Although 57 per cent of the US public now believes that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake, the military budget request that President Bush submitted to Congress is the largest since World War II — and little money is earmarked for domestic security. The budget requests $623 billion for military spending for fiscal year 2008, which begins Oct. 1.

Defence Department officials say budgets in future years might reflect considerable increases of that figure, based on the rationale that military spending currently represents only a small percentage of national gross domestic product (GDP).

“It seems odd that we’re even talking about the size of the private economy (which GDP partly reflects) since the private economy isn’t funding the military. We should be looking at the amount of public dollars available for investment,” Miriam Pemberton, research fellow at Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the centre-left think-tanks Institute for Policy Studies and International Relations Centre, said. Military spending “is now over 50 per cent of the discretionary budget,” she said. This budget, submitted in February, reflects the Bush doctrine’s policies of broad unilateral military action, which, according to a report released on Thursday by FPIF, “prescribes an expansive, global role for the military, one that even current levels of spending don’t come to close to covering.”

The FPIF’s “Report of the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget for the United States” for fiscal year 2008 points to the Bush doctrine of building military size and spending because “we can”, but that doesn’t ask the question of if “we should”.

The FPIF advocates a unified security budget which would pull together all the US security tools including military forces, homeland security and preventative non-military international engagement. This would make it easier for Congress to evaluate overall security spending and make the best allocation of resources.

The report voices concern with several security tradeoffs proposed within the 2008 budget. For example, the F-22 fighter jet programme — the strategic necessity of which has been seriously questioned — is receiving a funding increase of over $600 million in the 2008 budget. That $600 million could triple the amount the US plans to spend on cancelling debts of poor countries, or could increase by 50 per cent US contributions to international peacekeeping operations. Or it could more than triple the amount budgeted in 2007 for domestic rail and transit security programmes. FPIF also points to the $800 million budget for offensive space weapons, which some believe could lead to a new arms race.

The task force advocates a $56 billion cut in offensive military spending and a $50 billion increase on defence and prevention, which would convert a militarised 9-to-1 security budget

ratio to a balance of 5-to-1. While military spending remains a high priority in

the national security budget, the State Department has resorted to receiving private donations to subsidise its non-proliferation programmes such as the five million dollars of private money paid for the removal of highly enriched uranium from Serbia. “It was embarrassing (but) we needed the money,” said a State Department official quoted in the report. — IPS