Attacking the United States

We call it the “Department of Defense,” but the last time another country attacked our territory – and the United States had to defend itself against an enemy nation – was World War II with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 were mounted by a pan-national terrorist organization (not a country), al Qaeda, using irregular soldiers employed on a suicide mission. All our nuclear warheads, vast array of fighting ships and aircraft and the huge accumulation of ground forces that constitute the bulk of our military sat idly by as terrorists sequentially decimated two of this nation’s greatest buildings and attempted to destroy the heart of our military mind in seriously damaging the Pentagon.

Today, we are smarter, accessing global telecommunications, the Internet, infiltrating where we can, sharing information with other countries facing the same terrorists, employing drones, satellites with incredibly-high-resolution cameras, smart bombs and financial weapons to dry up the support systems that allow terrorist groups to operate. The deployment of vast forces of American might has managed to wound, perhaps fatally, the al Qaeda operatives who are desperately trying to reestablish their presence in Yemen and to find a foothold in Lebanon as Syria’s grin on the nation loosens, but al Qaeda’s extreme policies and fanatic willingness to inflict wanton collateral damage probably lost them many of the hearts and minds they were counting on anyway.

Meanwhile, other forms of anti-American Islamic fundamentalism – replete with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Taliban and other “replacement” terrorists – is alive and well. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – the major conflicts we have fought since WWII – have either ended in stalemate (armistice), total failure or the installation of unstable and often anti-US governments. We haven’t won a single large-scale military effort since WWII. All having a huge military has done is to involve the United States in wars all over the earth, making us appear to be a global bully and less a global policeman. And we still have the largest military on earth.

As two wars ended or are ending and given our deficit pressures, we’ve dropped from spending 47% of the world’s entire military budget two years ago: “The 2009 U.S. military budget accounts for approximately 40% of global arms spending. The 2012 budget is 6-7 times larger than the $106 billions of the military budget of China, and is more than the next twenty largest military spenders combined. The United States and its close allies are responsible for two-thirds to three-quarters of the world's military spending (of which, in turn, the U.S. is responsible for the majority).” Wikipedia. Some of this is because of cuts, and part of it is because some nations – Russia and China, for example – are beginning to spend a bit more on weapon systems.

So here’s the mega-trillion dollar question: how big (or small) does the United States military have to be to keep the United States and its citizens safe? Could we live with 35% of the global military budget? 30%? 25%? Would we be OK if we outspent merely the next five largest militaries combined?

Remember when Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower (above) warned how, if we were not vigilant, military vendors would generate such vast economic wealth, with plants scattered about many Congressional districts across the land, that they would literally have the political clout to force massive military expenditures – further enriching their coffers – on American taxpayers with no genuine benefit to the country at large. (See the excerpts from his famous pair of “military industrial complex” speeches reproduced in significant part in my April 7^th blog). We have most certainly ignored this great WWII general’s words.

While we can’t just dump hordes of U.S. soldiers into an economy that has no jobs to welcome them home, we can at least begin a further long-term, phased reduction in our armed services, like 2.5% per year until we hit new reduced target levels. We could then move most of those savings into education, infrastructure and research to create both new jobs to absorb some of those returning soldiers, but, more importantly, to invest in a new and more vibrant future that would make the United States that much more worth defending. Or we can continue to fund an unwarranted level of military force and spend ourselves out of existence, following in the path of ancient Sparta , Rome and the Ming Dynasty or the modern fall of the Soviet Union. Do we wake up now or simply wait until it is too late to fix this broken economic model?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we cannot effect the above savings, let’s at least change the name to “Department of War.”