Spend More on Defense but Purchase Less Security

That seems to be our national strategy these days.

I'm going to start an internet campaign of putting the words "defense budget" in quotations because -- according to my unscientific survey out around the country -- Americans are feeling pretty uneasy about their security and our leadership priorities. In other words, just whose defense are they talking about? It seems that really only a handful of people, Members of Congress, the president, commercial "defense" interests, those who benefit from the military's revolving door (where defense public servants walk through and, like Cinderella, end up in a castle in Fairfax County). The following random bits of information showed up in my in box recently, and they each make me wonder if there's much difference between a conspiracy theory and organized, collaborative intent. I don't believe in conspiracy theories -- but in this case it seems that our leaders are almost intentionally not paying attention anymore when it comes to real security threats. Truth be told, our problem is simply that we're stuck in the past -- fighting some phantom USSR and hoping that China explodes another rusty old weather satellite so we can rationalize our faith in the the really expensive technology gods to save us with weapons in space. We're spending upwards of 500 billion this year, more when you add in the war costs (then the numbers make my head explode Wheeeeeee!) A pittance of this money is dedicated to funding the direction that our whole ship of state needs to go (away from the bully principle and toward the persuasion one) But the skeptic in me thinks that the USA never will right itself with all the gold-plated barnacles on its hull. We must engage in a discussion about our nation's security, abandon old rhetoric and cite specifics. We have a wide open window right now to do so, while simultaneously championing core military values like public service and real post-9/11 needs. How might this happen? Here are few examples of public sector plunder and how to respond to them without being accused of criticizing the military.

Example One: Bribing Poland to take missile defense. This boondoggle spectacular formerly known as "Star Wars" is costing American taxpayers nearly $9 billion dollars this coming year (after more than a hundred billion spent). Its industry makers have cleverly internationalized it -- an expansion on the strategy of making sure that some component of your weapon is made in multiple congressional districts. So we're telling Poland that we will buff up their military if they will just please just cooperate and put part of this non-working jalopy of a weapon on their soil. I went to see missile defense in Alaska as part of a congressional delegation a few years back. Words fail me. But farce will do. Let me just say that it was like going from drinking the Kool Aid to mixing the kool aid, to being in the kool aid jacuzzi. The trip came with a defense contractor Dr. Strangelove type. Acting as our minder, he got mad and then ignored me for much of the trip because I asked a few questions that I found on the MIT website. (Actually, I asked the question and he said it was classified, then I said the part about finding it on the internet. Dr. Strangelove not happy.) Then he insisted on sitting next to me during the fabulous Anchorage skyline dinner. This is another post but there were exactly four of us on the trip whose jaws kept dropping to the floor -- especially after we spent only an hour with the Navy SEALS and a whole day on a chartered fishing trip (those appalled included the professional military with us). There's a lesson here: DON'T Confuse the public servants with the commercial interests. The military is NOT the defense industry. That means don't say "the military budget needs to be cut." Say "we need national security reform across the board and the roles and missions of the military need to be on the table along with everything else." If you put people ahead of profits, the military will love you for it.

Example Two: The military budget should automatically be 4% of the GNP. Legislation has already been introduced in both the House and the Senate that would make the defense budget an automatic transfer payment -- thereby negating any attempts to make hard choices in defense spending. Of all ironies, the uber-conservative Heritage Foundation is using this argument to reframe the old standby guns-versus-butter debate. It's Social Security and Medicare versus Defense, according to their online video course. There is merit to some of this argument. The budget train wreck is well-documented and is actually going to happen before it hits the station (uh, like right now). But methinks that the intention behind this claim is to silence opponents who are worried that they might be accused of insufficient patriotism when they bring up new security issues like climate change, counter insurgency and what the heck are we going to do with 90K more troops? This is a clever strategy for maintaining the conservative philosophy of defense debate which can be summed up crudely as "shut up, you traitor": More precisely, if nobody asks hard questions on this issue, we'll never get to tax cuts for zillionaires and the fact that conservative philosophy has even privatized our nation's sacred cow: the U.S. military itself. Heck, even the Congressional Progressive Caucus substitute budget recognizes that rebuilding the military is going to be very expensive. I never thought I'd see the day that their bottom line is $468 billion. But they are the only ones willing to throw down the gloves on what we desperately need. Not the usual guns versus butter debate, but the guns versus guns debate. Our over-deployed National Guard is creating a dangerous deficit of emergency personnel and their equipment is full of sand, ruined. We need to talk about why the military has taken on the lion's share of foreign policy AND defense responsibilities around the world. We need to learn the strategic lessons of counter insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and apply them to defense spending. We need to ask ourselves why it was the Army and Wal-Mart who came to the rescue in New Orleans and not a civilian agency? This all has to do with money. The military budget might need to be more, it might need to be less -- but making it an automatic transfer payment? Noooooooooo. Lesson: the military will appreciate any public conversation about the role of the military in U.S. democracy. It is long overdue and the lack of it is threatening the institution. Citizen discussions about these issues are the cornerstone of democracy. Tell anyone who disagrees with you to read the constitution.

