Most of us, I think, are familiar with President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning in his farewell address against the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower warned us, “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 are cold and are not clothed.” But prescient as he was, Eisenhower could not have envisioned over fifty years ago the enormous cost and overwhelming power of our 21st century military and security systems. I have long feared that power, and now that a sociopathic narcissist has become commander-in-chief, I fear it even more. While many may fear ISIS and others Russia or China, I do not doubt that the single greatest danger to our civilization is our own vast national security establishment, especially now that Trump is commander-in-chief. Its enormous cost and waste, its imperialist aggressiveness, and particularly its lack of accountability threaten us all.
Our incompetent and willfully misinformed excuse for a President wants to increase military spending by $54 billion. Cutting spending on the the state department while increasing Pentagon spending makes us weaker, not stronger. Both General Petraeus and former Defense Secretary Gates have pointed out that what we need for our security is not more troops or more weapons, but more professionally trained foreign service officers, people trained in languages, cultural analysis, and diplomacy. Yet, in his abysmal ignorance, Trump insists on building up our military while cutting state department spending. And given what we know already about the Trump administration’s dealings with the Russians, there is no telling how much influence Putin may have on how we use our enormous military.
The wasteful cost of our national security system is already staggering, massive spending that reduces the funds available for other purposes, thereby contributing to the marginalization and even the death of millions. We spend more on national security than the next seven highest-spending countries combined, almost three times as much as China, seven times as much as Saudi Arabia, and nine times as much as Russia.
And that just includes the regular budget for the Pentagon, omitting the Overseas Contingency Fund and intelligence operations, and who knows how much else in expenditures that are classified. But even that does not account for all national security spending. According to Mother Jones, additional billions are included in the budgets of the Veterans Administration, the Energy Department, and Homeland Security.
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2013, David Cay Johnston argued that, if one included interest on debt incurred for military expenditures, total national security spending for fiscal 2013 would equal $1.3 trillion. In a more recent estimate, The Project on Government Oversight has estimated the true cost of the 2017 military budget, including costs hidden in the budgets of non-military departments, at $1.038 trillion, up from $997.2 billion in the 2016 budget.
That amount, which does not include interest on debt resulting from national security expenditures, is over 90% of the 2017 discretionary budget. So if we wonder why our leaders tell us that we can’t afford single payer health insurance or afford to repair our toxic water systems or invest in education for all or rebuild our deteriorating inner cities or heavily subsidize renewable energy, one reason is that we spend far too much on national security.
So what does the trillion dollars spent on national security buy? William Hartung lists, among other wasteful expenditures, $2.7 billion for a spy balloon that is useless, $8000 per unit for helicopter parts “worth $500 each,” and billions for replacement parts “that will never be used.” Altogether, Hartung found $33 billion dollars in obviously wasted spending. And, of course, as Hartung points out, the Pentagon has spent billions privatizing not only its support units, but its warmaking, creating, in effect, a wasteful and dangerous army of unaccountable mercenaries.
Besides outrageously expensive weapons, the Pentagon spends billions on foreign bases that, according to David Vine, do more harm than good not only to the host countries, but to our own national security. Vine has estimated that the US currently has approximately 800 military bases in 80 or so different countries all over the world at an estimated yearly cost of $156 billion. All other countries combined have a total of approximately 30 foreign bases, Russia most among them with 8, a mere 1% of the US total, scattered among former Soviet republics. So the US has over 26 times as many foreign bases as all other countries combined. It also has hundreds of thousands of troops, their dependents, and support personnel stationed in nearly 160 foreign nations.
Why do we need these bases? Do they enhance our security? Do they make us safer? Vine wonders that no one seems to be asking these questions, then goes on to argue that they actually do more harm than good:
Rarely does anyone wonder how we would feel if China, Russia, or Iran built even a single base anywhere near our borders, let alone in the United States. . . . While logic might seem to suggest that these bases make us safer, I’ve come to the opposite conclusion: in a range of ways our overseas bases have made us all less secure, harming everyone from U.S. military personnel and their families to locals living near the bases to those of us whose taxes pay for the way our government garrisons the globe.
