The Mittser on defense spending:
“I am fully committed to strengthening America through our values, through a growing economy, and through a military that’s second to none,” Romney said. “I will not cut the military budget. I will instead expand our essential weapons programs and our (number of) active-duty personnel. I do these things not so that we have to fight wars, but so that we can prevent wars.”
According to Mitt, not only do we not need to cut defense, we actually need to spend more! And we need to do this to prevent wars, presumably because otherwise our “enemies” whomever they might be, might be tempted to attack us or our allies.
Except that, you know, we already outspend the entire rest of the world in defense spending, and, oh by the way, most of the other major military powers in the world are actually allied to us. I mean, look at the “rogues” out there.
Iran. Oooh, scary. The Iranian regime is a thugish theocracy. I have no particular fondness for that regime. But look, according to SIPRI figures from 2010 we outspent Iran $687B to $7B. A 98-1 advantage is not enough to deter them? It needs to be, what, 100-1? More?
How about North Korea. There are no reliable figures for North Korean defense spending, but their entire GDP is around $30 billion. Our defense budget is 20x greater than their entire national income. Indeed, South Korea alone spends about the same on defense as North Korean GDP.
Then you get China. We outspend them at least 5-1. But what’s more, China isn’t some weird “rogue” country. It is our most important economic partner. As I’ve written elsewhere:
China and the United States are tightly bound together by economics. They are our second largest trading partner. They hold hundreds of billions of U.S. debt. Our countries are intertwined not just as matter of interests, but as a matter of actual interrelations. The case for overlapping interests, in short, is not an abstract one. This is not like when people say that the U.S. and Pakistan have shared interests regarding Islamist extremism, if only the Pakistanis understood their interests properly. No, in the U.S.-China case, not only are there shared interests in the abstract, there is a potent record of action demonstrating those shared interests.
You’re telling me, Mitt, that in a time of constant calls for austerity that we need to increase defense spending as a hedge against our most important economic partner? Really?
And this is where I want to bring Reagan back in the mix of things.
I know this is a contentious issue, and indeed debates continue to rage over how much the Soviet Union actually spent on defense. But look, CIA estimates had the Soviets surpassing us in defense expenditures by the early 1970s in the wake of the post-Vietnam U.S. drawn down. This was surely wrong and reflected a massive over-estimate of the size of the Soviet economy in the 1970s. But even if we cut those estimates in half, we still get a major power spending 30-60% of what the U.S. was spending. We barely traded with them. We were engaged in an ideological struggle around the world and proxy conflicts in various regions.
I don’t want to re-litigate the Reagan arms build-up. My only point is that when Reagan pitched “peace through strength” and the need to increase spending to deter Soviet aggression, he was, at least, operating in some sort of reality-based construct. Reasonable people can — and did — disagree about the need for increased defense spending in 1980. But even had Carter been re-elected we’d have seen a massive buildup. Carter’s final Five Year Defense Plan (FYDP) called for a significant ramp up in spending.
But now, here we are in 2012. We’re running massive deficits and Romney and his ilk are using that to justify cuts in services. We spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined. We outspend all plausible threats combined by at least 10-1 and in some individual cases 100-1, leaving us to contemplated spending more on defense to deter our more important trading partner, who, by the way, we already outspend 5-1. It is just madness.
amk
Shorter mitt – I am solely here to help my MIC pals like darth, fuck america.
foodriots
The military spending will continue to increase because that is how you get other countries to start listening to you…snark.
Paulk
Don’t forget, too, that Mitt wants to do this while simultaneously making our budget picture worse by massively cutting taxes.
It’s actually as if he wants to emulate the Soviet self-destruction by wasting their essential resources on pointless wars and over-militarization while infrastructure collapsed.
Bulworth
Defense spending, like wars themselves, and tax cuts, pay for themselves.
/snark
El Cid
Why don’t we just buy North Korea? I really think that if we made a big enough offer, they’d accept. I can’t think it’d be that high. Their leadership seems to envy the big money of their Chinese new elite peers.
halteclere
It isn’t madness if you are hitched to the military/defense gravy train. It’s the best government program for financial bloodsuckers!
ding dong
Well, Bernard you do realize that Mr Romney and his cronies have to do somet5hing to stay in the .1percent and what better way than from defense contracts where you can accuse any oppponent of the contract as being soft on terrah and unAmerican.
kd bart
“Increased defense spending is good for companies that make weapons and most of my friends own large holdings in such companies.”
