In 1960, President Eisenhower warned us of the growing influence and power of the Military Industrial Complex. He was right and we ignored him. Today our country has the world’s largest total annual Military Budget of over $650 billion, additional defense-related spending of over $350 billion, more than 1.5 million people serving in its Armed Forces in over 100 countries around the globe, and is currently involved with two major wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, both now lasting more than our 4-year involvement in World War II.
Many conservatives and Republicans view the sole role of the Federal Government as provider of National Defense – and everything else is superfluous. For 2010, total direct and related military funding allocations will come to over $1 trillion – or more than 35% of all Federal Spending. Republicans support these expenditures unquestionably, perpetually giving it military bases, equipment, and new armaments even when the generals say they don’t need or want those items. Defense related items include Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, military pensions, and debts related to unfunded military expenditures.
Many Republicans’ only answer to different political, economic, social, or international issues is to turn to the Military. They even advocate drastic cuts in Medicare and Social Security payments to reduce the recession-caused $1.4 trillion 2009 federal deficit and the nearly $10 trillion in accumulated federal debt so as not to raise any taxes or cut any Military spending.
Even most Democrats are reticent about stopping Defense spending on new and old technologies and closing bases anywhere in the U.S. or world. They have been so afraid of being labeled “soft” or “anti-American” that they have also become hawks when it comes to the U.S. Military. As a result, all Defense and military spending has large bi-partisan support.
All the prior great world empires and their massive militaries could not stop their declines and collapses in the face of other rising economic, military and political powers. Ancient Rome, Renaissance Spain and the Netherlands, and finally Victorian England of the last 2 centuries, could not sustain their global empires with military might alone. The U.S. will face the same results unless we take a creative and new approach to our Military. We cannot rely upon military force as our only answer for all our nation’s major inadequacies in a highly competitive global economy, but we can use its intense and interconnected approach to meet our various challenges.
The U.S. Military has helped developed many new technologies that have found numerous civilian applications. Unfortunately many of those private enterprise developers or state-lead investors are not always within the U.S. as they were in the past. The Military has always been on the forefront of new cutting-edge life-saving medical care as they have had to piece together many soldiers seriously injured while fighting in various wars throughout history.
The U.S. has a major unemployment problem and a stagnant economy. More than 20 million Americans are now unemployed, underemployed, or not even counted officially in our total workforce of around 150 million. This is a massive waste of human capital that we desperately need to use for our country’s future. Due to the deep recession, our volunteer Military has met or exceeded all its recruiting goals for the past fiscal year and is on track to do so again next year.
Private businesses will not hire until they see new paying customers and increasing gross revenues. They do not make expansion plans based upon tax breaks or the size of the Federal Deficit. Only the Federal Government can provide the needed stimulus to get this economy going.
The Chinese have already emerged stronger from this global recession by relying upon strong Keynesian actions that we are still afraid of using. They acted promptly and with full force. Whereas our leaders in Washington continues to argue and dither endlessly while waiting for our dysfunctional and self-centered banking and financial sectors to resume normal activities. In reality they will be of no help to the U.S. economy, businesses and general public for years to come.
All the proposed governmental stimulus plans are timid, ill-planned, and not geared towards solving underlying structural problems. Republicans hate them because they will increase federal spending but not the Defense Budget. Democrats are reticent because the multiplier effect is not what they had hoped – particularly in extending consumption protection measures such as unemployment benefits, food stamps, Medicaid, meager credit card reforms, cash for the favored consumer good of the month, meager mortgage refinancing assistance, and tax credits for purchasing homes for the few that have the credit, steady jobs, and cash to afford them today. We have forgotten about long-neglected and much needed major investments in our transportation, energy and educational infrastructures because they aren’t defense-related to justify enough funding to come close to what our global competitors are spending in these areas.
The straightforward solution to our nation’s multiple problems is to simply draft everyone who is unemployed, wants to work full-time but is not, not working due to giving up, and those who did not qualify for unemployment benefits. We could immediately put 20 million people back into the Military at typical starting annual military salaries of around $17,000 to $20,000 a year. The costs of providing most state unemployment benefits would be eliminated. This move would increase the annual Military Budget by about $500 billion – a rounding error for Federal purposes and much smaller than the first Stimulus package that will run out of money by the end of 2011. These newly-drafted unemployed Americans and their families would all have health insurance under the Military’s comprehensive single-payer medical care system.
