The U.S. Military Institution as an Obstacle to Civilization's Resilience: Part III
US President Dwight Eisenhower during his 1961 farewell address.
Although the military’s enormous power and wealth is justified as being necessary for the security of the nation and the freedom of its people, there is little evidence to support that notion.[i] Americans are no safer than people of any other stable government. They are killed by foreign powers in no smaller numbers than are citizens of any other First World country. If anything, given America’s numerous conflicts and the three thousand deaths of 9/11, the opposite is the case. American military power has made Americans less safe. Furthermore, while maintaining the world’s number one military, the United States has become the world’s most indebted nation.[ii] All its vital signs have gone south. It ranks 37th in health performance (although it spends proportionally more than any other country).[iii] Once at the top of the class, it ranks 12th in the proportion of young college graduates, and of the 34 OECD countries, it ranked 14th for reading levels, 17th for science and 25th for mathematics among fifteen year olds.[iv]
The military’s wealth and power does, however, serve the more obvious self-interests of the institution, itself, verifying President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of what he famously called the “military-industrial complex.” Given by the former five-star general and Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower’s presidential “farewell address to the nation” in 1961, included this caveat:
“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 statehouse, 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.”[v]
The official defense budget was 58 billion dollars in that year, a tenth of what it has been in any given year so far in the 21st century.[vi]
George Kennan is remembered for similar warnings. Called the “most influential diplomat of the 20th century,”[vii] and profusely honored for his service and his writings, Kennan was a key architect in the strategy of political (as opposed to military) containment of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.[viii] He wrote, “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”[ix] After that powerful enemy did sink, one might have been forgiven for thinking that we were safer and that the military spending might go back to peacetime levels. But as Kennan had presaged, other dangerous enemies suddenly surfaced. Enemies we never knew existed—George Bush II’s “Axis of Evil” triune, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, then Saddam Hussein, Al Queda, the Taliban, and ISIS—were somehow even more powerful than the Soviet Union. Or so the media pundits have us believe and the logic of the ever-rising military budget would suggest. And, quite serendipitously for this permanent war economy, now looming over the horizon is the expanding specter of China.
Maintaining enemies has been very costly to the American taxpayer. According to the Nobel economist Joseph Steiglitz and Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School at Harvard University, the most recent Iraq 2003-2011 war, alone, will cost a total of three trillion dollars.[x] Much of that will come in the way of debt to our children because the country was not able to simply dip into its pockets and pay for the war outright. As states and empires and kingdoms have been doing for centuries, the U.S. government borrowed from banks to pay for its ventures, and the banks will be profiting for decades.[xi]
China, who has become America’s latest bogeyman, has five times the U.S. population and borders over a dozen countries, yet spends $120 billion dollars annually on their military.[xii] Shockingly, the U.S. spends five-times more on its military than the world’s second most powerful war machine and as much as the rest of the world combined.[xiii] By the way, we are considering here only the official $600-$700 billion Department of Defense budget.
Note that most of the other largest military spenders are U.S. allies -- the UK, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Italy.
A large portion of these monies (hundreds of billions of dollars) goes into the purchase of a nearly unimaginable spectrum of products—a myriad of ships, satellites, land vehicles, aircraft and weapons, clothes and uniforms, buildings, furniture, office and electronic equipment, roads, power stations and electric grids, landscaping and lawn maintenance, food, kitchens and dining room equipment, linen, beds and bedding, print and internet media, entertainment venues, bowling alleys, golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools, subsidized commissaries (the PX), package stores, and on infinitum—plus all the products and personnel who service and maintain this parallel world. And so the Department of Defense has been called “the largest industrial entity in the United States, and the president is its CEO.”[xiv]
The United States military is the world’s single largest consumer. Each year, the military funnels hundreds of billions of American tax dollars into the accounts of private businesses. Hundreds of billions of dollars of products and services that the American citizens do not buy directly. Perhaps don’t want to buy because they do not need them, or cannot buy because of personal and national debt. According to Kevin Carson, “The chief virtue of the military economy is its utter unproductivity. That is, it does not compete with private industry to supply any good for which there is consumer demand.”[xv] Or, seeing it from the supply side of the economic equation, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of excess production that the American citizenry, on their own, cannot absorb.[xvi] Big business is awash in manufacturing potential for which they have no consumer. By buying their excess production capacity, it is in a sense another way that government subsidizes big business. Over a trillion dollars is annually taken from the citizen/consumer in the way of taxes and then given to banks, business, and the military in what has become one of the world’s largest upward redistributions of wealth. About $4000 a year from each and every American man, woman, and child. And when, in 2011, the heavily debt-ridden country actually began to include cuts to the defense budget as part of its overall debt-reducing strategy, the media airwaves and print became alive with debate and denunciation.[xvii]
REFERENCES
[i] Ratnesar, R. (2011, April 11) Military Spending Must Be Part of the Deficit Debate, Time. Available at http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2064468,00.html Accessed March 1, 2013. And this is from a mainstreeeeam source.
