What would you buy with $419.3 billion if you had the choice?
Well, one really good first idea might be to give about $69 to every woman, man, and child on God’s earth. If the taxpayers of the US were to do that, just imagine what a change that donation might make in the lives of the most impoverished of our fellow humans! In a mid-size village in Africa, people could pool their money together and get a good ways toward producing a safe drinking-water system for everyone. Or, every 20 families (= 100 people?) could club together and hire two pretty good additional teachers for their children.
Or… or… or… There must be thousands of fabulous ideas for how to spend such a sum of money!
Instead of which, the Bush administration is proposing sinking $419.3 billion into purely military goods and services in Fiscal Year 2006.
(That’s the figure for budgeted “Discretionary Budgetary Authority”… Of course, who knows how many “supplementals” they might also come up with along the way?)
So which of those two ways of spending this humungous gob of money would seem better to serve the national security of the US and its 285 million citizens and (a deeply intertwined concept, this) the human security of all the world’s 6.1 billion people?
By way of comparison, the amount the Bush administration is requesting for all non-military international work is $33.6 billion.
And then, there is this. Namely, an article in Monday’s NYT, in which Tim Weiner wrote about the massive additional spending that some people in the Pentagon want to engage in, to upgrade the technology in the hands of the military including thru a truly mega-buck program called Future Combat Systems.
Weiner wrote:
- Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program, called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion…
That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by the Army, does not include a projected $25 billion for the communications network needed to connect the future forces. Nor does it fully account for Army plans to provide Future Combat weapons and technologies to forces beyond [the] first 15 brigades [out of about 45].
Now some of the military’s advocates in Congress are asking how to pay the bill.
“We’re dealing today with a train wreck,” Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania and vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a March 16 Congressional hearing on the cost and complexity of Future Combat Systems…
The Army sees Future Combat, the most expensive weapons program it has ever undertaken, as a seamless web of 18 different sets of networked weapons and military robots…
But the bridge to the future remains a blueprint. Army officials issued a stop-work order in January for the network that would link Future Combat weapons, citing its failure to progress. They said this month that they did not know if they could build a tank light enough to fly. [? — HC]
The Army is asking Congress to approve Future Combat while it is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose costs, according to the Congressional Research Service, now exceed $275 billion. Future Combat is one of the biggest items in the Pentagon’s plans to build more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of more than $1.3 trillion.
The Army has canceled two major weapons programs, the Crusader artillery system and the Comanche helicopter, “to protect funding for the Future Combat System,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a member of the Armed Services Committee. “That is why we have to get the F.C.S. program right.”
I’d like to, er, humbly submit that maybe it’s not the “FCS” system that the US citizenry and our representatives in Congress “need to get right”… Maybe instead it’s our whole approach to the rest of the world?
I mean, why on earth should we think that a globalized “Manifest Destiny” mentality backed up simply by hard steel power that is also, um, “highly networked” or whatever the appropriate FCS jargon is– that this would do anything to strengthen the wellbeing of our communities or the security of our nation?
It didn’t work for the South African authors of apartheid… No reason at all it should work for us. So, please! Let’s focus all our efforts, and our spending, and our technological wizardry into getting back into right relationship with the rest of the world, instead… That way lies security. And that is the “seamless web” to which we should truly be paying attention.
This post makes me feel like the U.S. should be called “Airstrip One” as Britain is named in Orwell’s “1984”. What does the U.S. do these days besides pursue war?
It is amazing how incompetent these people are although some other governments behave the same way. Bangladesh spends 50% of its budget on the military. I guess we are witnessing how resistant a bureaucracy can be to change. Can these politicians say “no” without losing their positions? I suppose totally unscrupulous/flakey politicians can be found anywhere.
The congressional horror show continues. Some day I wonder if these weapons will be turned against us. They are basicly tools of coercion which give one group of people power over another group.
I agree, Helena, the mentality behind the “FCS” sounds a lot like the old South African regime’s “Total Strategy” that we defeated.
Further reflecting on Internet encounters, it seems clear to me that just as with SA in the “Total Strategy” years of the 1980s, when the military became florid in its delusions of omnipotence, so also at the same time has the intelligentsia withdrawn from support of the US state.
There is a band of rogues from Perle and Gaffney through Limbaugh & Co to Horowitz the absurd hounder of bloggers. But these are not the mass of the US intellectual strata.
The intellectual class as a whole has withdrawn, as it did in SA. It is not necessarily revolutionary yet but it no longer voluntarily supports the status quo. Where are the films and books sympathetic to the Bush wars? Where is the “Mrs Miniver” of today? The “Green Berets” of today, or even the “Deer Hunter”. There don’t even seem to be any “Saving my Buddy” manipulative schlock books, plays or movies. Nor even a “Seven Days in May”.
