Gut the Military

For fiscal year 2007 the United States is spending $439.3 billion dollars (pdf) on the military, specifically the department of defense.  Doesn't sound like much, does it?  But this figure's a little misleading.  First we need to factor in what is being spent in Iraq, which for some reason doesn't get included in the "military spending" figures.  It's supposed to be around $110 billion, but some say it will be higher.  Still we're not there.  The CIA and various other "defense" operations are unconstitutionally protected from disclosing budgetary figures.  They are all funded from what's called the "black budget," and it's estimated at around $1.1 trillion a year, a complicated number because it's not merely subtracting known expenditures from total revenues.  (Read the report for more details on this.)  So all told we spend around $1.6 trillion dollars a year on our military apparatus.  It's long been known that we spend more on the military than all other nations combined, but that's without the black budget.  With that factored in, we hold a 3:1 advantage.
Just think about that for a second.  $1.6 trillion, every single year, being pumped into other countries, for what reason?  Are we being protected?  Of course we are, but not by that $1.6 trillion.  As a matter of fact a pretty strong case can be made that by stretching our military out, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Germany to South Korea to every single continent, we've made ourselves significantly less secure.

But the security issue is largely irrelevant.  We are a naturally secure nation, buffered by two huge oceans and two friendly neighbors.  Real security, including our ports and various other points of ingress like airports and borders, are costly but not $1.6 trillion costly.

Conservatives like to complain about any spending in the United States that is used to help anyone in some way destitute, including all forms of welfare.  However, they jump all over themselves at the opportunity to waste massive amounts of money, much that we don't even have, in foreign nations providing almost no benefits to Americans.  It's not a question of conservativism in general; many actual conservatives, like Ron Paul, have it right.  Such spending is indefensible, whether by liberals or conservatives, and both gladly do it and have for years.  We have thousands of bases all over the globe, providing jobs to soldiers and contractors, which do nothing but provide a living space and security for those same soldiers and contractors.  Oh, and of course they make hefty profits for the manufacturers of rapidly outdated military equipment.  Who actually benefits from all this?

Surely not us.  Defenders of the military like to trot out that old canard that our soldiers are protecting our freedom, when nothing could be further from the truth.  Our freedoms aren't under attack, except from within.  I've said it before, if they really were protecting our freedoms, they'd be in the streets of D.C.

These kind of jobs and these kinds of workers are what are desperately needed here, at home.  They work for the government, it's already a welfare job, so why not use them to help the nation, rather than pumping all that money into pointless military exercises in other nations?  It's a strange position we find ourselves in, with attacks from coast-to-coast on supposed welfare projects like children's health insurance or Medicaid, but to talk about slashing the biggest, most pointless, and least effective corporate welfare scheme of all is an automatic guaranteed electoral loss.

And all the while, the nation we've built slowly falls apart.  Of course there was the collapse in Minnesota, but did you even know that on Thursday another bridge collapsed in Mesa, Arizona?  Or that two other bridges were closed that same day because collapses were deemed possible?  And back to that $1.6 trillion figure.  If it seems familiar, it should.  It's exactly how much the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated it would cost to bring our entire infrastructure back to the "good" category.

The key principle behind progressivism as I see it is that we must use our common wealth for the common good, and wasting over a trillion dollars every year has nothing to do with that common good.  Our military system absolutely must be gutted. It's the most important structural change our nation needs to make in order to achieve the society we as progressives imagine we can have.  We need a much smaller, smarter, and faster standing military to protect us from the incredibly rare instances (the last one being World War II) in which our presence was necessary, and we need the mechanism in place in order for civilians to do their duty when the nation is truly called upon.  Yes, the draft must be brought back.  Imagine the natural accountability our politicians would then get to experience!  Our "intelligent" defense mechanism must be brought to focus on actual security, not monitoring protest meetings and installing elaborate camera surveillance systems in tiny towns.  And their actions must be brought out of the realm of "black budgets" and be held publicly accountable just like the constitution says they must.  Oversight and accountability is what makes democracy work, and without it we end up with the truly ghastly situation we're in now.

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