We Need to Change Our Spending Priorities Away From Military Adventurism and Toward Domestic Concerns
by John Lawrence
The military-industrial complex needs to be defunded, and the budgets of Homeland Security, the FBI and cybersecurity need to be augmented. We need to reconsider what "national security" really means especially in an era of climate change and pandemics. If the world's nations can not get along, climate change will end human civilization. The western nations, especially the US, need the cooperation of Russia and China in particular if climate change can even be mitigated to a less disastrous level than is already baked in the cake. Russia is one of the largest exporters of fossil fuel products, and will profit most from the thawing of the Arctic. If they are treated as pariahs, they will not be too concerned if the rest of the world becomes uninhabitable. Scientific American reported in an article entitled It's Time to Rein in Inflated Military Budgets:
"Despite the trillions of dollars Congress and successive administrations have lavished on the Pentagon since the turn of the century, the massive U.S. arsenal and fighting force deployed worldwide are powerless against grave, nonmilitary threats to national security—from a raging pandemic to the fact that tens of millions of Americans breathe foul air, drink tainted water, and struggle to pay for food, housing and health care.
"Such a reassessment is long overdue. No other country’s military outlays come close. In FY 2019, the Pentagon’s budget was nearly three times bigger than China’s defense spending and more than 10 times larger than Russia’s. All told, the U.S. military budget in 2019 exceeded the next 10 countries’ defense budgets combined and singlehandedly accounted for a hefty 38 percent of military spending worldwide."
The truth is that lobbyists for the military-industrial complex will lose money if a sane foreign and domestic policy is adopted. It is a hotbed of self interest which will come up with infinite rationales for continued military spending even when it is obvious to a disinterested observer that the Defense Department is just an unabashed money pit. The article continues;
"There are plenty of reasons to cut the Pentagon’s budget, but its track record of profligate spending is among the most obvious. If the Pentagon were a private corporation, gross mismanagement would have forced it into bankruptcy years ago. Dysfunctional internal controls, aided and abetted by years of lax congressional and administration oversight, have enabled it to waste tens of billions of dollars annually, and the last 20 years are littered with a parade of overpriced, botched and bungled projects.
"In just the first decade of this century, the Pentagon was forced to cancel a dozen ill-conceived, ineffective weapons programs that cost taxpayers $46 billion. They included the Future Combat Systems program, a fleet of networked high-tech vehicles that did not work; the Comanche helicopter, which—after 22 years in development—was never built; and the 40-ton Crusader artillery gun, which never even made it to the prototype stage.
"To put this example of managerial malfeasance in context, these canceled programs collectively cost more than the federal government spent on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the last five years.
At least the Pentagon killed those projects before they wasted any more money. All too often, it does not know when to pull the plug. The Army’s attempt to replace its outmoded Bradley tank is a case in point. Over the last 17 years, it has blown an estimated $22.9 billion on three flawed prototypes, but in February—just three weeks after rejecting the third failed design—it issued yet another request for proposals from defense contractors."
To put it bluntly many peoples' livelihoods and many corporation's profits are tied up with the continued exorbitant spending by the Federal government in support of the Defense Department, but Defense is a misnomer if the spending priorities are so out of wack compared to the actual threats to the American people. In short we are wasting money on so-called defense and letting the real threats go unfunded and undefended.
