The full text and audio of Ike’s "Farewell Address" can be found here…

Several key articles and reports released recently point out the sorry fact that we’ve never heeded Ike’s sage advice…

A joint report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the think tank Foreign Policy in Focus entitled; A Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2009. Here’s the intro…

At a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July, Eric Edelman, Under Secretary
of Defense for Policy, said: “We all agree that a militarized foreign policy is not in our interests.”

He’s right. Since 2004, the annual Unified Security Budget report has outlined and promoted a rebalancing of resources funding offense (military forces), defense (homeland security), and prevention (non-military international engagement, including diplomacy, nonproliferation, foreign aid, peacekeeping, and contributions to international organizations.)

FINDING:■ ■ This year that goal has entered the realm of conventional wisdom. During the past year, the foreign policy establishments
representing defense, diplomacy, and development have all converged to support a rebalancing of security spending.

Leading the pack has been the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates himself. In a November 2007 speech he said, “Funding for non-military foreign affairs programs… remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military… Consider that this year’s budget for the Department of Defense—not counting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—is nearly half a trillion dollars. The total foreign affairs budget request for the State Department is $36 billion… [T]here is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security.”

But saying this should be done is not the same as actually doing it.

FINDING:■ In the last budget he will be officially
responsible for, the increase Secretary Gates requested for his own department closely matched that $36 billion that he cited, and deplored, as the State Department’s total.

When supplemental war spending is included in the total, this budget widens the gap, in real terms, between current U.S. military spending and all previous levels since World War II. This budget would have U.S. levels exceeding total military spending by the next 45 countries combined.

FINDING:■ Our analysis shows that 87% of our security resources are being spent on military forces (in the regular budget alone, excluding war spending), vs. 8% on homeland security and 5% on non-military international engagement.

Finding: In the final Congressional appropriations for FY 2008, the ratio of funding for military forces vs. non-military international engagement was 16:1. Despite Secretary Gates’ lament about this disparity, his defense budget for FY 2009 actually widens it to 18:1.

This report, written by a taskforce of experts in fields including military budgeting, forces and policy, nonproliferation, development, alternative energy, and homeland security, outlines a way to do the rebalancing between military and non-military security tools, rather than just talking about it.

It recommends $61 billion in cuts in military programs and explains why each can be made with no sacrifice to our security.

The reductions include:

About $25 billion to be saved by reducing ■our nuclear arsenal, keeping National Missile Defense in a research mode and stopping the weaponization of space;

Another $24 billion in savings from scaling ■back or stopping R&D and production of weapons we don’t need;

About $5 billion in savings from unneeded ■conventional forces including two active Air Force wings and one carrier group;

and,

About $7 billion from tackling procurement ■waste and pork-barrel earmarks.

The Unified Security Budget also shows where an additional $10 billion in savings can be achieved by rescinding funds that were appropriated in previous years but have not yet been spent.

As the third finding points out we’re spending 87% of the funding for military forces vs. 5% for non-military international engagement in the Bush administration’s budget for the 2009 fiscal year.

As Ike eloquently stated…

…America is today the strongest, the most influential, and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches, and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among peoples and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension, or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.

We’re reaping what Shrub has sown…!

As one of the participants, Travis Sharp, noted…

What many Americans may not realize is that the United States is likely to spend $711 billion on national defense in the fiscal year that began on October 1 (assuming fiscal year 2009 war costs are $170 billion, an estimate provided by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates). You read that correctly: the United States will spend more on defense over the next 365 days than on the $700 bailout package.

That averages out to $1.9 Billion a day!

Where are our priorities?

As a Truthout article points out…

"If the defense budget is indeed going to decline, the Pentagon will have to do something it hasn’t done in years," Sharp said. "It will have to choose what to spend money on instead of just buying everything it wants."

Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, points out in a recent report in Armed Forces Journal that, in contrast with their price tag, our military forces are smaller than they have been since the end of World War II, and major military equipment is older than it has ever been. Wheeler attributes this strange disparity to gross misappropriation of funding, with more money now being used to buy fewer weapons – some of which will not even be used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Additionally, Sharp noted the high price tag of "high-risk missile defense programs," as well as Cold-War-era weapons systems that are not only costly, but also out of date.

"There’s lots of low-hanging fruit, if ever there were a Congress or a Secretary of Defense willing to make cuts," Wheeler told Truthout.

Rethinking military spending right now is trickier than it might look, according to Craig Jennings, federal fiscal policy analyst at the government watchdog group OMB Watch. In a time of deep economic crisis, Jennings told Truthout, it doesn’t make sense to cut government funding. Yet, a shifting of funds from the military to other priorities could work well.

We need to hold our critters’ feet to the fire… They need to rein in their pet defense projects that virtually encompasses every federal congressional district, just as Ike noted…

Learning the lessons of history will avoid our being doomed to repeat it…!