Bang for the Buck

For the Defense Department to merely tread water, a good rule of thumb is that its inflation-adjusted budget must grow about 2 percent a year (roughly $10 billion annually, each and every year). Simply put, the costs of holding on to good people, providing them with health care and other benefits, keeping equipment functional, maintaining training regimes, and buying increasingly complex equipment tend to grow faster than inflation. This is, of course, no more an absolute rule than is Moore's law about changes in computing capacity. But like Moore's law, it tends to hold up remarkably well with time, especially when downsizing the Defense Department's force structure is not really an option, and it is not today.

-Mike O'Hanlon

Moore's Law is of course not a "rule," but rather an attempt at formulating a natural law in the manner of the physical sciences, which is to say descriptive, not proscriptive. Although there are presumptive upper limits to its applicability, it has so far proven to be an accurate description of the rate of expansion of the capabilities of digital electronic devices.

How this is applicable to military spending is beyond me, and probably beyond O'Hanlon, who betrays no evidence of having ever written a budget or looked beyond the pie charts to the line items. Hell, he doesn't appear to know the difference between operating and capital expenses. Meanwhile, I know the Pentagon is fucked, but I find it hard to believe that they don't fund depreciation. I know that the forever wars require infinite expansion of military expenditure, and so does the Augustus of the West, Barack Obama, which is why he keeps throwing more money at the military. Meanwhile, if we froze defense spending now and China, the next biggest spender, were to institute 10% annual expansion in military expenditures, it would still take them twenty-five years to reach our level of annual outlays. Just sayin.