Zifnab
If only we had some other President in our recent history who cut taxes and increased defense spending. Someone we could compare Mitt with. God, if only I could remember his name. Greg Branch? Gordon Brown? Grover Baggins? Meh, probably not important.
gnomedad
Mr. Romney, should we always spend more on the military and never less? Is there a way to tell when we’re spending enough, or should we always spend as much as possible? If so, shouldn’t we increase taxes so that we can spend even more?
Omnes Omnibus
But the Chinese are Comminists, you cudlip.
It had to be done. Sorry.
Roger Moore
At this point, I think increasing military spending makes us more likely to get into wars, not less. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a President with a massive military, every international problem looks amenable to force. Anything that happens in a country where we have a military base looks like a threat to our position. We’d be a lot less likely to get into wars if we shrank our military to a more sensible size and abandoned a lot of our far-flung bases in parts of the world where we have no real interests. Bring ’em home.
BGinCHI
Mitt’s speeches remind me more and more of Steve Carrell’s character (the weather man named Brick) in “Anchor Man.”
cathyx
We need to spend more on military because Iran already has a missile that could reach the U.S. if it could put it on a ship and move it to within 600 miles of the American coastline. Imminent threat and all that.
redshirt
War is peace, freedom is slavery, yadda yadda.
We live in 1984 now. In truth! There’s TV’s that can watch you now, and that will surely only proliferate.
Martin
– Some hippie named Dwight
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: “I love lamp.”
redshirt
@BGinCHI: Brick Tamlin did go on to a prominent position in W’s administration.
Due to his lamp love.
cathyx
@gnomedad: The answer to that depends on where his blind trusts are invested.
MattF
Seems to me that this is a shout-out to the ‘war everywhere, all the time’ crowd. Invade Syria, attack Iran, lob couple missiles at North Korea, see what happens.
rlrr
It isn’t about defense, it’s about dick waving…
rlrr
I’ve heard this whole “cut taxes, increase defense spending, balance the budget” mantra before.
wrb
I understand that the DOD is facing a critical shortage of tee-times at their exclusive golf courses.
Worse,in two incidents last year a colonel was forced to fly commercial.
Randy P
I was never able to understand how Darth Cheney was able to successfully terrorize the American public with the idea that Al-Qaeda was scarier than the WW2 Axis and Soviet Russia combined. But succeed he did.
rlrr
@Roger Moore:
Bingo. Imagine if Bush had to actually raise an army to invade Iraq. Having a standing army already to go made it that much easier…
EconWatcher
I’ve always assumed that comparing our defense spending with Chinese defense spending must be grossly misleading because, while we don’t pay our military folks well, I would imagine they get paid many multiples of what Chinese soldiers make. So presumably China gets a lot more bang for every buck, and our allgedly massive edge in spending isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I realize they’re only beginning to develop a blue-water navy, etc., but I would think in other ways they’re much more formidable than their spending numbers would suggest.
Of course, these views are unburdended by any evidence. Am I right?
terraformer
Defense spending is the new “third rail.”
Used to be SS was that third rail, but the concept has been redefined by the establishment because power does not care for concerns of the polloi, but it sure does care for concerns of their golfing buddies.
Haydnseek
Watch the teabagger congress critters trip over themselves grabbing as much corporate welfare for defense contractors in their districts as they can. After all, it’s not really spending when it’s for defending our way of life against the Muslim Brotherhood in our midst. The problem is those cops, teachers, firefighters and janitors whose pensions are bleeding us dry! Why can’t those un-American libruls get it? Because they hate America, that’s why.
Gian
Yes Reagan did continue the increases in degenerate spending that began under Carter. The ones perhaps sparked by an ill fated invasion of Afghanistan.
He also ran some great commercials … would third rate military dictators laugh at America and burn our flag in contempt if Ronald Reagan were president?
Some people still think the adverts are reality … there’s a bear in the woods too
joeyess
How dare you introduce facts into this election!
SatanicPanic
@El Cid: Haha, that would be a novel solution. Totally amoral, but seriously, offer the top leadership $10 billion to divide up with the condition they get the hell out, and then flip the country to South Korea for $15 billion. Everybody wins! Not that I don’t like your plan (because I actually do), but it would take Mitt Romney to actually make this happen.
