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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We begin with an unknown that's probably really unknown, any day now, president Biden will either sign or veto a massive spending bill more than $800 billion just for the next year. 847 billion is the exact number I've seen. Maybe you're thinking that's a lot of money to run the federal government for one year, $847 billion, getting close to a trillion a year.

That's real money. Well, here's the reveal. That's not the whole federal budget for next year. That amount is just for the military, and it's $45 billion more than President Biden even requested. Congress added that 45 billion of our tax dollars more than the President put in for. We'll explain why. The whole federal budget, by the way, was around $6 trillion in the fiscal year that just ended according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Think Tank, the largest single item is healthcare at around 25% of the budget. Then social security at around 20%. Then the defense budget, which the center says is 13% of our tax dollars. Another way to look at it comes from the Turbo Tax website, believe it or not, which says the federal government spends approximately 20% of its budget on social security, 20% on healthcare, and 20% on national security, most of which goes to the Pentagon, the defense budget per se.

Those are some basics that you might not have known. While most members of Congress of both parties vote for these large amounts of defense spending every year, not all of them do. Here's a contrast that may interest you. Here is New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on this show last month when I asked her if the defense budget these days is too big for the nation's actual defense needs, I asked her that question. Gillibrand is on the Armed Services Committee, so it's very relevant to her. Here's the beginning of her answer

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Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Actually, this funding is essential for the men and women who serve for their families for their ability to have access to food and housing and we should not shore shift our military but more importantly, Brian, is the national security of the country. The reason why I go to the Halifax Conference and the COP26 conference is the world is much more dangerous than I think people understand and the risks to America are far greater than they actually know.

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Brian Lehrer: "The risks to America are far greater than most Americans actually know," said Senator Gillibrand here last month. We'll play more from that exchange coming up. Here's Senator Bernie Sanders on Sunday on CNN State of the Union. Sanders says he will vote as he usually does, against the defense budget Bill.

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Senator Bernie Sanders: Look, we have 85 million Americans who have no health insurance. We have 600,000 people who are homeless. We have a dysfunctional healthcare system, dysfunctional childcare system where working parents are paying $15,000 a year on average for childcare. We have got the stock protecting the needs of working families.

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Brian Lehrer: Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator's independent, of course, from Vermont, who speaks pretty differently from Senator Gillibrand, Democrat from New York, doesn't he? Let's talk about this as the president gets ready to sign or veto the bill, we all know he is going to sign it unless he shocks us. With us now, Slate's military affairs columnist Fred Kaplan, his columnist called War Stories, and he is the author of many books, including his latest The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Fred's column in Slate Atlas Week is called, there is No Good Reason for a Defense Budget This Large. Now you know where he stands. Fred, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fred Kaplan: Thanks. Good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: First of all, if listeners are surprised to hear this as our lead angle today, because nobody else is talking about it. That's part of your article. The media shrugs. At this ginormous defense budget.

Fred Kaplan: It is stunning. Let's put this in some perspective so 847 billion, as you said, that is 45 billion more than what President Biden asked for. What President Biden asked for was about 35 billion more than what the previous year's defense budget is. Last year's budget was $75 billion larger than Donald Trump's last budget so this is not Trump change.

Now you might say, and friends of mine that their initial reaction was, "Well, look, inflation is up by 7% or 8%. We're sending a lot of stuff to Ukraine." Makes sense that we need to spend that much more but here's the thing that is neglected this amount of money, this 847 billion does not include any adjustments for inflation. It does not include any of the extra weapons or the money that we're sending to Ukraine to buy weapons.

This is just the ordinary stuff. Next year, they will have to pass, Congress will have to pass an emergency supplemental that adjusts for inflation, that adjusts for the weapons that we're sending to Ukraine so this is what-- Let me just explain what this is because it's really crazy. Every year, the civilian leaders in the Pentagon and the White House set a maximum of what the defense budget's going to be, the services, the Army, Navy Air Force then submit their budgets, and then they submit something called unfunded requirements.

In other words, things that they would like to have, but that exceed the top line of the budget. This has been going on for years. Most of the time everybody in Congress knows that this is just political gamesmanship. It's not to be taken seriously. What happened this year is that Congress accepted the entire package of unfunded requirements. In other words, this extra 45 billion, it's not stuff for Ukraine that's already there.