Where the intellectuals are positively engaged against the regime their work is of high quality, as with your blog, dear Helena, or Counterpunch, or Juan Cole, or Kurt Nimmo, or Abbas Kadhim. This, too, is reminiscent of the 1980s in SA. It’s a good time to make a name! You will not be forgotten. You are carving out the future – a human future not a robot one.
Helena,
It’s interesting to contrast the cost of the military, especially that of the Iraq war to this mere fact reported by Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission’s special expert on the right to food. Reporting to the commission’s headquarters in Geneva, he said that more than a quarter of Iraqi children do not have enough to eat and 7.7% are acutely malnourished – a jump from 4% recorded in the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion and claimed that situation was “a result of the war led by coalition forces”. (from the Guardian)
Dominic,
I’m less optimistic than you concerning the US intelligentsia. There are a lot of right wing think tanks who are now working their way in the university structures, creating a backclash against progressive professors and against affirmative actions. During the Vietnam war there were a lot of antiwar protesters in the Academic world. It doesn’t look so nowadays. At least not yet. It may change if US reintroduce the draft however. There are some very good and progressive blogs, but there seem to be much more right wing ones (as Juan Cole discussed some days ago) and the forums are often dominated or interrupted by rogue conservative people.
I am suggesting that apart from the scoundrels (as in “scoundrel time”) the regular intellectuals are not supporting the regime. They are not as a rule revolutionary, i.e. most of them are not actively organised. But they are not “on-message” for the regime either.
This is how it was in SA. It’s a different comparison to the Vietnam years. I’m saying there is a drawing back by the intellectuals as whole which is not translated into collective action.
The few who stand out against the regime (let’s not forget Justin Raimondo too) are outstanding writers. The pro-regime scoundrels and rogues are very low-grade by comparison.
I’m not saying you don’t need a mass movement (as we did – the UDF, COSATU, the ANC &c.). You need other factors as well. But what you are set fair to do is to withold intellectual hegemony from the regime. The devil, after all, does not have all the best tunes.
Thanks all, for the comments. Dominic may be right re the intellectual climate here in the US (which does put some awesome responsibility on those of us challenging the ruling dogma from inside the belly of the beast– who are quite a bit more numerous than he indicates, I think… ) But he (you) are also right to point to the centrality of the need for a visionary and disciplined mass movement. That, we totally don’t have. We don’t even really have a concept of what one might or should look like! We really need to start brainstorming hard– at a global level– on that.
Thanks Christiane for the link on the growth in hunger in Iraq. If I can fix a software glitch the backside of the blog seems to have and write a new post, I’ll try to highlight that.
Helena,
I picked it from Juan Cole to be honnest. Our daily press (Le Temps and others) tells more on the subject than the Guardian, but it doesn’t focus especially on Iraq. One had an interview of Ziegler who, among other things, states that the US is ruining the UN organizations. Ziegler also describe how the last nominations went at the UN and how nowadays no one can be appointed without US aproval. A recent and hihgly qualified nominee for Kosovo for instance was rebuked by the US at the last minute because he had being an anti-war protester at the time of the Vietnam conflict. (Since he wasn’t a US’er, you wonder how they got the information ?). Ziegler also had some statements on the World Bank, on the globalization etc.
May be it would be worth a translation ? But I’m quite busy this week.
What’s really disappointing is that the Democrats have had nothing to say about the crucial 2002 “National Security Strategy”.
I think that Helena is right in saying that many Americans have misgivings about American policies since 2001. They have gotten very little leadership from among the US power elites. That’s not a good sign.
“But he (you) are also right to point to the centrality of the need for a visionary and disciplined mass movement. That, we totally don’t have.”
Yes, we DO have it, but nobody recognizes its potential yet. It’s called The Green Party.
I hope you don’t mind but I posted some of this article on my own blog. I also include a link to your address. I am a rookie, so if I should take the comments off, just let me know.
Anyway, I appreciated your article. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that a country who continues to spend more and more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. The priorities of our nation alarm me.
Jeremy– welcome to the Comments boards here!
Anything that’s up here– main post or comments– comes uder our “Creative Commons” license which means yes, absolutely do go ahead and use/cross-post etc the material from here. But attribution, preferably with easy hyperlinks, is absolutely the collegial thing to do.
If you want to put up another comment with the hyperlink to your own blog, that wd be excellent. Unfortunately the way the comments get shown here people’s hyperlinks aren’t shown unless they’re in yr text.
Regarding the tanks, the article actually meant light enough to be transported inside a transport plane, by the way.
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