Many of the talking heads in our media equate security and defense with how much we spend on our military.<\/p>\n
Evidently, President Joe Biden agrees with those talking heads, as his administration\u2019s first defense budget is $715 billion, larger than President Donald Trump\u2019s last defense budget. Just $10.4 billion is allocated to cybersecurity, identified as a threat by many. However, this isn\u2019t the labor-intensive task as other portions of our defense budget and therefore doesn\u2019t serve as a jobs creator as other portions of the budget. So, it doesn\u2019t receive as much attention. Arguments over what really constitutes security are absent in today\u2019s discussion on defense. However, there are a few in the political realm willing to speak some truth.\u00a0Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, called the budget request \u201ca starting point,\u201d adding that in-depth, bipartisan hearings will be held to hash out the proposal\u2019s details because \u201ctaxpayers shouldn\u2019t have to pay for programs or systems that are wasteful or ineffective.\u201d Again, we could invest more in cybersecurity and spend much less on military hardware and be safer. However, we\u2019re not receiving any leadership from Mr. Biden or many others.<\/p>\n
Of course, some\u00a0\u2014 working on behalf of the military-industrial complex\u00a0\u2014 are arguing that Biden\u2019s budget is a radical departure from Trump\u2019s, not even an argument if one looks at the numbers. Defense currently makes up just under half of total federal spending, according to the National Priorities Project. Hypersonic weapons are particularly important to President Biden\u2019s defense budget. Sara Sirota pointed out in her story \u201cBiden\u2019s Defense Budget is a Big Win for Hypersonic Weapons Contractors\u201d that the Pentagon has yet to point out the exact reason we need such weapons, but we\u2019re spending billions on them anyway! On top of the dollars spent, such weapons might kick off an arms race with geopolitical competitors like Russia and China.<\/p>\n
Proponents claim hypersonic weapons travel faster than the speed of sound and can evade detection by our enemies. However, some have voiced opposition.<\/p>\n
\u201cNumerous questions about the weapons remain, such as how the Pentagon plans to use them, their cost-effectiveness, and still-underexplored crisis instability risks,\u201d said\u00a0Kingston Reif, the Arms Control Association\u2019s disarmament expert. \u201cThese unanswered questions deserve a more critical examination by the Biden administration and Congress than has been undertaken to date.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cameron Tracy, an arms control expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, recently argued that hypersonic weapons\u2019 value has been exaggerated.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsing public data from a 2010 experimental Air Force boost-glide vehicle (one of two kinds of hypersonic systems), Tracy found that these weapons are in fact slower than ballistic missiles traveling intercontinental distances and are vulnerable to detection by space-based sensors,\u201d said Sirota of Tracy\u2019s findings in her story.<\/p>\n
While our country seems obsessed with every penny spent on anything non-military, the military-industrial complex has cornered the market on the discussion of the definition of security.<\/p>\n
When will the debate on real security start? Of course, that debate should include what it takes for our country (its citizens) to be economically secure, a key component of our overall security. More economic security might blunt the trend away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarian democracy.<\/p>\n
Jason Sibert<\/strong><\/p>\n Executive director of the Peace Economy Project in St. Louis. This story was originally published in Today’s Advantage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many of the talking heads in our media equate security and defense with how much we spend on our military. Evidently, President Joe Biden agrees with those talking heads, as his administration\u2019s first defense budget is $715 billion, larger than President Donald Trump\u2019s last defense budget. Just $10.4 billion is allocated to cybersecurity, identified as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/pep.jpg?fit=300%2C300&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6600,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6599\/revisions\/6600"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}