It's just more planes, more ships, more of this, it's not like they went through the budget and said, oh, the price of these 30 planes has gone up. We'd better ask for more money. No, they're asking for another 10 or 12 or 15 planes, which are going to cost more and so, actually, even this 847 billion, by the time the Supplementals come in next year, it's almost certainly going to exceed 900 billion or so.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you think nobody but you practically is talking about it in the media? I mean what has made news is the provision in this Defense Authorization Act that Republicans got in there that ends the COVID vaccine mandate for members of the armed forces. There's been coverage of that, but not the budget itself in any scrutinized way. Why do you think that is?

Fred Kaplan: Well, my cynical answer would be the next time Senator Gillibrand is on your show, you should ask her. I don't really know the answer. It might be that part of it is theater, like the defense budget. Not that many people in Congress take a close it's an enormous document. There are staffers on the committees that scrutinize it, but most congressmen don't and so the world, she's right. The world is a more dangerous place.

Some of our rivals are acting more aggressively. There is inflation and so the inclination is, well, let's just give the Pentagon whatever amount of money they ask for. I think that's part of it. Also, I think part of it, maybe in the last few years, we've all become numbed to the sounds and sight of extraordinary sums of money. I mean the amount of money that went for COVID relief or infrastructure maybe compared with a few years ago, 800 billion doesn't sound like such an extraordinarily marked.

Brian Lehrer: Some maybe not. I think in the COVID era, the total federal budget did jump from about $4 trillion to about $6 trillion so that's obviously ginormous in its own right. To take a step back, referring to what I brought up in the intro, most people don't know what the federal budget is or right where it goes so that breakdown is pretty interesting. Roughly, according to TurboTax, 20% for defense and other national security, 20% for social security, 20% for all the healthcare programs. Medicare, Medicaid, the children's health insurance program, and Obamacare policy subsidies. Someone once said the United States government is basically an insurance company with an army. It's like that. No.

Fred Kaplan: Well, they also say Russia doesn't have a military-industrial complex. It is a military-industrial complex so maybe with oil tossed in there as well. It's not bad. This is going to make me sound like an old codger, one of these old people complaining about kids-

Brian Lehrer: These days.

Fred Kaplan: -running on the sidewalks or something, but when I worked on the Hill as a staffer, now again, this was 40 years ago, but there were staff members of the Armed Services Committees and the House and the Senate, and these were tended to be very hawkish guys, and they almost all were guys back then, but they would scrutinize every line item of the defense budget.

They would say, "Well, this system, it's proved really, it doesn't work in tests. We're withholding the funding until the tests get better. This, looking at systems A and B, they do the same thing, and B is more cost-effective than A, so we're getting rid of A." They would really do it at that level. As I understand it these days, nobody is really doing this. Nobody is doing it.

Also, Brian, the kinds of comparisons you were mentioning with healthcare and so forth, there are congressional budget committees. What most people don't know is that the budget committees were set up in the 1970s in the wake of the Vietnam War and a lot of criticism of the defense budget. The whole point of the budget committees were to set national priorities.

In other words, they were supposed to come in and they were going to say, "We're going to allocate this much for guns and this much for butter," so to speak. It just never worked out that way because the chairman of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees were much more powerful. There is actually nobody in the Congress, and really, not that many people in the White House either, who say, "We have this chunk of money and we have these things that all the agency heads say are priorities.

Here's the amount of budget, here's the money that they're going to get. You have to set priorities within that sum of money you can't have anymore." That doesn't happen anymore. One, you would think, crucial function of government, which is to determine how much of the tax dollars go to X, Y, and Z doesn't really happen.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you can weigh in here too, or ask Fred Kaplan a question, are we spending too much, too little, or Goldilocks just right on the US military? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Should Biden sign or veto the Defense Spending Authorization Act or anything else you want to say to or ask Fred Kaplan War Stories columnist from Slate 212-433-WNYC or tweet @Brian Lehrer? By the way, do you think there's any chance that Biden vetoes this Defense Authorization Act because he sees it as too big or for any other reason?

Fred Kaplan: No, and I bet the House can give odds on that one.

Brian Lehrer: I bet the House and the Senate. 212-433-9692 on those comparisons with Medicare and Social Security spending, Giovanni in [unintelligible 00:13:08] is calling in. Giovanni, you are on WNYC. Hi there.

Giovanni: Good morning. When you made a reference to that amount of money at $6 trillion, and Mr. Kaplan said, well, 20%, 25% of that goes into social security, some amount of it goes into Medicare which is health, what you didn't say, and I'm retired, I have Social security, I have Medicare, I'll be 83, but I pay that. It's an earned entitlement. Everybody pays for it at a flat rate. No distinction. 6.1% up to, I think, at this point may be close to $200,000.