Violet
@BGinCHI: Can someone do a video? You know, like that Tracy Flick from “Election” one they did on Hillary during the primaries. That would be excellent.
gnomedad
@EconWatcher:
True if we’re discussing invading a neighboring country via infantry, at least.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
While I totally agree that we need to significantly cut our defense spending, and that having a large military tends to make us want to use it more (and treat it as a golden hammer), I don’t think your defense in terms of China is very strong. Countries in and of themselves are not always rational actors.
Look at North Korea and tell me they are acting rational.
Look at China and Taiwan. In what way does it make sense for China to keep missiles pointed at the island and always keeping that kind of tension?
And let’s look through history. Please explain Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union from a rational actor POV.
PeakVT
Militarily, the USA is safer than ever. There’s no large power seeking to force an alternative economic system on the world. There’s zero risk of a land invasion. There’s zero risk of a marine invasion. There’s no country that keeps its nuclear forces constantly on high alert. The main risk is from terrorism, which is best treated as an intelligence and law enforcement issue. More heavily armor objects won’t do much to solve the only threat the US faces.
Shorter: Mitt is full of shit.
Violet
@PeakVT: What? Canada isn’t invading us?
MikeJ
To be fair, it would be stimulus, just not the most effective form of it. Having the government spend billions, some of which will go to people working for LockMart or Boeing isn’t inherently bad.
It’s just that we have so many other things that we need to spend money on (roads, rails, teachers, firefighters, building a new grid) that putting all our money into toys isn’t the best way to go.
Bernard Finel
@EconWatcher: Yes and no. They do pay their troops less, which allows them to have an active force roughly 40% larger than ours despite a much small budget.
But, that does not imply more bang for the buck. The training and sophistication of American forces is second to none. I’m not being jingoistic here, just stating facts. Compare our training facilities to their. Compare hours on the firing range. Compare education. Compare doctrine development and sophistication. Compare expertise in combined arms.
Compare, well, basically any input or output measures of quality, and American forces are far, far ahead.
We have huge personnel expenses, true. But there are massive benefits to that in terms of conventional warfighting.
The 5-1 ratio, if anything, understates American military dominance I would argue, though this is a complex issue and requires thinking through specific contingencies.
rlrr
@PeakVT:
The main risk is from terrorism, which is best treated as an intelligence and law enforcement issue.
While true, stating this is a sure way to be labeled as soft on terrorism…
The Moar You Know
@Randy P: This is easy, actually; the Axis and the Soviets never managed a successful attack on the American mainland. Al-Qaeda did. This caused Americans, who at the core turned out were bed-wetting cowards of the worst sort, to do exactly what bed-wetting cowards do when they perceive a threat to their comfy recliners – freak the fuck out and try to kill everything in sight.
Panicky people are really easy to mold to your will, if you only promise them that you can make everything feel safe again.
EconWatcher
@Bernard Finel:
Interesting and helpful, thanks.
SatanicPanic
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): It wasn’t all that long ago that China was engaged in an orgy of smashing its cultural heritage and had literally (yes, I do mean literally) no foreign policy for FIVE YEARS. But it does seem like cooler heads have prevailed since then.
PeakVT
@rlrr: Yeah. As with every other major topic, an adult discussion isn’t happening anytime soon.
The Other Chuck
I love lamp. And the trees are the right height. Lemon. Wet. Good.
Martin
@Bernard Finel: And from what I understand, for all of the bluster of China invading Taiwan, China largely lacks the means to do it. The Chinese army is huge not because China needed a large army not to defend against Mongolia, rather they needed a huge army to keep the chinese public in line – much the same reason why the Iranian and North Korean armies are huge. These forces are relatively ineffective for foreign work and are all about preventing domestic uprisings.
Which only begs the question why we need to defend against such things.
Bernard Finel
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): If they are not acting rationally, then they won’t be deterred whether we spend $600 billion or $700 billion defense.
I also disagree with all your specific examples. China’s missiles make perfect sense (and work) in terms of deterring more explicit moves toward Taiwanese independence.
North Korea leverages its ability to threaten others into both immunity from military attack and economic concessions at various times. It works well for the regime… less so for the population.
Hitler’s invasion of Russia was a classic “window of opportunity” decision. And, by the way, it almost worked. Soviet forces came very, very close to complete collapse.
I’m not saying military decisions are always rational. They aren’t. But the rationality is more pervasive than people realize. The point, though, is that whether our adversaries are rational or not, more defense spending is not the answer given the current distribution of military power.
burnspbesq
An increase in defense procurement is the only stimulus program that will ever be acceptable to the House Republicans. And it creates skilled manufacturing jobs in the United States.