It certainly appears that in many cases, our troops stationed on foreign bases have not been the most gracious of guests. Huge bases have forced local people off their lands and disrupted local economies. Such bases often lead to the growth of widespread “exploitative” prostitution in neighboring communities. US troops, protected from local prosecution by Status of Forces agreements, commit rape and other crimes against the local populace. Vine points out, “GI crime has long angered locals.”
According to Vine, the argument that we need those bases to respond to threats is spurious. In separate studies, the Bush administration and the Rand Corporation both concluded that technological advances have enabled us to respond so quickly from our country that closer bases are unnecessary. Rather, our foreign bases seem to contribute to resentment. Finally, as Vine says,
By making it easier to wage foreign wars, bases overseas have ensured that military action is an ever more attractive option — often the only imaginable option — for U.S. policymakers. As the anthropologist Catherine Lutz has said, “when all you have in your foreign policy toolbox is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Ultimately, bases abroad have frequently made war more likely rather than less.
And, then, of course, our military is among the world’s most prolific producers of toxic waste and greenhouse gases. Our military’s fuel consumption totals approximately 320,000 barrels of oil per day, making it, according to Barry Sanders, “the largest purchaser and consumer of fuel of any agency or country in the world” and “the largest polluter.” Sanders adds that of all the nations in the world, only Gibraltar, the Netherlands Antilles, and Singapore use more oil per person than the US Defense Department.
Moreover, the Defense Department itself has on its 19 million US acres approximately “39,000 contaminated sites” and 141 Superfund sites and is responsible for about 750 other such sites on “abandoned military facilities” or other sites on American soil not directly owned by but supporting the military. That amounts to about 75% of US Superfund sites. Former Michigan congressman John Dingell has said, “Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated,”
As if that were not enough damage, our national security establishment has gone far beyond simply establishing a presence on bases in 80 foreign countries. We have more frequently than any other country since World War II interfered in the political and economic systems of sovereign nations. The Federation of American Scientists has listed “notable deployments of U.S. military forces overseas” between 1798 and 2010. Working my way through this long list, I counted 166 such operations since World War II. While many of these events may well have been minor, others were more significant. Some, in fact, amounted to US led or supported overthrow of sovereign governments and, in at least some cases, the replacement of democratic governments with authoritarian ones. Nicholas J.S. Davies counts 80 such coups since 1953. Of these he lists 32 countries where US supported coups have been successful in overthrowing sovereign governments.
How many have died as a result of our war crimes, our careless, unjust, and illegal interventions in the affairs of other nations? How many have been severely wounded, left unable to earn a living or live a normal life? How many have been driven from their homes and forced to live in squalid refugee camps? How many have been terrorized by our “shock and awe” campaigns, by our incessant bombings, by our drone attacks? It is almost impossible to say. Certainly, considering that in Southeast Asia alone deaths resulting from our warfare range over a million while in Iraq and Afghanistan the most widely accepted estimate is about half that, the totals must number in the millions. An estimated 50%-90% of those fatalities were non-combatants. When one adds in the long-lasting effects of weapons and toxins left behind such as landmines, Agent Orange, and depleted uranium, the millions of refugees, the lives disrupted by wars we began or supported, the whole communities terrorized by our bombs and drones, the number seriously affected by our military aggressiveness must number tens of millions.
Alarmingly, this vast national security establishment, which has cost so much and done so much damage, is in practice accountable to no one. Part of the reason the Pentagon can get away with its wasteful expenditures is that it has never undergone an audit. The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 requires all federal agencies to undergo a basic audit annually. The Pentagon is the only federal agency that has failed to comply. In fact, according to The Project on Government Oversight, the Pentagon has spent over $6 billion in an unsuccessful effort to prepare for an audit. Efforts to determine just where the Pentagon’s massive spending has gone have discovered $8.5 trillion appropriated by Congress between 1996 and 2015 simply “unaccounted for.”
