Conventional wisdom, that dour specter, seems to be saying we don't have enough money to fix many of our biggest problems, such as global warming or shifting to carbon-free energy. But wait! The Pentagon itself has determined that there are plenty of resources that the Defense Department could do without, according to the Boston Globe:
A senior Pentagon advisory group, in a series of bluntly worded briefings, is warning President-elect Barack Obama that the Defense Department's current budget is "not sustainable," and he must scale back or eliminate some of the military's most prized weapons programs ... Pentagon insiders and defense budget specialists say the Pentagon has been on a largely unchecked spending spree since 2001 that will prove politically difficult to curtail but nevertheless must be reined in.
The New York Times concurs:
After years of unfettered growth in military budgets, Defense Department planners, top commanders and weapons manufacturers now say they are almost certain that the financial meltdown will have a serious impact on future Pentagon spending.
The Defense Department by itself spends over $500 billion per year, plus over $100 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, plus other expenses -- we're spending close to $1 trillion per year for national security.
But what could possibly be more important for our long-term national security than building a healthy economy and preventing Florida from going under water? Below the fold, some logic on why our national security would be stronger in the long-term if the military budget was seriously cut back now.
History provides a very straightforward lesson: Those countries that can amass the largest pool of industrial resources are the countries that can build the largest militaries. For instance, the United States produced at least 40 percent of the world's manufactured goods before World War II and had one of the world's smallest armies, yet it was able to create the world's largest military because of its factories (the classic explanation of this point is the subject of the book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy).
The Soviet Union also built up one of the world's largest military establishments, but it used its manufacturing capacity mostly to produce military machinery, instead of renewing the factories that made its military equipment possible. The same process is threatening the U.S. In the long-run, if the manufacturing system in the U.S. becomes so anemic that it can't even be used to rebuild itself, the U.S. military (and economy) will slip into second-class status.
The current implosion of the automobile industry is a symptom of this trend. Without the help of a thriving manufacturing ecosystem, even with competent management, the car companies would be hard pressed to compete with national manufacturing systems such as those that exist in Germany and Japan. Those countries are not burdened by a huge military establishments and a corporate elite who are enthusiastically dismantling the manufacturing capacity of the nation.
We have a deteriorating manufacturing capacity in addition to a bloated military establishment. And on top of all this, the entire energy infrastructure needs to be replaced. The fossil-fuel economy is doomed: Oil and natural gas will become more and more difficult to find, and even the U.S. coal supply is limited. In addition, if we don't want to lose Florida and New York City, if we don't want America's breadbasket to turn into the Great Midwestern Desert, if we don't want Death Valley to engulf the entire Southwest, then we'd better stop using fossil fuels and prevent climate change.
So let's say we took several hundred billion dollars annually out of the military budget and directed that money toward the construction of a vast, modern smart electrical grid, a high-speed rail network, and a national wind farm system that would provide baseload electrical power [PDF]. If all of these systems were made in the U.S., the industrial ecosystem that has been so recently clearcut could be regrown. And with a thriving industrial system based on clean, renewable energy, with a geographically stable country, then we would have the capability to rebuild a dominant military system, if that should ever become necessary again.
In other words, a green, manufacturing-centered economy would mean energy independence, economic independence, and no need for a future Declaration of Independence.
And that's why our long-term national security depends on cutting the military budget now.
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Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:55 am
14 Nov 2008
Sure, go ahead...then when Ivan rolls through Poland you can thank yourselves.
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Golden Toad Posted 4:05 am
14 Nov 2008
Barney Frank's been talking about cutting military spending in a fashion very similar to the National Priorities Project: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID= ...
It remains to be seen how much traction these ideas will gain in Congress. I don't think Obama has said much about reducing military spending or cracking down on corrupt contractors, but at least he will get us out of Iraq, which should free up a lot of taxpayer dollars (unless they're simply diverted to a "surge" in Afghanistan).
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JohnH Posted 9:10 am
14 Nov 2008
I do wonder if even now we have the political will to do it. Many people owe their jobs to the complex but I believe many of them would gladly trade those jobs for others like the above. The status quo is clearly a death spiral for US manufacturing, in which the only industry left will be the weapons industry.
And then there are the jabailos of the world who refuse to see the possibility that Ivan's recent cold war-like threats might be a reaction to our behavior in placing cold war relic missile defense systems in eastern Europe. Maybe we should put our sword down first, and see how the Russians react to that.
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Wolverine Posted 8:25 am
16 Nov 2008
The first thing that should be done is to close all the foreign military bases, where the U.S. has no business being. Next would be to eliminate the most harmful aspects of the military, such as attacking marine mammals with extremely loud noises and eliminating nuclear and chemical weapons.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:51 am
17 Nov 2008
Wolverine, there are all kinds of things that the military should be cut back on. One other random one, apparently they actually help the illegal whalers that Watson and others try to track. They should be helping the whale defenders, not vice versa.
And to address a point made by JohnH, the late Professor Seymour Melman championed an idea called economic conversion, the basic idea being that every military factory would have to have a 2-year plan about how to convert that factory to civilian production, the thought being that the workers in those plants would thereby have some protection against unemployment caused by cutting the military budget. Now, many unions see military production as one of their last bastions, so they don't get very excited about the idea of cutting the military budget, even with conversion; and when a Speaker of the House, Jim Wright, wanted to make economic conversion his top priority, whaddaya know, the representative from Lockheed, Newt Gingrich, manufactured an ethics crisis that got Wright kicked out of Congress.
So the odds aren't very good, I admit: but we need to at least put the idea into the mainstream of discussable topices, which it doesn't seem to be right now.
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