It’s as close to Keynesian as any Republican can get without being drummed out of the radical right movement.
Which makes it the best of an array of bad outcomes.
bemused
I know I’d feel so much safer with Mitt, the varmint hunter, on the job, shudder.
japa21
I would like to see Romney define “essential weapon systems”. Does he mean those that Congress finds essential or those that the military thinks are essential. They are not always the same. And usually, those deemed essential by Congress amount to more than those deemed essential by the military.
Amir Khalid
The entity that most recently attacked America in what could be called a big way used 20 guys with box cutters. Neither country where America was most recently at war has an air force to speak of, let alone one you fight with F-22s or F-35s.
In fact, we seem to moving away from large-scale wars between nation states, toward smaller ones where at least one side is a non-state entity. And thinking of hardware in terms of refighting WWII with mo’ better hardware, while profitable for your “defense” contractors”, seems like trying to hammer in a screw. So the US has enough hardware — the bestest on the planet, bar none. It’s probably time it started thinking more about the human dimensions of conflict.
Meanwhile, if America is spending too much on its military, then the rest of the planet is spending too little. When military intervention deemed necessary by the UN Security Council can’t happen without US participation, and that US participation is always conditional on US ability or willingness to join in with its hardware, then the world has become too dependent on one nation’s military capability.
You guys need to spend less on your military or you’ll go broke. The rest of us need to spend more because we shouldn’t be depending on you alone.
The Moar You Know
@EconWatcher: Might be true in terms of actual dollars, but damn, most enlisted families are on both AFDC and food stamps, and it’s been that way since the 1990s. The Chinese soldier may well have a better standard of living than his American counterpart.
What’s ballooning the relentless expansion of American defense budgets is the use of contractors, period. There is no function performed by defense contractors that couldn’t be done more cheaply if the expertise were kept in house. Sadly, both because of the above-referred pay issue, and the way that career promotions work in the armed forces (you’re moving up or you’re tossed out) it’s not possible for the military to keep their skilled people. Hence, contractors. Sometimes incredibly expensive contractors.
wrb
@burnspbesq:
There are actually some pretty benificial expendatures that could be put under the defense budget:
Hardening the power grid, repairing defense-critical transportation infrastructure, energy independence, etc.
Brachiator
Many conservatives have Bigger Dick Syndrome when it comes to military spending.
MattF
@Bernard Finel: And institutional factors matter– the recent assassinations at the core of the security establishment in Syria are far more dangerous to Assad than any number of UN resolutions. I’d be very wary of attempts to quantify those sorts of differences between, say, the US and China.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@MikeJ: Except, in terms of stimulus, military spending isn’t anywhere near the top, in part because the product it is spent on is not generally turned into something that is usable by other parts of the economy, unlike a road or a TV (which allows commercials), but a lot of the money goes to the wealthy people running the military contractors.
22over7
@burnspbesq:
Yes. Defense spending, or the military/industrial complex, is a HUGE employer. Contractors, bases, plants, or labs are in practically every district in the US, and that’s not counting the hundreds of thousands of people serving on active duty.
Most of these jobs pay well, and the top research and engineering jobs pay really well.
Romney isn’t going to lose any votes by promising to keep up the good work. No politician is.
Do I think we spend too much on war? Hell yes. But every stupid project has its boosters, and every base has its community, and it gets really complicated when you try to separate them.
Jason Tondro
Long time reader, first time poster.
Keep this new guy. He’s golden.
Scott S.
Come on, people, we need a bigger military budget for the coming War on Porn!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Bernard Finel:
And think of how many potential threats we have deterred by having a massive military.
As for Taiwan, what has China’s threats really bought them: Yeah, Taiwan isn’t a country in the UN definition of the term, but it has its own government and it gets protection from the US. Not exactly a success for the effort.
Amir Khalid
@wrb:
Infrastructure projects and non-fossil fuel energy, no matter how beneficial, are der Sozialismus. Only weapon systems are proper freedom-loving expressions of American exceptionalism. Don’t you people know this already?
Culture of Truth
10-1 spending cuts vs tax increases are inadequate; 10-1 military spending ratios are weakness.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Amir Khalid:
The nice thing about having a military full of F-35s and F-22s is that you can’t occupy and invade foreign countries with them.
Roy G.
The Right Wing is a cargo cult, mouthing phrases to please the deity while understanding none of what they say.
wrb
@Amir Khalid:
Well yes, but I’ve wondered about the possible benefits of changing the packaging.
