caitlin Fitz Gerald recently contextualized what it meant for the Army to suddenly discover $900 million in parts for Stryker armored vehicles sitting unused in storage. The U.S. could have bought 600 Tomahawk missiles for that money, or two entire Littoral Combat Ships, or outspent Serbia’s defense sector. It could have funded the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services for 23 years.
It turns out there’s a happy coda to this story — somewhat.
I discovered today that the GAO recently updated its assessment. Its 2013 look into the previous year’s defense acquisitions tells a sunnier story. Hardware costs dropped by $44 billion (.PDF), since ten of those 96 programs came out of the acquisition pipeline. Those included big-ticket items like the F-22 Raptor stealth jet, the Marines’ canceled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and the C-27J transport plane.

Those numbers are crazy.  $74 billion is almost the total cost of the food stamp program (SNAP), even with all of the increases under our "food stamp President."  What's more worthwhile, feeding people, or having tons of unnecessary stuff in case we have to go blow up some brown people who may or may not hate us (before we kill members of their families)?  Personally, I'd go with feeding people.  However, opinions differ.