For these two WA Democrats, Ukraine conflict resets expectations for smaller military

President Biden signed into law a $1.5 trillion spending bill Tuesday morning, representing how Democrats' thoughts on military spending have evolved following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That evolution is evident when you consider two Washington state Democrats who come at the issue from different perspectives.

On the surface, the debate between ramping up President Biden's social programs and paying for more missile defense systems looks like a classic debate of "guns vs. butter." Beneath the surface, there are deeper questions about the role of the United States in a changing world.

“The Pentagon budget has continued to increase every year," said Washington State Representative Pramila Jayapal who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Jayapal said she supports sending $14 billion to help Ukraine. But she’s against the increased funding — now well over $700 billion — for the U.S. military that Congress included in its big spending package last week.

This year, that budget increased by 6%. It includes money for planes and ships that President Biden and the Pentagon didn't even ask for, Jayapal said.

DefenseNews identified some examples: Three littoral combat ships as well as a dozen Super Hornet fighter jets are being funded (even though the Pentagon had planned to decommission the ships and shut down the Hornet production line).

Jayapal said the Pentagon is the only federal agency that isn't audited.

"There’s tremendous waste, fraud, and abuse," Jayapal said. "And it now eats up almost half of our entire federal budget with defense spending. So we feel very strongly that that number should come down.”

It should come down, she said, "because we've ended our forever war in Afghanistan."

Jayapal argues that lower military spending would free up money to spend more on domestic programs. That view was once shared, to some degree, more broadly across the Democratic Party that currently holds power in Congress.

But the Ukraine situation has caused some members of her party to vote in favor of growing the military, rather than shrinking it, at least at this time.

Washington State Representative Adam Smith, who describes himself as skeptical regarding military spending, said Russia has made our military needs more expensive.

"What has changed is Putin is clearly a larger military threat to our allies in Eastern Europe than we anticipated. And we're going to have to figure out how to meet that threat," he said.

"Having a larger NATO force presence in Eastern Europe as a deterrent ... that costs money," Smith said, as does "making sure we can provide our NATO forces in that region with the missile defense systems that they need.”

Guns versus butter

This moment in history looks familiar to Darrell Allen, a history professor at Seattle Pacific University. He says Washington state's politicians are exploring the classic debate of “guns vs butter.”

The argument goes, “if you put more into spending for defense then that takes away from social programs,” he said.

Allen notes that before World War II, the choice was between ramping up to fight the Nazis and continuing the New Deal social programs that brought the United States out of the great depression.

Again in 1967-68, the competition was between funding the war in Vietnam and continuing the War on Poverty, and other parts of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program.

Jayapal's critique that the Pentagon is getting more money than requested reminds Allen of 1968.

"I think you always have this interplay between 'Should we spend more on defense?' and 'is there graft going on within the defense spending?'"

But Allen said while there are similarities, there are also major differences between then and now. As bad as the situation is now in Ukraine, in 1941 most of Europe had already fallen.

“And so, when you get reduced to Great Britain being the only major ally that’s taking on the Germans, it looked dire,” he said.

Also, he said the U.S. military is far more capable than it was before World War II or during Vietnam.

In the end, the guns-versus-butter argument is an oversimplification of the choices nations face, he said.

And the Democrats from Washington state who hold positions of influence in a Congress would agree.

For Representative Jayapal, defense spending is one leg of the three-legged stool that shores up U.S. security. In her opinion, the "defense" leg is still important — it's just too long now, causing the stool to wobble.

She'd like to see less money for weapons and more money for cybersecurity and diplomacy.

"We've seen in this moment with Ukraine, how the State Department has been absolutely crucial," she said.

For Representative Smith, meeting Putin's aggression with funding in this moment does not mean he's left behind his skepticism of excessive Pentagon spending. It's just that the United States faces existential questions around what its role in the world is going to be.

Smith said his response to that question is influenced by a recent editorial essay by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. "How do we grow the coalitions?" Smith paraphrased Gates. "How do we address the needs of developing nations, so we can build stronger alliances? Diplomacy, development ... all of those are tools we're going to need to address the increasingly hostile world that we live in."

President Biden signed the $1.5 trillion spending bill on Tuesday, March 15, 2022.