A recent staff article is advocating a reduction in military spending as proposed by some Democratic lawmakers. Since Vietnam, the US military has been used in questionable military “interventions” across the globe. While not all have been bad, enough have been counter to democratic and rule-of-law principles that reducing the defense budget has long been a liberal rallying cry to reduce the executive branches proclivity to engage in these misadventures. I have certainly supported a reduction of the defense budget myself in the past. But the times, they are a changing.
Today the world faces the twin threats of climate change and fascism. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gives a stark example of how these two challenges are intimately linked. The fascist government of Russia, a country ruled by and for oligarchs, and a major producer of climate changing fossil fuels, engages in a war of conquest. The best hope to control climate change is true democratic principles where collective commons is protected instead of being stolen by oligarchs. Russia hopes to destroy the fledgling democracy next door to enrich itself.
In this global context Democracies must be prepared to assist weaker countries around the globe from falling under the influence, or simply being conquered by, larger autocratic states. We are in a fight for the existence of our world. It does us no good to put all of our resources into fighting climate change to have our country fall to internal or external fascism.
I don’t think ANYONE denies there is waste in the US defense budget, including the Pentagon. They received more money than they asked for. So it is easy to assume we need a smaller defense budget. But what we may need is a redirected defense budget. By all means, get rid of costly boondoggles that will never see the light of day or have minimal impact upon our forces abilities. But we still need forces capable of responding to threats around the world, and the ability to assist allies in the fight against fascism.
The US has long been focused on weaponry designed to be solely used by the United States. As such, we can design items that are militarily powerful, yet also extravagant in their maintenance and support needs. There has been a long debate in the Ukraine Update threads concerning the delivery of Abrams and F-16s to Ukraine. The main point of “going slow” with them (a relative term anyway), is that they require significant training and logistical support. A reenvisioned US military should consider that Ukraine may not be the last country we support in this way, and that future weapon systems be easier to train on and support logistically. A smaller logistics footprint would not hurt our own military and equipment quicker to train on means that should the US ever engage in a full existential war itself, we can train our own new recruits more quickly to face whatever the challenges are.
But fighting isn’t the only aspect of our military. The US military has long been recognized for its superior logistical ability which sets its far above any of the other nations in the world. While that logistic ability has too often been spent on dubious endeavors, it also allows the US to send disaster relief around the world far quicker than anyone else. While that ability has been used unevenly, in a world of ever increasing climate disasters the ability to quickly stabilize disaster areas is important. It’s also not cheap.
I don’t think anyone on Daily Kos wants a bigger defense budget for the military to engage in Vietnam style conflicts. And I hope everyone here wants to put the resources into dealing with climate change. But what we should not be doing is thinking that our current and future defense expenditures should be in any way based on what we did or didn’t do 10, 20, or 60 years ago. We don’t need to arbitrarily reduce our defense budget by 10% to pay for dealing with climate change. We need to reduce oligarch money and power to fund defense against fascism and to improve our world in all the ways we want to. If that ends up in a smaller cost for our defense budget, excellent! But it needs to be based on our needs to defend democracy around the globe and not on old assumptions.
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