The US$716.5 billion military budget requested from Congress by US President George W. Bush earlier this week has set new records and raised many eyebrows both at home and abroad.

White House officials said the budget request can be viewed as the Bush administration's efforts to bring defense spending under control and make it more transparent.

The package includes US$235.1 billion to support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the regular defense budget for the 2008 fiscal year, which alone hits US$481.4 billion, among the highest in the history of US defense expenditure.

The US defense budget reached US$497 billion in 1952 during the Korean War, and US$428 billion in 1968 during the Vietnam War. In 1985 when the Reagan administration launched a massive military buildup, it surged to US$453 billion, according to Fred Kaplan, a defense expert at Slate.com.

US defense expenditure in 2008 will be higher than it has been since WWII, said Steven Kosiak, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think-tank.

Long-term goals and the present war

The continuous increase in US military spending is a story of decades, if not centuries, in accordance with the basic policy for all US presidents to sustain the country's military supremacy in the world as an essential tool to maintain the country's superpower status.

Therefore, it is not surprising that every year a large portion of the US defense budget will be spent on costly programs to develop and procure the most advanced weapons in the world.

In the 2008 defense budget, the funds allocated to such programs total some US$140 billion, a figure close to that of the current year.

Programs like the F-22 stealth fighter, the next-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the DDG-1000 stealth destroyer, the Virginia-class attack submarine and space weapons, will never have to worry about their funding.

However, more money has been needed since the Bush administration launched its costly "war on terror" in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, prompting record highs of US military expenditure in the years since then.

According to statistics from Congress, the Bush administration has so far spent more than US$500 billion fighting the "war on terror," and most of that money has been spent in Iraq.

The situation poses a problem of how to allocate resources between supporting the present war in Iraq and the long-term goal of sustaining military supremacy.

To ease the contradiction, the Bush administration tends to place hope on an early end to the war. The new budget plan expects the war costs to drastically decrease in 2009 from the level of US$141.7 billion projected for 2008.

Guns and butter

Notably, the big leap of US military expenditure in the 2008 budget plan is achieved at the expense of domestic spending.

Compared with the 11.3 percent hike in the defense budget, those for non-military programs only get the slightest increase of 1 percent.

If the inflation factor is taken into account, budgets for those programs actually shrink.

In other words, it is a budget seeking more "guns" but less "butter."

As a result, the bipartisan conflict is going to be more complicated.

All the programs facing budgetary cuts, including healthcare and education, are the policy priorities for Democrats, who promised voters to invest more in these programs as they took back control of Congress last month.

But the Democrats, with the 2008 presidential election in their sights, are unwilling to propose sharp cuts in military spending, as it would be viewed by some voters as a move to harm the US military.

The most likely result of the bipartisan fight is expected to be a limited reshaping of the budget.

If the budget plan encounters big problems, the Democrats will have more grounds on which to exploit the mistakes of the George W. Bush administration, thus boosting their chances in the 2008 race, according to analysts.

Whatever the outcome of the bipartisan fight, the burden of war is certainly to be shouldered by US citizens, who mostly care about "butter" and not "guns."

(Xinhua News Agency February 8, 2007)