Hugely bloated military budget? Perhaps not.

Click here for a Paul Krugman "Opinion" article in The New York Times entitled "Military spending isn't as expensive as you think." 

It starts with an interesting look at the concept of "left" and "right," commonly thought of as too simplistic:  

Well, while people may be complicated, politicians aren’t. Careful statistical analysis of congressional voting shows that politicians are very clearly arrayed along a left-right spectrum (yes, Joe Manchin is the rightmost Democrat, and Susan Collins is the leftmost Republican).

Krugman makes the point that "voters aren’t as easily characterized as politicians, but they, too, seem to be growing more one-dimensional."

Then he gets to the common belief that military spending is excessive:

It’s true that Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.” But he gave that speech in 1961 — that is, his warning was as far in our past as, say, the Spanish-American War was in his. Military spending today is much smaller as a share of the economy than it was then.

He follows with an eye-opening chart that shows that while defense spending as a share of GDP was high in the '50s -- as high as 16 percent at one point and 12 percent in 1961, when Eisenhower gave his famous speech. But since 2000, that figure has been somewhere around 3 to 4 percent -- as high as 6 percent around 2010, but close to 3 percent in the last few years

He concludes: 

So, do we have a hugely bloated military budget? No doubt the Pentagon, like any large organization, wastes a lot of money. But recent events have made the case for spending at least as much as we currently do, and perhaps more.

First, one of the revelations from the war in Ukraine has been that those expensive NATO weapons systems, from Javelin anti-tank missiles to HIMARS, actually do work.

More important, it turns out that the era of large-scale conventional warfare isn’t over after all, and there are real concerns about whether our weapons production capacity is large enough to deal with the potential threats.

By all means, let’s have good-faith arguments about how much America should spend on its military. But repeating 60-year-old clichés about the military-industrial complex doesn’t help the discussion.