For those of you who love to listen to Donald Trump rattle on about making America great again and how he’s going to rebuild our military to make it the greatest force in the world, a few facts could be in order and even might be found enlightening.
Last year we spent $596 billion on the military. The House just passed a version of the NDAA raising that to $602 billion for 2017. If you count related activities like Homeland Security, veteran’s affairs, nuclear warhead production, military aid to foreign countries and interest on military expenses hidden in the national debt, that figure comes to at least $1 trillion.
Looking at this massive figure, the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development has formulated a plan by which they could provide every single one of our 564,708 homeless people a million dollar home and still be able to give the generals change. That’s a fantasy use for the money but the place that we could really be using it is to fix our infrastructure, which is in a shambles.
The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that from 2016 to 2025 there will be a funding gap of $1.,4 trillion for the repair of our roads, rails, electricity, airports, waterways and port facilities. The result of this will be that every single US household will lose $3,400 in disposable income each year during that period because of inefficiencies’ in the functions of each system and the way it effects commerce in general.
To solve this problem Obama put a $35 billion transportation plan in his budget request this year. It would have been paid for by a $10 a barrel tax on oil, one of the substances that are poisoning out atmosphere. It was, naturally, demolished by a Republican congress, traditionally in the pocket of big oil that is now asking to increase the military budget for 2018. The question seems to come down to whether we want to kill brown people in foreign lands, or have a country here that works. And if we decide on the latter how do we get that money away from the Pentagon so we can spend it on sensible stuff like college tuition.
Well, first you have to find out how much the pentagon actually has and in order to do that you’d have to do an audit. Dirty word “audit;” especially around the Pentagon, the only government agency that seemingly can’t possibly pass one. Of course there are many reasons for the Pentagon’s lack of financial clarity, the foremost, according to them, is that many of their projects are highly classified and therefore the details of them cannot be open to universal scrutiny. Some of this is obviously true, but most of it is just as obviously, pure unadulterated bullshit, conjured up by Pentagon big wigs to cover up their criminal lack of responsibility over how they spend taxpayer’s money. I say criminal because none of it is due to lack of ability. It is all due to a state of premeditated obfuscation that makes any kind of accountability virtually impossible.
Our current military budget equals that of the next seven nations combined. That is immense, even is Trump doesn’t understand it We have troops, ships and planes, all over the world, protecting the interests of all our allies and occasionally, even our enemies. Senile idiots like Senator John McCain and talk show host John McLaughlin use their platforms to cater to incompetent generals and greedy weapons manufacturers. They are constantly telling us how we need more and bigger, when what we really need is less and more efficient.
Even to the least informed, it has to be blatantly obvious that this is a twofold problem. We spend too much money on the military, and we spend it in the wrong places. Those two misguided approaches grow from a foreign policy philosophy that has to change if we are ever going to make sense of our military budgeting.
Special Note: We are not the world’s cop. What we are is a nation with an enormous military machine that spends far too much money on things that go boom, leaving far too little to spend on human problems at home.
Sure, we should take responsibility for being the world’s strongest (despite Trump’s bullshit.) superpower. Yes we do have humanitarian positions that we should maintain across the globe. But our current stance does not reinforce that position, and we often allow our foreign policy decisions to fly in the face of our moral responsibilities.
We have hundreds of thousands of troops, left over from previous wars, stationed in foreign lands, helping those countries economies but bankrupting us.
Why do we have 50,000 troops in Germany? Trump and his fascists are here. Why do we have thousands of troops stationed in Italy? American’s already know how to eat Italian food. What about Japan? Are we just paying them back for the two bombs we dropped to end WWII?
When asked where they want to spend all this military money the hawks point to the same tired old money pits; bigger, faster planes, more tanks, more troops, etc.
But we don’t fight wars with those weapons anymore. We already have plenty of weapons to fight those kinds of wars if we ever see one again. Right now our navy is so much more powerful than anyone else in the world that it’s a joke. We have six carriers. China has one, a reconditioned old wreck that they bought from Russia and a couple of others that they bought from Australia and Ukraine and turned into amusement parks. Not exactly threatening unless you expect them to arm the roller coasters. No one else has even one.
Our current carrier fleet is used more as movable bases than as attack platforms. This blog has already explored the driving of tanks directly from the production line to storage space in the desert simply because we don’t need them but still have a contract with their manufacturer, a contract that is backed up by plenty of parties full of hookers and vacations in exotic places. And what about the billions wasted on a ten-year in development aircraft that has yet to display any of the elements needed to supplant our existing air force. These are specific examples of deliberate waste brought about by sweetheart contracts between the Pentagon and various weapons manufacturers who keep the Pentagon brass deep in their pockets.
No, we don’t need more money for the military; they already have too much. What we need is to cut back drastically on military spending, cut back drastically on the money being wasted in foreign countries by keeping unnecessary troops there, and use that money for veterans support, infrastructure, cheap higher education and a dozen or more areas that desperately need that money here.
The one place that we are spending money on the military that maybe we should, is in Africa where we currently have a major base in Djibouti and depending on cooperation from local authorities, are looking at opening more in Burkina Faso, Cetral African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Gabon,Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan and Uganda. That is a very aggressive agenda but Africa is the next place that is ripe for development and therefore for aggression. We have already spent $600 million on construction at the 600-acre Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.
Of course none of these African operations exist. At least not formally! If one would question the Pentagon they would laugh you off the premises and later tell auditors that such operations must remain classified and therefore are not officially on the books. It’s this kind of fiction that makes military accounting impossible and allows the Pentagon to continue to hand in higher and higher budgets without getting the generals who run it fired.
This is the kind of stuff that Donald Trump doesn’t get, mainly because he is; to paraphrase Clarence Darrow, “The kind of man who doesn’t think about things he doesn’t think about.” But of course, those are exactly the things he should think about.
So where should we end up cutting back on our military? Across the board of course, but with one exception, Cyber Warfare! Right now we cannot possibly be too far ahead of where we should be on the Cyber front because that is where the rest of the wars of this century will be fought. If we don’t have the strongest Cyber forces we will no longer be what we are now, the greatest and strongest nation in the world. And you can bet there will be more, rather than less wars, ahead. Humanity is just too stupid, greedy and religiously fanatic for any other scenario to be possible.