With the close to one trillion dollar stimulus package inching its way through Congress, no one has even bothered to suggest a way to pay for it without adding it to the already humungus national debt. Politicians can only hope that other countries (mainly, China, Japan and Saudi Arabia) will consider the US to be too big to fail, and will blithely go along with loaning us additional billions. Meanwhile, the US continues to operate 761 military bases abroad costing billions upon billions each year. At the same time the military-industrial-political (MIP) complex continues to fund godawfully expensive boondoggles like the F-22 fighter plane being built by Lockheed Martin. These projects are designed in such a way as to bring the maximum number of dollars into the maximum number of political districts, and, therefore, represent jobs and patronage that politicians can claim to have brought home to their constituents. While the bases represent the military garrisoning of the world, the Air Force and Navy's complex weapons systems represent sheer waste as they are designed to counteract a threat that doesn't even exist while weapons systems like the Warthog aircraft which can be built at a fraction of the cost of the F-22 are actually useful in combat in situations that are likely to present themselves today, namely fourth generation insurgencies. HELLO, the Soviet Union has ceased to exist! And Osama bin Laden, operating out of a cave, has been successful in causing the US superpower to spend another trillion dollars adding that to the national debt and hastening the day when the American empire will go the way of the Roman one.
According to Nick Turse:
Since bin Laden's supreme act of economic judo in 2001, the U.S. military has spent multi-billions of tax dollars on a string of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, failed wars in both countries, and a failed effort to make good on George W. Bush's promise to bring in bin Laden "dead or alive." Despite this record, the Pentagon still has a success option in its back pocket that might help bail out the American people in this perilous economic moment. It could immediately begin to auction off its overseas empire posthaste. To head down this road, however, U.S. military leaders would first have to take a brutally honest look at the real costs, and the real utility, of their massively expensive weapons systems and, above all, those bases.
Today, the Pentagon acknowledges 761 active military "sites" in foreign countries -- and that's without bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, and certain other countries even being counted. This "empire of bases," as Chalmers Johnson has noted, "began as the leftover residue of World War II," later evolving into a Cold War and post-Cold War garrisoning of the planet.
With those bases came a series of costly wars in Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s. An extremely conservative estimate of their cost by the Congressional Research Service -- $1 trillion (in 2008 dollars) -- tops the present economic bailout. Add in brief cut-and-run flops like Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia, from 1992-1995, as well as now-forgotten hollow victories in places like the island of Grenada and Panama, and you tack on billions more with little to show for it.
Since 2001, the Bush administration's Global War on Terror (including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) has cost taxpayers more than the recent bailout -- more than $800 billion and still climbing by at least $3.5 billion each week. And the full bill has yet to come due. According to Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, the total costs of those two wars could top out between $3 trillion and $7 trillion.
While squandering money, the Global War on Terror has also acted as a production line for the creation of yet more military bases in the oil heartlands of the planet. Just how many is unknown -- the Pentagon keeps exact figures under wraps -- but, in 2005, according to the Washington Post, there were 106 American bases, from macro to micro, in Iraq alone.
If you were to begin the process of disentangling Americans from this world of war and the war economy that goes with it, those bases would be a good place to start. There is no way to estimate the true costs of our empire of bases, but it's worth considering what an imperial tag sale could mean for America's financial well-being. One thing is clear: in getting rid of those bases, the United States would be able to recoup, or save, hundreds of billions of dollars, despite the costs associated with shutting them down.
Here's an idea - why not convert some of those military bases to Peace Corps bases which could be maintained at a fraction of the cost and would represent an effort to solve the real problems of the world which have to do with providing food and clean water to more than a billion people lacking them. This will do more to improve America's image and the good will of others towards the US than all the military bases combined because the heart of the matter in terms of terrorism is the economic disenfranchisement of much of the world's population. This is what breeds resentfulness towards the US. Devoting resources to peace will yield greater dividends than devoting resources to war and be far cheaper. The US controlled IMF and World Bank has for the last 30 years been involved in an effort to shove laissez faire economics down the throats of the world's lesser developed nations. Milton Friedman was personally involved with Pinochet in Chile in order to convert the Chilean economy into laissez faire capitalism with disastrous results for the Chilean middle class. These efforts at privatization devastated the middle class while creating a class of super wealthy individuals. This policy was replicated over and over in other parts of the world including the privatization of the water supply in Bolivia. Now with the discrediting of Chicago School of Economics capitalism, a new paradigm for economic development is in order - one which helps directly the poverty stricken, the billions without adequate food, medical care, clean water or housing. In short the Peace Corps could start to remedy these problems on a world wide basis thus gaining friends for America instead of engendering resentment world wide. Call it socialism if you will, but direct help for the billions of suffering worldwide set up in such a way as to strip out the profit motive would be the surest way to provide direct help and get immediate results.
