The U.S. Military Institution as an Obstacle to Civilization's Resilience: Part II
According to some historians, all of Civilization is a result of the emergence of warfare.[i] The organization of society and the development of kingdoms and nation-states, religion, technology, culture, history, everything has been a response—in this view—to the escalating force of men in arms. The last four millennia of China’s history serve as an exemplar, according to both Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order and Mark Elvin in The Retreat of the Elephants. The war metaphor of Retreat suggests that, through the millennia, humanity’s western spread across the Asian continent has come at the expense of another large-bodied species, emblemized by the otherwise indomitable elephant. The war has featured not only humanity against itself but against everything living. If this premise is correct, if military and war were the primary cause and the central institution of civilization—and no opinion is offered here on this hypothesis—but if this premise were true, then our present situation where corporations are king represents a significant evolutionary advance.[ii] For however predatory and rapacious corporate capitalism may be, its methods of wealth extraction have sometimes been less brutal than the military’s. They often use other slightly more subtle—if no less dehumanizing—tactics to assert their domination. But the military represents, without equivocation, the most violent, bestial, testosterone-induced, fear and terror (“shock and awe”) dimension of the human repertoire. Whatever its role has been in the surreality of cultural memory, the military remains a powerful institution in the affairs of our planet.
There are only four countries of more than a million people without standing armies—Costa Rica, Haiti, Panama, and Mauritius. In most of the rest, the military exerts a strong, if usually invisible, influence on the social order.[iii] As Mao Zedong famously proclaimed, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The American empire, beginning with the Monroe doctrine in 1823, has been increasingly predicated on that axiom. Since World War II, America’s status as the world’s hyper-power comes as much from its military might as from its economic dominance. Possessing history’s single most powerful military, it has been involved in over fifty armed conflicts since the mid-20th century.[iv] In that time, it has fought proxy wars in Greece, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, and Israel; invaded and/or bombed, in a manner unprecedented in the receiving country’s history, the following—Korea 1950-1953, Laos[1]1965-1973, Cambodia 1969-1973, Vietnam circa 1965-1973, and Iraq in four separate events—Operation Desert Storm, Operation Desert Fox, and its longer version, the 1991-2003 No-Fly Zone War, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The United States has ignored international law (Panama invasion, 1989) and the rulings of the International Court of Justice (Nicaragua, 1984); formed coalitions of dubious legitimacy (Iraq invasion, 2003); fought covert wars (in Laos, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, among others); overthrew democratically elected sovereigns (1953, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh; 1954 President of Guatemala Jacobo Arbenz Guzman; 1973 Chilean President Salvador Allende); and emplaced, armed, funded and/or “advised” innumerable oligarchs, monarchs, and despots (Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), Anastasio Somoza Debayle (Nicaragua), Mohammad Rezu “The Shah” Pahlavi (Iran), Jean-Claude Duvalier (Haiti), Mobuto SeSe Seko (Zaire), and Chun Doo-hwan and Park Chung-hee (South Korea) make up but the short-list).[v]
In 1947, the United States Department of War was renamed the National Military Establishment, which was then again in 1949 renamed the more innocuous Department of Defense. Since then, it has come to oversee the largest peacetime war machine ever assembled. Even when counting only its official Department of Defense annual budget of between $600 and $700 billion (since 2007), the United States military accounts for nearly half the world’s total military expenditures.[vi] Besides the monetary cost of being in one or more perpetual wars, these vast sums of wealth go into maintaining 1.4 million soldiers and 870,000 active reserves on 440 domestic military bases, and an additional 738 military bases in one-hundred-and-fifty countries.[vii] Among its far-flung empire, it deploys two-and-a half million American soldiers, mercenary soldiers in “privatized military firms,” spies, and military and civilian technicians, teachers, and other personnel; operates eleven carrier battle groups over the world’s seas (China is working on building one), and, among the notes of ecologic interest, maintains 234 military golf courses and uses between 120 and 145 million barrels of oil annually.[viii] That’s more oil than is consumed by any one of over 170 countries in the world.
The term empire is now generally accepted as an appropriate description of America’s global role, even among its supporters.[ix] The sheer power of its military is reflected not only in its overt presence outside U.S. borders but by its unassuming ubiquity inside, as well. The economy of every congressional voting district in the United States is tied to the military—either by the presence of military bases or through businesses dependent on military contracts.[x] By 2010, it was appropriating at least 1.2 trillion dollars of American tax money, every year, the single largest piece of the U.S. government’s appropriation pie, taking over a third of the whole.[xi] A half-trillion of this total was placed in agencies other than the Department of Defense and has therefore resided outside public awareness and has rarely been, if ever, part of the public discussion, even in the venerated media such as the New York Times and NPR.
