Rethinking Our Military

America spends more on its military than the next ten military budgets combined. More money than the France, England, Germany, Japan, Israel, Russia, China, and several others combined. Why is that? And for all of that spending, the vast majority of Americans are not employed by the military.

There is also a curious funding scheme for our military. The Navy has the same budget as the Air Force and the Army. The funds are wracked up more or less evenly between the different fighting units. Does this funding square with reality? Do each of these entities need the same resources all of the time? No, but that is the deal that was cut after WWII and that is how it has remained.

We believe an overwhelming military keeps us safe, but does it? Did it stop 9-11 from occurring? Will it stop other attempts at destroying our citizens and our infrastructure? I doubt it. We are devising better methods of detecting threats on the homeland, but those defensive instruments are not tanks, ships and planes. If we are able to thwart another attack it won’t be because we have that kind of fire power. Prevention will be the product of good intelligence. We have to remember the weapon of choice in the case of 9-11 was a box cutter. You don’t need a military to stop that; you need to know what is going on.

Other than the pitifully naïve, no one thinks we do not need a military, but that force should be small by design. Having a robust military, according to some people prevents war. Actually the opposite is true. If you are trained as a military officer, you tend to want to test your metal.

Here is another point to ponder. Nothing saps the life out of a country than the enormous expense of the military. Military product research throws off some beneficial technology that can be used in civilian life, but so does space research, or energy research, or medical research, or any basic research for that matter, but all of those research areas create useful tools for civilian use as the primary product. Military products are designed to destroy and not much more.

We spent over a trillion dollars on an idiotic war in Iraq. We suffered more than 4,000 dead soldiers and 35,000 more wounded, some of whom bear mental scars that may never heal. It is a travesty. At the same time the rest of the world applies its resources to developing new systems and products (even some that were invented in the US).

We could have used that money to rehabilitate and modernize our entire national rail system. The result would have been a more efficient country moving people and goods and adding substantially to our national wealth. Shame on our leaders for taking us down this road! Shame on us for not throwing these bastards out of office!

Ernie Fazio