Why is even Paul Krugman pro-military spending? :(

I know better than to disagree with a public intellectual who is a Nobel recipient.  But, the following lines in Paul Krugman's piece don't resonate well with me, at all:

Start with a basic point: Slashing government spending destroys jobs and causes the economy to shrink.
This really isn’t a debatable proposition at this point. ...
Even Republicans admit, albeit selectively, that spending cuts hurt employment. Thus John McCain warned earlier this week that the defense cuts scheduled to happen under the budget sequester would cause the loss of a million jobs. It’s true that Republicans often seem to believe in “weaponized Keynesianism,” a doctrine under which military spending, and only military spending, creates jobs. But that is, of course, nonsense. By talking about job losses from defense cuts, the G.O.P. has already conceded the principle of the thing.

Seriously?  Krugman arguing in favor of maintaining the defense spending, too?  And by mockingly citing the "weaponized Keynesianism" he thinks he is reinforcing his argument?  Something is certainly rotten!

In his zealous pursuit of a certain policy option, has Krugman completely overlooked a simple fact that the US now spends more on military than the rest of the world combined.  Yes, the rest of the world combined! Ye tu, Professor Krugman?

If even Paul Krugman can write defending the military's budget, then we are in deep shit.

Contrast that with the following observation:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This is a world in arms. This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. 

That quote on guns and hunger is, of course, from President Dwight Eisenhower's famous farewell speech that gave us the phrase the "military-industrial complex."  Jill Lepore reminds us about Ike's warning shot and a lot more in this New Yorker essay on the question on how much military is enough.

It is not merely the defense expenditures that worry me.  Even more than the dollars we spend there, I get depressed when I read and watch how much anything military has become sacred.  As Lepore writes:

Americans “have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.” Even as military spending has soared, war has become more distant: less known than imagined, less remembered than forgotten. War has become a fantasy: sleek, glossy, high-tech (more “Top Gun” than “Apocalypse Now”), and bloodless. Americans have less experience of war, and know less about the military, than at any point in the past century. 

I agree; "a romanticized view" is a better description.  It is simply bizarre.  So bizarre is this unholy combination of a romanticized view and weaponized Keynesianism that we continue to push for the manufacturing the tanks that even the military doesn't want!

Krugman is, of course, not the first economist, it seems like, who makes atrocious statements when caught up with the goal of maximizing the GDP.  Nearly two years ago, Larry Summers made the following point:

Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.

What a disgraceful fall from that wonderful starting point that Lepore reminds us about

The United States, a nation founded on opposition to a standing army, is now a nation engaged in a standing war.

As Jill Lepore notes:

“God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do,” Eisenhower once said.   

Looks like even god can't--we have a bigger military than hers!