Would such stimulating expendatures sell better if put in the defense budget to be administered by the defense contracting establishment?
Get some generals out there demanding that the bridges be fixed and the grid be secured.
How could one argue that they are a worse investment than more things that blow up?
Comrade Dread
@Paulk: Well, look what happened in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Wholesale capture of the nation by some rich oligarchs.
Granted, then the government took a shift back towards authoritarian and some of those oligarchs ended up on the wrong end of a hit squad, but you know, you roll the dice, you take your chances.
WereBear
These people are sure “everyone hates us” because they are externalizing the deep-down realization that everyone hates them.
I know Freud wasn’t right about everything but he has the Wingers nailed down.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
You are arguing with the people who think that if everyone had guns there would be less shootings and death.
Actually it’s the same argument.
J. Michael Neal
@SatanicPanic: We’d have to pay South Korea to take the North off of our hands. It’s the ultimate negative equity country. Twenty-three years later, West Germany is still paying a ton of money to rebuild the former DDR and they were a ton wealthier than North Korea is.
A complete collapse of the DPRK and its forced integration with the South is just about South Korea’s worst nightmare, topped only by the DPRK startinga war and then collapsing, forcing integration with the South. They can’t afford to rebuild it. The US probably could, particularly if we just subsidize the South’s effort, but it would be a painful amount of money, even for us.
I’m sure the basic idea has been considered, but actually *buying* North Korea is the easy part.
Ruckus
@rlrr:
How do you wave something the size of a half used golf pencil?
chopper
mitt’s right! if we blow everything on the pentagon and go completely bankrupt, we won’t have any more wars, because china would just buy us at a yard sale.
Amir Khalid
@wrb:
I fear that in such a scenario, you’d suddenly see Republican politicians adopting a lifelong enmity toward the US Army Corps of Engineers.
J. Michael Neal
@Bernard Finel:
Disagree. The Red Army didn’t come close to collapse. It *did* collapse. That the Wehrmacht got as far as it did happened only because of that collapse.
The problem is that it only took the Soviets about five months to rebuild the Red Army into a minimally effective force. It may not have reached a level of real quality for another two years, but it started causing the Germans a ton of headaches along the upper Dnieper by late August, 1941.
The Germans just didn’t have enough troops to cover the whole front as it widened. They especially didn’t have enough mobile troops. And they had immense difficulties supplying the ones that they had. Worse, when you start looking at the casualty lists, you realize that the Wehrmacht was wasting away from the first day of the war. As appalling is it is, the Soviets could withstand losing millions of men, but the Germans couldn’t overcome losing tens of thousands.
This isn’t to say that invading the USSR was entirely irrational. The problem was that Nazi Germany was going to have to fight the Soviets at some point and their chances were better doing it sooner rather than later and on Soviet territory rather than their own. It was never anything but a low probability gamble. And, frankly, they had already pulled off one ridiculously low probability gamble (invading France, in which they caught every single break conceivable).
danielx
Cue Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, Charles Krauthammer, Elliott Abrams, the demented Kagan clan, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith (the dumbest motherfucker on the face of the planet), et al…standing and doing the wave. This is perfect, since if you don’t have a war handy the next best thing is hyping threats and getting ready for one.
Note: to the best of my knowledge, the only one of these assholes with any skin in the game, as it were, is Michael Ledeen, both of whose sons are Marine officers. Doesn’t make him any less of a shithead, but it does make him somewhat less of a hypocrite. The rest of them are all for wars as long as they and theirs don’t have to fight in them.
Jason Mattera: “I’m fighting the battle for ideas…”
Captain C
@cathyx: Exactly. Because the U.S. Navy wouldn’t ever sink a suspicious Iranian ship in missile range of the coast unless the Navy budget was increased every year.
And of course, the Iranians would actually send such a ship, knowing there would be no retaliation if they fired a missile at the continental U.S..