Brian Lehrer: I think it's 125%.

Giovanni: That's not an issue. Let's get that clarified. Now, in terms of the military budget, he asked you about Senator Gillibrand that was on your show. You might remember when she said, "Yes, we're trying to work some things out. We should get it done. It's going to go in on an omnibus." Now, the omnibus is the tricky part of any budget because when you look at it, that's where people, you want to build a wall like Trump or somebody

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Brian Lehrer: That's the more general federal budget.

Giovanni: Correct. I think she mentioned omnibus per se. That's where they start digging and see where the Congress goes, no, we want the army bush. That's where our

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Brian Lehrer: Got it. Giovanni. Thank you. An interesting call and certainly he's right Fred as you know that there is a Medicare tax and a social security tax, what we call payroll taxes that come out of people's paychecks. It is a separate show and worth talking about, and we do talk about it, that the amount of money that goes in from people's payroll taxes isn't enough to fund the projected need of all the retirees coming in the next decades, but at least there are those separate tranches of money that we pay for like that by name, and then we have to figure out how to make it enough.

I wonder what would happen if there was a military budget tax dedicated out of our paychecks that would start a whole different debate in this country about the military budget, perhaps you think?

Fred Kaplan: Well, also, another thing about social security is that it's obligated. Congress can't touch that. There's two different parts of the budget. One is stuff that you can actually adjust and the other part, which is previously obligated. Of the part that can be touched, the military actually is a much higher percentage. I don't have the number right here, but it's something like 50% or 60%.

Look, obviously, I think the level of public education on this issue is extraordinarily low. The fact that you thought, and I think probably correctly, that many of your listeners might have thought, that the entire federal budget might be something like $850 billion is stunning. I really blame the mass media for some of this. There should be, and there used to be explainer pieces on this.

When the Congress passes a $16 trillion, or whatever it is, budget on an $850 billion defense budget, there should be something in the newspaper or online or something that rather than focus so much on what this guy said and how that person voted, and some tiny little but controversial item in the budget that's been passed or rejected, should have a little statement, here's what this is.

$50 billion of this is for nuclear weapons, $25 billion is for navy ships. Here are the kinds of contingencies that people think this might be needed for. Otherwise, you fail to recognize that the Defense Department, and listen, I'm not someone for slashing the defense budget to what it was 10 years ago or anything like that, but it is a bureaucracy.

It is no accident that the percentage of the defense budget that goes to the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force is almost one-third, one-third, one-third. Now, what does that tell you? It either tells you that the founders of the Defense Department in 1947 who figured out roles and missions of the services were incredibly wise enough to realize that 70 years from now, you would still have these divided up, one-third, one-third, one-third, or it's a bureaucracy like everything else.

If you gave one service way more money than the other two services, there's going to be a revolt of the admirals or the generals. It is a political document. It is a bureaucratic document. It is also a national security document, but those distinctions need to be made and parsed.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, didn't you leave out a branch of the military? It's in the Army--

Fred Kaplan: Well, the Marines--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, the Marine.

Fred Kaplan: The Marines is part of the Navy so it's included in the Navy budget.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian in the Bronx, you're on WNYC with Fred Kaplan, War Stories columnist from Slate. Hi, Brian.

Brian: Oh, hello. Thank you. I'm making the same point that was made before that the Social security inclusion is the unified budget, which I think is the Vietnam-era attempt to dilute the percentage that the Pentagon makes. I think the point was just made excellent. It is more like half of what we spend. Social security is money that comes out of the federal government, but there's no discretion about it.

It is a separate option. That was made well so I won't ask you to repeat it, but then I would add that president Jimmy Carter, didn't he make the point recently that some of these countries that are our so-called enemies, I am in favor of slashing the military budget just to say, our so-called enemies don't spend this vast amount of money, and that part of the reason that China, which is a country I'm not saying we should become more like in a general way, but part of the reason that they're able to accomplish what they accomplish, including investing in our debt is because they don't fight these endless wars and they don't spend this amount of money, and a final point is, if you look at the wars that we've fought since 9/11, they've accomplished nothing. The Taliban's still in Afghanistan and according to Kirsten Gillibrand, the world was more dangerous. It's very expensive and very ineffective.

Brian Lehrer: Brian, a lot of interesting points there. I'm sure a lot of people in the military and national leadership, in general, would say that things were accomplished in the Iraq war, maybe in the Afghanistan war. Fred, both callers so far have brought up the Vietnam era. I noted a line in your article arguing that today's defense budget, which you say is too big is structured along Cold War lines. What military or military budget is that?

