Day of reckoning ahead for U.S. defense spending.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSEWATCH

* The nation's dismal economy has cost millions of Americans their jobs, homes and life savings. Barring a miraculous recovery, the economy's next target could be America's military superiority.

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Before anyone panics, the U.S. military will continue to be the world's most powerful for years to come. But the extended forecast does not look good. The government's own defense gurus are warning that it is not a question of if, but when the United States will lose its military superpower status.

These ominous predictions, by all accounts, are hard to fathom. The Pentagon's budget this year is the highest since World War II--and accounts for almost half of what the world's militaries spend.

But with the nation drowning in debt, it isn't difficult to see how the financial burdens of superpowerdom may be too much to bear. The United States, some experts warn, would be wise to restrain military spending in order to regain its financial strength.

Congressional Research Service analyst Stephen Daggett best articulated the dilemma facing the United States.

"We're in the midst of a shift away from American military predominance toward something different," Daggett told members of Congress last fall. "The big change that's going on in the international security environment doesn't have to do with military forces, it has to do with financial power, and the financial shifts are all away from the United States and toward Asia," he said. "We're still, for several years, clearly going to be technologically predominant in military capabilities. How long we'll have the ability to do all of the above--to project power of every kind, both in ground forces, maritime forces, air forces, I don't know, but it's eroding slowly over time."

Even defense hawks are recognizing that the immense spending of the past decade while the U.S. military has been fighting two wars at a cost of more than a trillion dollars means it will soon be time to pay the piper.

"The fact that U.S. defense spending has doubled during the same period that its economy has shrunk from 32 to 23 percent of global output tells you a day of reckoning lies ahead for U.S. defense spending," wrote industry analyst Loren Thompson, CEO of the Lexington Institute. "Five percent of the world's population can't keep sustaining nearly half of global military outlays while generating only a quarter of global output. ... We have reached a point in our history where our resources are so...