The Military Option

The Military Option

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower-1961

When we look to cutting costs we have to look at military expenditures since it forms one of the top two expenditures in the federal budget. The military budget is certainly a behemoth and encompasses many areas of our economic and social structure.

The warning of President Eisenhower about the dangers of allowing the military-industrial complex to become too influential and entwined with our economic structure has come to pass. The industries that are involved with what we euphemistically call defense are giant players in the global market. If we drastically cut Boeing or Lockheed-Martin or Grumman we may not only affect our economy but we will certainly enrage legislators who are zealous in protecting those jobs in their districts.

But the potential for world changing action is in this category. The changes here will affect not only international relations but also domestic issues such as energy, imports and exports.

While we like to think of the military as protecting us from external threats that is a little misleading. The purpose the military serves to a large degree is to protect property rights of our domestic industries. For instance, the oil industry imports a large percentage of our raw materials and it falls to our military to secure those sources. It also is true that the military is the largest consumer of those resources. For instance, we have the 5^th fleet of the US Navy based in Bahrain, a tiny sheikdom island in the Persian Gulf. Its purpose is to protect the shipping lanes for oil traffic and it is the taxpayer, not the oil companies, who pay for that. It is one of the hidden costs of our hunger for oil.

We have many industries that depend on exports for profits and it falls to our military to protect those markets and our government to promote our industry there. Often we offer inducements to those nations to persuade them to view our products in a favorable light. In many cases we prop up despotic governments to create a favorable environment for our industry. It is the taxpayer that pays for that, not the industry. In fact, we may actually offer tax breaks to those industries.

Foreign governments benefit from being under the protection of our defense umbrella. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Israel and the list goes on and on. The taxpayer pays for that, not those countries and all of these are financed through the defense budget even though they have little to do with defense.

Other foreign governments benefit from our defense because of their reliance upon the United States for a significant part of their national revenues. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Iraq do not have to devote as much effort to developing their own national economies or acceding to the wishes of their people. Without the support of the United States they would have to deal with their domestic issues in a more forthright manner. Another of the hidden costs of our oil addiction borne by the American consumer.

Some analysts of our budget think we have already moved to a permanent war footing. It is hard to argue with that analysis since we have been involved in conflict in one spot or another with few exceptions for my entire life. Our economy is stimulated by the direct injection of taxpayer dollars into the defense and related industries. This is absolutely no different than what we tried to do with stimulus dollars to encourage the economy to grow during this recession.

Our government and the deficit hawks would have you believe that our social programs are the largest of our budget items and they are indeed significant. There is another way to look at it. Right now we figure our budget by including Social Security receipts as revenues and benefits as costs. But Social Security is financed by a dedicated tax that is separate from the rest of the budget and should not be included in this analysis. It has not always been so. If you delete Social Security revenues and benefits from the analysis the defense portion of our budget jumps to 57% instead of 25% or so. Using this analysis the entitlements drop from 54% of the budget to 30%. What they don’t want to tell you is that the government borrowed the Social Security money and spent it and doesn’t want to pay it back.

So, for everyone who thinks that we can just stop spending money and straighten the deficit and debt out, think again. What is required is a total rethinking of our domestic military industries and our foreign policy that uses the American consumer to finance dubious alliances around the world. We need to rethink the global military strategy and try to decide what is necessary and what is not. This is much harder than just not spending.

Medicare and Medicaid are difficult issues but they are not problems that can’t be solved. They can be dealt with through managed care and subsidies. We may find there is quite a bit of money left once we stop trying to carry the load for the entire world.

It is my belief that if we began to divert money and other resources away from the pursuit of war and directed them towards invention and economy that we would necessarily force the world to follow us. Other countries would be forced to increase their attention to economic and social matters.

During the cold war we had competing political philosophies driving a neo-imperialistic mode of international relations. Since the cold war ended even the socialistic nations have begun to engage in free market enterprises. Free markets will inexorably lead to democratic institutions and we would be better served by training our resources in that direction.

Please do not take this to mean we don’t need a military. We do. We just don’t need it to be bigger than the next 13 nations combined and we should ask ourselves if what we are doing is proper.

My take is that the solution to our financial problems is not superficial but it is structural. It is hard and that is why no one wants to get out front on it.