Fred Kaplan: Well, it's basically structured. Look at the Navy budget, it's basically structured around aircraft carriers. If you have an aircraft carrier, it needs escort ships, destroyers, frigates, cruisers, submarines, supply ships. It's all structured around that. Army, it's structured around brigades. Air Force is structured on Air Airways. There are defense analysts who stay, look, the big threat from China--

We're going to send these enormous ships into their harbors. They're going to get pummeled with anti-ship missiles. Maybe what we need are a larger number of smaller ships. There's even some research and development in ships that aren't manned by anybody like drones. There is no systematic thought being given to these alternative defense postures within the Defense Department.

It's the structure that there are new things in there. For example, there's quite a lot of money in this budget for artificial intelligence and cyber defense and that thing. If you woke up somebody who'd fallen asleep in the 1970s and had them looking at this defense budget, they wouldn't find too many surprises in it.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Can you confirm what the caller said about China's military budget for a country that also has global geopolitical ambitions and that has four times as many people as the United States, is their military budget less or less of a percentage of their federal budget? Do you happen to know?

Fred Kaplan: Yes, it is, but here's something that is overlooked. There's a lot of people who say the United States' defense budget is larger than the next 10 countries combined. I don't know if that's exactly true, but generally, it's true but there's a reason for this, and this is something worth debating as well. China, Russia, India, other countries, they're basically regional powers. We are a global power. We have commitments across the globe.

We need military forces of the Atlantic, the Pacific, Europe, Korea. We're all over the place. Therefore, if that is the case, and if that's the way we want it, we have to spend a lot more money. Also, we pay our soldiers and sailors and airmen a lot more money than other countries do and they just got a, I think a five and a half percent pay hike in this budget and also provide for their healthcare to a much greater extent than any other.

That's part of the defense budget too but in terms of the global commitments, maybe there should be a debate. There hasn't been one for a long time. Do we want to have a commitment to defend all these parts of the globe and if you do, then a higher defense budget, again, as I'm saying, not necessarily a defense budget this high but a higher defense budget than what other countries is spending is necessary.

Brian Lehrer: Two of our callers went back to the Vietnam era, Greg in Brooklyn is going to go back even further. Greg, you're on WNYC. Hello?

Greg: Hi, Brian. Good morning. I just want to very quickly go way back about 70 years to after the II World War, when President Dwight Eisenhower reminded everybody of his military-industrial complex that was developing at that time and he warned the country about the dangers of a self-perpetuating a system like that, which when unfortunately has happened.

I think, Brian, after 9/11, the level of paranoia in this country grew so greatly that the Pentagon essentially got a blank check and frankly, the Pentagon doesn't even ask for this much money. It's congress and the political hacks in Congress that want to preserve their pork barrels for their districts and that's why they're such an inflated budget. I just want to reflect on that and put that in. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. On the military-industrial complex, let me go right to another caller. CT in Brooklyn who has a personal story that's I think going to reflect or at least allege something here. Hi, CT.

CT: Hello. I worked in contracting industry after the Vietnam era from '76 to '84 and I do know at that time that contractors would inflate the prices quite a bit. A whole lot. I also remember that there was a big thing in the news.

I think one of the presidents back then made a note of it, how prices were being inflated for the military and it was in the media and then it just stopped but did it then greatly, and I'm sure they do it even more now. You can have one product that's a price for everybody else in the military, they would boost the price up and that's not all I have to say.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much for that anecdote. We used to hear about the $700 toilet seats and things like that. Not so much anymore. I don't know if they do a better job of weeding that out but they're corporate interests and as the previous caller said, there are port barrel interests because there are jobs related to the Pentagon in their districts, right?

Fred Kaplan: Yes. Well, you remember that there was a defense, a Pentagon cost analyst many years ago named Ernie Fitzgerald who said that an airplane is simply a fleet of spare parts flying in close formation. In other words, what you heard about the $600 toilet seat and that thing, it applies to every spare part that's on a plane and a plane is basically just a collection of spare part.

This is part of the problem. There is no real competition. There have been so many mergers in the defense industry. You've got basically three or four major defense contractors and once they have a contract to build a ship, that's a big thing. That takes a multi-year venture. If the costs suddenly go way up, it's not like the Pentagon can say, oh, we're taking this away from corporation X and we're going to give it to corporation B.

