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How Much is Enough?
Once upon a time, people researched and wrote reports about lower defense spending and converting the military-industrial complex into a peacetime economy. These reports came from university research institutions, private think tanks, and the federal government. They are memorials to the hope kindled in the brief post-Cold War and pre-War on Terrorism moment when anything seemed possible. Even cutting the military budget was not unthinkable because we had pulled the planet back from the brink and survived five decades on the edge of nuclear midnight. Scholarship turned itself to the work of dismantling the war machine in such a way that no one -- no machinist turning bolts on bombs or aircraft engineer with his polished plans -- was crushed in the process.These reports read not just like they are 15 years old. They read like dispatches from a remote and almost unimaginable planet.
Converting the Cold War Economy, published in 1993 by the Economic Policy Institute, began with the premise that President George H. W. Bush's $281 billion budgets could be halved over the next decade. The report proposed even bolder actions: "Deeper cuts resulting in budgets as low as $67 billion a year are conceivable if the U.S. were to defer preparations for unilateral action in favor of a cooperative approach to security based at the United Nations and if arms sales by the major industrialized countries to the Third World were stopped."
What a difference 15 years makes! The Pentagon lost $13 billion alone in the sofa cracks last year. The Government Accountability Office put the price of Pentagon accounting problems at $13 billion in 2005.
For fiscal year 2008, we are looking at a "base military budget" of $520 billion and another $127.5 billion in war spending, which means that total military spending will hit $647.5 billion. The Bush administration has presided over one of the largest military buildups in the history of the United States. $647 billion is a lot of money. After adjusting for inflation, it represents the highest level of military spending since World War II.
Following the Money
Why are we spending so much? In large part, it is because of the many Cold War systems that have managed to stay in the budget and in the Pentagon's "toolbox" despite having no relevance, no rival, or no hope of ever delivering what they promise. One of the best examples of all three of these categories is ballistic missile defense -- a problematic, unjustifiable and immensely expensive military programs. Since concept development in 1983, the United States has spent close to $100 billion dollars on various version of the program. In tests, the system has failed in five out of 11 tests since 2004. This rate was so abysmal that the Missile Defense Agency stopped releasing the results of system and component tests.
The U.S. military budget has never been bigger and our propensity toward militarized solutions from immigration and totalitarianism to terrorism and nuclear proliferation has never been stronger. To speak of cutting the military budget, reallocating resources to support a broader range of security tools, converting away from military-dependent production is a tough task right now. But it is necessary. The military-fits-all solution is failing to deliver on a single promise. We are not safer. "They" are not freer. And we are more hated abroad than ever before!
Oxfam recently published "Africa's Missing Billion: International Arms Flows and the Costs of Conflict," which estimates the economic cost of armed conflict to Africa's development at about $300 billion since 1990. This sum, says Oxfam, is the equivalent of all the international aid from major donors during the same period. The money lost to war and weapons, asserts Oxfam, could have helped develop new approaches to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, cured malaria and tuberculosis, and addressed Africa's need for education, clean water and adequate sanitation. The Losses at Home
The report demonstrates that it is possible to quantify the economic potential lost to wars. Here, we, too, can measure what we lose with a half trillion military "base budget" and many hundred billions more spent waging war in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It is visible in every panhandler and soup-line, in overcrowded classrooms and dwindling health-care budgets, in each hard choice that is made in U.S. cities, towns, and rural areas.
It is also visible in our crumbling infrastructure. The Report Card for America's Infrastructure from the America Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) assessed the physical state of aviation, bridges, dams, drinking water, the national power grid, hazardous waste, navigable waterways, public parks and recreation sites, the rail lines, the roads, schools, security, solid waste, transit, and wastewater throughout the United States and gave the American infrastructure a grade point average of D (poor). The ASCE estimated that it would take $1.6 trillion in investment over five years to repair and restore this infrastructure.
How can we be a secure nation when bridges collapse, water mains explode, and the power grid fails? In each of these recent three instances, the first thought was terrorism. But gravity, neglect, and overuse were the only three active members of the cell that brought down the bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota in August 2007.
Where will the money come from to rebuild American infrastructure? Who will do the work? These are hopeful questions that can be answered with visionary and practical economic and social policy decisions in Washington. Not asking the questions means continuing to lose out in our economic, human, and national security.
FPIF columnist Frida Berrigan is a senior program associate at the Arms and Security Project of the New America Foundation.
Copyright © 2007, Institute for Policy Studies
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59 Comments so far
Show AllHey! I know that! I'm not referring to anything that could conveniently be "recovered" after the fact. And I'm not trying to endorse or concoct a conspiracy theory. All I would like to know is, since I have an abiding interest in physics, is how the wings could impact the ground, leave perfectly shaped, shallow indentations, and then somehow bounce up and fold around the fuselage, like an umbrella, and follow the rest of the airplane down into the central hole until the whole plane disappeared below the surface. And, of course, I would like the explanation proffered to keep in mind that the ground was dry and mediumly compacted with a light to medium gravel content and that none of the ground dug out by the excavators was moist. Now, that's not asking too much from a scientific investigation, is it?
