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Military Spending vs. Defense Spending

David Brooks has a headache: To be honest, my brain has hurt ever since Ron Paul made that distinction between military spending and defense spending in the debate the other night. Was the invasion of Normandy military spending or defense spending? What about the Battle of the Bulge? I’m totally confused. Yes, it is a […]

David Brooks has a headache:

To be honest, my brain has hurt ever since Ron Paul made that distinction between military spending and defense spending in the debate the other night. Was the invasion of Normandy military spending or defense spending? What about the Battle of the Bulge? I’m totally confused.

Yes, it is a difficult distinction to grasp, isn’t it? It is a euphemism to refer to spending on military deployments and installations that have nothing to do with the defense of the United States as “defense spending.” This is politically useful for those in favor of larger military budgets and an activist, militarized foreign policy, since they can portray opposition to their latest proposal as an unwillingness to defend America. Americans have been pretending that spending on unnecessary wars has some relationship to national defense, even when the supposed threat being countered doesn’t exist and the U.S. and its allies start the war.

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