[ii] CIA (2011), Cuadra (2011). When national debt is compared to GDP, then its ranking rises to 37th in the world (CIA, 2011:695).
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) (2011) The CIA World Factbook 2012, Skyhorse Publishing Inc., New York. The newest information can be found at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
Cuadra, L. (2011, August 31) List of World’s Largest Creditor and Debtor Nations, Financial Sense. Available at http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/leslie-cuadra/2011/08/31/list-of-worlds-largest-creditor-and-debtor-nations. Accessed June 20, 2012.
[iii] WHO (World Health Organization) (2000) Measuring Overall Health System Performance for 191 Countries, GPE Discussion Paper Series: No. 30. Available at http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf. Accessed June 20, 2012.
[iv] College—College Board (2011). OECD—Zeitvogel (2010, December 7).
College Board (2011) 2011 Progress Report: Executive Summary, College Board Advocacy & Policy Center. Available at http://completionagenda.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/reports_pdf/Progress_Executive_Summary.pdf. Accessed June 20, 2012.
OECD (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2013, March 4) Aid to Poor Countries Slips Further as Governments Tighten Budgets. Available at http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/aidtopoorcountriesslipsfurtherasgovernmentstightenbudgets.htm Accessed June 1, 2014.
[v] Available at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5407.htm.
[vi] SIPRI (2011). Adjusted to 2009 dollars the $58 billion would be $308 billion (and as a proportion of the total U.S. economy official military spending has declined from about 10% in 1961 to 5% in 2012), however this adjusted value greatly minimizes the actual difference in American military hardware and power between the years 1961 and 2011. That is, the 2011 DoD budget of $700 billion does not translate into a mere doubling of military spending and power over the 1961 date. In the intervening fifty years many other variables come to play, including the cumulative effects of military spending and technological advances.
SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) (2011) SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, Available at http://www.sipri.org/databases/milex. Accessed September 29, 2011.
[vii] O’Hara, C. (2005, March 21) Cold Warrior, Foreign Policy. Accessed at http://foreignpolicy.com/2005/03/21/cold-warrior/
[viii] Smith, J.Y. (2005, March 18) Outsider Forged Cold War Strategy, Washington Post, p. A01. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45242-2005Mar17.html. Accessed March 1, 2013.
[ix] Kennan (1987:11-12) in the forward to Norman Cousin’s 1987 book The Pathology of Power.
[x] Stiglitz, J.E., and Bilmes, L.J. (2008) The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, W.W. Norton and Company, New York.
[xi] Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, Brooklyn, NY..
[xii] SIPRI (2011b), Richburg (2012).
SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) (2011b, April 11) World military spending reached $1.6 trillion in 2010, biggest increase in South America, fall in Europe according to new SIPRI data. Available at http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2011/milex. Accessed March 1, 2013.
Richburg, K. (2012, October 23) China’s Increasing Military Spending Unnerves Neighbors, The Washington Post. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-increasing-military-spending-unnerves-neighbors/2012/10/23/4b66a7ae-1d29-11e2-ba31-3083ca97c314_story.html. Accessed March 1, 2013.
[xiii] SIPRI (2011).
[xiv] Seymore Melman, quoted by Berman (2006:144), in Berman, M. (2006) Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, W.W. Norton and Company, New York.
[xv] Carson (2010:60), in Carson, K. (2010) The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, Booksurge. In keeping with his belief in the free sharing of information, Kevin Carson provides free access to one of this century's most radical books at https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/C4SS-Desktop-Manufacturing.pdf
[xvi] Harvey (2003), Carson (2010:60).
Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.
[xvii] Eaglen (2011). In Bumiller (2011, November 22), we see a Pentagon so sure of its institutional power that it doesn’t consider cuts as a likely prospect. This would be the kinder explanation for “a department that plans for every contingency was not planning for this one.”
Eaglen (2011) Defense budget is not large enough to cover president's foreign policy agenda, USNews, Are Cuts to the Defense Budget Necessary? (Debate Club sponsored by the Shell petroleum corporation) Available at http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/are-cuts-to-the-defense-budget-necessary. Accessed November 24, 2011. When I last checked (February 22, 2017) this url was no longer available, although still listed on google: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=debate+club+USNews,+Are+Cuts+to+the+Defense+Budget+Necessary?&*
Bumiller, E. (2011) Despite Threat of Cuts, Pentagon Officials Made no Contingency Plans, New York Times. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/us/despite-threat-of-cuts-pentagon-made-no-contingency-plans.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print. Accessed November 24, 2011.
