76 Trombones Led The Big… Wait, Make That 39 Trombones

Music’s age of glorious excess, the one epitomized in the hard-rock parody “This Is Spinal Tap”, or in the less-celebrated and already-cancelled HBO series “Vinyl,” has been over for some time, with the limos replaced by Uber and the Bolivian marching powder replaced with hipster PBR.

Except when it comes to military bands, where reports of $11,000 flutes and $12,000 tubas have gotten a few members of the House of Representatives up in arms. That’s the word from Washington, which would like to curtail what it sees as the Pentagon’s largesse when it comes to its musician corps, which numbers over 6,500 assigned to everything from formal orchestras, marching bands, and rock combos that are deployed globally in locations ranging from front-line outposts to capital-city embassy soirees, a total of 130 individual units, at a time when the military is finding itself short of qualified personnel to fill posts such as fighter pilots and encryption specialists.

There’s plenty of irony to go around; one of the film’s most memorable scene involves a “Tap” gig at an Air Force base playing for an officers’ gala where guitar-amp feedback is virtually weaponized. But the reality isn’t quite as funny. Cumulatively, the U.S. military’s musicians cost taxpayers about $437 million in 2015 – almost three times the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts.

You Spent How Much On What?

However, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Military spending should be focused first and foremost on military necessities, of course. The problem is, figuring out exactly what those are isn’t easy. For instance, how necessary were two sculptures costing $670,000 for a VA facility in California – that serves blind veterans? Or a 27-foot artificial Christmas tree that cost one military facility in Chillicothe, Ohio $21,500? A VA facility in Puerto Rico spent $610,000 on artwork and one in Alaska spent $100,000 on a sculpture. At the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, $483,000 went for a large decorative rock and $807,000 was for the site preparation for the rock outside the building. Inside the center, the VA spent $365,000 for a sculpture at the entrance to the pool, and $305,000 for a sculpture in the center’s main lobby.

Even the weapons that putatively are the subject of most military spending produce some questionable numbers. Stories about $600 toilet seats for the Air Force’s C-5A Starlifter in the 1970s and ‘80s have achieved the status of legend, and what’s billed as the world’s most sophisticated fighter aircraft project, the F-35 Lightning II, is seven years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget, all before a single airplane has been deployed.

Here are some more numbers. The sources for many members of the U.S. military’s music groups are high school band organizations, and those are showing growth at a time when the military may have to curtail its music programs. NAMM’s 2015 sales analysis shows a 6.3-percent increase in the retail value of instrument shipments to school programs, with a notable 10.5-percent gain in brasswind instruments. “Also,” NAMM’s report noted, “brasswind sales have benefitted from strong participation in drum and bugle corps,” which are often a bridge to military musician positions.

The Best Deal In Town

So in the grand scheme of things, the Pentagon’s $437 million music budget doesn’t seem all that onerous, especially within the context of the DoD’s $600 billion annual budget. The military has already begun trimming its musician ranks; the New York Times reports that the Army has cut 600 band personnel since Congress started calling for reductions in 2011, and it plans to cut 270 more by 2019; the Marines and Navy have terminated two active-duty bands, and the Air Force has cut three. (Even though, as the paper points out, it’s unclear whether decreasing the number of bands would decrease costs, “…since the cuts would mean more travel for the remaining musicians…”)

The great things about military music entities are that they are useful whether or not we’re in a war. They serve as recruiting tools during holidays and events. But so do groups like the Navy’s Blue Angels, which costs about $40 million a year to maintain the squadron of $21 million FA-18 aircraft, which also consume another $20 million in fuel expenses for rehearsals and performances. And while the Blue Angels or the USAF’s Thunderbirds may prompt the occasional teen to seek out flight training, the uniformed bands almost certainly inspire far more of them to pick up a horn or a drum, creating – coincidentally – a new pool of musicians who’ve already gone through their musical basic training using Hickman’s books. In fact, military musicians may be the best ROI the taxpayer ever got from the Pentagon. Think about that the next time the parade passes by.