Hoodie
Mitt just wants to make the world safer for outsourcing. Seriously, this may also a bid for a voting bloc that Obama has started to make inroads on. DoD funnels money to Mitt’s defense contractor pals, but it also is the nurse cow for a portion of the population that traditionally has voted republican. The DoD is essentially a socialist country within a country, with relatively generous retirement, healthcare, recreational and other bennies, and guaranteed profits for defense contractors. My father-in-law and cousin are both retired military and as wingnut as can be, even though they’ve sucked off the government tit most of their lives. The former saw “action” something like 50 years ago, but the closest he got to combat was a helicopter crash due to engine failure. The latter never got closer to combat than running a hospital surgical unit for a few months during the relative cakewalk of Gulf War I, the rest of his duty being some relatively comfortable onshore hitches in San Diego and Spain. They both loves them some Tricare and cheap golf. That’s not to knock their service or to say they shouldn’t get their benies (after all, that was the deal), but they (and their spouses) tend to have an oversized sense of entitlement, as if they were equivalent to guys like my dad, who spent 4 years getting malaria and got shot twice in the South Pacific. Actually, that’s why my dad hated the Legion and the VFW, because they were full of superpatriot rear echelon pukes.
japa21
@wrb: Of course military expenditures must be on things that blow up. There was an attempt by the Republicans to drop any funding for the Navy to go ahead with its green bio-fuel testing because the bio-fuel cost too much. Of course, the real reason is that the military is trying to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, for reasons of national security, but that would mean fewer dollars to big oil. And big oil profits really are more important than national security.
Amanda in the South Bay
@J. Michael Neal:
No, better for the Soviets to be the ones invading Germany; Especially if Germany never declares war on the US, and there’s only minimal support for the Soviet Union/lendlease. The great Soviet advances into Central Europe wouldn’t have been possible without lend lease. Invading the Soviet Union is a logistical no-go from the start.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
As an aerospace engineer, this is a topic near and dear to me, about which I’ve thought a lot [for years I’ve referred to myself as a ‘minor drone in the MIC’ (though now that ‘drone’ has other meanings I’ll need to come up with another boilerplate quip)].
To be clear, I consider Mitt’s idiotic (and innumerate) position on taxes and defense spending to be one of the reasons he is such a tangible threat to the country’s future should he win.
However, you picked the wrong day for this post. I have no fight in me today. So I’ll just make a bullet list for you.
(1) The ratio of GDP-to-defense spending needs to be halved, probably even thirded if we can pull it off. Hardly anyone on the Right understands this.
(2) It took 60 years to build up the Empire. It will take at least 60 years to wind it down. Hardly anyone on the Left gets this. (For one thing, you need to give the GDP time to grow, so as to pick up the slack as you draw down).
(3) I think the UK could serve as a good model for how to do this, being the most recent (in fact, one of the very few) examples of how an Empire can slowly wind its posture down without collapsing its economy (the fate of most other Empires)… yet still remain a major world power. And yes, that includes keeping the nuclear deterrent, as they have done.
(4) Emerging tech such as drones, ‘cyberwarfare’ (how I despise that term), and other things are critical to achieving (2) and (3). In fact, maybe the only way. Hardly ANYBODY seems to get this one.
(5) We also can’t do it alone. Some of our allies have gotten a little too used to having the US play Brute Squad whenever needed, and will have to pick up the slack for their domestic security as we ourselves tend to our own business. We can’t afford forward bases with 30,000+ troops on them anymore. Especially since it’s now clear that the 20th century boots-and-tanks model of mass warfare is likely a thing of the past. Here, have 5,000 troops, backed up by a fleet of drones and other tech. More than enough to keep potential invaders at bay while you wait for the carriers to arrive.
That’s all I got for now. But I do believe that all of the above is obtainable.
Birthmarker
Great post, BF!
Mike in NC
The notion of having a draft dodging coward like Willard M. Rmoney as commander-in-chief is truly sickening.
Captain C
@Randy P: I never got that either. As someone who grew up in the ’80s, during which we lived with the very real (if in retrospect, somewhat more remote than hyped) threat of thousands of Soviet ICBMs and SLBMs which could reach our shores in half an hour or less (and pretty much completely trash the country for millennia once they got here), and with parents who were born during World War II (an actual war against dangerous enemies), I could never figure out how anyone roughly my age or older could have been stampeded into panic by the whole Bush administration fear-mongering over a gang of extremists who couldn’t do more than terrorize and who pretty much have managed to piss off everyone they come in contact with, including potential and former allies.
Hal
He is lock step with the Ryan budget plan, which gives more money to the military than the military is even asking for, based on his expertise in what is good for the military.
Makes me wonder who is really on Mitts VP short list.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
While true that MIC spending is stimulative in the broadest Keynsian sense, it amounts to the most base and least effective Keynsian idea. To wit: Pay people to dig a ditch, and then pay people to fill it in.
Last time I checked, we extract about $0.65 of stimulus from the MIC for every $1.00 we spend, at current levels.
