Of money and militarism.

I found it hard to take Michael Fitzgerald seriously in "Militarism: A Way of Life" (November/December 2004). In his opening paragraph he calls his own credibility into question with an emotional assertion that his father helped kill children in Vietnam in order to feed his own kids.

Fitzgerald posits that, having hijacked Keynesian economic theory, the powerful military-industrial complex perpetually steers our country toward a state of war in order to line the pockets of war profiteers and to keep our (war) economy running with the "wrong kind of jobs." He claims the $7 trillion national debt is largely a product of this arrangement.

However, U.S. defense spending has averaged less than 4 percent of GDP for the past decade. The 2004 federal budget allocates only 17.5 percent of total spending on defense, or 3.5 percent of GDP. Likewise, during Fitzgerald's "peace dividend" period in 1996, defense spending accounted for 17 percent of spending or the same 3.5 percent of GDP. In fact, the average percentage of GDP for all the years since 1940 is only 8.3, even taking into account World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. While it is true that our national debt is massive and largely the result of long-term structural problems in fiscal policy, to blame it "mostly" on war profiteering is a conspiracy theory that even Oliver Stone wouldn't touch.

Kenneth O. Lynn,

Colonel, USAF

Goldsboro, North Carolina