Our Nearly $1 Trillion Military Budget Won’t Make Us Safer – OpEd

Lindsay Koshgarian

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If you looked at the U.S. military budget without knowing otherwise, you’d probably guess we were in World War III.

Our military spending is now the highest it’s been at any point since World War II — and Congress keeps adding more. The House of Representatives just passed legislation that will take military spending to $895 billion, while the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a bill that would total $923 billion.

Those totals don’t even include the military aid to Ukraine and Israel that was included in the $95 billion war package Congress passed this spring. We’re teetering closer and closer to a $1 trillion military budget.

Adjusting for inflation, the last time the national security budget topped $1 trillion was in 1945, the final year of World War II.

Unlike a world war, there’s nothing happening today that can justify this level of spending. Even the war in Ukraine and the decimation of Gaza (which is being carried out with U.S.-supplied weapons) account for just a small fraction of overall spending.

So what’s all this spending for?

It’s to keep the U.S. military machine running as it has since World War II, with the more or less explicit goal of global military domination. That goal is shared by many in Congress. But members of Congress also receive constant encouragement — and campaign funds — from for-profit, corporate military contractors who can expect to receive about half of the total military budget.

But it turns out that global military dominance is pretty expensive. And luckily, it’s not at all necessary to safeguard U.S. security.