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by Peter A. Belmont / 2009-02-13
© 2009 Peter Belmont
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Barney Frank contemplates cutting the military budget.
Anyone who wants to do that—as progressive thinkers may be assumed to do—face two (or more) power groups: the proponents of imperialism through active war-fighting, and the proponents of vast war-production.
I propose (at least as a thought experiment) that we keep war-production but abandon imperialism through frequent war-fighting.
The war production will then be something like digging holes and then filling them back in, but will at least be less expensive and also less generally destructive than the war-fighting has been.
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Anyone who wants to cut the American military budget must overcome at least two distinct power-centers: the proponents of imperialism through threat and use of aggressive war-fighting[1] and the proponents of armaments-production.
The first of these is the undeclared, unknown, unacknowledged, but evidently vastly powerful group who desire an American Empire secured by military means (or who just plain like fighting wars). This is the group that so desperately wanted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan irrespective of whether these wars were really advantageous to America’s security. This group supports both the existence and the frequent use of a strong military, and is well-connected politically.
The second power-center is the well-known military-industrial-Congressional complex, with its enormous budgets, military-production facilities carefully located in every Congressional district, and, presumably, vast campaign donation systems. These people want military production to continue and will not easily be dissuaded from this program.
The second power-center (military-production) can be satisfied, in principle, by a program which would not satisfy the first power-center.
This program is a sort of pacifist military-production system by which weapons are produced and then (without any military use) buried in a deep pit. This is a “jobs program”, sort of like hiring people to dig holes and then fill them in again. Very expensive of money and scarce natural resources, but not otherwise too damaging. Keeps those military-production facilities busy, and all those people at work. Profits and campaign contributions keep flowing.
At least such a “build but don’t use” treatment of military equipment would not require the killing and destruction (and scattering of depleted uranium dust and cluster bomblets and land-mines) that the actual military use is thought (by militarists) to require.
Such a program would have the further advantage of avoiding (so one would hope) the expense of paying off all the war-profiteers (destroying and then rebuilding Iraq is rather like digging holes and then filling them in again, except that the profits are enormous, especially where, as recently, the US has not required any accounting for expenditures). Such a program would have the advantage of reducing the costs of maintaining so large a military, would let the National Guard soldiers go home, and would leave the mercenaries (of the Blackwater variety) to find other, less bellicose, work.
A further benefit of this sort of military spending would be that, by weaning our military away from frequent war-fighting, we might so thoroughly dis-accustom the American people from its casual acceptance of war-fighting (and its far too casual acceptance of “collateral damage”) that it would begin to question unnecessary and illegal war-fighting wherever and by whomever done. (That might of course bring on a third pro-military power-center, better left undiscussed here.)
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[1] Wars of aggression are forbidden by international law, but the US regards itself as a 900-pound gorilla, granting itself immunity and impunity with respect to war-crimes.
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