America’s Ungodly Military Budget Not Rising Fast Enough for the Wall Street Journal
Dissecting the string of half-truths the paper’s editorial page uses to bemoan the White House’s $850 billion FY25 proposal
It is difficult to imagine a corporate news outlet more dedicated to the public relations needs of the military-industrial complex than the Wall Street Journal. Any regular consumer of the publication’s content will attest to the fact that no amount of militarism or cash for the nation’s weapons manufacturers seems to be enough for the paper. The day after the White House unveiled its fiscal year 2025 proposal for $849.8 billion in new spending for the Department of Defense, the Journal had words for the “military budget fit for 1991.”
On March 12, the paper’s editorial board voiced its concerns regarding what it framed as President Biden’s decision to leave the American military “in a state of managed decline”.
This is how the media lies to the public while telling the truth. Nearly everything in this piece is factual, yet the op-ed’s intentional lack of context paints a picture of the world that is very different from the one we’re actually living in.
The alternate reality these deceptions construct is one in which nearly $1 trillion in military spending is dangerously low. This is accomplished by framing the budgets of the US government’s perceived adversaries – who spend just a fraction of what America spends and have never attacked or even threatened to attack the US – as dangerously high.
The op-ed opens with a sloppy maneuver:
The President’s $850 billion request for the Pentagon in 2025 is a mere 1% increase over 2024. That’s a cut after inflation, the fourth in a row Mr. Biden has proposed.
This initial argument asks the reader to ignore several important factors.
First, the Journal demands that its audience uncritically buy into the inflation asterisk argument so many have repeated without considering just how little sense it makes.
The US government’s military budget was $682 billion in 2018, a 5.5% increase from the year prior. At this moment in time, the US was already spending more on its military than the next seven highest foreign military budgets, combined. Somehow, it wasn’t enough, and annual increases of 7.5%, 6%, and 3% would come in the years that followed.
These pointless and irresponsible boosts – signed into law by President Trump – made money for defense contractors and drew applause at rallies, but also made the world more dangerous.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a UK-based think tank, the US launched 2,243 drones during the first two years of Trump’s presidency. This compares with 1,878 strikes during all eight of Obama’s years in office.
Trump has received praise in many circles for not starting any new wars – an embarrassingly low standard – but he needlessly accelerated the ones we were already fighting, killing thousands of innocent people in the process. His supporters cheered his increases in so-called “defense” spending but chose to ignore the human toll of these policies.
The op-ed fails to specify what it would consider to be an appropriate increase in spending. Would it be the nearly 8% YoY increase seen in 2019? If so, this would translate to a $904 billion budget for 2025, and $972 billion for 2026. When one factors in things like the VA, Homeland Security, and the State Department – elements of the US security state which have their own separate budgets – the US government’s “defense” total is already well north of $1 trillion. This is an obscene, absolutely frantic rate of expansion of the military budget that, even for a corporate monstrosity like the US, is wholly unsustainable and unrealistic.
To suggest that $850 billion is too low of a number to spend on one nation’s military is absurd, regardless of the inflation-adjusted purchasing power of what is already an astonishingly high figure. This is especially true when one considers how much other countries spend by comparison.
Included in the Journal’s litany of arguments for shoveling even more money into the coffers of what it considers to be a woefully underfunded military is the fact that “China announced recently a 7.2% increase in defense spending.” This is incredibly misleading, and the sleight of hand is intentional.
On what planet is a 1% increase to $850 billion inferior to a 7.2% increase to $232 billion? In what world is having a military budget that is 266% higher than a country with a billion more people considered dangerous? Especially if it’s a country on the other side of the world which has never threatened the US?
As is shown in the image below, without adjusting for inflation, the Pentagon actually spent more on our military in the 80s than China spends on its military today.
When the author of this article was just seven weeks old, President Reagan proposed a military budget that is $13 billion higher than the CCP has allocated for this coming year.
The paper then pivots to the current state of the world:
What’s happened in the past year? Israel was brutally attacked and is now fighting a war for survival. Iranian proxies have fired drones and rockets at U.S. troops in the region more than 100 times, and its terrorists in Yemen have taken a global shipping lane hostage. Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is a bloody slog that he could still win. North Korea is ratcheting up its belligerence toward South Korea, which the U.S. is bound to defend.
Exploring and adequately contextualizing each one of these incredibly simplistic and intentionally vague statements is beyond the scope of a single article, yet even a brief summary reveals how absolutely misleading they are.
The US government, as it has for decades, has provided the IDF with everything it needs, sending billions to the Israeli military since October. The funds have been used to indiscriminately bomb Gaza and kill more than 33,000 Palestinians, a number that continues to swell by a few thousand people with each passing week. The supplemental funding request set to shower Israel with an additional $14.1 billion has yet to be finalized but it’s House republicans who’ve been responsible for the delay. The president requested the funding – that will only continue to murder innocent civilians in Gaza – and is eagerly waiting to sign it into law. It is also worth noting that throughout the months-long negotiations to approve the $95.3 billion supplemental funding bill, the Biden administration has continued to ship weapons to Israel. Citing Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter, the Washington Post reported that the White House signed off on a transfer of more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs to Netanyahu’s government as late as last month.
