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pentagon budget
Project 2025, Poison Gas, and Endless Wars for Profit
Militarism is more than the flow of blood. It’s also the flow of money.
Aug 03, 2024
The right-wing Republicans . . . the Christian nationalists . . . have hoisted their flag: Project 2025, a.k.a., Project Hell on Earth, and it’s coming to a future near you. Or so they believe (and hope).
But the Democrats are on our side! They won’t let it happen, right? While the deep right puts forth its stalwart vision of a recreated world, the moderate center stands cautiously and awkwardly for the status quo of the moment: only some war, mixed with social spending and even a minimal awareness of the problems posed by climate change. God forbid, however, that a counter-vision of the global future — a vision of a world that transcends war and militarism — should be part of mainstream politics. That would be pushing things too far, that is to say, defying the corporate donors who keep the political process going.
So, as the presidential election looms, we have to look at what’s at stake, as outlined in Project 2025: “The nearly 900-page document,” Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes write at TomDispatch, “outlines a plan to ramp up U.S. military might, slash social welfare programs, and prioritize ‘traditional marriage.’”
Military might — yeah, that’s the political key. They add: “Nor is this new. Every year, the Pentagon budget invariably passes with widespread bipartisan support, even if a few representatives vote otherwise. Since the 9/11 attacks, in fact, $21 trillion has been funneled into war, surveillance, policing, border control, and incarceration. In Fiscal Year 2023, nearly two-thirds of the federal discretionary budget funded the military-industrial complex and militarized spending.”
Project 2025 simply eliminates all doubt: Peace is not the way — at least not the lefty version of it.
Militarism is more than the flow of blood. It’s also the flow of money. War is taught, historically, as simple and precise: good and evil go at each other, one side (usually the good guys, the “righteous” ones) wins, and life simply moves on. There are no further consequences. The takeaway is only this: If you want to be safe and secure, you have to be well-armed and ever-prepared for battle. War, in other words, is permanent — and ever on the horizon. At least this is the world of today, indeed, the world that “civilized humanity” has bequeathed itself.
Project 2025 simply eliminates all doubt: Peace is not the way — at least not the lefty version of it. The unquestioned worship of militarism must be our future, and will be if Trump wins, at least according to Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025. He called it the “second American Revolution” but assured us it will be bloodless, uh . . . “if the left allows it to be.”
What fascinating wordplay. Those who disagree with the Project had better keep their mouths shut. If they don’t, we’ll have to respond violently, but it will be their fault. That’s how the system works.
Here’s another way to look at it:
“The end of World War II was not the beginning of an era dominated by a devotion to peace,” Serdar M. Değirmencioğlu writes at Community Psychology. “Instead, the defining mindset of the period was militarism with no moral limits. Nuclear war was now possible and more was on the way. . . .
“It is now (more) clear than ever that militarism is morally bankrupt. It can justify everything: Nuclear massacres, nuclear weapons, hundreds of military bases around the world, toppling regimes in Guatemala, Chile, Grenada or any other country for that matter. Add an undeclared war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Add napalm and Agent Orange. And no, it did not stop when the Cold War ended. Militarism justified the invasion of Iraq and of Afghanistan, black sites, Guantanamo and so on. Militarism has always served and justified injustice — at home and away from home.”
Let me repeat: Militarism has no moral limits — which, seemingly, turns the term “war crime” into an absurdity. Once you start killing people, it’s hard to stop. You kill innocent civilians. You kill children. You commit genocide. But, oh gosh, doing that is a crime. Well, so what? That means nothing.
Project 2025 seems like nothing more than Project Same Old, Same Old, amplified with political arrogance (social spending is bad) and the belief that we need a good dictator.
Militarism “can justify everything.” And the terrain of justification keeps expanding. In the wake of World War I, one of the horrors wreaked upon the world was poison gas. Less than three decades later, we had the atomic bomb to ponder, fret over and, of course, continue developing. Oh, but “mutually assured destruction” has kept us safe! Except for all the non-nuclear wars the world has managed to squeeze in (during my lifetime).
So Project 2025 seems like nothing more than Project Same Old, Same Old, amplified with political arrogance (social spending is bad) and the belief that we need a good dictator. That’ll keep us safe! All I can do is spray a little poison gas onto this viewpoint, that is to say, quote the ending to Wilfred Owen’s poem about World War I — specifically, about the horror of a poison gas attack and the soldier who failed to get his gas mask on in time. Titled “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the poem ends with a Latin phrase that means: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”
. . . If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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Why a $1,000,000,000,000 Military Budget Makes Us Less Safe—Not More
We need our tax dollars for healthcare, climate, and education—not war and destruction.
