The United States spends almost 40% of the aggregated global military budget. Four times what China spends and an amount equal to the blended total of the next ten largest military spenders combined. Ten times the Russian expenditures. We have 800 overseas military bases – China has three – and eleven top-of-the-line nuclear carriers, each worthy of building an entire fleet around. China has three, not-quite-so-sophisticated nuclear carriers, although in total naval vessels, theirs is a larger navy… but hardly the equal of what we maintain. They have about 600 first level jet fighters; we have 2000. We also have 20 times the number of nuclear weapons.
So when our military leaders testify how China is doing this or Russia is doing that, basically how they are threatening the United States by these military expenditures, how do you think we appear to the world as a military threat… because we dramatically outspend and out-deploy our military like no other?
Attempts to audit the waste and inefficient expenditures within the US Pentagon have come up against an unfathomable military taxonomy of budgetary acronyms that simply have stymied any meaningful results. Federal auditors literally gave up. Congress is addicted to approving military requests for more money, even in the face of losing. Like Vietnam. Or trying to create a pro-American Iraq but instead handing ideological control to Iran. Or spending decades in Afghanistan and the Iraqi/Syrian sector, only to watch as most of Afghanistan is back under Taliban control – we are finalizing a peace treaty with them even as there is a totally different government in Baghdad – and as the Assad regime, which we vowed to topple as we also took on ISIS, is still running Syria with Russian and Iranian backing.
We do not seem to be able to win most of the wars we actually fight, and it would seem reasonably safe to conclude that by now, every nuclear nation on earth – even North Korea – understands that an all-out nuclear conflict is an unwinnable race to mutually assured destruction. Still, we mount major new weapons initiatives, build new carriers, advance stealth aircraft and dream of space lasers. Even as our archaic power grid is completely vulnerable to hacking, our financial system is dependent on an easily distortable digital network and our own social media can be turned against us at critical times… like during an election. Every time I have visited China over the last decade, I reluctantly had to marvel at their own infrastructure, modern and efficient in most large cities. Not exactly what I have experienced in my own country.
Also, Russia does so much more with less. Unholy alliances with powerful autocrats willing to cooperate with Putin’s anti-American directives. Hacking and disinformation campaigns. Setting up tests to make sure they can shut down our power grid in relevant urban centers. As we will ultimately spend $1.7 trillion on an amazing but maybe too-complex-to-maintain troubled F-35 aircraft (pictured above), one that can be configured for carrier use, vertical take-offs and landings, or traditional stealth fighter/bomber capability. It is certainly the best out there, the envy of our enemies… but not of our taxpayers.
Let me put this another way. China is spending roughly the same $1.7 trillion on its “Belt and Road Initiative.” As we spend military money to “protect America and her global trade and security interests,” China’s B&R Initiative is focused on creating trade-driven infrastructure in countries providing foodstuffs and raw materials to China and buying China’s manufactures in return – to the treaty exclusion of the United States. As we spend money to protect (but not grow) our economic links to the world, China’s focus is on growing that trade structure directly. Very long-term commitments. By narrowing her military might to Asia, China can make do with fewer military resources and still exercise the necessary regional power.
The military hero of WWII, General Dwight David Eisenhower, followed Harry Truman into the US presidency. In his 1961 farewell speech at ending his term in office, Eisenhower uttered these words: Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
But we obviously did not heed his admonition. Today, military vendors are strategically located across the land, in many states and congressional districts, to insure that congressional votes for military expenditures are always in local self-interest. We cannot win sustained ground wars against deeply embedded local insurgents – so-called “asymmetrical warfare.” The predominant wars that we have fought in recent history and either stalemated or lost. Those fancy and very sophisticated new weapon systems, trillions and trillions of dollars’ worth, just do not work to defeat the guerilla fighters we have faced. Our military is geared dramatically to fight and defeat traditional organized militaries, which we only occasionally meet on the battlefield.
In 371 BC, the ancient military superpower of Sparta fell. Increasingly cloistered and isolationist, anti-immigrant and heavily focused on building and maintaining an indigenous army to the virtual exclusion of all other values, Sparta did not change with the times. It wasted its resources on old-world (even then) assumptions. Are we making the same mistake? We are paying more and more to protect less and less.
Think about how China is building virtually unbreakable trade links with the rest of the world while we rattle our luscious sabers. Their military is more than enough to protect its desired sphere of influence. While we keep following the same-old/same old. Our infrastructure is decayed. Our educational systems are getting worse so fast. Our government is less representative than at any time in our history. Our power and influence, backed by sanctions, have not moved China or Russia to back down on any major pressures we have asserted. And even our allies are not necessarily joining us in a harsh chorus against obvious foes.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it seems that common sense has left our American building some time ago.
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