Iranian proxies are firing rockets at American troops who’ve now entered their third decade of illegal, unjustified occupation, and our government is continuing to endanger the lives of its soldiers by insisting that they remain in a part of the world where they don’t belong. The easiest way to avoid US soldiers being attacked in Iraq and Syria is to remove them from these countries and send them home.
The Biden administration continues to engage in a conflict with the Houthis that Congress has yet to authorize; the Pentagon has been bombing Yemen since January although the president has admitted that these strikes will do nothing to alter the state of affairs in the Red Sea.
How or when the war in Ukraine will ultimately end is a mystery, yet the one certainty many are still unwilling to internalize is that American weapons are impeding, not expediting, its conclusion. Nevertheless, the Biden administration hasn’t stopped flooding Kyiv with weapons.
The US is bound to defend South Korea and it is continuing to do so. As it has done for many years, the US military continues to maintain a presence of roughly 28,500 troops in South Korea. Furthermore, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US accounted for approximately 71% of South Korea’s arms imports from 2018-2022. The Journal is unclear about precisely which part of this alliance it finds unsatisfactory and makes no mention of how these shortcomings should be remedied.
During his three years in office [and especially since October 7th], Joe Biden has demonstrated his commitment to a foreign policy portfolio that is as aggressive and overtly in line with traditional Western dominance as any Republican who’s come before him. One would think that having someone so hawkish in the Oval Office would be viewed as a net positive by an outlet as militaristic as the Wall Street Journal, but it would appear that the president’s actions aren’t nearly as important as the ‘D’ next to his name. This disingenuous criticism is what the Journal requires to arrive at its desired conclusion: the US should be spending more on its military.
It’s all a creative way to twist and warp the undeniable fact that the US outspends the rest of the world by a significant margin.
Publications like the Wall Street Journal like to pretend otherwise, but Russia’s recent 29% annual increase for its entire military budget is still roughly half of what the US spends on just its navy.
What’s most important to remember about these comparisons is that they’re being made using manufactured enemies, not genuine ones.
In the op-ed, the Journal describes one of the obligations that it feels the US is failing to fulfill:
The U.S. needs to build 2.3 subs a year to meet the Navy’s needs while also supplying subs to Australia under the Aukus pact.
The US actually doesn’t need to do any such thing. The Pentagon loves to talk about the importance of using Australia as a strategic outpost during a future possible war with China, but it’s not at all clear why such a war is as likely as US officials make it out to be.
By every logical measure, the US government outspends the rest of the world, is far more militaristic, and has an international footprint that vastly eclipses all of its global peers. Nevertheless, the Beltway never ceases trying to fearmonger the American people with new and emerging threats that are in constant need of funding. The op-ed does precisely this with the passage that follows:
Remember the news only weeks ago that Russia is fielding anti-satellite weapons that threaten the U.S. homeland? The U.S. needs to diversify and harden its satellites in space, yet the Biden budget would cut the Space Force by $600 million over last year’s request.
This is a reference to yet another installment of the US government’s most cherished tradition – laundering the intelligence community’s talking points through its mouthpieces in the mainstream press.
This latest episode began earlier this year with a two-sentence tweet from Congressman Mike Turner. On February 14, the Ohio Republican issued a brief, cryptic statement relaying that “the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has made available to all members of Congress information concerning a serious national security threat.”
Multiple publications – including ABC News, The Washington Post, and CNN – all cited sources on background who confirmed that this was connected to Russia’s development of a space-based capability that could pose a threat to the world’s satellites. According to this reporting, the Kremlin is advancing technology to strike the infrastructure above earth with a nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered weapon.
This pursuit was confirmed by the Biden administration shortly thereafter.
“Though Russia’s pursuit of this particular capability is troubling, there is no immediate threat to anyone’s safety,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters the following day. “We are not talking about a weapon that can be used to attack human beings or cause physical destruction here on Earth. That said, we’ve been closely monitoring this Russian activity, and we will continue to take it very seriously.”
Kirby did not address whether this capability would be powered by nuclear energy or if it is being developed to deploy a nuclear weapon.
The Washington Post, a publication that never hesitates to repeat the security state’s fairytales – relayed its sources’ unsurprising assessment:
The capability is a nuclear-armed — not a nuclear-powered — weapon, said two U.S. officials, who like others familiar with the intelligence spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
What is true and what isn’t about this alleged Russian program isn’t known. However, news like this should always be taken with a grain of salt, given the intelligence community’s well-documented history of exaggerating and/or fabricating potential threats.
This same Post article includes a quote from a think tank source who points out that Russia’s use of a nuclear bomb in space would essentially amount to a “suicide kamikaze attack.” In the report, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Todd Harrison notes that such an action would [obviously] also affect Russia’s own satellites, as well as various hardware controlled by Russia’s allies.
“It would turn the whole world against them, and I mean including China and Latin American countries, and India as well,” Harrison said. “They would screw everyone if they used a nuclear EMP weapon in space.”
It is also important to consider that many in Washington are not as concerned as Turner about this supposedly devastating development, with quite a few members publicly stating that the American people have nothing to fear.
This is context the Journal purposely omits because, as always, its advocacy for more and more goodies for the military-industrial complex is always the paper’s most urgent priority.