This weekend Americans will observe the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. and mark the 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address, perhaps the most significant presidential valedictory in modern times.
What do these two giants of American history have in common?
Both rang the alarm about an unchecked military establishment devouring a disproportionate amount of the federal budget at the expense of pressing domestic needs.
Given the current defense budget -- at $725 billion -- is at its highest level since World War II in inflation-adjusted dollars and double what it was in 1998, their warnings remain all too germane today.
Eisenhower's farewell speech, delivered on January 17, 1961, was most notable for his warning about the "military-industrial complex": the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry."
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," he said. "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
He called for the country to maintain a balance among national priorities. And he stressed that Americans must consider the future consequences of their choices. "We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage," he cautioned. "We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."
Six years later, echoes of Eisenhower's admonition could be heard in a speech Martin Luther King, Jr. gave exactly one year before he was assassinated.
Most remember King as the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott and the August 1963 march on Washington, when he gave his famous "I have a dream" speech. But that was the King of the early 1960s -- before violence erupted in our inner cities, and before the country plunged deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam. King's April 4, 1967, speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," rebuked his critics who claimed "peace and civil rights don't mix" and condemned the violence perpetrated by the United States on the Vietnamese people. He called for an end to U.S. bombing and a unilateral ceasefire. And he called for mass protest and resistance.
More important, King went "beyond Vietnam" to address what he saw as a destructive flaw in U.S. priorities. For King, the Vietnam War was "but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." Linking the war to domestic policy, he drew the connection between spending billions of dollars on death and destruction and the neglect of the poor, the jobless, the undereducated and the sick at home. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift," he said, "is approaching spiritual death."
In January 1989, in the waning days of the Cold War, I ran excerpts from King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech in the peace magazine I edited, Nuclear Times. As it turned out, it was our second-to-last issue. With the end of the U.S.-Soviet conflict, the foundations that underwrote our bimonthly assumed that our mission had been accomplished, so they cut off our funding. There were no other enemies that matched the might of the U.S.S.R., and many in the peace community we covered were looking forward to a "peace dividend." They presumed the United States now could cut its military budget dramatically and spend that money at home. That perception was bolstered two years later when Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared: "I'm running out of enemies. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung."
Powell's observation 20 years ago is still basically true: The United States has no militarily significant rivals, notwithstanding the terrorist threat and the war in Afghanistan. Regardless, the Defense Department is still buying Cold-War style weapons systems, still maintaining more than 700 bases and facilities outside our borders, and still spending at Cold-War levels - more than all other countries' military budgets combined.
Last month, President Obama's Deficit Commission recommended a modest $100 billion in military spending cuts over five years. After initially rejecting any reductions, the Obama administration last week did an about-face and ordered the Pentagon to cut $78 billion over the next five years. That amounts to less than $16 billion a year -- a paltry 2.2 percent decline.
Given U.S. military superiority, we can afford to be much more aggressive. For example, cutting our spending on NATO, a Cold-War relic with no strategic purpose, would save about $100 billion a year. Killing the troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program would save more than $300 billion. It would be a lot more cost-effective to continue the current jet fighter programs instead.
The bottom line is we simply cannot afford all the bells and whistles the military-industrial complex and its friends in Congress want, nor do we need them. So when we remember Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dwight D. Eisenhower this weekend, we also should remember their alarm bells about a bloated military establishment, which ring even truer today.
Elliott Negin is the former editor of Nuclear Times magazine, which the Utne Reader named one of the "10 magazines that made a difference" in the 1980s by presenting "bold new perspectives on global survival." He now is the media director of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC. The views expressed in this column are his own and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
It would be helpful to understand that most of the people working for "military-industrial complex" are actually on welfare. They are essentially paid with the money from the military budget and it's taxpayers' money, our money if you will.
into the military. That proved to be a bad choice, without balance. However, cutting military
cuts jobs, more people unemployed isn't going to help either. It's now become an issue of a
double edged sword, placed in a profoundly no win situation.
Pres. Eisenhower's warning should be on the front page at least once every year as a small rebuttal to the vast pro-war propaganda.
-jbraunstein
Or as other commentors said,
"I will credit Eisenhower at least for having the courage to point out the dangers in his farewell speech and consider that he understood what was happening but rationalized his actions and was caught up in the inertia."
"Let’s not be too hard on Eisenhower. It’s true that Eisenhower expanded the military-industrial complex during his presidency. It’s just that as his presidency was winding down, he came to realize his mistake. In his final speech before the nation, Eisenhower was speaking to the nation in general and to his successor in particular, warning them not to make the same mistake that he had made. Criticism of Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex would be justified if he had made it before he became president, then gone out and expanded the military-complex anyway."
Americans are going broke paying for all of this folly. Oh well!
Is today's military appropriately tasked to maintain a presence in Germany and Japan 65 years after the end of WW II? Have the deployments of the American military world wide been carefully thought out and tied to specific mission objectives? Do the arsenals of the various military services include separately designed, duplicative in function weapons systems? Are the procurement proceedures in the Pentagon efficient and effective?
Pull the wasteful, fraudulent, abusive, poorly planned, and inertia-driven spending implied by those questions out of the defense budget and whatever is being spent is being spent wisely.
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Parks
Shorelines
Dep't of Education
Funding private research and developement
Arts
College loans and grants
Research grants
Import export policies
Agriculture research
Nasa research and developement
EPA
Clean air and water
Emergency and relief personnel and policies
Meals in schools
Elder care
and many, many more which helps our country grow and improve for our children.
Way better than all the collateral damage and misery caused by the illegal wars pushed by the Greed mind set.
However, there are two things that could be done to improve this. Firstly, and everyone's mileage may vary on this, is the amount of money that is spent on foreign conflicts and how much we should/can throttle back on that. Secondly, a reorganization of the spending could well have a great effect on our economy i.e. vastly increase money spent on labor force, increase the percentage spent on specialists (Army Corp of Engineers etc.), increase the percentage spent on R & D.
Were we to bring all the troops home , they would need to be based - and would spend their paychecks - in America. A great boost to many local economies.
Were we to re-task the Electric Boatworks and Lockheeds of the country to make products that America needs (electric trains , cars , modernize the grid) it would greatly benefit our economy.
Also, spending money on R & D as opposed to production can do nothing but support our infrastructure through innovations. Though it may be a discredit to the human race, almost all technology innovations have come about because of military research. Finally, when I suggest we increase the enrollment in areas such as Army Corp of Engineers - it would seem an obvious step to have them rebuild domestic infrastructure.
We'll let you buy as many assault rifles as you want provided you agree to support the following:
- Reject the concept of 'pre-emptive strikes'
- 50% DoD budget cut
- Withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan in 2012
- Allow states to manage weapons and weapon laws as they see fit
It's a sweet deal! After all, so many of you toting guns around would be a deterrent to terrsts coming to Merca. So with you all armed to the chin, we shouldn't need to be "fighting them over there" anymore, right?