Defense Spending, Terrorism, and the Shrinking Military

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Sean D. Smith
  • Minot Air Force Base Public Affairs
MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. --  As an election year, 2016 will be filled with national dialogue about government spending, and that includes discussion of money and the military. Some see reduced defense spending as a step in the right direction, and others see it as a problem. Will military spending go up or down with a new president? Is the military really shrinking? How does that affect national security?

On the whole, military spending really has declined. Defense spending made up 20 percent of the national budget in 2010. In 2015, it was less than 16 percent. Some reasons for that include pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fact that spending was literally forced down by America's brush with sequestration in 2013.

However, for the future, the Obama Administration has proposed a budget that would increase defense spending by approximately 8 percent.

So defense spending will be on its way up, but as some presidential candidates continue to point out, the military itself is shrinking. Over the past four years, the U.S. Army had shed approximately 80,000 positions, and there are new cuts on the way. In a broad sense, all branches of the armed forces are being consolidated. These statistics are sometimes used as evidence of declining national security, particularly from terrorism. However, that sort of rhetoric is business as usual in elections, and it doesn't reflect reality.

American armed forces are still globally dominant, and even with recent reductions the United States is still the biggest military spender in the world, spending more than twice as much on defense as China -- the next largest spender. But the national security debate isn't limited to the balance of national power, because terrorism is also a major talking point in American politics.

Fortunately, terrorism is not a statistically meaningful threat to American citizens. Americans are more likely to be killed by lightning strikes than terrorism -- and even death by lightning is extremely rare, unlike obesity, which contributes to the deaths of half a million Americans annually.

Presidential candidates will talk about a shrinking military being equivalent to shrinking security, but American citizens are thousands of times more likely to be killed by heart disease or car accidents than any form of hostile action -- yet it's unlikely this year's candidates will have much to say about seatbelts or fast food, because these things don't provoke an emotional reaction the same way terrorism does.

The military really has been scaled back, though there's no credible evidence that's resulted in any strategic or security shortfall. While defense spending has gone down, it will inevitably go back up, as will the size of the military, for better or worse.