In June 1879, William Tecumseh Sherman gave a speech to the cadets of Michigan Military Academy.  There before a crowd of 10,000 people he had this to say,“…I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that someday you can use the skill you have acquired here.  Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!”

            Hell is what we as a nation have been in for the better part of a decade.  But this hell had an upside.  During this last decade the United States has had to re-grow its’ military from the drawdown of the 1980’s - 1990’s to the state we are in today.  Prior to 9/11 the Defense budget was around $370 billion, today the Defense budget is $550 billion dollars.  This buildup in personnel and equipment led to many things; jobs and an industrial military complex that has benefitted greatly from America’s decade of confict. 

            The military has around 1.4 million men and women serving on active duty.  This is a far cry from the previous decades when there were over 2 million people serving on active duty (Defense Budget for FY2003: Data Summary", CRS Report for Congress). It is easy to do the math, since the end of the Cold War the U.S. has cut over 600,000 from its active duty force.  From this downturn the military has had to rely more heavily on defense contractors.  The last fiscal year alone the “Department of Defense has spent $316 billion dollars on contracts… and at the start of Desert Storm there were 50 people serving in the military for every 1 contractor over seas.  In Afghanistan now, there are approximately 100,000 contractors, a ratio of 1:1  (Singer, Peter W. "The Regulation of New Warfare", The Brookings Institution, February 2010.).  Cuts to the Defense Department are being felt on Military bases all across the United States.  Security officers on posts are getting laid off, soldiers with a spotty past that the military turned a blind eye to, as little as 3 years ago, are now being chaptered from the because they never could shake their criminal behavior.  It won’t stop there, soon it will be PT failures, or soldiers that can’t progress in ranks and if the Defense Department can’t meet it’s numbers from chapters then the cuts will come.

            Cuts too are already being felt in the defense industry.  “Honeywell, which sells aircraft engines and other kits to the military, expects the base budget to decline about 1 to 2 per cent a year over the next decade, resulting in a 2 per cent to 4 per cent annual decline in revenues for its defense unit for three years...expect these budget cuts to affect the large prime contractors and to ripple across the supply chain to smaller, specialized providers,” (Industry feels the sting of US Defense Cuts, By: Jeremy Lemer, Financial Times).  The talk now isn’t about when change is coming, because it has already.    

People today are tired of war and look at the military as the biggest offender of an overspent federal government.  They are tired of the nation building in countries that many of them will never set foot in. So politicians will go after the defense budget, because most of their constituents will clamor for that happen then to see cuts in their medicare or social security.  But the Defense budget has an unforeseen effect on these two programs.  The Defense Budget is what has made the American economy the powerhouse it is today.  We have freedom of the seas because of the power of the US Navy.

  The United States needs to be strategic in allocating future resources.  Human rights in developing and land-locked countries depend heavily on foreign assistance.  Better appropriations procedures and auditing can go a long way to ensure that mouths are truly being fed. Budget constraints will be felt on domestic and international economies.  It will be as Sherman said, "hell".