By M.Bali
From Progressive Agenda and Wish list Report: progressivewishlist.wordpress.com
“Deficits don’t matter,” Republican Vice President Richard Cheney once famously declared. Four years ago a highly placed government official corrected Cheney in a different and crucial context. He said, “I believe the single, biggest threat to our national security is our debt…” It was not some ultra-liberal financial specialist talking: it was Admiral Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla) said on “Morning Joe” in 2013 that “$100 billion could be cut.” Ron Paul (R-TX) says that less than half the defense budget is for actual defense, the other half is for militarism overseas.
And Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense in both the Bush and Obama administrations, asked, speaking on May 10, 2010, that, “Does the number of warships we have or are building really put America at risk when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies or partners? Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the WW II supreme commander, pioneered in this discourse on April 16, 1953, by delivering his famous speech weeks into his administration. As his time in office advanced, so did the blooming of the military/industrial complex:
“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 are not clothed. 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… The military-industrial complex has a total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—[that] is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government…The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities”.
Military spending now accounts for 54% of discretionary spending in the entire federal budget ($599 billion of $1.1 trillion). If the massive defense budget, more than $1 trillion on national security this year, consisting of baseline budget plus “overseas contingency” of $601 billion in 2015, down from $610 billion spent in 2014, and $20 billion in the Department of Energy budget for nuclear weapons, nearly $200 billion for military pensions and Department of Veterans Affairs costs, and other expenses, an obscene waste of resources, which has to be spent, a strong national security can be better achieved by investing military and homeland security spending publicly in America only.
Instead, the current spending priorities are geared towards subsidizing much of the defense budgets of many countries, called allies, actually making up 2/3s of the NATO’s entire defense budget, in spite of the vicinity of an extra 27 nations in the association, and then maintaining more than 4,000 bases inside the U.S. and 1,000 overseas, lodging 255,000 men and ladies in uniform: 65,000 positioned in Europe, 80,000 in East Asia and Japan, 5,000 in North Africa, the rest scattered in 140 nations. The recurring yearly fixed expense of every base ranges from $50 million to $200 million, as per a RAND Corporation study; at bottom $36.85 billion for each year. What’s more, positioning military personnel abroad is significantly more expensive than it is at home: RAND says from $10,000 to $40,000 more every year, per individual.
As indicated by David Vine’s recent book, Base Nation: How U.S. Army installations Abroad Harm America and the World, that is to say, bases abroad cost as much as four times the sum spent on Social Security, Unemployment and Labor ($29 billion); almost twice as much as Housing and Community ($63 billion); four times as much as Science ($30 billion); and 1.7 times as much as Education ($70 billion).
All these bases are serving several purposes, mainly employment and training for command and obedience, which could all be done at home at a lower cost, but, for the interests of the military-industrial complex, who are bristling with their 655 lobbyists employed by the contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, many of which pay no taxes, the main purpose is obviously that of leveraging and showcasing of all these bases as convenient showrooms for U.S. military products. But just like in other Western powers, and just like any other local manufacturing industry, the non-nuclear arms industry should set up their own show-rooms everywhere without such massive government subsidies.
The political elites, Democrat or Republican, serve the demands of military-industrial complex corporations and empire. The military machine holds well the political and economic arenas hostage, and can mount daily effective public opinion campaign, scripted like a Walt Disney movie. The Pentagon spends $4.7 billion a year and has somewhere in the range of 27,000 employees who deal with enrollment, promoting, psychological operations and advertising, as indicated by a 2009 report by The Associated Press. Even the putative socialist Bernie Sanders has refused to challenge the status quo, in which the United States has 1000 foreign military bases while the rest of the world combined has 30.
This spending is the main driver in perennial budget deficits. It also carries a tremendous opportunity cost. Direly needed investments in infrastructure, education and social programs are neglected at the expense of runaway military costs outside the country. For better long-lasting results, some of that wealth could be funneled into science research, technology industries, climate change mitigation, the medical world, or education.
Foreign policy based on pursuing of virtual military domination and the cultivating of corporate consumer markets worldwide is guaranteed to breed more conflicts and wars that foster more conflict over time. (“The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations”, by David Friedman).
In his remarks, Eisenhower also cautioned against seeking a world power for the sake of military-industrial complex: "Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions."
Other dairies by same author:
*Voter Suppression: The Republican War on Voting Rights
* What to Do to Mitigate Looming Climate Change: 10 Specific Policies
* How to Make the Corporations and the Wealthy Pay More Taxes