Furthermore, noting the inherent nature of military spending, which is essentially about destruction and killing the prospect of EVER turning a real profit on this “investment” is extremely dubious. Only in the face of actual undoing of our country could spending on military – in the face of ACTUAL defense of our borders prove a net plus economically. Otherwise it’s throwing money in the toilet.
That said, I’ve grown weary of people mislabeling MIC spending as either Keynsian or stimulative – even when done with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and even when there is a small grain of truth to it in the most technical sense. When all of the bullshit is stripped away it’s clearly neither.
The purpose behind Republicans calling for more “defense” spending is the same as their purpose behind the “starve beast” idea. It’s a way to destroy the economy of this country, while getting a modicum of political cover for doing so. It’s a loot and burn tactic just like everything else they’ve been doing these past few decades.
danielx
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
All too true, unfortunately (at least on the time required).
Like I’m telling you anything new…but it bears repeating:
It’s not just a question of defense industry executive and Pentagon officers fighting for their particular rice bowls, either. Congressmen fight like hell for defense jobs because they are among the relatively few high-tech, decent paying manufacturing jobs that can’t be outsourced (mostly anyway).
Getting rid of those jobs in somebody else’s Congressional district is fighting pork barrel. Keeping them in your district or bringing in more? That’s bringing home the bacon to your constituents, which is why production of components for the F-22 (for example) is spread across 35-40 states. It’s sure as hell not because it produces manufacturing efficiencies, it’s so all those congresspeople of whichever party have a stake in keeping ridiculously expensive and/or unneeded weapons systems alive.
J. Michael Neal
@Amanda in the South Bay: Evaluating the Red Army in a scenario in which they’re the ones invading Germany at the start of the war by comparing it to the one that took the initiative in 1943 is very misleading. You can’t even really compare the Red Army in that scenario to the one that existed on June 21, 1941.
That Soviets wouldn’t have attacked until their own forces were ready. They were in the process of completely reorganizing their forces at the time Operation Barbarossa commenced. That was a major contributing factor in their instant collapse. In addition, because of the purges, they had a lot of mid- and high-level officers that were completely inexperienced at their command levels.
If they had had the time to complete the reforms and train their officers, it would have been a very different military, one that would have been more than capable of maintaining an offensive. Their real problem would have been that they would have been attacking a Wehrmacht that hadn’t been ground down by two years of fighting in Russia, but this probably wouldn’t have stopped them from winning.
As for the value of Lend-Lease, I think you’re overselling it some. That’s certainly true in a situation in which the Soviet industrial base isn’t devastated and conquered. Even in the real world, it didn’t make the difference in allowing the Red Army to sustain offensives. The lack of it would certainly have drastically lengthened the amount of time it would have taken them to get from Kursk to Berlin, but they would have managed it eventually. By the time large scale shipments were getting through (which wasn’t until the second half of 1943), the handwriting was on the wall.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
Drum up fear to get people to give up their rights and their money.
Spend money on the MIC to enrich the rich, while fleecing the middle class and the poor.
In the end, destroy our country, and loot what’s left of the treasury.
Spending more on our MIC is just a cog in that plan. There’s not much left to be said on this subject.
maurinsky
@PeakVT:
Exactly what I was thinking. Are there legitimate threats to the U.S.? Yes. Will a military response solve them? Heck, no. The wars we are involved in right now are just sowing the seeds for the next round in a generation or so.
Kurzleg
Not to mention the fact that such over-the-top defense spending, presence and posture throughout the world might actually make us less secure since it ups the ante for any rival that might come along. It’s one reason why Iran is pursuing nukes.
Anna in PDX
Ths is a sort of “talk to me like I am stupid” thing (sorry for the TNC reference) and I am mostly addressing OP and @JudasEscargot and @Danielx: Can’t any of these huge MIC industries use all this knowledge they have to create non-military things? pardon my ignorance but I live near a Boeing installation and it is just hard for me to believe that only military stuff can be done by all these high level scientists, when bridges are collapsing not five miles from them.
Or to ask it in another way, if there were some government demilitarization program for these companies that encouraged their R&D people to branch out, so they could start contributing to fixing the domestic infrastructure fiasco, wouldn’t that help to jump-start or grease the skids of this slow process that you (Judas Escargot for example) say will take 60 years?
Captain C
@PeakVT: Not to mention that if some other power was actually capable of rustling up the 10 or so million (if not more) troops that it would actually take to have even a prayer of invading the U.S. (and that’s before you take air power and so forth into account), and putting them on a flotilla, well, that flotilla would probably get nuked into oblivion well before it got within major fallout range.