Jun 28, 2024
f you looked at the U.S. military budget without knowing otherwise, you’d probably guess we were in World War III.
Our military spending is now the highest it’s been at any point since World War II — and Congress keeps adding more. The House of Representatives just passed legislation that will take military spending to $895 billion, while the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a bill that would total $923 billion.
Those totals don’t even include the military aid to Ukraine and Israel that was included in the $95 billion war package Congress passed this spring. We’re teetering closer and closer to a $1 trillion military budget.
Adjusting for inflation, the last time the national security budget topped $1 trillion was in 1945, the final year of World War II.
Unlike a world war, there’s nothing happening today that can justify this level of spending. Even the war in Ukraine and the decimation of Gaza (which is being carried out with U.S.-supplied weapons) account for just a small fraction of overall spending.
So what’s all this spending for?
We need members of Congress to do three things: focus on the problems we do have, stop trying to rule the world, and have the spine to say no to military contractors.
It’s to keep the U.S. military machine running as it has since World War II, with the more or less explicit goal of global military domination. That goal is shared by many in Congress. But members of Congress also receive constant encouragement — and campaign funds — from for-profit, corporate military contractors who can expect to receive about half of the total military budget.
But it turns out that global military dominance is pretty expensive. And luckily, it’s not at all necessary to safeguard U.S. security.
After 20 years of disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too many in Congress and military leadership haven’t learned that having the biggest, strongest military in the history of the world costs a lot — more than $21 trillion in the first 20 years of the millennium — but doesn’t make the world any safer.
Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) called for adding another $55 billion to the already-gargantuan Pentagon budget — supposedly justified by competition with China. But the U.S. military budget is already more than three times higher than China’s.
Many experts agree that the military threat from the Chinese has been oversold. But whatever threats the U.S. faces, it should say something more troubling about the U.S. military if we can’t achieve security by spending more than three times what an adversary spends.
Anyone genuinely concerned with the security of the American people should be more concerned about that $1 trillion military budget. The obsession with China and world dominance is bleeding our public coffers. This is money that can’t be invested in infrastructure, education, health care, or other necessities to keep our own country functioning.
Meanwhile, as another summer starts, we face growing bills for disaster relief from floods and heat waves to storms and wildfires. In a world where climate change is making these disasters more frequent, we have to start budgeting for those expenses and doing more to limit the damage by transitioning to renewable energy.
Even a fraction of the $1 trillion soon to be spent on the military would go a long way to making life safer on each of these fronts.
Luckily, we don’t face the same problems the world did in 1945 — and we don’t need a World-War-III-level military budget. Instead, we need members of Congress to do three things: focus on the problems we do have, stop trying to rule the world, and have the spine to say no to military contractors.
Only then will we have a budget designed for 2024, not 1945.
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Nearly $1 Trillion in Military Spending Makes Us Less Safe, Not More
It’s time to reverse course on the Pentagon budget, but neither the White House nor a majority in Congress are likely to do so of their own accord.
Mar 13, 2024
The Pentagon released its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2025 this week. There were no major surprises, unless you’re shocked by the fact we are continuing to over-invest in a strategy and a military force structure that is making the world less secure.
If this budget goes through as requested, the Pentagon and related activities like work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy will come in at $894 billion. That’s slightly less than the number being debated for this year, but far more than the levels achieved at other major turning points like the Korean and Vietnam wars or the peak of the Cold War. Meanwhile, Congress has shown little ability to provide adequate input or oversight of these huge figures. Over five months into the new fiscal year, it has yet to even pass a 2024 budget.
What could possibly justify devoting these enormous sums to the Pentagon at a time of urgent national need to address other threats to our lives and livelihoods, from climate change to epidemics of disease to rampant inequality? The primary answer is the same one we have heard repeatedly in recent years: China, China, and China.
But as I have noted in a recent paper for the Brown University Costs of War Project, by any measure the United States already spends two to three times as much on its military as China does, and outpaces it by far in basic military capabilities like nuclear weapons, naval firepower, and modern transport and combat aircraft. In the areas where there is room for doubt about the relative military power of the two rivals, from emerging technology to the likely outcome of a war over Taiwan, dialogue and diplomacy offer a far better chance of reaching a stable accommodation than spinning out scenarios for “winning” a war between two nuclear-armed powers, or by running a costly new arms race.
