We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Budget?
Public Deposited- Creator
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Kloempken, Will
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History
- Abstract
- Living in the United States, it certainly feels like the military and military-adjacent issues receive much attention by both the media and everyday people. There are a variety of opinions on the military, ranging from condemnation of the state of veteran services to what role the military should play in foreign affairs. Especially with rising inflation and skyrocketing debt, the military budget is often at the center of the conversation. President Eisenhower foretold the future when he warned about the burgeoning military-industrial complex. The fiscal year 2021 saw more than $700 billion allocated to the Department of Defense; the proposed FY 2023 budget would allocate a whopping $773 billion (in part due to inflation). Abiding by the traditional budget division, $230 billion of that sum would be dedicated to the Navy and Marine Corps. In terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a metric often used to put spending in perspective, military spending has remained at around 3.5% since 2014–almost a whole percentage point of that spent just on the Department of the Navy. The world average in 2020, in contrast, was 2.0% of GDP spent on militaries. This has understandably led to questions of form and function regarding budgetary parameters of the U.S. military, especially in comparison to other discretionary spending programs. This paper will dig deeper into the arguments surrounding naval spending. Specifically, what can be done and what ought to be done as equipment begins to age and population growth slows? The hundred-billion-dollar question is: how much should be spent on the Navy?
- Date of publication
- 2022
- DOI
- Resource type
- Article
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Journal title
- The Journal of Foreign Affairs at Carolina
- Journal volume
- 8
- Journal issue
- 1
- Page start
- 62
- Page end
- 71
- Language
- English
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