In addition, our acceptance of the government’s classifying hundreds of millions of documents has allowed the Pentagon, the NSA, and the CIA as well as the multi-national corporations that work for them to escape accountability for their war crimes. As we all know, no one except low level soldiers has been prosecuted for the torture inflicted by our agents in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor has anyone in the Bush administration been prosecuted for the massive war crime of the Iraq War. Thus far, the Pentagon has managed to prevent publication of the full torture reports in spite of the efforts of some in Congress. And the military managed to escape any accountability for the criminal bombing of MSM’s hospital in Kunduz. Instead of punishing the war criminals, we imprison the whistleblowers, courageous public servants such as Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, and Edward Snowden. As for its environmental destruction, the military is by law exempt from environmental regulations.
So why do we as a people allow ourselves to be cajoled into supporting such a bloated and illegal security establishment? Though there are many reasons, I think two are primary. First, many of us have allowed ourselves to be scared into believing that in order to be safe we must control the entire world as if it were our empire. It would appear that our politicians, with very few exceptions, support that view while we, rather than questioning their scare tactics, meekly agree. We have allowed ourselves to be convinced that any questioning of our military establishment is unpatriotic. We call our troops “heroes,” grossly cheapening that word, and in our mass support of such movies as American Sniper we exalt as great heroes brutal, callous, uniformed mass murderers. When people in any way question our “exceptionalism,” as Colin Kaepernick did by refusing to stand for the national anthem, huge numbers of our people along with many of our politicians and much of our media, attack them. It’s as if our insistence on our own perfection as a people can brook no dissent.
Second, and perhaps even more insidious, the American security establishment has so enmeshed itself into our economy in communities throughout the nation, that to extricate ourselves would require major economic disruption. Far too many among us depend for our economic security on military spending, whether directly or indirectly. To ensure such economic dependence, Lockheed Martin used companies from 44 different states in producing parts for its F-22 fighter (Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire, 175). In support of its F-35 fighter, Lockheed Martin claimed “that the plane will produce 125,000 jobs in 46 states.” Of course, many US communities are economically dependent on military installations. According to its 2015 “Base Structure Report,” the US military operates 4154 sites in the United States. Assuming that at least 10% of these are large enough to employ substantial numbers of workers, we have an average of eight communities per state at least partially dependent on military expenditures.
This vast national security apparatus is apparently accountable to no one as the war crimes of this century—rampant torture without consequence, aggressive and offensive war, regime change, universal surveillance, the bombing of civilians and of medical facilities, the lack of an audit, exemption from environmental laws--testify. Many of us appear to subscribe to the strange myth that we Americans are “exceptional,” that we are the “good guys” with a responsibility to protect the world from the “bad guys.” But if we want to indulge in such sweeping and dubious judgments, the evidence suggests that we are not the “good guys” at all, but rather among the worst of the “bad guys.”
And so, here we are with other nuclear powers—most notably China, Russia, and North Korea--pushing back against our aggressive imperial overreach. At the same time, we have enabled the election of a newly inaugurated president, a childish braggart with the attention span of a 10 year old, arrogantly ill informed and unwilling to learn, a narcissist who may well regard our enormous defense establishment and our huge arsenal of nuclear weapons as his personal playthings, who wants to waste another $54 billion on military spending, and who, even worse, may ultimately be controlled by the dictates of a brutal and ruthless Russian tyrant. And so woefully deceived are many of our fellow Americans that I strongly suspect they will agree that to “Make America great again,” we must waste even more on our military and must follow a strong man who emulates Vladimir Putin.
I vacillate between defiance and despair, more and more leaning toward the former.
Resist! And may God help us!
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