Imagine, for a moment, if Pentagon officials, supposedly toiling in our name, actually condescended to ask us for our thoughts. What do we think about global military strategy, garrisoning the planet, the ways in which our forces are structured, and how, where, and for what they should be deployed abroad?
Sound crazy? Here in the U.S.A. it most distinctly does, but not to the citizens of New Zealand. A Kiwi friend of mine recently sent me “Defence Review 2009,” a publication of New Zealand’s Ministry of Defence (MoD). And catch this: it includes a survey soliciting the advice of ordinary New Zealanders with respect to military affairs. It actually asks for the counsel of civilians on a “top ten” list of questions whose topics are remarkably comprehensive, including what the priorities of the country’s Defence Force should be, both now and in the future. Citizens can even present their views on military matters at a public hearing attended by MoD representatives, all in the name of public consultation. And the Defence Minister responds to the people in clear English sans the cobwebs of jargon that typically entangle our military pronouncements.
In case you haven’t noticed, here in the U.S.A., requests from the Pentagon for citizen feedback aren’t flooding our email boxes. So I thought — since no one in that five-sided fortress on the Potomac has asked a thing of me — the least I could do was ask a few questions on my own. Here, then, is my own top-five list of questions that we, the American people, should ask the Pentagon, even if none of its officials want to hear from us. Maybe they’re a tad more pointed than those in the Kiwi survey, but that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, they’ve been a long time in coming.
- Our military is supposed to be a means to an end: national security. Due to its immense size and colossal budget, has our military not become an end as well as means?
- In World War II, Americans could explain “Why We Fight” in part because the government provided a clear and compelling rationale for war. Why are the goals of today’s wars so opaque to most Americans?
- If our military provides us with our way of “nation building” abroad, won’t countries and peoples be more likely to copy our military ways and weaponry than our democratic teachings?
- America is facing painful budgetary belt tightening. Why is the military immune?
- Why does “support our troops” seemingly end when they leave the service, leading us to tolerate such inequities as an unemployment rate of 21% for young veterans?
And my answers…
1. Absolutely! It’s as if the military exists as a branch of a cartel of industries, whose bottom-line seems to dictate built-in obsolescence to ensure future defense contracts. For example, rather than fusing all armed forces under a single “defense force” each branch of the military has its own command, supply, weapons, and logistics operations infrastructure. This separateness of the branches of the military embeds redundancies that waste taxpayer funding. If the Army gets some new uniform item or equipment, it isn’t something that all other military branches have at their disposal, so that we have built in redundancies in procurement, contractor costs, waste, parts supplies, etc. Under a single “defense force” these redundancies would be eliminated and the budget savings would be extraordinary.
2. “Why We Fight” is not clear to most Americans because the reasons given to the public seem to be ever-changing based on political expediency and what any official at any given moment can get away with saying in public. Just look at the 3 ring circus surrounding justifications for the Iraq War: WMDs which did not exist (and then there’s Powell with his vial and the aluminum tubes and Niger yellowcake…), Freedom and Democracy (so why didn’t we attack Saudi Arabia?), Saddam + Al Qaeda (no actual link), Saddam kicked out inspectors (when he didn’t), etc.
Paul Wolfowitz: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason [for going to war].” [USA Today, 5/30/03]
Richard Perle: At a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing in March, 2001, he said, “Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. . . . How far he’s gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don’t think we really know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate. . . . And, unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we’re able to report.”
During Bush’s first 100 days in office his officials were already looking at military options to remove Saddam from power, and this was long before 9/11/2001 — scroll all the way to the bottom of that linked page to the last memo, and note Tab C: Executive Summary: Political-Military Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq Crisis. Also note the date stamped at the top (January 31, 2001) as well as a reference to a 1 Feb 2001 meeting in that document.
And then there’s the Downing Street Memos of Summer 2002 which give us a clear look at what the real thinking was behind closed doors. In essence, they rejected any and all uncertainty from the intelligence community and “fixed” (as in “rigged”) the intelligence (cherry-picked) to suit their post-Saddam agenda. That also explains why they relied on Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, “Curveball”, phony Nigerian yellowcake document, etc. And then you’ve got Joe Wilson publicly refuting the official lie, and well, they outed his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, whose NOC CIA work entailed investigating and stopping the nuclear blackmarket cartel (which poses a real threat, not a ginned-up threat, to national security). You have to wonder about what these people’s priorities actually were… CYA (cover your ass) seems to have been priority #1, and “I’ve got mine” was priority #2.
So, why did we invade Iraq? The only answer that makes much sense is control of Iraq’s main resource: oil, but also the lucrative contracts that loomed in the future reconstruction of Iraq (and let’s not forget the construction of military bases and that huge embassy). And if that pesky entity known as the Internet and its open information sharing hadn’t gotten in the way, it’s likely the Bush Administration and its transnational corporate pals wouldn’t have been publicly exposed as the greedy warmongers that they are.
“Why We Fight” can be best summed up with a thorough reading of USMC Major General Smedley Darlington Butler’s “War Is A Racket“.
