US Military Spending Increased? Yes

In the United States of America, as in every other country in the world, there is an ongoing debate as to where the government’s money should go and how much should be put towards a given interest. Since every country must have some sort of defense to enjoy any kind of prosperity, one of the main issues at hand is naturally how much money should be spent on the military. The United Sates has, throughout its history and especially since World War II, spent a great deal of money on defense. Everything from the clothes a soldier wears to a nuclear warhead, the U.S. has spent an enormous sum of money on its armed forces. A more recent debate that has been hitting home lately in America is not whether or not we should spend money on our military, but whether or not we spend enough. Many people argue that what we currently spend is adequate, or even too much, and America will continue to be a world power without an increase in military spending. Others, however, feel that in order to remain so prosperous it is necessary to go one big step further and increase our military spending to ensure national security. It seems that the ladder opinion is a wiser one, and this paper is going to explain exactly why this is the case.

With the absence of the paradoxical stability that the threat of all out war between two ideologically driven alliances (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) brought with it, most analytic communities now agree that many new or older, revitalized threats have emerged to endanger the democracies of the West and that this re-emergence is categorized by a gross lack of predictability in addition to a great variety (The Terrorist Research Center 1).

Yet another reason for the United States to increase military spending is because we can. America has always been a very economically strong country and the U.S. dollar has been the most prolific form of currency for a great number of years. Americans do indeed pay a lot of taxes and the government certainly generates a lot of income. With all of the countless threats and especially the developments of serious missile weaponry, if we can increase spending, there is very little justifiable reasoning to not do so. “The projected cost of national missile defense (NMD) deployment between 2001 and 2005 is $10.5 billion. We believe the nation can certainly afford an annual outlay of $5 to $7 billion dollars for missile defense” (Foreign Policy/Academic Journal 1). Thus the United States is capable of increasing military spending, and certainly it would be very wise for the country to do so before it is too late.

Thus besides all out war there are other threats, and other kinds of threats, that have proven to be concerns for America’s many interests and thus spending indeed needs to be increased. A perfect example of a different kind of threat that has perpetrated America’s defense is terrorism. Especially since September eleventh it has become all too clear that terrorism is a very serious threat to our nation’s economy, security, and prosperity. Obviously before then our nation was not prepared for such an attack, and thus we now need to economically account for a much more serious anti-terrorism effort. This is just one example of changing times—the U.S. had never experienced such a serious blow from foreign terrorism in its entire history. Thus with the changing current events our military must change too, and this means an increase in spending to ensure that a country once not prepared to stop certain attacks such as the one on September eleventh can indeed prevent another like thing from happening. Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Henry H. Shelton summed this up wonderfully about the U.S. military when he said “the force must have the capability to dominate across a full spectrum of military operations all at once. Not only able to dominate in one place, at one moment in time, but be flexible and responsive enough to undertake multiple tasks in multiple locations simultaneously” (Rourke 213). Thus for this reason and many others the Untied States needs to increase its military spending to be able to provide adequate defense against a changing and growing variety of realistic threats to our national security.

ny people in America feel that since we are not currently involved in any major wars and the cold war