Musings: A Question of Culture: Reviewing The $10-billion Military Budget
Preamble by Azim Khamisa
A recent Los Angeles Times article (LINK HERE) reported that over the past 10 years approximately $10 billion was spent by the Missile Defense Agency in technology that has proven unsuccessful.
That is a huge amount of money to waste when there are such other needs unmet in our social services. My personal passion and focus over the last 20 years has been to address the challenges of youth violence. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, each day in the United States, 187 children are arrested for violent crimes. One in 12 teens in high school are injured or threatened with a weapon each year. And seven children are killed by guns daily.
How can we justify such irresponsible spending when every day our defenseless children and youth are being wiped out right here in our own backyard in a frenzy of bizarre violence? We are by far the most violent first-world nation in the world, and that is not a good thing. Being the world’s richest nation and the only super power, we have a tremendous impact on the planet’s culture. What happens in America eventually happens in the world. While we are exporting our democratic, meritocratic, free market economic model – which is a good thing – we are unfortunately also exporting our violence. When it comes to violence, the United States is a very poor role model to the world! We need to urgently address that here at home first before blowing billions on foreign soil.
Violence is a learned behavior – no child was born violent. If you accept that as a truism nonviolence can also be a learned behavior. But we have to teach it – kids are not going to learn that through osmosis! At the Tariq Khamisa Foundation (www.TKF.org) we are successfully teaching these principles of nonviolence: empathy, compassion, forgiveness and most importantly peace-making. In my 20 years of doing this work what gives me the biggest hope is that not only are these principles teachable, our children are hungry for them. We need to invest in this education broadly and not waste it on the pursuit of unworkable fantasy war technology. However besides the challenges of youth violence, there are many other over-arching social issues that are EQUALLY important to address – read on!
Not being well versed in the Department of Defense (DOD), I turned to my wise friend and colleague Stan Siegel, a former TKF board member and one who has intimate knowledge of DOD for his wisdom on this irresponsible spending. Please read his piece below, and make sure to ask the tough questions Stan proposes to your district legislators as we approach the Presidential elections next year.
A QUESTION OF CULTURE
By Stan Siegel
The LA Times ran an article on April 5, 2015 titled “Misfires Leave $10-Billion Hole.” The article is focused on the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), a part of the Defense Department that is charged with protecting U.S. troops and ships as well as the homeland from attacks by ballistic missiles. Missile defense is a hard problem, and technology plays a large role in how successful MDA can be.
The Times article focuses on four technologies aimed at MDA’s homeland defense mission – a large sea-based radar, a chemical laser to fly in a Boeing 747 airplane, a kinetic energy interceptor, and a multiple kill vehicle. In total, MDA’s investments aimed at developing these four technologies have cost $10 billion dollars over the past 10 years or so. The article carefully chronicled each technology, describing the early optimism, the problems encountered, and for each, the eventual disappointment. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go through each of these. Suffice it to say that in the end, the programs for all four of these technologies had to be killed or sidelined after they proved unworkable. Aside from the failures themselves, there were two big issues raised:
- The article discussed critical reviews of the four technologies that were post facto conducted by prestigious groups like the National Academy of Science and the Defense Science Board. The reviews revealed that the ideas were flawed and, for the most part, could not have led to a useful defense system in any case. Had these reviews been conducted before the programs were initiated the $10 billion expenditures could have been avoided, and MDA could have focused on paths that may have actually led to a workable missile defense system. It seems that the MDA has a shortage of engineering disciplines to avoid going down blind alleys and wasting money.
- The same April 5, 2015 issue of the LA Times also had an article titled “Failing programs kept alive by lawmakers.” In this discussion, it is shown how members of Congress are eager to throw money into programs such as the failed four – when the programs bring work to their districts. This article revealed that even when smart people in the Defense Department made it clear to members of Congress that the technologies would fail, the Representatives and Senators forced the Defense Department to keep working on these ideas. The pressure from the politicians in Congress is clearly tied to work that was done in their districts.
The $10-billion hole discussed above is the tip of a large iceberg in defense spending. While $10 billion is an enormous amount of money, in the large scheme of defense spending, where a single aircraft carrier costs $15 billion, and a single USAF bomber costs over $1 billion, people don’t view $10 billion over 10 years as such a big deal. Maybe if there was less money to spend, people would be more careful in how they satisfy important objectives.
We can recall that in 1961, then-former President Eisenhower said in a speech, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
His admonitions have been universally ignored. In 1961, we were in the middle of the cold war with the Soviet Union, and were just getting immersed in Vietnam. Annual defense spending (normalized to 2005 dollars) was just under $400 billion. Today, with no major threats to our national security, defense spending hovers around $600 billion. This is larger than the combined spending of the next 10 countries in the world including China ($129 billion), Saudi Arabia ($81 billion) and Russia ($70 billion). And, the Republican-dominated Congress we have elected is clamoring to further increase U.S. defense spending.
How can this make any sense?
Instead of continuing down the path of continuous growth in spending on defense, this seems like it would be a good time to rethink our role in the world. We should be asking some tough questions about what we’re doing with our defense forces such as:
- Why do we maintain a force of 30,000 in South Korea, the world’s 15th largest economy?
- Why do we maintain a force of thousands in Europe and at NATO?
- Why are we using military force in the Middle East? What do we hope to accomplish?
Suppose we were to cut U.S. defense spending in half to $300 billion annually? We would still be spending more than China, Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. America is full of innovative people and we should be able to devise a new worldview to guide the country and use this vision to develop new defense strategies to keep the country safe. With such a reduction in defense spending we would free up $300 billion annually that could be used to improve our quality of life. Imagine:
- Finding paths to reduce the wealth and income gaps and thereby re-invigorate our middle class.
- Investing in infrastructure programs to repair our crumbling roads, bridges and air travel, modernize our power grid, and provide WiFi for all.
- Using significant funding for mental health to find cures for Alzheimer’s disease, PTSD, depression.
We should ask 2 important questions:
- Is our enormous defense spending making the world a safer place or a more dangerous place?
- With reduced defense spending, can we do more to improve the quality of life for Americans?
Americans have an opportunity to confront a question of culture. Do we continue with unbalanced and runaway defense spending, or do we choose a path to focus on improving the quality of life for all Americans?
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