In today’s story about the Barney Frank appearance on Monday, your reporter wrote: “considering that most of the defense department’s budget is spent outside the United States.” Overall, I am very sympathetic with Frank’s message, but not with that phrase; it is simply wrong.

It is not clear from the story that these are Frank’s words or the reporter’s, since there are no quotation marks. But either Frank was wrong, or the reporter did not understand what he said.

By far the lion’s share of the defense budget is spent in the United States. It pays contractors and workers in the U.S. (like Bath Iron works) to make goods for the military. It pays service contractors, in the U.S., to provide things like fuel, base maintenance (as at the now closed Brunswick NAS). It buys research from companies and American universities. It pays 800,000 civil servants almost all of whom work in the U.S. for the military. And it pays the salaries and benefits of U.S. forces, the vast majority of whom are based in the U.S.. In Maine, in 2009, for example, that meant $2.4 billion in total defense spending, $776 million of which was for contracting at Bath.*

Only a tiny part of the $600 billion defense budget is actually spent overseas, even when the troops are deployed overseas. Payroll for troops in Afghanistan is mostly paid stateside and spent by their families who live here. Equipment for Afghanistan is bought in this country.

It is part of the problem Barney Frank underlined in his talk — we spend way more than we need to on the military in part because of the domestic economic impact of that spending, and the lobbying of communities and contractors who have made the military budget a jobs program in this country. What the development of projects like Brunswick Landing can demonstrate is that it is possible to create a healthy local economy without Defense Department dollars.

Gordon Adams
Brunswick

*Source: Bloomberg Government Study, Impact of Defense Spending: A State-by-State Analysis, November 2011, based on U.S. Govt. data.