This text was adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee. Preface

“A Theft from Those Who Hunger and Are Not Fed”

Oscar Arias, a former president of Costa Rica and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, echoed these famous words from President Eisenhower when he wrote a decade ago that US military spending took money away from important domestic needs. “Americans are hurt,” he warned, “when the defense budget squanders money that could be used to repair schools or to guarantee universal health care” (Arias, 1999, p. A19). ^[51]



The $300 million cost of each F-35 fighter aircraft could pay for the salaries of 10,000 new teachers.

Source: “First F-35C Flight,”Wikipedia, Last modified on November 20, 2011, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_F-35C_Flight.ogv.

Since Arias wrote these words, the United States has spent more than $5.5 trillion on defense outlays in constant dollars (see Figure 16.3 "International Military Spending, 2010"), including $1.3 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cost equivalencies illustrate what is lost when so much money is spent on the military, especially on weapons systems that do not work and are not needed.

For example, the F-35 fighter aircraft has been plagued with “management problems, huge cost-overruns, [and] substantial performance shortfalls,” according to a recent news report (Kaplan, 2012).^[52] Each F-35 costs about $300 million. This same sum could be used to pay the salaries of 10,000 new teachers earning $30,000 per year or to build twenty elementary schools at a cost of $15 million each. In another example, the Navy is designing a new series of nuclear submarines, with construction planned to start in 2019. The Navy plans to purchase twelve of these submarines. Each submarine is projected to cost more than $8 billion to build and another $21 billion in constant dollars in operation and maintenance costs over its lifetime (Castelli, 2012). ^[53] This $29 billion sum for each submarine during its lifetime could provide 5.8 million scholarships worth $5,000 each to low- and middle-income high school students to help them pay for college.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provide additional examples of “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.” These wars cost the United States about $1.3 trillion through 2012, for an average of more than $100 billion annually (Harrison, 2012). ^[54] This same yearly amount could have paid for one year’s worth (California cost figures) of all of the following (National Priorities Project, 2012): ^[55]

• 
  146,000 police officers
  
• 
  million children receiving low-income health care (Medicaid)
  
• 
  1.7 million students receiving full-tuition scholarships at state universities
  
• 
  1.6 million Head Start slots for children
  
• 
  179,000 elementary school teachers
  
• 
  162,000 firefighters
  
• 
  2.5 million Pell Grants of $5,550 each
  

All these figures demonstrate that war and preparation for war indeed have a heavy human cost, not only in the numbers of dead and wounded, but also in the diversion of funds from important social functions and needs.