In a wave that is seeking to curb entitlements, focusing heavily on cutting benefits under Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and perhaps still so-called Obamacare, it is interesting to note where federal expenses are not being trimmed. Even as pensions are collapsing, wages dropping, the middle class contracting and 90% of the earnings increases only reaching the top 10% of the economic ladder, entitlements will suffer as the military continues to play in a yard or a pool where the cost of technology is soaring. It is impossible to design modern, large-scale weapon systems without spending a multiple of the dollars of the systems they are destined to replace. The Sequester seems to little more than a blip, a pause in the rolling military spending machine we have become.
Proponents argue that we have no choice, that to be and remain the best military on earth, we have to spend the money. Strangely, these are the same segments of our political systems are screaming for a balanced budget. They ignore the fact that having this capability made getting into two wars – in Iraq and Afghanistan that sent the budget deficit through the stratosphere and have dramatically failed to produce the stated results of regional stability – too easy.
A just revealed insider statement tells us Dick Cheney, seeking to scare Congress into repealing all those restrictions imposed on the President’s war-making powers after the Vietnam War, needed a threat, real or manufactured or real to “kick some ass.” He seems all-to-easily to have convinced the President. “New York Times reporter Peter Baker is out with a new book that reportedly reveals some eyebrow-raising details about the Iraq War.
“A senior official from former President George W. Bush's administration is quoted in ‘Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House’ saying American troops went into Iraq because the U.S. was looking for a fight… ‘The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick. Afghanistan was too easy,’ the anonymous official said, according to Politico.” Huffington Post, October 20th. As the wars dragged on, a budget surplus became the biggest federal deficit in history, exacerbated by a recession that hobbled the country’s ability to restore fiscal balance.
The coming battles to reduce spending seem unfortunately unlikely to do much to a military budget that accounts for over 40% of the aggregation of all military budgets on earth, more than the next ten nations’ budgets in the sector combined. One example of what our military is building can be seen in its next generation of naval destroyers, a class of ships named for a destroyer commander (admirable Admiral Elmo Zumwalt) who, under the Nixon Administration, became this country’s youngest Naval Chief of Staff. The Zumwalt class, which is expected to generate an order for 20 vessels, is nevertheless an impressive piece of hardware. It saves money by requiring a smaller crew, and, equally impressively, it was delivered on time and on budget. The smiles at the cost savings have to stop there. At $3.5 billion a pop, these destroyers cost three times the cost of the ships they are replacing.
“[The ship] features an unusual wave-piercing hull, electric-drive propulsion, advanced sonar and guided missiles and a gun that fires rocket-propelled warheads as far as 100 miles. Unlike warships with towering radar-and-antenna-laden superstructures, the Zumwalt will ride low to the water to minimize its radar signature, making it stealthier than other warships.
“The ship was envisioned for shore bombardment, but its size and a power plant that can produce 78 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 78,000 homes — make it a potential platform for futuristic weapons such as the electromagnetic rail gun, which uses a magnetic field and electric current to fire a projectile at seven times the speed of sound… With so many computers and so much automation, it will need fewer sailors, operating with a crew of 158 — nearly half the complement aboard the current generation of destroyers.
“‘The concept of the Zumwalt is sort of a bridge between the traditions of the past and the new world of networked warfare and precision-guided munitions,’ said Loren Thompson, defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. ‘It’s not so much a radical concept as it is an attempt to pull off a full range of missions with a ship that has one foot in the present and one foot in the future.” The Washington Post, October 20th. It’s that “future” part that is both compelling and disturbing.
As we have seen repeatedly, because we have the cutting edge of warfare, we have been less than restrained in deploying it. We have generally not been particularly good at building global intervention coalitions with broad support (we can usually find a couple of participants, however) and have had a bad habit of going it virtually alone. Iraq was really not a full NATO effort; the U.S. and the U.K. dominated this effort, for example. Even when conflicts arise without our fomenting them, where our British or French allies have made decisions of intervention in recent Arab Spring conflicts, our superior technology generally gets strong requests to join or assist, even if it is only in long-distance attacks.
Entitlements and unfunded government pension obligations do have to be balanced and placed on a stable and financeable plain, but we really have to look at how our government serves our people. While we need to be safe from attack, we seem to lure hostile extremists by our often-failed military expeditions, have been forced to create a mega-expensive Homeland Security defense as a result, and our deficits from such militarily-induced efforts have done as much economic harm as 100 al Qaedas. These angry zealots could never have inflicted as much damage on the United States, caused the same number of military casualties and driven us to battles and gridlock within our staggeringly dysfunctional political system, that we have inflicted on ourselves with the profound costs of our military and the wars they were directed to fight. Our massive military power seems to have made us less safe, and the battles from the resulting budget deficit have us at our own throats.
There is a deep philosophical chasm that we face. No one likes to talk about it, but from Sparta to the Ming Dynasty, whole civilizations have fallen because of excessive military spending. As we face trillions and trillions of dollars of debt, we are looking down history’s calling card of destruction if we don’t stop and figure out exactly what we are doing to our ability to survive into the future. We’ve denigrated our commitments to education, infrastructure and research (other than military research) to support and unsustainable “military industrial complex” (not following the early warnings of Republican war-hero and U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower).
We are willing to sacrifice training for high-tech-jobs, the elderly, the sick and the poor to feed this monster, a monster that all-to-often has turned on us. Want to face budget truths and economic realities? Then it’s time to face our overall military strategy rather from a ground-up analysis. Attack or defend? Alone or with allies? Want to see the hard cost numbers of our propensity to shoot first and ask questions later? Go to http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ and prepare to be blown away! Congress will undoubtedly compromise with the wrong direction, but history is less forgiving.
I’m Peter Dekom, and why is the obvious so completely difficult to understand?
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