"I know that! I'm not referring to anything that could conveniently be "recovered" after the fact."
Ad Hoc hypothesis rejected. You have no evidence that was done.
"All I would like to know is, since I have an abiding interest in physics, is how..."
The fact that *you* may not like an answer is irrelevent, and doesn't prove or disprove anything.
Don't spend too much more time on this man, it will hold you back or worse, prove self destructive.
That site you posted really sucks by the way, and I don't mean it's contemt (although the references to all the other conspiricies is telling). The design is lousy and unclear. Plain text would have been better.
Hah! A picture speaks a thousand words. Yesterday was the first day I saw that site. I googled it. Of course I didn't expect I would get a definitive answer. I know how the establishment likes to convince themselves that they have "plausibly denied" anything that makes them uncomfortable, but the thing is, every other secret agency and/or government in the world has recordings of all the broadcasts from that day of 911, so who do the spooks think they're fooling? And it's not like I was trying to expose any secrets like the commercial airline companies having cloaking technology for their jetliners, such as that one which crashed into the Pentagon. I mean, I would never have believed they had the tech to make a jetliner invisible if I didn't see it with my own eyes on that security tape which showed the impact and explosion. Why, they even developed the tech to hide the effects of the slipstream, as any casual perusal of the security video clearly shows.
And I appreciate your concern for my safety, but the fact is I've had extensive experience in dealing with the secret agencies of the U.S., including their ultra-secret S.A., and I can assure you that they are a bunch of losers. Their best performances are in the progress reports that they write to stroke each other to create a myth that they can all believe in.
JMACNEIL, If your bullshit comment was in referance to my post, you can F##k off. I never bullshht or lie unless I'm attempting to be humerous or sarcastic. In this case I was not. It was not hard ground, it was not soft muck either, it was farmland, shortly after the monsoon season in Taiwan. It was not the only such aircraft accident either. If you care to find aircraft accident reports since the years 1945, you would find that aircraft do bury themselves in the ground and leave little of the aircraft showing above ground at the crash scene. You can take your mathamatical quotes and stuffem in my opinion, the C-130 aircraft was buried in a hole in the ground and left only most of it's tail and some engine and prop parts lying above ground.
Haw, haw! You're losing it! Obfuscation won't gain you any points. I don't give a shit what anyone else knows, or I wouldn't be in the secrecy business.
You don't give a shit what anyone else knows. That is so obvious.
I didn't think you would understand that. It was obvious by the presentation of your dissimilar anecdote before classifying an obviously singularly unique crash as "not unusual at all" that your agenda was merely to deflect reasoned discussion on the subject. And when you jumped in, enraged, after the mention of the S.A. and tried again to divert the discussion, to an apologetic examination of impact velocities on varied topographies, that was so obviously a desperate diversionist strategy, so typical of the nsa.
It must be difficult for those agencies to recruit and retain good help, especially since the main requirement is to have to continuously lie to cover up all of the deceit and outright crimes. And then have to spend the rest of every agent's career making up new lies to cover for the old lies. Not exactly a formula for building character, but perfectly suited to keeping all members of the gang compromised.
Anyway, the lack of disclosure concerning the events of 911 was not unexpected and I'm sure such a modus operandi will remain the trademark of those stupid organizations, especially from the U.S., which fallaciously like to refer to themselves as "secret". So we, in our naivete, will continue to accept such nonsensical explanations which are profferred, such as when they described the impact force of a block of foam which supposedly brought down the space shuttle Columbia. Although, to be truthful, I'm pretty sure that people with little experience and knowledge in physics would accept such an explanation as the foam falling at a certain velocity, because the optical illusion is to prepare them to think that. But to a trained observer the separated foam didn't fall but was still in the ascendant when the space shuttle rose up the few yards to intersect it. Just a little matter of distance/velocity ratio, really, and, like any wing forced to move fast through a measurable atmosphere, there is a pressure wave of air in front of the wing. I wonder, did they account for that bow effect when they had their little cannon shooting chunks of foam at the wing part in that hangar? Is this the place where the theme from the X-Files should cut in as you guys slink into the shadows?
Stupid CD edit function.
" I don't give a shit what anyone else knows, or I wouldn't be in the secrecy business."
LOL! Appeal to Authority is always a false arguement, and to One's Own Authority the worst version of the offense, but I think you topped that by alluding to the "secret" nature of your business, to somehow excuse yourself from further explanation on it. Nice try.
(Heh,heh,) But isn't that the ultimate dust-off? In a way, isn't that what Jack's character was implying when he, enraged, stated, "You can't handle the truth!"? Isn't that the attitude of all of those self rigtheous idiots in the corporate government who think that they somehow are more qualified to decide how everyone else should organize their lives?