Reefer Madness

Some blame faulty navigational charts, others human error. The Philippine government tells us that the United States violated three legal restrictions: entering a protected national environmental zone (a national park) without permission, failing to pay the park’s entry fee and obstructing park rangers in their duties. Whatever the cause, American taxpayers are about to lose a $277 million minesweeper (plus the salvaging costs and fines) hung up on the Tubbatatha Reef in the southern Philippine archipelago, an ocean park designated by Unesco as a World Heritage site.

The U.S.S. Guardian (above) ran into the reef on January 17^th and began taking on water. Manila was pissed. They are still considering what fines and sanctions to levy against the United States, and the extent of the current longer term environmental damage is still being assessed. Damage to the local critters and life-forms (there are approximately 350 species of coral, 500 types of fish, turtles, sharks, dolphins, etc.) could be substantial. They cannot really evaluate the damage – which could generate $300 per square meter of damage – until the ship is removed.

It is rare to lose a naval vessel other than in combat, and the plan is to cut the ship into three giant pieces and haul those away. It’s a wooden-hulled boat, no longer seaworthy, had no business in that park (where no recent U.S. Naval vessel had visited), and this isn’t the biggest deal on the planet. It’s just plain waste, stupid and unnecessary, but one of those “little accidents” that range from crashing aircraft due to technical malfunctions, trucks and tanks crashing and failing. Lose and F/A-18? About $50 million. A Stealth B-2? Probably more like $800 million. An Abrams M1-A2 tank? $6.2 million. A Blackhawk helicopter? Over $6 million. And no, American taxpayers, they don’t have insurance!

I’m being crass and not counting the losses, injuries and deaths, to human beings that result from such accidents. But even in death benefits and disability pensions, the costs to these aspects of accidental death are significant, and generally we lose slightly more soldiers and sailors to accidents and suicide than we do in combat operations, a fact that was salient even during the peak combat years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The subtext here is the value that the American people are receiving from placing so much equipment and personnel in harm’s way… or in a simple statistic about accidental losses. Would we need to spend so much on “Homeland Security” if we didn’t range and forage all over the world, pissing off folks in distant lands, invading or attacking their lands – often losing the big war or failing in the basic mission as we have in both Iraq (Iran’s new “little buddy”) and Afghanistan (where the Taliban are sitting in the wings waiting to replace one of the most corrupt governments in the world) upon our departure.

Take our military ventures immediately preceding the economic collapse. $1.5 trillion in direct costs, but when you add the pensions and all the indirect costs, double that amount. Since we cut taxes back then, we effectively borrowed the cost of those lost causes. And guess what happens when you are slammed by a recession when you already have deficits that large? Yup, the deficits simply grow exponentially.

So if we want to examine the new “trickle-down economics” as they really apply, may I suggest: stupid long-term military adventurism with unbridled and unnecessary military costs (we still spend 41% of the global military budget by ourselves) without seriously high taxes trickles down into massive deficits and unsustainable levels of continuing debt. Think of a small snowball rolling down a steep mountain until it becomes a horrific avalanche! That’s reefer madness.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if someone can actually tell me exactly how the average American benefited from invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, please tell me now.