We must pay closer attention to the consequences of the massive military spending and widespread military activities being carried out in our name
Unfortunately, the rhetoric and resources underpinning the new Pentagon request are more consistent with arms racing than accommodation. The department remains firmly committed to its plan to build thousands of “autonomous, attritable systems” by August 2025, with the express purpose of developing the ability to overwhelm China in a conflict in Asia. In plain English, this means building swarms of drones and other high-tech systems controlled by artificial intelligence. And the plan is for these systems to be cheap and readily replaced if large numbers are destroyed in battle.
The idea that the U.S. arms industry can produce large numbers of new systems quickly and affordably, and build replacements on short notice, runs contrary to the experience of recent decades. It’s an exercise in wishful thinking that could result in the worst of both worlds — spurring China to increase its investments in next generation military technology even as it is unclear whether the United States can develop and integrate it successfully in any reasonable time frame.
Far from increasing our security, once these new systems are developed and fielded they will almost certainly make the world a more dangerous place. This point is underscored in a new report from Public Citizen which notes that “[i]ntroducing AI into the Pentagon’s everyday business, battlefield decision-making and weapons systems poses manifold risks.”
For example, although current Pentagon guidelines pledge to keep humans in the loop in decisions to engage in lethal force, once autonomous weapons are produced on a large scale the temptation to use them without human intervention will be great. This in turn will have a cascade of potential negative effects, from dehumanizing the targets of these systems, to making it easier to contemplate going to war, to risking mass slaughter caused by a malfunction in one of these complex systems.
And as Michael Klare has written in an analysis for the Arms Control Association, the dangers of AI and other emerging military technologies are likely to “expand into the nuclear realm by running up the escalation ladder or by blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack.”
Klare also rings the alarm bell about the real risks of technical failures involving next generation technologies:
“Non-military devices governed by AI, such as self-driving cars and facial-recognition systems, have been known to fail in dangerous and unpredictable ways; should similar failures occur among AI-empowered weaponry during wartime, the outcomes could include the unintended slaughter of civilians or the outbreak of nuclear war.”
These are all strong reasons to go slow and evaluate the consequences of applying AI to military operations, not engage in uncritical cheerleading that gives lip service to risk assessment while moving full speed ahead towards deployment of autonomous systems. To his credit, President Biden has pledged to promote talks with China on “risk and safety issues related to artificial intelligence.” An analysis by Sydney Freedberg of Breaking Defense points out that “the Chinese have been showing signs they are receptive, particularly when it comes to renouncing AI command-and-control systems for nuclear weapons.“ More discussions of this sort are urgently needed before moving full speed ahead on AI-driven weapons.
The urge to deploy AI and other emerging military technologies without adequate deliberation or scrutiny is just one of the troubling elements to come out of this week’s Pentagon budget release. Staying the course on the Pentagon’s plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons and continuing to subsidize a policy of global military reach that has helped spark the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to fuel future conflicts than prevent them. And despite President Biden’s recent, tougher rhetoric in response to Israel’s slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the White House fact sheet issued in conjunction with the Pentagon budget release provides a whitewashed, wildly misleading description of the U.S. role in enabling Israel’s brutal attacks:
“After Hamas’s horrific terrorist attacks against Israel, the President has led the United States to support Israel’s right to defend its country and protect its people in a way that upholds international humanitarian law, while ensuring the Palestinian people have access to vital humanitarian aid and lifesaving assistance.”
It is impossible to square these claims with the actual situation in Gaza, and attempting to do so makes a mockery of the administration’s repeated references to supporting a “rules-based international order.”
The bottom line is that the United States is spending far too much on the Pentagon, much of it in service of goals that are likely to cause far more harm than good. It’s time to reverse course, but neither the White House nor a majority in Congress are likely to do so of their own accord.
We must pay closer attention to the consequences of the massive military spending and widespread military activities being carried out in our name, and stand up for more realistic policies that can set the stage for a future free of unnecessary conflicts and dangerous arms racing. We can’t afford to let the Pentagon and the policies it underwrites continue on autopilot, promoting military approaches to problems that don’t have military solutions, all too often with disastrous results.
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