".. So what looks like an inexpensive military operation in Libya is actually costing taxpayers about $2 billion per day.."

"... However, at a time when the federal government is borrowing about $4 billion per day from lenders like China, it might be worthwhile to focus some thought on what Admiral Mulloy was really saying. He didn’t say Libya was cheap, he said most of the bill had already been paid. And therein lies the crux of a fiscal dilemma that politicians and policymakers will face as they struggle to reduce the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world. Can America continue to sustain the kind of global military posture that enables it to simultaneously execute a no-fly zone in Libya, a counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan, disaster relief in Japan, and a host of other operations from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf to the Horn of Africa? While its European allies seem hard-pressed to cope with a modest military challenge on their own doorstep, America has embraced a global role that requires its forces to be pretty much everywhere there is a threat of instability. So what looks like an inexpensive military operation in Libya is actually costing taxpayers about $2 billion per day, because that’s what the Pentagon and other security agencies of the federal government spend to maintain a posture that allows the military to go anywhere and do anything on short notice.

There is good reason to believe that posture is no longer affordable — or more precisely, that the public is no longer willing to afford it. When the new millennium began barely ten years ago, the United States was generating roughly a third of global economic output and also sustaining about a third of worldwide military spending. Since that time, though, the two measures of power have diverged dramatically, and so today America only produces about a quarter of output while trying to sustain nearly half of military spending (over $700 billion in a global total of $1.6 trillion). In other words, five percent of the world’s population is trying to cover fifty percent of the world’s military bills with only a quarter of the world’s wealth. That’s the sort of equation that might make sense in a national emergency, but it looks untenable as a long-term proposition. Yet Pentagon policymakers say they can’t make ends meet for much less money, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates asserted last year that when it comes to deficit reduction, “we are not the problem” — even though his department consumes a fifth of the federal budget and has seen its buying power grow by three-quarters over the past ten years..."