Example Three: The U.S. Air Force is falling apart
Remember a few weeks back when a B2 bomber fell into the ocean off Guam and sank to the bottom like a 1.2 billion dollar anchor? Now, thank God the pilots got out safely, but the rejoinder should have been. HOW MUCH AGAIN? And we would have learned that 1.2 billion is a lowball estimate. Meanwhile, it's a real problem that the Air Force's old airplanes are cracking and heaving and endangering our military personnel. But why isn't the Air Force making some hard choices? Pay for the good stuff that works -- and quit firing personnel (40K fired last year). Don't get me wrong. I would stand in line all night to get a ride in a B2. I love beautiful machines. I have spent untold paychecks on a 1974 BMW Bavaria and only gave it up when I had a real baby. But we called the Bavaria "cream puff" for a reason. It was for looking, not for driving. The B2 is a cream puff. Most important, though, we can't afford the B2. Not when the majority of threats are not happening at 30K feet and we have no peer competitor on the horizon. Yes, it has some great qualities, but it was built to fight the Soviet Union and it can't be justified in today's scarce budget climate. I have lots of arguments over this plane with friends. And I have a great deal of admiration for the Air Force -- they let me take the Air Command and Staff College -- and I have great hope for it as the youngest and in many ways the most progressive part of the military. But we need to get over the collective eight-year-old-boy admiration of fighter pilots and commandos and get to work on brainwashing the rest of the world into not fighting us in the first place. For example, the Air Force's counter insurgency doctrine is frighteningly immature and grasps at straws. Maybe the Defense Department should start doing product placement for some of the really great -- but ugly -- planes...like the A-10 "Warthog." Or a movie about the superb human rights champions among the Air Force JAG corps (their lawyers). Lesson: If you're going to criticize the military, remember to say something good, positive and problem solving about it at the same time. It is our largest and most admired public service, after all.

Follow Lorelei Kelly on Twitter: www.twitter.com/loreleikelly

Comments

[Sundialsvc4]

"Ike" Eisenhower warned us that what he called the military-industrial complex would act like a very rapidly metastasizing cancer. And we see that.

New Orleans? Unimportant.

Crumbling highway bridges? Stick the states with the bill.

Health care for the elderly, or the not-elderly? Who cares. They're lesser people. We Got Ours.

When the Cold War was an accepted principle, there was "no end to money" but also "no question." You ate your cereal in the fallout shelter, and you crawled under your desk at school. When the Berlin Wall was built, there could have been no greater symbol of "the enemy," even though most people do not know that there was daily subway service underneath it.

Real security is much harder. Having actual employment at actual factories in your own country, not "we sell for less" sole-source tyrants, is real security. Having money to spend on your own people is real security. But ... what does a system that makes King Midas look like a pauper actually have to do with "security" anyway?

[dadw5boys]

BUSH HAS PAID OUT OVER $ 40 MILLION DOLLARS TO ARMED MILITIAS SO THEY WILL NOT ATTACK U.S. TROOPS.

THINK ABOUT THAT!!!!!!!!!

TAKE AMERICANS TAX MONEY AND PAY IT TO PEOPLE WHO JUST SIT AND HOLD A GUN.

AMERICANS WORKING 2 JOBS JUST TO EAT AND HAVE GAS IN THIER CARS!!

[realitytrumpsbull]

Um, no offense, but go blow it out your bukenstaken, lady, 'brainwashing'? Not if I get Selected for George's job, you can file that business under, 'past failed ideas'. Diplomacy is the fine art of telling people to go to blank in such fashion as that they actually look forward to and start making independent preparations for the trip. I think I can do me some gooder diplomacyer;), vote for me, we'll show em how to REALLY do this job!

Bert08

[PhoenixtheUndying]

Tips to Get People to Leave America the Hell Alone.

1.) When dealing with the world, try to act like a member of a community instead of God Almighty.
2.) Leave other countries the hell alone and use technology to secure ours.
3.) Comprise the intelligence community of non-partisan experts.
4.) Take a chunk of our defense budget and work with foreign governments to improve access to education and helthcare for all citizens.
5.) Officially end any conflicts like Korea we are technically still in the middle of.
6.) Only invade the countries that actually try to attack us.
7.) Stop changing governments and training armies under the authority of the CIA
8.) Rebuild the stuff we've blown up faster than Hamas and Hezbollah can. I'm just saying...
9.) Listen to the people at places like the Army War College instead of Donald Rumsfeld.
10.) Elect a president than can pronounce "nuclear".

