If we are nonetheless leaving critical holes in our capabilities, that strongly suggests either a profound failure to set appropriate priorities or else a badly broken contracting model. I’m open to Schake’s argument, but the article doesn’t address the skunk in the room: in 2020, the United States spent more than twice the combined defense budget of Russia and China.

But I still think we have moved from an era in which the economy was operating well below potential and the tradeoff was mostly fake to one in which we are facing relevant supply-side constraints. Noah Smith argues that life is more complicated than a simple “guns or butter” tradeoff, which is true. Today’s inflationary situation is different, though, and in most cases resources consumed by the defense establishment probably do come at the expense of the civilian economy. As a question of politics and economics, the buildup was fine. And on macroeconomic terms, I was not critical of the Trump-era surge in military spending - the economy handled the ballooning budget deficits just fine, and Congress was consistently increasing domestic spending during those years as well.

The political economy of the late-Obama years plausibly led to underspending on defense as part of the goofy dynamics of the budget sequester and the austerity politics that dominated after the 2010 midterms. Joe Biden is seeking a $30 billion increase in the Defense Department’s budget (a very restrained increase when you take inflation into account), but Congress seems likely to appropriate considerably more funds, for a total DoD budget north of $813 billion.īut Kori Schake writes in Foreign Affairs that we ought to be spending dramatically more, arguing that “the changes needed to bring the Defense Department’s budget back in line with its strategy involve a hefty price tag: around an additional $384 billion per year, a figure about 50 percent greater than the current Pentagon budget.” spends an enormous amount of money on defense.

Matt yglesias 1 billion