Chalmers Johnson has long written about the folly of spending trillions of dollars on the military industrial complex including the 761 military bases abroad that comprise what he calls "base world":
It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.
Equally striking, the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan -- insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships, and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.
That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."
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The inevitable day of reckoning, long predicted by Pentagon critics, has, I believe, finally arrived. Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their reelection campaigns.
Given the present major recession, whose depths remain unknown, the United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George H. W. Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles per hour).
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President Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M. Gates as Secretary of Defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 "Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.
The Air Force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley. Though he was undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control of nuclear weapons.
Similar savings could be gleaned by shutting down military bases abroad that are very costly to maintain and staff.
Without those bases, billions of dollars in other Pentagon expenses would immediately disappear. For instance, during the years of the Global War on Terror, the Overseas Cost of Living Allowance, which equalizes the "purchasing power between members [of the military] overseas and their U.S.-based counterparts," has reached about $12 billion. Over the same period, the price tag for educating the children of U.S. military personnel abroad has clocked in at around $3.5 billion. By shutting down the 127 Department of Defense schools in Europe and the Pacific (as well as the 65 scattered across the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rico, and Cuba) and sending the children to public schools, the U.S. would realize modest long-term savings. Once no longer garrisoning the globe, the Pentagon would also be able to cease paying out the $1 billion or so that goes into the routine construction of housing and other base facilities each year, not to mention the multi-billions that have gone into the construction, and continual upgrading, of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Some recent Pentagon contracts for general operations and support functions overseas are instructive. In March, for instance, Bahrain Maritime and Mercantile International was awarded a one-year contract worth $2.8 billion to supply and distribute "food and non-food products" to "Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and other approved customers located in the Middle East countries of Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia."
In July, the French foodservices giant Sodexo received a one-year contract worth $180 million for "maintenance, repair and operations for the Korea Zone of the Pacific Region." These and other pricey support contracts for food, fuel, maintenance, transport, and other non-military expenses, paid to foreign firms, would disappear along with those U.S. garrisons, as would enormous sums spent on all sorts of military projects overseas. In 2007, for instance, the Army, Navy, and Air Force spent $2.5 billion in Germany, $1 billion in Japan, and $164 million in Qatar. And this year, the Pentagon paid a jaw-dropping $1 billion-plus for contracts carried out in South Korea alone.
The Pentagon and the Defense Department will have to come to grips sooner or later with the fact that the current recession era US economy cannot support these far flung military operations, foreign bases and expensive purposeless weapons systems. It needs a redesign from the top down. Instead of high flying super speed jets which cannot possibly hit targets on the ground accurately without destroying civiliian population in the process, what are needed are low and slow flying aircraft and drones which can be manufactured at a fraction of the price. Strip out the jobs and make work programs from the MIP complex and a stripped down lean and mean military machine could be designed from the top down - one which is designed to face the threats of the 21st century - and one that would require only a fraction of the expenditures. Combine that with diplomatic efforts to bring peace in the world and economic aid to the world's suffering and struggling and you have a sustainable policy worthy of a great nation. Obama has already started down this road, but how far he can get in the face of immense opposition remains to be seen. The whole tone and face of America in the world is already starting to change from that of the bullies who controlled American policy for the last eight years. They did more to create enemies than to make friends. Instead of destroying enemies (the Bush-Cheney approach) Obama will try to convert them into friends. After all they are mainly stateless actors whose grievances result from America's heavy-handed approach to foreign policy for the last 30 years and even before that. The approach was ideologically driven and supportive of US corporations that had their fingers in the pies of various nations in order to profit at those nations' expense. American ideology has turned out to be a nightmare that has brought the world to its knees not by American military might but by colossal financial fraud and the failure of unfettered capitalism.
Other countries are starting to take a bolder stand against having US military bases in their countries. Case in point: Kyrgyzstan - the President of which has recently said that the US base there will be closed. This base is important to the US effort in Afghanistan, but evidently Kyrgyzstan wants more money from the US to keep it open and Russia resents having US bases in its "sphere."
Nature abhors a vacuum so while there are some who want to resurrect a failed ideology of unfettered capitalism, the consensus world wide is that this philosophy has failed and must be replaced by one more conducive to the welfare of the average middle class person instead of the preening, moneyed elite.
