U.S defence spending up 14% to $700 bn

U.S. defence spending per capita in 2009 dollars post-WWII, a metric I chose because it makes the periods of relative increase and decline clear.

The point I wanted to highlight is that past big increases had some sort of pretty obvious reason behind them: usually a big war (or two). Likewise periods of flat or declining spending correlate to the lack of an ongoing major war and/or the easing of international tensions. The decline in Obama's second term was a result of both drawing down forces in Iraq & Afghanistan and the budget sequester, so I'm not sure what label to put on that, but the combined causes are obvious enough.

So... why are we radically jacking up military spending now? A 14% increase in a single year to $700 bn is pretty big. In terms of our foreign policy situation, it just doesn't seem to have any rhyme or reason to it beyond pure domestic politics. There's not any "major" war that's ongoing or imminent (even Trump's erratic bellicosity tends to manifest itself in more limited ways). Tensions with Russia are what they are and have worsened, but of course this administration isn't exactly antagonistic towards Putin, and even aside from that direct military confrontation is still a pretty distant possibility. Likewise our disputes with China tend to be more focused on trade than on any kind of possible war. Most of the discussion about Iran or North Korea focuses on the idea of a limited strike, not an Iraq-style invasion and occupation. Of course we still have the U.S. military in lots of places we shouldn't, and doing things we shouldn't be doing, and we were already spending way too much on it. The American globe-straddling empire is still as real and expensive as ever. But we're not doing anything that involves massive deployments of hundreds of thousands of troops in large-scale combat operations. Even the relatively limited war against ISIS is more-or-less over and won. Afghanistan still drags on as the perpetual never-ending war, but our current deployment levels there are far below their peak.

The closest analogy would be the post-detente buildup during the 1980s arms race... but that was targeted at a particular foe and had a certain deliberate logic behind it (whether it was correct or not). It was part of a strategy to leverage our greater prosperity to outspend the Soviets... it wasn't increasing military spending just for the sake of increasing military spending. But that seems to be what we're doing now: jacking up spending levels not out of any particular need or any particular foe, but just for the sake of spending more. Because Trump & the GOP like buying more and bigger things that go boom, and because Republican voters like it too. It's blindly invoking the political muscle-memory of Reagan's buildup without any of the context or strategy that prompted it.

Even within the usual mainstream premises of post-WWII U.S. foreign & defence policy, a spike in military spending right now just doesn't make any sense. We have no coherent or rational reason to need it.