Can the Defense Budget Shrink Without Risking National Security?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It makes me sick to my stomach thinking of beefing up military capacity while cutting military medical benefits. How about this instead: you sent other people's sons and daughters overseas to be maimed and killed, so now you fucking take care of them.
The cost of health care needs to be factored into wars for 50-60 years afterwards, not framing the conversation with the word "entitlements" to subtly imply that ex soldiers are somehow taking more than they deserve. Lumping military in with bloated public sector employee benefits is shameful.
"An entitlement is a guarantee of access to something, such as to Social Security, Medicare or welfare benefits, based on established rights or by legislation." [1]
The word got tinged with a pejorative sense in recent years probably because it also has a definition in clinical psychology. We commonly say somebody "has a sense of entitlement".
I would not doubt that its a deliberate Republican talking point to use that word rather than "benefits" or "public assistance" in order to associate it with the psychological definition.
> In clinical psychology and psychiatry, an unrealistic, exaggerated, or rigidly held sense of entitlement may be considered a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder, seen in those who "because of early frustrations...arrogate to themselves the right to demand lifelong reimbursement from fate."
Why? They're professionals, they knew the risks and accepted the gambles. It's not like you went and conscripted a bunch of poor bastards, or tricked them into it.
It seems to me you either believe that everyone deserves decent health protection - in which case what you decide here has implications for how the national system should run - or you don't. But being hired for soldiering seems an odd point at which to digress from the general rule.
I doubt the US can cut the support they give soldiers much more. They are already paying close to minimum wage (unlike the admins, who no doubt make a lot more). If they cut much more, they'll pretty much have to start offering prisoners pardons for signing on (which will drive out good candidates, and piss a lot of people off).
Wouldn't it be nice if Congress had to guarantee $200,000 per year, for life for each person who's been to war?
That should serve to make Congress that much more reluctant to send people to new wars. Unfortunately, with technology advancing so rapidly, they would probably only have that much more incentive to make autonomous killer robots real, and to make massively more drones. I think they're still going for that anyway, just at a slower pace than it would happen with such a law.
I'd loose more sleep over DMV employees having their benefits cut personally.
US is today the main aggressor in the world, what China an Russia are doing by economic treaties, the US is using force alone. Afganistan, Iraq, Libia, Siria.
US is trying to force people in the world to keep using the petrodollar, but they had abused so much their power(printing it like crazy and exporting inflation and poverty to other countries), that the rest of the world is looking for alternatives, and they will find them.
All empires try to sustain past glories by force, from the Spanish empire in Nederlands to British Empire in India, Germany(France) and Japan(in China) before WWII. But empires come and go.
There could be so many solutions that could be used to cure the root cause of attacks against US, but most of them are completely unacceptable to the people running the military in US, and the MIC. Their solution is always war and destroying those that oppose them (even if that "solution" creates even more problems in the long term for the security of US).
It's the same problem with the NSA, which is run by an army general, who just happens to be not-amusingly nicknamed "Emperor Alexander". Instead of thinking that in order to make the Internet infrastructure in US secure by default (including banks, and whatever institution they tend to use in their arguments), they think that they need to have access to everything themselves, through loopholes, and they say that's what will keep the US infrastructure safe - when in fact they're just making it less secure. But that's okay, because it just means they get to ask for "bigger budgets to fix it", just like the military gets to ask for bigger budgets, after they create more terrorists with drone assassinations, double taps, and signature strikes.
There is wisdom in this laconic phrase: Si vis pacem, para bellum
Does the nation run the army or does the army and its assorted industrial parasites run the nation? I doubt anyone in Washington has the testicular fortitude to find out.
Criticism: "B-b-b-but you can't use nukes to put down internal rebellions(1) or bring liberty to the oppressed nations of the world(2)!!"
Response to 1: "That's what the police+national guard is for."
Response to 2: "Damn fucking straight."
Yes, Prime Minister has a funny scene about the nuclear deterrent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE
This isn't the Middle Ages where pansy nobles played at war and had dinner together in between having their peasants butcher each other. If the US and Russia were to go to war it wouldn't be an honorable clash and if our tanks beat their tanks and our planes beat their planes well gosh darnit guess they give up Siberia.
Here's a thought experiment: if India didn't have a strong conventional force in Kashmir and just threatened to use nukes on Pakistan if they invaded, would Pakistan call them on it? And if the Indians did toss a nuke, would Pakistan really respond and invite a few dozen others?
Of course it plays better with the population to have war once in a while. Gives the illusion of change, drives a narrative and so on. But I doubt most major decision makers are crazy enough to risk prolonged nuclear exchange.
The lesson I take from that video is maybe slightly different: Why go to war with the Soviets at all? Would my life as a British/US citizen be better with Gorbachev/the USSR in charge or would it be better after a prolonged nuclear exchange or would it be better after a decade of conventional World War 3?
Freedom and independence are overrated and not being dead, starving and at war are underrated by modern societies to a staggering extent.
This is probably the main point:
"Fortunately, there are ways to cut defense spending without hurting military capabilities. Besides maintaining its war-fighting capability, DoD, like any entity, maintains a back-office bureaucracy to oversee its business functions. That overhead accounts for roughly 40 percent of its budget. It’s hard to compare different industries, or even government agencies, but one examination of 25 industries showed average overhead rates ranging from 13 to 50 percent, with the average across all industries being 25 percent. A RAND study of overhead and administration costs among defense contractors found them to be “tremendous drivers” of weapon costs at 35 percent. The largest domestic programs—Social Security and Medicare—get by with costs in the single-digits."
I actually think we could cut by 50-75% over time and receive the same net benefits, by changing force structure, reducing "optional" missions like going to war in Iraq, and fixing the acquisitions process. You would be reducing capabilities at that point, but not in ways which hurt national security. It would take a while due to retirement and medical obligations.
I'd be willing to listen to someone who wanted to cut 90% ultimately. That would require fundamentally recasting the US military as a wholely domestic force, with a much slower reaction time to new threats, but might ultimately be preferable if the world becomes more peaceful.
The incredible expense of our recent wars illustrates why this is true: It takes so much money to move a modern force across an ocean and keep them supplied when there is zero attempt to interdict supply lines that it would be astronomically expensive to invade any nation across an ocean if they could put up any threat at all to supply lines.
Our military spending militarizes American society. Police are militarized. We think we have an uptick in manufacturing but if you subtracted out the military manufacturing we would have very little productive manufacturing. We don't realize just how huge a dead weight we are carrying in jobs and capex that produce zero gain in our standard of living.
Cutting military spending, and building an economy that delivers credible performance numbers without that empty unproductive spending is the economic priority of our age.
Having said that, I do believe a lot of money could be better allocated outside and within the military. That is to say, I think we should aim to get more from less. I'd like to point my finger at government contracting overhead, I think the financial belt could be cinched quite a bit.