Despite the cuts in defense spending, that spending represents 50.1 percent of all federal discretionary expenditures in FY 1998, and payments of veterans' benefits another 3.5 percent.
(3) The United States spends much more on defense than all of its allies or principal adversaries combined. Total defense outlays of selected countries in 1996 were as follows:
On a per capita basis, the average American spent $1,208 a year on defense in 1990, the average Britisher $670 and the average German $570.
Arguments That Defense Cuts Imperil Readiness
Advocates of higher defense spending than projected under current plans argue that the nation's military commitments exceed its current capabilities and that this mismatch is likely to increase in future years: "The strain on ever-shrinking armed forces attempting to undertake an ever-growing set of military tasks generates a series of deleterious effects that exacerbate one another. The frenetic pace of operations, the highest since Vietnam, is literally wearing out troops and equipment."
Despite the end of the Cold War, a series of ethnic and civil conflicts have led to the commitment of American troops in a variety of smaller wars in the 1990s, including the Gulf War of 1991 and the military interventions in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia as well as a variety of deterrent or low-level interventions and humanitarian, rescue and peacekeeping missions and deterrent missions, such as strikes against Iraq and threats thereof and the movement of the 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Straits in 1997 in response to Chinese missile threats against Taiwan.
Major cuts have been made in weapons programs of a strategic nature, such as the B-2 bomber program, a virtual cessation in the production of new nuclear weapons pursuant to the Start I and II negotiations with Russia and the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile program. However, deep cuts have also been made in weapons procu...