It's too late and you have to pony up to whatever-- Just one correction of one of your callers. Eisenhower made the remark about the military-industrial complex in his farewell speech of 1960 but look, this was a former five-star army general. He knew what he was talking about.

Brian Lehrer: Well, continue in a minute with Fred Kaplan, War Stories columnist from Slate. We're going to play another Gillibrand versus Bernie Sanders contrast pair of clips. When we come back and finish up this conversation and take more of your phone calls, a few more. Stay with us.

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Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: We have to be much more thoughtful about our place in the world and how we protect America and protect all these freedoms and protect everything that's necessary for human life. You cannot do that without making these long-term investments. I think the Ukrainian people are so grateful that America had the resources to send them the equipment they needed. Most of NATO did not invest in that way over the last two decades because they assumed there'd never be a war in Europe again.`

Senator Bernie Sanders: The Pentagon is the one major agency of government which has never been independently audited. There is massive waste and fraud and cost overruns within that agency so I think we can have the strong defense that we need without spending the huge amount of money that we're currently spending on the military.

Brian Lehrer: Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat from New York on this show last month, Bernie Sanders, independent from Vermont on CNN State of the Union on Sunday, as we're talking about the huge Defense Budget Act that President Biden will either sign or veto any day why it's so big nearly a trillion dollars and why almost nobody in the Democratic Party or the press makes much noise about that with Slates War Stories columnists, Fred Kaplan.

A few of our callers who we're not going to have time to get to because Bernie just articulated it, are calling in about this audit issue, saying the military won't audit itself like other agencies of government do. Do that to be true?

Fred Kaplan: As I understand it, there have been audits and there's always is a huge amount of money, tens of billions of dollars, that they cannot account for. They're not set up to be audited. I don't think-- It's not like somebody is pocketing this money. It's not kept track of in the same way that other government agencies, which, by the way, the Defense Department is the only government agency that really does a lot of manufacturing. Most other federal spending is services. Occasionally some goods, but it's mainly transfer payments. This is actually manufacturing stuff with no competition. Remember Biden said capitalism without competition is, what was it, swindles or something like that?

That's what's going on plus the phrase that a lot of conservative say about domestic spending, you can't just throw money at a problem. I think that's true. That's what we're doing with the defense budget. We're just throwing money. Let's say that it's done absolutely perfectly. Nobody's examining it. The oversight committees that are supposed to be examining it and the media that's supposed to be scrutinizing it. I've been looking at defense budgets for about 40 years. I know which documents to look at. It's not rocket science, but it's not exactly something that you can just wake up and figure out how to do in 15 minutes either. There needs to be a lot more public education about this.

Brian Lehrer: We've been talking about why the Democratic Party, which is supposed to be the anti-war party going back to Vietnam days and to some degree Iraq War days, why they don't make a big thing about the size of the defense budget. I don't mean to single out Senator Gillibrand, that's just a clip that we've had from our show that's representative really, of almost everybody in the Democratic Party in Congress. The Republicans could also be making noise as the party of fiscal restraint, but they are also the party of a strong national defense, and they're rhetoric more than the Democrats.

There is another thread in the GOP these days that Steve Bannon and to some degree Trump himself talked that same line spending should not be on military adventurism overseas but on working Americans at home. Is there a right left Bernie Sanders Steve Bannon coalition in a certain respect?

Fred Kaplan: Yes, in certain respect, but very little of this budget is for military adventurism or military operations, call it what you will. The parts that are tend to get to jack up the budget in an emergency supplemental. We're spending. So far, we've sent about $20 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine. Now, this tends to come out of our own stockpiles and at some point, there will be a supplemental request for about $20 billion to refill those stockpiles. $20 billion sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but that's 5%, not even 5% of the total defense budget.

I think that will keep going and that's a different show as you'd like to say, but for a while, it looked like there might be some danger in that because some Republicans, more isolationist wing were and McCarthy were saying we can't just give Ukraine a blank check on this. The incoming chairman of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees are actually quite gung ho on Ukraine and in every other part of the defense budget.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, that's interesting.

Fred Kaplan: I don't think that's going to be endangered.

Brian Lehrer: I was about to ask you about that because some Republicans are saying enough. We have needs here at home, which is not that different from the sentiment Bernie Sanders expressed.

Fred Kaplan: Let's see about whether they find that argument at home.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, well, there's certainly that, but here's Texas Republican Congressman Michael McCaul. Listen.

Michael McCaul: Every single US dollar counts and the Biden administration should expect the Republican-controlled majority in the House next congress to be vigilant and demanding transparency and accountability for US assistance to Ukraine. The American taxpayer deserves this. The era of writing blank checks I think is over.