Besides the $600 to $700 billion budgeted yearly to the Department of Defense, there is another half trillion dollars allotted to other governmental departments for purposes of military and security.[xii] Excluded from the Department of Defense budget, for example, are $50 billion for Homeland Security; over $50 billion for the CIA; over $120 billion dollars that goes to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs and related programs.[xiii] Retirement benefits for retirees—both for military personnel and for civilians in the Department of Defense—come to about $70 billion annually. Estimated interest on the federal debt from wars past and present comes to about $180 billion each year.[xiv] Approximately half of NASA’s $19 billion budget is used by the military for spying and intelligence-gathering by satellite. About $19 billion of the Department of Energy’s budget goes into nuclear stockpiling and cleanup. Also, $18 billion of the foreign affairs budget is used each year for many other military-related operations not occurring in the acknowledged war zones of Iraq or Afghanistan.[xv] There are numerous other miscellaneous and “black budget” items that raise the total annual military expenditures to tens of billions more. These include the State Department’s financing of foreign arms sales, the FBI’s counterterrorism budget, and the still secret budget of the National Security Administration (NSA).
Furthermore, the Department of Defense operates a complex, confusing budgetary system that is opaque to federal accountants.[xvi] Between 1996 and 2015, 8.5 trillion U.S. taxpayer dollars doled out by congress to the Pentagon has gone accounted for.[xvii] It wasn’t all squandered. Tanks and guns were made, soldiers paid, wars waged. But some unknown billions upon billions disappeared in what the Reuters news service called an “epic waste.” All this military wealth and waste can be considered to be part of what George Bush II’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the “known unknowns.” That is, we know that we don’t know about many of the military’s specifics.
The United States spends nearly twice the $600 billion that is universally quoted as the country's military expenditures. The $600 billion covers the Department of Defense budget, that much is true. However, as we can see, the DoD budget covers only about half of the U.S. tax dollars committed to the military industrial complex.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
[1] The more than two million tons of bombs rained down on Laos during the American-Indochina War exceeded all of that dropped on Germany and Japan combined in World War II. Vietnam received nearly three times that in total tonnage (Summers, H.G. (1985) Vietnam War Almanac, Facts on File Publication, New York).
[i] Jean Baechlers, cited by Elvin (2004:88) - Elvin, M. (2004) The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Fukayama (2011:23) - Fukuyama, F. (2011) The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
Graeber (2011) - Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, Brooklyn, NY.
[ii] Even here, I may be unduly crediting capitalism, as Graeber (2011) reminds us that capitalism has expanded at the barrel of a gun.
[iii] For but one example, note Sanger, D.E. (2011, February 19) When Armies Decide, New York Times.
[iv] The United States possesses history’s most powerful arsenal due to its thermonuclear capabilities. And even when considering power relative to the rest of the world, post World War II United States may outrank history’s behemoths, such as the Mongol, Roman and British empires. Armed conflicts—Blum, B. (1995) Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, Monroe, MA.
[v] Chomsky (1969, 1987, 2003, 2013), Summers (1985), Ingram (1999), Richardson (1999), Johnson (2000, 2003), Wiseman (2003), Wedel (2009:9,209n), Libin (2011).
Chomsky, N. (1969) American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays, Pantheon, New York.
Chomsky, N. (1987) The Chomsky Reader, edited by James Peck, Pantheon Books, New York.
Chomsky, N. (2003) Towards a New Cold War: U.S. Foreign Policy from Viet Nam to Reagan, The New Press, New York.
Chomsky (2013) Power Systems. Metropolitan Books, New York.
Summers, H.G. (1985) Vietnam War Almanac, Facts on File Publication, New York.
Ingram, S. (1999, January 5) Laos: “Most-heavily bombed place,' BBC News, Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1100842.stm. Accessed September 5, 2011.
Richardson, J.J. (1999, April 6) Clinton’s Other War, Mother Jones, http://motherjones.com/politics/1999/04/clintons-other-war. Accessed September 5, 2010.
Johnson, C. (2000) Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Henry Holt and Company, New York.
Johnson, C. (2003) The Largest Covert Operation in U.S. History, History News Network, George Mason University. Available at http://hnn.us/articles/1491.html. Accessed September 5, 2011.
Wiseman, P. (2003) Thirty-year-old bombs still very deadly, USA Today. Available at http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-12-11-laos-bombs_x.htm. Accessed September 5, 2011.
Wedel, J.R. (2009) Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market, Basic Books, New York.
