The Pentagon's giant sucking sound

Those draconian Obama defense cuts are actually not. As Fred Kaplan reports in Slate, the real spending reduction proposed for fiscal 2013 is a mere 1 percent less than the actual spending in FY 2012. More details have yet to emerge, but the obvious winners are technology and special operations; the losers the ground forces.

And none of this accounts for the many hidden places for defense spending, such as the State Department, which is spending heavily on its own drone fleet and security contractors. According to the New York Times, 5,000 private security contractors, along with drones, are protecting 11,000 embassy employees in Iraq alone. Mission accomplished.

Mr. Obama's line about using money spent on wars for nation-building at home was also a bit disingenuous. The $1.3 trillion-and-rising cost was mostly borrowed, including from China. Conservatively, the United States spends more on its military than the next 14 biggest military powers in the world. This is Ike's Military Industrial Complex in full flower. It distorts the economy and until its really addressed, America can't recover and compete.

There are winners from the status quo, including big defense contractors such as Boeing. While we've allowed our high-tech manufacturing to migrate to Asia, America has actually increased its market share as the world's largest arms merchant -- often with catastrophic consequences in the many small wars you never read about. But this edifice is not as productive, not as constructive for rebuilding the middle class, or, as Eisenhower foresaw, not healthy for a democracy, as a more balanced use of national resources and focus.

Someday, the United States will need to restructure its economy for peaceful competition in a neo-mercantilist world, to meet the national-security threats (acknowledged by the Pentagon) of climate change and peak oil. Or debt or another misbegotten military adventure will force us to, on very unfavorable terms. What's happening now is not making us safer. It's making us poorer, and ultimately more at risk.