Good question BK. In researching the answer, I found that I was wrong in my original estimates of annual savings. I made the mistake of calculating things like the Congress so often does--using a ten-year period rather than just one year.

We have spent a trillion dollars on fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, $1.121 trillion to be exact. But that was over a nine-year period, from 9/11/2001 thru fiscal 2010. That's an average of about $125 billion per year. That's almost one-quarter of the entire current defense budget of the U.S.

The pace of war spending is increasing. Recently Congress approved the (supplementary) fiscal 2010 defense spending bill that included $128 billion to be spent on the two conflicts through Sept. 30. The Defense Department has said that it will request an additional $33 billion to pay for the surge in Afghanistan troop strength earlier this year. So it looks like war spending this year will total $158 billion. Total defense spending will be about $558 billion for 2010.

If we use Congress's "ten year estimate" approach, continued war spending at the current rate would total $1.58 trillion in the next ten years, an increase of 26% over war costs so far.

Returning to how much could potentially be saved in defense spending, I'll refer everyone to a recent report published by the conservative Washington think tank, The Cato Institute. In their report, a recommendation to the current 108th Congress which was not acted upon, Cato recommends a reduction in defense spending from current levels to about $200 billion per year. That would be a 50% cut in "basic" defense spending. Added to that amount would be any savings resulting from a reduction in troop strength in Iraq and Afghanistan in coming years. Make whatever assumptions you'd like on that question--Iraq says they want us totally out of there in 2011, and many military experts have opined that our efforts in Afghanistan are totally ineffective and should be stopped as soon as possible. Everyone should arrive at their own conclusions on the question of how much longer we keep fighting wars in the Middle East.

The portion of the Cato report regarding defense spending, with all their detailed recommendations, can be found at...


By the way, in their report Cato recommends cutting the number of attack submarines from 55 to 25, more than a 50% reduction.

So what is the bottom line on what potential annual savings in defense spending might be? Reading a lot of what has been published suggests that it could be in the range of $250 to $350 billion per year.

Another bit of perspective might be of interest. As Draconian as the Cato-recommended cuts to the defense budget would be, if achieved they would reduce the total federal budget by about 7.6% per year. Such huge cuts would only reduce the total national debt by about 2% per year! There would need to be substantial more cost-cutting and probably increased revenues in order to first balance the annual budgets and then begin to reduce the national debt.

Substantial additional cuts in federal spending as well as increases in revenues (taxes) will obviously be necessary for the U.S. to move towards a budget that actually begins to whittle away at the skyrocketing national debt. If we think that cutting the budget of the Defense Department in half is Draconian, consider how little it would actually accomplish in balancing the budget and reducing our national debt. Consider how much more every American will have to sacrifice in order to achieve meaningful results. As I've said here before, it's simple arithmetic.