The Military is famous for inventing “make-work” projects to keep everyone busy – shuffling mountains of paperwork and marching endlessly to Sousa Marches are just a few old stalwarts. Our current group of unemployed Americans now contains many college graduates, engineers, computer programmers, machinists, and all types of hard-working skilled and professional people who care about the future of this Country. They would prefer meaningful work over unemployment benefits and food stamps.
As for protecting the private sector, the Military has been outsourcing all types of public work to private contractors and further expanding these policies would be ample stimulus across the entire American economy. Many of the draftees could be assigned at various private companies as interns to learn new job skills and help the private business expand.
Let’s not stop just there. We should move our entire federal bureaucracy with the exception of Social Security and Medicare, into the Department of Defense, and rename it to its old moniker: The Department of War. At least this name would be honest and highly effective. All Federal programs, departments, agencies and commissions for all types of public purposes would now be properly thought of as waging wars against insecurity, poverty, illiteracy, drugs, illness, environmental degradation, tax evasion, inadequate healthcare, poor transportation and bad mobility, and so forth.
The SEC might be a more effective regulator if it conducts audits with a contingent of Marines. If everything is considered for Defense or War, then no Federal public program could be subject to decreases, cuts, or sensible reviews for efficiency. “You can’t oppose that – it’s for the war effort and we have to support our troops” – even if they are only local IRS employees in Cleveland auditing some tax returns. Even Native Americans would agree that moving the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Department of War would be honest with history.
We would achieve bi-partisan – near unanimous – support for everything that Republicans and Democrats both want. The Marines could lead squadrons of accountants and auditors to invade The Cayman Islands, Lichtenstein, Bermuda, and Delaware in order to amass evidence of corporate and individual tax evaders to help close our budget deficit.
New high speed rail, better mass transit, and rebuilt highways and bridges to move our 22-million-strong army around the country? That would be accomplished in 4 to 6 years as a fully-funded $300 billion annual national defense project. One of the selling points of the Interstate Highway System was for national defense as President Eisenhower saw first-hand the German autobahns built by the Nazis when he was General of all Allied Forces in World War II.
It’s not disingenuous to make this sweeping proposal. Too many Americans and our political leaders do not appreciate and understand the urgency of the challenges we face in all facets of American life. We are losing the global economic war to other competitors – and some, the Chinese, are big Military competitors as well. Unless we call our citizens and governmental organizations by new names that actually mean something and convey a true sense of determination, urgency, national purpose and global action, we may be deluding ourselves in thinking we can continue as we have.
We face huge challenges in rising income inequality and poverty, lack of affordable healthcare, good educational opportunities and job training, and much more. We face global environmental challenges and possible real wars all over the global over natural resources and food supplies. Should we not approach alternative energy sources, better domestic and international land, water and air management, and global threats of ocean and land degradation with a fully-engaged war-like attitude? A focused, multi-faceted, non-partisan, non-ideological, strategic military approach may be our only viable option for national transformation.
If we undertake a new national program or policy, we have to do it well and with an all-out effort – whether it is waging war against terrorists, poverty, illiteracy, food poisoning, bad traffic, global economic competitors, joblessness, energy dependence, or various environmental challenges. We also have to be honest with ourselves and quit living in the delusional mindset that we have all the time to endlessly debate and argue over every god-damn miniscule policy point while other countries take massive, sweeping and effective actions to address their national and global challenges.
Americans are getting angrier at Washington because it is completely out of touch with the rest of the country, the world, and reality as a whole. By the time our political system finally agrees upon some timid new actions, the changing facts and the world will have left us far behind. The dangerously toxic combination of ignorance, short-sightedness, stubborn arrogance, unregulated greed, a lack of creativity, extreme partisanship hugging discredited rigid ideologies, special interests throwing around gobs of money to influence laws in favor of the few, and no overall sense of collective urgency, could be our nation’s final undoing.
Marc Pascal