[EspritDeVoltaire]

This whole problem goes back to what President Eisenhower referred to as the Military-Industrial Complex. There is a HUGE portion of the GDP which is based upon the "defense" industry and there are lots of people getting rich owning these stocks. The most profitable sector of our economy other than energy is war and energy benefits here also.

Our economy is so interwoven with these industries that it's beyond frightening. Armaments are one of the few heavy industry goods manufactured in the US which are still profitable, they're growth industries. They not only sell to the US government, but to anyone to whom it's not prohibited to do so.

This is the root of the Republican lust for War. Do you actually believe the administration is afraid of these countries they keep beating the war drum about? Do you think the Iranians, for example, are an actual threat to anyone? No, the answer is a war economy is always a good economy for investors. The country may go down the tubes from the spending, but the Wall Street crowd is getting richer than Croesus.

[magen]

They say the US military is the greatest in the world.

With their zillion dollar budget, stealth technology, huge aircraft carriers, smart bombs, computerized GPS satellite surveillance and targeting systems, and armored vehicles, why can't they stop an insurgency armed with AK-47's and improvised explosives?????

[RogerHWerner]

We could have stopped the Iraq insurgency long ago. Anyone knowledgeable of unclassified weapons in our arsenal would understand this. So, why don't we simply win the damn war and be done with it?

For a possible answer one must look back 40 years to Vietnam and then glance back a generation further to Korea. We probably could have won both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts but elected to fight protracted wars and settle for a draw in Korea and defeat in Vietnam because the costs of victory were more than our political leaders were willing to pay. In both wars, our military argued for unrestricted war but in both cases, the good sense of civilian leadership overruled military imprudence (in the case of Korea prudence prevented war with China and possibly the USSR) and in Vietnam possible war with the USSR). Even if a wider world war was not inevitable in 1950 and 1965, civilian leaders considered the price of total victory too high and instead opted to fight for status quo at the 49th and 17th parallels. Both wars were catastrophic for civilians but at least in the case of Vietnam, they might have been more so...as in the total annihilation of Hanoi. Civilian leadership asked was victory worth the international fallout resulting from the wholesale destruction of entire cities. Killing peasants in the countryside was one thing but torched cities with millions dead in a flash was more than our leadership, even Nixon, was willing to accept.

If we consider Iraq, an effective approach for ending insurgency would be mass slaughter as in wiping out cities. If Basra, Fallujah, and Sadr City had been turned into smoking pits that would put an end to any insurgency in those locations wouldn't it? This sounds barbaric but did anyone object to our annihilation of German and Japanese cities between 1943 and 1945? War is Hell. If we carried out the same level of destruction in Iraq that we undertook during WWII, I doubt there would be much left in Iraq for insurgents to defend. We could simply take the oil. If other Muslim nations didn't like this, there's a military solution to that problem too. That such solutions have never been publicly entertained at least illustrates Ms. Kelly's point.

We have so many grandiose weapons in our arsenal but short of total war most are useless. Thank goodness, even a lunatic like Cheney has never seriously suggested using strategic weapons Iraq: It's bad enough their use in Iran is discussed...and make no mistake, if we wished to destroy Iran's nuclear capability we could do it by wiping out most of the country and its population. But my god the cost. Would victory in a war where our national life was not threatened be worth it? The international political fall out is hard to imagine. Perhaps mass destruction of entire cities was justified during WWII but clearly that was not the case in Korea and Vietnam, and, it isn't in Iraq. Our most lethal weapons can't be used for reasons that are entirely political and ethical.

[desmirl]

Just for giggles. The KC-135R is one of the greatest tankers ever! Take a fifty-year old airframe and 4 25 year old CFM-56 engines, and you have a purring sweetheart that cruises 100 knots faster than a 767 with all four engines at FLIGHT IDLE setting. So, knowing that our tanker fleet is getting tired (metal fatigue), we could 1) take the KC-135s apart and completely rebuild them--thus extending their utility for another 30 years or 2) build a bunch of new KC-135Rs at a budget price because it was a very simple but elegant airplane that did its job wonderfully, or 3) try to soak the taxpayer with a modified 767 that had enough problems meeting the Air Force's needs that the contract goes to Northrup/Air Bus who will get to SOAK the taxpayer for billions.... Oh, my.....

[MajorKong]

I have over 1500 hours in the KC-135R. It's a great airplane, but it doesn't cruise "100 knots faster than a 767 at flight idle". A 767 has a max cruise of .86 mach and a KC-135R will cruise at maybe .87 mach (but usually less to save fuel).

[desmirl]

If you have the hours, I'll defer to your experience. But, that's not what the pilots in the KANG are telling me. They say they routinely fly higher and faster than 767s and at much lower throttle settings. Anyway, Tex Johnson proved you could do a slow roll in the Dash 80, and since that time I've been in love with two a/c: the C-130 series and the KC-135s--both of which are legends.