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The Discussion That Isn't HappeningWhy isn't Congress asking tough questions about Pentagon spending?

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Sept. 21, 2007, at 6:14 PM ET

The Senate is debating the defense bill now, and the central fact about the proceedings is that nobody's talking about money.

Certainly this is strange. The military budget in question—not including any money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—totals $500 billion. This is roughly equal to the military budgets of all the rest of the world's nations combined. Adjusting for inflation, it is larger than the U.S. military budget at the peak of the Cold War—in fact, larger than any budget since the Korean War. Again, this is true, apart from the money allocated for the current wars.

Shouldn't some legislators be asking about the ways the Pentagon is spending so much money and whether all those ways are necessary?

It would be one thing if, in lieu of debates about programs and budgets, they were at least arguing over policy and priorities. But they're not doing much of that, either.

The most explosive debate has been over a Republican amendment to denounce MoveOn.org for its advertisement besmirching the name of Gen. David Petraeus (which the group rhymed with "Betray Us"). The ad was merely witless (and tactically idiotic), but the proposed amendment was worse: a disingenuous ploy to equate criticism of the war with disrespect to the armed services. It passed by a wide margin.

Democrats have offered up a dozen or so amendments, mandating or suggesting various approaches to withdrawing troops from Iraq or altering the strategy that keeps them there. These motions, too, are kabuki. Everyone knows they're unlikely to attract the 60 votes needed to circumvent a filibuster, much less the 67 votes to override a presidential veto.

The Democrats' amendments at least have political value. Their sponsors can say afterward that they tried to work out a compromise. They can add that some of these motions were approved by a majority of the Congress, but they were blocked by Republican stubbornness. They can then campaign in 2008 on the need to put 60 Democrats in the Senate, so they can pass substantive bills.

Still, for the moment, they're not accomplishing anything. And beyond the symbolism and electoral positioning is a debate that isn't happening over real money and national security.

The House and Senate budget committees were established in 1974 to make such a debate possible. The Vietnam War was ending. The public wanted someone to set new national priorities. No congressional body had the power to do that, to look out on the entire budget and impose limits on each federal department. That would be the budget committees' job, and the Congressional Budget Office, which was formed at the same time, would assist with economic analyses.

Things didn't work out that way. The functional committees—armed services, transportation, energy, and so forth—continued to rule their domains. There remains no forum where lawmakers could discuss and decide the question: "How much for guns, how much for butter?"

This is, in a sense, understandable. Especially during wartime, especially after the nation has been attacked, legislators don't want to seem "soft on defense" by proposing that the money for, say, one F-22 stealth fighter-bomber ($230 million) be reallocated to health care or a college-loan program. (At the same time, though, when legislators cut $230 million in health care or college loans, they aren't forced to acknowledge that they chose to spend the money on an F-22 instead. A choice is being made, in effect; it just never has to be put in those terms.)

But the current evasion goes well beyond questions of guns vs. butter, hawk vs. dove, or conservative vs. liberal. Congress is also shirking choices of guns vs. missiles vs. ships, subs, and planes.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
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