Libin, K. (2011, February 5) U.S. has history of backing despots — when they’re useful, National Post. Available at http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/they’re-‘our’-sobs-u-s-has-history-of-backing-despots-useful/. Accessed September 5, 2011.
[vi] Ratnesar, R. (2011, April 11) Military Spending Must Be Part of the Deficit Debate, Time. Available at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2064468,00.html. Accessed March 1, 2013.
SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) (2011) SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, Available at http://www.sipri.org/databases/milex. Accessed September 29, 2011.
[vii] Johnson, C. (2006) Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Metropolitan Books, New York.
GlobalSecurity.org
[viii] Johnson (2004:1-5,102 2006:137-170), Singer, P.W. (2004) War, Profits, and the Vacuum of Law: Privatized Military Firms and International Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, v. 42, pp. 521-550. America’s European allies field most of the other carrier battle groups. Worldwide, no single country besides India possesses more than one such fleet. DoD petroleum use—Indiana Senator Richard Lugar’s website, (Lugar Energy Initiative, The (2007) Oil and the Military, The Lugar Energy Initiative. Available at http://lugar.senate.gov/energy/security/military.cfm. Accessed January 2, 2012).
Vidal (2010, October 28) reports that petroleum use is twice this amount during war time -- (Vidal, J. (2010, October 28) Surging price of oil forces US military to seek alternative energy sources, The Guardian UK. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/oct/28/oil-us-military-biofuels. Accessed January 7, 2012.)
Robert Bryce (2005), reporting in the Atlantic Monthly, estimated the petroleum used in Iraq alone to be several times this amount (Bryce, R. (2005, May) Gas Pains, The Atlantic Magazine. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/05/gas-pains/3897/. Accessed January 7, 2012.)
[ix] Ruppert, M.C. (2004) Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada.
Murphy, C. (2007) Are We Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA.
[x] Forthecommondefense.org (2011) Defense Breakdown Economic Impact Reports: 2011 Defense Contracts by Contractor Location for all Congressional Districts. Available at http://forthecommondefense.org/districts/. Accessed February 17, 2013.
[xi] Hellman, C. (2011, March) The Real National Security Budget: 1.2 Trillion, Mother Jones. Available at http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/real-us-national-security-budget-1-trillion. Accessed September 5, 2011. Given the many ingenious ways appropriations are hidden and spread across the federal budget, there are no definitive totals for tax money allocated to the military institution as a whole, however estimates converge at 1.2 trillion annually in the past years. For a similar accounting see Hellman and Kramer (2012) at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175545. Without considering interest on the borrowing for military expenditures, they arrive at $931 billion.
[xii] Pincus (2011, February 14) Budget 2012: Defense Department. Available at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2011/02/budget-2012-defense-department.html. Accessed March 1, 2013.
[xiii] Pincus, W. (2010, October 28) Intelligence Spending at Record $80.1 Billion in First Disclosure of Overall Figure. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102807237.html. Accessed March 1, 2013.
Department of Homeland Security (2011) Budget in Brief Fiscal Year 2012. Available at http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/budget-bib-fy2012.pdf. Accessed March 1, 2013.
VA (U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs) (2012, February 13) VA Budget Request Tops $140 Billion for Veterans Programs. Available at http://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=2263. Accessed March 1, 2013.
[xiv] Hellman (2011). As of this writing, interest rates are at historical lows. Should they return to historical averages, the military debt would increase substantially. Also, given that banks in foreign countries hold about half of the U.S. debt (which is now in the neighborhood of ten trillion dollars), the debt incurred by the U.S. for the military institution’s benefit ironically works against the very nation the military is mandated to protect and in favor of the military. The two hundred billion dollars leaving the country strengthens other countries at U.S. expense, making military dominance more necessary. The military wins by every accounting.
[xv] Wheeler, W.T. (2008, February 4) What do the Pentagon’s Numbers Really Mean? Center for Defense Information. Available at http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=4199. Accessed September 5, 2011.
Higgs, R. (2010, April 17). Defense Spending Is Much Greater Than You Think, The Independent Institute. Available at http://blog.independent.org/2010/04/17/defense-spending-is-much-greater-than-you-think/. Accessed September 5, 2011.
Hellman (2011).
Kolawole, E. (2011, February 14,) Federal Budget 2012: Agency analysis, Washington Post. Available at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2011/02/federal_budget_2012_agency_ana_1.html. Accessed September 5, 2011.
[xvi] U.S. Government Accountability Office (2010, 12/21) US Government's 2010 Financial Report Shows Significant Financial Management and Fiscal Challenges, Available at http://www.gao.gov/press/financial_report_2010dec21.html. Accessed September 5, 2011.
[xvii] Paltrow (2013), Leo and Ehley (2015).