3. Options: copy our militarism, get us to fund their military, or send our military in instead. After all, the only excuse we seem to need to send our military anywhere is the possibility of lucrative corporate profit at Third World peoples’ expense (in terms of their national resources, their environment, their lives and livelihood, and their low wage laborers). Who do you think is footing the bill for much of Israel’s military and its weaponry? And if war is, as is often said, to “spread democracy”, then why didn’t we attack Saudi Arabia, one of the least democratic nations in the Middle East?
4. I ask the same question myself: Why is the military immune from budgetary cuts?
4a – I’d much rather see consolidation of military resources under one unified “defense force” than redundancies among the various branches of service (think: Star Trek infrastructure). Where are the proponents of the unified field theory of military spending, and why aren’t they more vocal?
4b – The United States accounts for 48 percent of the world’s total military spending. The United States spends more than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined. Why do we operate over 900 military bases in virtually all parts of the world, but would never allow another nation to build a military base within our own borders? Why are we responsible for paying for policing the entire world? Shouldn’t other nations shoulder their part of that burden if such spending is vital to all nations’ security and our “shared mutual interests”? Frankly, I think if we have to shoulder that burden ourselves, then we should also have 48 percent of the world’s jobs at a living wage (outsourcing accounts for only 3-4% of the U.S. job losses), and 48 percent of world industrial manufacturing should be occurring within our own borders, and 48 percent of world trade should also be with the United States (why is there a trade imbalance at all?). Are we that stupid that we can’t negotiate a much better deal for ourselves, or what?
4c – What about the Financial Terrorists? We’ve seen now how Wall Street and its casino-mentality bankers and brokers have posed a threat to our nation’s economic security. Why aren’t we sending in the military to neutralize THAT threat? Heh.
4d – On the other hand, any cuts to defense spending should not at all be allowed to affect our nation’s veterans and their compensation or benefits. Those military contracts should always be honored, but are all too often thrown under the bus in favor of some new lucrative defense contractor’s latest gizmo, program, or profit motive. Frankly, I’d like to see every disabled veteran given a job and a house… free and clear of debt or taxes. These veterans have, imho, earned at least that, no matter what their percentage of disability is rated at by the VA.
5. This ties in to my point at 4d. No veteran, particularly the disabled veterans, should be unemployed or homeless. There’s no excuse or justification for that.
Roughly one in three U.S. homeless adults is a veteran. Some 131,000 veterans, about 97 percent male, are estimated to be homeless on any given night. Life expectancy for homeless people is 30 years less than average.
This is according to the VA’s own research on homelessness. And yet, the amount of spending on shelter for homeless veterans is well below demand for housing, else there would be no homeless veterans today. At the same time, many of the “Rust Belt” cities (i.e. – Detroit) are emptying out and housing and many other buildings are being abandoned and even bulldozed. Why isn’t there a comprehensive plan in place to solve these two problems along with job creation? What percentage of the VA’s program budget to end veteran homelessness is actually spent on obtaining housing? About 1%, and from what I can see here, their 5 Year Plan will help only about 40,000 veterans… a drop in the bucket, and this year’s census will give us a more accurate up-to-date picture of what the numbers actually look like. So, should we believe Shinseki is serious about ending veteran homelessness?
5a – Which brings me to this point: Why do so many federal agencies (where veterans could possibly be employed) have to be located in Washington DC, and wouldn’t national security be enhanced if those agencies were decentralized from an area that was attacked on 9/11/2001? We do have teleconferencing and telecommuting technologies. It’s not as if they all really need to be in DC. Decentralizing government agencies would also spur development of nation-wide high speed rail, which would also mean job creation.
5b – Solving the problem of homeless veterans would cut homelessness by one-third, at least among homeless adults. Does our nation not want to invest in those who’ve given their all in service to this country, or is that just a lie to help military recruitment? Yes, veteran healthcare is important, but it’s not the entirety of what problems veterans are facing today, especially in this Great Recession we’re mired in currently. We ought to be giving veterans a “bailout”, not rewarding corporate executives who did so much damage to our nation’s economic security. They don’t deserve bonuses. What does this say about our nation’s priorities?
5c – Support Our Troops? How many transnational corporations, including those who think Golden Parachutes and Executive Compensation and Bonuses for “Too Big To Fail” companies, have undertaken the sponsorship/stewardship of a homeless or unemployed veteran? They get tax credits for hiring, but where are the statistics on turnover and pay? And by sponsorship/stewardship I mean, a full-boat, helpful hand up: housing, a good paying job with security, healthcare supplementary insurance (dental, vision, preventive, etc.), transportation, etc. Many of these companies think nothing of supporting pro athletes with millions in sponsorship (not to mention the multi-million dollar Superbowl advertisers who should feel shame at this point, but don’t), so why not veterans who actually performed a valuable service for this country and who protect the nation’s corporations who profit from its citizens? What’s the matter, don’t they SUPPORT OUR TROOPS?
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