Brian Lehrer: That was from a congressional committee hearing just last week, but you don't think there's going to be much in terms of numbers have Republicans who don't want to send more aid to Ukraine?

Fred Kaplan: I don't think so. Also, I think this fund, the money, the weapons that are being sent over to Ukraine, and the reimbursements we receive for that from our own defense budget, that I think is being documented pretty closely, precisely to preempt these kinds of challenges. I don't think there's a lot of traction for them to gain on this.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. John in Babylon, you're on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: Hi, how are you doing? I just want to challenge this assertion that there's no auditing and no accountability in defense manufacturing in the Defense Department budget. The DCMA, the Defense Contract Management Agency, that's all they do is constantly audit defense contracts. They watch things tightly, they are down to the nickel and dime. The idea that there's no competition just isn't true. It's an intensely competitive industry. People compete against each other constantly and what your guest said is exactly accurate. This is a manufacturing, goods are delivered. The goods are verifiable, do they work, do they not work. If they don't work, money isn't spent on them anymore.

If they do work, then more money is spent on them and they're improved. It's not like Medicare, where there can be a tremendous amount of fraud and there's no definable deliverable product at the end of the day. This money is spent, they get outstanding product, and it's demonstrated by the fact that 5% of our budget has brought the Russians to their knees in Ukraine. That's nothing for us, and we've stopped them dead in their tracks. This is money well spent in a very dangerous world. China does not like us, they're not our friend. Russia is not our friend.

This is money that we actually get a payback from, and it creates really good, well-paying, high-skilled, good benefits middle-class jobs, that keep middle-class people in their homes, send their kids to college, and they got people retire at a decent age. This money is probably the best-spent money the government spends. To say that it's not audited and it's not competitive is not true.

Brian Lehrer: Well, first of all, tell my elderly parents that there's no actual-defined benefit from Medicare but you told her screener that you represent defense manufacturers in New York. You're the chairman of an industry group on Long Island, so just for disclosure.

John: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: Is there still much of a defense contractor industry on Long Island? My uncle worked for Grumman back in the day, is there still much on the island?

John: Excluding Queens and Brooklyn, which we could add in, Long Island does about $6 billion a year in direct contracts. There's about 10,000 direct employees just in Nassau and Suffolk and well over a million square feet of manufacturing space. It's a tremendous economic driver for Long Island and those dollars are all dollars that come into New York from out of state.

They are either aerospace dollars coming from Boeing out in Seattle or in Wichita, Kansas, or they're defense dollars coming from the federal government. Those are contracts coming from California, St. Louis, Missouri, coming out of Texas, some of them coming from Massachusetts. In New York itself, it's far, far greater. We have billions and billions of dollars in direct defense manufacturing in New York State that no one knows about.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you for your call. I appreciate it. There's chairman of a defense manufacturers industry group calling in. We're almost out of time but what were you thinking as he was saying all of that?

Fred Kaplan: Well, there are auditors, it's the DCMA, but it is a very undermanned, underfunded agency and I think he understands that. There is something called the Development Test and Evaluation Office and Operational Test and Evaluation Office, which does supervise tests of weapons. Again, very undermanned, very underfunded. Several years ago, there was a real tiger who ran that office, he was fired. His entire staff was fired. There are a lot of weapons that are deemed to be-- For example, if there's a test of a big missile, and it's launched but then explodes before hitting its target. That's considered a partial success because it was launched. It's not considered a failure.

The kinds of weapons that we're sending to Ukraine in the context of the entire US defense budget, these are very low-tech weapons. In terms of what's going on in Europe and against Russia, they're highly sophisticated but these are pretty straightforward weapons and they're doing quite fine. Competition, spare parts and subcontracts and things like that with some systems, they're very competitive in terms of the prime contractors, the actual like Grumman, Luckey, Northrop, things like that, it's very uncompetitive. They're not even a handful of major defense contractors doing that work. The caller is doing his job and he's right about some things, but he overstates the oversight that we really have on these things.

Brian Lehrer: There you have it, folks. Now at least you know that there is an $847 billion Defense Authorization Act on President Biden's desk right now, including $45 billion more provided by Congress than the president even requested. Not many people are talking about it. We have thanks in large part to Slate's military affairs of War Stories columnist Fred Kaplan. His column on this is called, there is No Good Reason for a Defense Budget This Large. His latest book is The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Fred, thanks so much as always.

Fred Kaplan: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

 

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