TheMillerCircle.org

Who could avoid noticing that, so far, the Pentagon’s budget has been off the table as a target for budget cuts, for transferring wasteful military-industrial spending into jobs-related resources in the private sector. Donald Rumsfeld may go down in history for the disaster he created through his mismanagement of the invasion of Iraq, but his worst legacy may yet be realized in the from of a long list of military hardware, ordered before the Cold War had ended, that he should have canceled, sometime ago but didn’t bother. Many of these bills are coming due now and will be impossible to meet. Robert Gates may have been appointed by Obama to give bipartisan cover for budget slashing that is desperately needed for a country that can no longer afford to rule the world. The state of our financial collapse has taken place with a military-industrial complex that is so bloated and excessive, that all by itself, it could produce a permanent state of diminished standard of living, if we do not begin to seriously challenge the need for these obsessively high military budgets.  The question of the size of the military budget goes to the heart of the issue about what constitutes security?

Chalmers Johnson, writing in the TomDispatch, is one of the gurus of the defense and intelligence industries; he has written three books in the last few years on the subject of our fading empire and describes the fail-safe way that the military gets away with ordering obsolete, unnecessary military hardware–nothing less than “boy toys.” Johnson bases his analysis on one done by Chuck Spinney years earlier, who detailed the now routine bureaucratic scams that are the tried and true system of getting new “stuff”–or, in short, the military procurement system. These methods are just as vile as the credit swaps or Bernie Madoff’s ponzie scheme, done under the legal rubric of national defense. The two most important methods honed to perfection by the military and their industrial partners are “front loading” and “political engineering.”

Front loading is the military practice of appropriating funds for projects that are based solely on the personal assurances of the sponsor that something new and glitzy will be made, but without any preliminary prototype or significant testing that validates the concept. Front loading involves making an estimated  cost for the project that is unrealistically low, thereby making it easier to get approval from Congress. By the time the new hardware is delivered, usually years behind schedule,  the cost per item has skyrocketed into obscene levels. But, what saves the project from being canceled is its companion policy of  “political engineering”: this is the seemingly subtle art form of awarding contracts and subcontracts in as many Congressional districts as possible, making as many incumbents as possible dependent on military money for their own re-election prospects. With the right contract in their district, Congressman can run on that alone. Orders for obsolete and out of date military hardware now seem like part of an important jobs programs for Congressional constituents. The processes of front loading and political engineering allow unnecessary and expensive equipment, things that are often over-designed and prone to failure. stay on the procurement train, even if they finally arrive years late and $ billions over the initial projected cost. Underestimating the final cost of the item is part of the strategy of getting it through Congress. If unchecked, this runaway procurement process may finally impoverish the country. The 2009 launching of the latest Nimitz-Class aircraft carrier carried a price tag of $ 6.2 billion (George H.W. Bush), and now we have ten of these. What for?

The current military budget, which totals more than $1 trillion each year (without the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), has seepage into multiple facets of our economy, so that there is something in the budget for everyone, including those who still want to pursue a course of world-wide American hegemony. As Chalmers Johnson argues, the current level of military spending is simply unsustainable. Yet, how to reel it in?

The Lockheed-Martin F-22 is a classic example of the dilemma we face with military spending and hardware procurement. Plans for the F-22 began in 1986, during the Cold War, at a time when the Air Force believed that the Soviets were planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter. By the time the prototype F-22 had its debut on May 11, 1997, the Cold War had been over by nearly a decade and it was obvious to all that the new Soviet fighter would never be built. But Lockheed Martin, the F-22′s prime contractor, argued that we needed it anyway and went ahead with plans to sell 438 planes for a total of $70 billion. By mid-2008 only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered. The numbers had to be reduced by huge cost over-runs. But the Air Force still wants to order 198 planes, though the current Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, is balking, no doubt under pressure from Obama.  At $350 million each, the F-22 is the most expensive fighter plane ever built. Although advertised as a stealth fighter which can avoid radar detection, under battle conditions, it must activate its own fire-control radar which makes it fully visible to the enemy. So Stealth is just for Sunday flying exercises I guess. The other feature of the F-22 is that it is highly maneuverable at super high altitudes, but since there are no other planes that can engage the F-22 at those altitudes, what’s the point? This new fighter plane is completely irrelevant for the wars in which we are currently engaged. Indeed you could argue that the higher altitude bombing which these kinds of planes carry out, creates some of our more serious problems of “collateral damage” involving large numbers of civilian deaths. Many have argued that the increasingly successful recruiting of new fighters from Pakistan to join the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan is the result of our bombing Pashtun Pakistani communities, causing death and serious injury to their family members. The other reason that the military still insists on buying more F-22s is that we have given so many F-16 fighter jets away, that we need a better fighter plane if we should ever have to go to war against one of the countries armed with our F-16 fighter jets. Since Israeli fighter pilots use F-16s and have better and longer training in them, what will happen if we have to go to war with Israel? We might be defeated in the air war.

You can readily see how long and how far you can carry these arguments, marching right up to the edge of an absurd bankruptcy. Yet, for the past fifty plus years, these arguments have given us the most expensive military hardware in the world, most of which is of questionable value for the new kinds of conflicts we can expect if Afghanistant is any indication. Beyond the F-22, lies the F-35, an even more advanced and expensive fighter plane. In contrast to the Airforce, which emphasizes planes as if we were still in the Cold War, our Navy has built armada of ships, based on carrier forces, as if they expect the Japanese fleet to rerconstitute themselves and set sail again for Pearl Harbor. There is not a branch of the service that does not have an expensive array of new weapons devices under development that are not needed and may actually impede our efforts in the kinds of conflicts we currently face. We are paying a fortune for a military that is not really giving us the kind of security we need, through tactics that seem to play for  the recruiting benefits of the Taliban. We must begin dismantling our military empire. We must close a good many of the 761 bases we have throughout the world (2008 report) and force the military to restrain is extravagant, useless weapons  procurement system and stop playing the political games that allow them to get their way on almost every weapon. The military knows only one way to solve problems and by having a large military, the military solution is usually the one that gets serviced first.  How many aircraft carriers do we need in face of an enemy like al-Qaeda or the Taliban? If we are going to have a global reach, it should be for peaceful strategies and not military hegemony. I suspect that most of the world doesn’t really want to go to war.

We were unable to rein in the military even after the Cold War ended. Now perhaps, the best of all reasons has landed on the front door of the Pentagon–the message that we can no longer afford to have a bloated military with an insatiable appetite for new hardware. From all the post 9/11 intelligence we have gathered, the single issue that deeply aroused many of the hijackers was watching the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on Al Jazeera and experiencing a prfound rage at America for being so one-sided in the conflict. Solve the Palestinian problem in an equitable manner, that eliminates the squalid poverty of the Palestinians and you will greatly diffuse the time bombs in the region. Wouldn’t we be more secure, if we had confidence that our country was out their solving these kinds of problems in an equitable manner rather than taking sides and prolonging the suffering? Doesn’t the plight of the planet, with climate change and species extinctions force everyone to think differently about land and water resources and shouldn’t America be taking a lead in making the planet more livable?

RFM