Militant US and the Military Industrial Complex

Everyone should be into politics, we live in a democracy and our participation in the governmental process is the cornerstone of our country.  Yet, there are many flaws in the system.  I often frustrated because the will of the people is often trumped by special interests, partisan politics and idealists.  The area in which it seems the people have the least say is when it comes to war.  Historically, in the Vietnam War as early as July 1967 the majority of Americans opposed the war, yet we did not leave Vietnam until around August of 1973.  In Iraq, public opinion turned against the war as early as June 2005 and even earlier the majority started to believe that we went into Iraq for the wrong reasons (ie. there were no weapons of mass destruction! Bush, you dumbass).  Since the end of WWII the US has not seen a single decade without conflict.  If you want to learn more about how our politicians are able to dupe us into conflict and the way they prolong these conflicts, watch this documentary, it is truly eye opening.

War Made Easy


Why?  Why do we have to be subject to constant conflict?  What happened to our stance as a non-interventionist state?  Unfortunately,  WWI and WWII proved that we could not just sit by while conflict affects the rest of the world and that we would not survive without a standing military.  But, that hardly justifies our governments rush to enter new conflicts.  The solution may be simple.  Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about it in his farewell address to the nation, the Military Industrial Complex.  The military industrial complex means that our industry is dominated by military industries and includes the relationship between these industries, our armies, and our legislators.  Recognize any of these names?  Boeing. General Electric. Lockheed-Martin. Northrop-Grumman Corporation.  These are just the most well-known of the fifteen major military corporations in the US.  These companies have a lot of power and drive our economy.  Through political contributions and lobbying, these companies have a lot of control over our politics and military.  It is ironic that the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe would later warn us about our dependence on war, but he was right.  In my opinion, one of the major reasons that so many countries hate us is because we tend to be bullies and we are too quick to use preemptive force when diplomacy may be more effective.  Look at current events in Egypt, all we needed to do to help was talk, not Shock and Awe.  We have so much money invested in international aid, we can have a great influence on other governments without the use of force.  Not to mention the travesty of funding other countries and groups corrupt militaries (ie. the Taliban).

I digress.  What does the military industrial complex really mean for citizens?  Debt.  Our government is constantly talking about what programs can be cut...well our defense budget.  For the 2011 budget (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/), discretionary spending for security programs is $895 billion and non-security is only $520 billion (note this does not include such programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. which are considered and should always be considered mandatory programs.  The budget for mandatory programs is $2.165 trillion)*.  The Department of Defense has a massive $718.8 billion budget; while the Department of Education gets $71.5 billion and the Department of Housing and Urban Regeneration gets $47.5 billion--both are programs I believe are much more important than defense.  Just for you Irene, the NASA budget is only a paltry $17.7 billion.  The greatest investment we can make as a country is in education.  Better education makes many other programs obsolete.  Better education improves health and lowers crime and poverty.  The program cost (purchase, maintenance, use, etc.) of a F-22 Raptor is $339 million, for that price we could hire approximately 170 teachers for fifty years at the current average yearly income for teachers (average yearly salary used for calculation $40,000, actual average ranges from $40,000-$44,000 based on level [http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary]).  Double teachers salaries and we could still hire 85 teachers.  In total we have 183 F-22 Raptors for a total program cost of $65 billion.  F-22s are even considered useless because F-18 are still more advanced than any of the aircraft used by other countries and F-22s will not be challenged for at least thirty years.  You do the math and figure out how much we can increase teacher salaries and how many teachers we could hire if we just eliminated our F-22s.

*Table of proposed budget by category from Budget of the U.S.
Government: Fiscal Year 2011, Cick for larger image.
(http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/)

The sad fact of our defense budget is we do not pay for it.  It is common knowledge that our spending on the wars in the Middle East is the major contributor to our national deficit**.  In the past we used to raise taxes to pay for wars, specifically taxes on the rich***.  Now, even tax cuts contribute $53 billion to the deficit.  Taxes are a different different story, but just as a note to all you flat tax proponents out there, we practically have a flat tax right now.  Our top level of taxation has dropped from $2.5 million to $200,000 per year, hardly a progressive tax system if you ask me.  To think the top level of taxation in the US used to be 91%! and now the rich are complaining about Obama raising taxes to 37%!  Yet I digress as I often do.  The point I am trying to get across is we should not cut spending in education or social programs before we cut our military budget, especially since the majority of it goes to wars that the people do not support.  We can be a global powerhouse without resorting to violence every few years.

**Budget deficit since 1963, the war in Afghanistan started in 2001
and the war in Iraq started in 2004

***Tax rate for the highest income bracket with tax hikes during
WWI, WWII and Korean War and tax cuts during wars in the
Middle East highlighted

Why does our government push war agendas besides influence from industry?  I have a theory based on Plato's Republic.  In Plato's description of a tyrant:

When "all is calm on that front [exiling his enemies from the state], his primary concern, I imagine, is to be constantly stirring up some war or other, so that the people need a leader [...] And also, wouldn't you say, so that impoverished by war taxes, they will be compelled to concentrate on their daily needs and be less likely to plot against him? [...] And in addition, I suppose, so that if there are some free-thinking people he suspects of rejecting his rule, he can find pretexts for putting them at the mercy of the enemy and destroying them?  For all these reasons, isn't a tyrant compelled to be always stirring up war?"

Is our government distracting us with war, so that they can push an unpopular agenda in other policy areas?  It is possible.  During President Bush's time in office the majority of news coverage was focused on the two wars in the Middle East; now our economy is in the dumps because of deregulation legislation passed at the same time.  Maybe Bush was a tyrant, or at least he fits Plato's definition well.  He stirred up war, destroyed our economy, bankrupted our country and ostracized anti-war views as un-patriotic.  As a citizen it is difficult to stand up to our government; as they explain in the documentary, we are uninformed, misled and berated by our "liberal" media.  Yet, we must always question.  We must always stand up for what we believe in and pressure our legislators to listen.  Challenging our governments decisions to go to war is not anti-patriotic, it is DEMOCRACY!  Julian Asange should not be persecuted for leaking information that should have been presented to the public before we decided whether we wanted to enter war or not.  Ultimately, our system of government does not give much power to the individual, but still we must try.  I cannot live in a country where the will of the people is so disregarded by the government we intrust to act on our will (besides war look at socialized medicine, which had majority support by the population, but we still do not have it).

Support our troops, not our government that puts them in harms way for unjust causes.  My favorite bumper sticker is:

Support our troops, Bring them home

Special thanks are due to my recent history professor Craig Harlan for teaching us so much about our government process and thus providing me for most of this information.