Highway Robbery - By Rosa Brooks

In August 2003, some colleagues and I were held up by armed bandits on the highway in Fallujah, Iraq. (Don't ask why I was dumb enough to be wandering around Fallujah.) My bandit -- there were quite a few of them, but I like to think of the guy who stuck a gun in my face as my bandit -- was straight out of central casting, complete with a red kerchief around his mouth and nose to disguise his facial features.

I doubt he knew much English, but he knew enough to say the magic words. "Money, money, money!" he demanded with a guttural, heavy accent, waggling his gun unnervingly around my head.

I handed him my wallet. He took out the cash and handed the empty wallet back to me.

"Shukrun," I said, using my sole word of Arabic. "Thank you."

"You are welcome," he said, and sprinted off to wherever bandits go when they're not robbing people. (This was in the good old days of 2003, when gunmen in Fallujah just robbed you.)

In some ways, this story is a reasonable metaphor for the current debate about the defense budget. Men with weapons intone, "Money, money, money"; we hand it over and say "thank you," even though much of the time we don't really know who they are or what they plan to do with our money.

At least, that's how it can look from the outside. The presidential candidates seem to be competing over who is more dedicated to ensuring a steady supply of funds to the Pentagon. And we're not talking about chump change: the United States spends more on defense than any other nation. In fact, it accounts for 41 percent of global defense spending: annually, we spend almost five times more on defense than China with its 1.3 billion people, and nine times more than Russia. We spend more on defense each year than the next 15 biggest spenders combined.

Obviously, some of this money goes to important programs -- salaries for soldiers, equipment, training -- but the Pentagon, with its vast budget and complex accounting system, is also an infamous money pit. Every couple of years, the inspector general or the Government Accountability Office discovers that large sums of DOD money have been spent on mysterious, never-accounted-for purposes.

I wrote last week about DOD's difficulty tracking humanitarian assistance projects, but the problem isn't unique to such efforts. DOD's a big place, and stuff gets lost: money, programs, people, organizations, the occasional small war. I spent far too much time, during my stint at the Pentagon, telling irritable twenty-somethings on the Hill that the Pentagon was Very Sorry for certain apparent budget discrepancies. Mistakes have been made.

Even many easily understood costs seem to be spiraling out of control: health care already accounts for nearly 10 percent of the defense budget, and DOD spending on health care has grown twice as fast as health care spending in the civilian sector. In a goofy-but-illuminating exercise, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments concluded that if the defense budget increases only in line with inflation each year while health care costs continue to increase at their current rate, virtually the entire defense budget would go to health care costs by 2039. To say that the defense budget could use a long, hard look would be the understatement of the decade.

Notwithstanding that backdrop, Team Obama and Team Romney are eager to assure us that they'll give the Pentagon plenty of money. How much money? Obama: A lot. Romney: A lot, plus even more. "Supporting our troops" always plays well with voters, and the current threat of budget sequestration offers extra opportunities for campaign trail posturing.

"Mitt will begin by reversing Obama-era defense cuts," Romney's campaign website assures potential voters. President Obama, complains Romney, has "repeatedly sought to slash funds for our fighting men and women." (He ignores the fact that the few "cuts" so far have involved reductions to the budget for Overseas Contingency Operations, reflecting the end of the Iraq War, rather than from cuts to the base defense budget.) Right now, the DOD base budget accounts for about 3.6 percent of GDP. Romney promises that he'll set the base defense budget at a floor of 4 percent of GDP.

How much money is that? Larry Korb of the Center for American Progress Action Fund estimates that the Romney proposal would "result in $2.3 trillion in added spending over the next decade compared to the plan presented to Congress by the Obama administration." Boiled down, the Romney defense budget plan is simple: Give the guys with guns money money money.