The National Assembly set next year’s defense budget at 34.3 trillion won ($32.3 billion), up 4.2 percent from 2012.
Yet security-related officials at Cheong Wa Dae and the defense ministry said the 2013 military outlay ``completely ignored the importance of national defense.” The reason: lawmakers pared 290 billion won, or less than 1 percent, from what they requested.
It is an open secret government ministries tend to swell their budget requests somewhat in view of customary trimming of a few percentage points at the National Assembly. Why should the defense ministry remain an exception from this time-honored practice? Do these officials think their ministry is a budgetary sanctuary of sorts?
Their complaint is all the more egregious, thinking the ministry failed to spend about 600 billion won in last year’s budget, twice as much as the 2013 cut, and carried it over to this year.
Most of the cuts were made in the procurement of new weapons, which itself is not desirable for the nation’s long-term defense capability. As lawmakers at the Assembly’s defense committee point out, however, it was due mainly to delayed contract signing with foreign suppliers or sluggish progress of the projects themselves, such as buying attack helicopters and next-generation fighters, a result of poor planning and bargaining.
Lawmakers at the defense committee said government officials were trying to hide their incompetence by passing the buck to budgeters. Many taxpayers will agree. Korea’s defense spending is the 12th largest in the world and its share out of the total government budget is similar to Britain’s 2.5 percent. Large military spending itself is not a problem for a country in a state of Cold War confrontation, but what matters is its efficiency.
The South Korean military spends at least three times as much as its North Korean counterpart but has never freed its people from security concerns because of a poor command system, loose troop discipline and low morale, and an inefficient and redundant weapons procurement and logistics structure. One day, military leaders put focus on qualitative enhancement of the weapons system, and change their words the next, saying quantitative expansion is equally important to meet challenges from the North.
Even more seriously, these military leaders, encouraged by conservative ideologues, are wrongly taking issue with President-elect Park Geun-hye’s ``welfare budget,” turning budgeting into a duel of defense vs. welfare ― all this over a 1-percent cut. This is both a misleading and dangerous notion, challenging public opinion and the country’s leader’s efforts to follow it. When will these generals and admirals realize the biggest threat to national security is not external but internal unrest among people stripped of a minimal social safety net and unsure about their everyday lives?
A Cheong Wa Dae official, while making public a secret procurement plan, lamented if the nation could save 1 trillion won in non-military spending, it could protect Seoul from North Korea’s long-range artillery attacks. Is he saying Koreans should resume a nationwide gold-collecting campaign to help the underfunded military? The 1 trillion won he mentioned is less than 1 percent what this administration has spent on defense. So where did they waste all the money except on the most urgent one?
All this explains why most Koreans find it hard to understand why the current national security team is not worth its salt.