Why is it so hard to reduce the Pentagon budget? (Via TomDispatch.)
To put this figure in perspective: despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did during its two terms in office.
.. What accounts for the Department of Defense’s ability to keep a stranglehold on your tax dollars year after endless year?
Pillar one supporting that edifice: ideology. As long as most Americans accept the notion that it is the God-given mission and right of the United States to go anywhere on the planet and do more or less anything it cares to do with its military, you won’t see Pentagon spending brought under real control.
.. Lockheed Martin, for instance, has put together a handy map of how its troubled F-35 fighter jet has created 125,000 jobs in 46 states. The actual figures are, in fact, considerably lower, but the principle holds: having subcontractors in dozens of states makes it harder for members of Congress to consider cutting or slowing down even a failed or failing program. Take as an example the M-1 tank, which the Army actually wanted to stop buying
.. In such periods, getting Americans behind a program of feeding the military machine massive sums of money has generally required a heavy dose of fear.
.. the U.S. aerospace industry produced an astonishing 300,000-plus military aircraft during World War II. Not surprisingly, major weapons producers struggled to survive in a peacetime environment in which government demand for their products threatened to be a tiny fraction of wartime levels.
.. NSC-68, a secret memorandum the National Security Council prepared for President Harry Truman in April 1950, created the template for a policy based on the global “containment” of communism and grounded in a plan to encircle the Soviet Union with U.S. military forces, bases, and alliances.
.. Senator Arthur Vandenberg put the thrust of this new Cold War policy in far simpler terms when he bluntly advised President Truman to “scare the hell out of the American people” to win support for a $400 million aid plan for Greece and Turkey. His suggestion would be put into effect not just for those two countries but to generate support for what President Eisenhower would later describe as “a permanent arms establishment of vast proportions.”
.. the disastrous Vietnam War, which drove many Americans to question the wisdom of a policy of permanent global interventionism. That phenomenon would be dubbed the “Vietnam syndrome” by interventionists ..
.. perhaps the biggest threat since World War II to an “arms establishment of vast proportions” came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, also in 1991. How to mainline fear into the American public and justify Cold War levels of spending when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, the primary threat of the previous nearly half-a-century
.. General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summed up the fears of that moment within the military and the arms complex when he said, “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.”
.. but the Pentagon helped staunch the bleeding relatively quickly before a “peace dividend” could be delivered to the American people. Instead, it put a firm floor under the fall by announcing what came to be known as the “rogue state” doctrine. Resources formerly aimed at the Soviet Union would now be focused on “regional hegemons” like Iraq and North Korea.
.. After the 9/11 attacks, the rogue state doctrine morphed into the Global War on Terror (GWOT)
.. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld evensuggested that Saddam was like Hitler, as if a modest-sized Middle Eastern state could somehow muster the resources to conquer the globe.
.. In the context of an increasingly militarized foreign policy, one might call Obama’s approach “politically sustainable warfare,” since it involved fewer (American) casualties and lower costs than Bush-style warfare, which peaked in Iraq at more than 160,000 troops and a comparable number of private contractors.
.. Recent terror attacks against Western targets from Brussels, Paris, and Nice to San Bernardino and Orlando have offered the national security state and the Obama administration the necessary fear factor that makes the case for higher Pentagon spending so palatable. This has been true despite the fact that more tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons will be useless in preventing such attacks.
The majority of what the Pentagon spends, of course, has nothing to do with fighting terrorism.
.. A Pentagon spokesman admitted as much recently by acknowledging that more than half of the $58.8 billion war budget is being used to pay for non-war costs.
.. That slush fund is also enabling the Pentagon to spend billions of dollars in seed money as a down payment on the department’s proposed $1 trillion plan to buy a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines.
.. The size of a Clinton buildup is less clear, but she has also pledged to work toward lifting the caps on the Pentagon’s regular budget. If that were done and the war fund continued to be stuffed with non-war-related items, one thing is certain: the Pentagon and its contractors will be sitting pretty.
.. fundamental change would require taking on the fear factor, the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, and the way the military-industrial complex is embedded in Washington.
Shimon Peres: Not Just a Man of Peace
Mr. Peres certainly would have liked to enter history as a peacemaker, but that’s not how he should be remembered: Indeed, his greatest contributions were to Israel’s military might and victories.
.. In the early 1950s, just a few years after Israel declared independence, he concluded that Israel must develop its own nuclear option. He established secret contacts with France to obtain nuclear technology. The nuclear reactor that now sits near the town of Dimona in the Negev Desert is largely thanks to these efforts.
.. Mr. Peres was courageous and imaginative. He was willing to consider and often to risk almost all political, diplomatic and military options, regardless of how fantastic and unrealistic they might be. In 1967, he sought to avoid the Six Day War, anticipating heavy losses for the Israeli army. He reportedly suggested that instead of going to war, Israel should detonate a powerful and extremely noisy device that would scare Egypt, Jordan and Syria out of their plan to attack Israel.
.. In 1975, when he was defense minister, Mr. Peres granted permission to one of the first groups of Israeli settlers to remain in the West Bank. Later, he supported the establishment of several other settlements, laying the first obstacles to the so-called two-state solution.
.. The right called Mr. Peres a defeatist for ceding some control of the West Bank, the left called him an expansionist because the agreement didn’t end the occupation. Both sides were not entirely wrong. In fact, Mr. Peres was trying to please everyone, settlers and peace activists alike. That was the story line of his political life.
.. But in reality he was motivated not by a lust for power or by greed, but by an outsider’s desperate quest for his people’s love.
.. It was ironic that Mr. Peres gained in popularity at a time when Israel was losing many of its friends in the world. He remains perhaps the last Israeli many in the rest of the world can still admire as they once admired his country. He died at a time of apparent transition. Not long from now, Israel may once again have to face crucial and painful decisions regarding its future as a Jewish and democratic country. These decisions will require a truly great leader, someone who, unlike Mr. Peres, demands his people’s compliance, not their love.
Bob Gates: Trump is ‘beyond repair’
He also attacks Trump as “cavalier about the use of nuclear weapons,” with “a record of insults to servicemen, their families and the military.” He criticizes the GOP standard-bearer as “willfully ignorant about the rest of the world, about our military and its capabilities, and about government itself.”
.. “He has no clue about the difference between negotiating a business deal and negotiating with sovereign nations,” Gates writes. “A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America.”
.. But he rules out Trump as “stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.”
Why Does the United States Give So Much Money to Israel?
The two countries just signed a new military-aid deal—the biggest pledge of its kind in American history. It have may seemed inevitable, but the record-setting moment is also rife with irony.
The pact, laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding, will be worth $38 billion over the course of a decade, an increase of roughly 27 percent on the money pledged in the last agreement, which was signed in 2007.
.. young Americans are far less sympathetic toward Israel than their older peers: A 2014 Gallup poll found that only half of those aged 18 to 34 favored Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict, “compared with 58 percent of 35- to 54-year-olds and 74 percent of those 55 and older.”
.. Bernie Sanders, who was extremely popular among young people during the Democratic primary season, controversially criticized Israel, winning “applause and cheers” from the audience at one debate for saying, “If we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”
.. The new money is an attempt to pacify Israeli concerns about continued threats from Iran, she added.
.. The money is also an attempt to satisfy congressional Republicans... The deal also directs more money back toward the United States. It eliminates a provision in the previous aid agreement that allowed Israel to spend 26 percent of its Foreign Military Financing on weaponry and other resources produced within Israel, rather than in the United States—a provision intended to help Israel build its own defense industry.