Captain C
@Bernard Finel: This is also why people who fret over China getting an aircraft carrier are probably worrying over nothing. Even setting aside that said carrier would be outnumbered, and at least as much of a target as ours, the U.S. Navy has had over 70 years to develop carrier doctrine and practice/perfect carrier operations, including a really nasty war (that would be World War II). That’s one hell of a head-start for anyone to catch up with.
RaflW
The only way I’d support more troops in US uniforms would be if we got rid of a lot of the contractors who are sucking the nation dry in their pursuit of profit through service.
I’m sure on some theoretical plane, you could argue that the US could save money and/or get better food/oil changes/whatever but the massive increase in the use of contractors has coincided with even more drive by defense companies to never, ever tolerate a budget cut.
And knowing what we do about shitty corp benefits, maybe healthcare and a few dollars in a 401(k), we’re paying for a lot of executive bullshit as well as profit and the average American who goes and serves in uniform or to those in uniform still gets crap while contractors get fat.
I suppose I’m verging on ardent soshulism (my gramdpa in Sweden was one of those, for realz) but I’m increasingly of the camp that says that profit in healhtcare and in defense are damn near, if not fully, morally wrong.
wrb
@Anna in PDX:
Exactly.
While we can’t instantly lay off 2/3rds of the people working
in the MIC we can just about instantly turn them to making things that do something more useful than blow up.
Grumpy Code Monkey
I’ve been in the belly of this particular beast for half my career, although it wasn’t until 2005 that I got to work on one of those legendarily huge contracts that makes the news.
Subbing for $MAJOR_DEFENSE_CONTRACTOR was an eye-opening experience. I don’t know if it’s a case of them being too big to manage themselves or what, but there were a lot of WTFs associated with that project. If you were an expert in A, you were assigned to work on Y. And as soon as a manager would get up to speed on Y, they’d be reassigned and a new person (with no relevant experience) would be brought in. It was like Groundhog Day as we’d have to rehash the same material that we rehashed six months ago that had been rehashed six months previously.
The actual coding was fun; interfaces would be generated from spreadsheets, and numerous stupid spelling errors were enshrined in the code forever. Specifications were not well-thought-out, leading to more than one “oh, crap” during integration and usability testing.
While it was a paycheck (and a damned good one), there were more than a few days where I felt like we were cheating people somehow. When $THAT_BRANCH_OF_THE_MILITARY finally killed the thing, I couldn’t fault them, even though it got me (and 2/3 of the company) laid off.
hep kitty
Why do we even bother to pay attention? Every single thing that comes out of his mouth is a bald-faced lie. And we can’t keep up with the onslaught of republican lies in general anyway. I’m tired of trying to keep up!
Wake me up when the debates start. This crap is getting old.
And Mitt’s looking/acting unhinged to me. I don’t know if his sense of entitlement can make it through this process before he just blows and turns all Incredible Hulk on everyone.
Chris T.
I think what we need is someone to shock the Republicans by proposing that the US spend $15 trillion on “defense” in 2013.
Chris
@Hoodie:
Yeah, I’ve said this before but it’s something I notice in DOD employees both in and out of uniform: the farther they are from the combat lines, the more smug they get about their service. It spans the spectrum from actual combat vets who generally prefer not to discuss it at all, to civilian contractors in northern Virginia who tend to be fucking impossible.
El Cid
@Chris: While serving (modestly) in active duty during the buildup to Gulf War 1, I was stunned at the attempted movie-scene dialogs being uttered by weekend reserve officers.
I felt like saying, ‘You guys realize that people hear you, right? And that you’re not currently in a WWII action movie battle scene, right?’
ericblair
@Anna in PDX:
Yes, I believe so. The industry is geared to large, complex systems of systems with advanced technology of all sorts in multiple and often hostile environments. A lot of it is flexible enough to be repurposed to civil and scientific projects of whatever scale. Frankly, I think you’d find a lot of the workforce would be delighted to change focus once the transition pain was out of the way.
But as long as the goopers have anything to do with it, it won’t happen. I don’t have any insight into the high-level planning, but it looks like the DoD is sneaking in as much green technology (including solar, biofuels, alternate materials and the like) that they can get away with, as well as more generally applicable IT projects such as electronic medical records for DoD and VA. However, like someone else said, there are enough repubs that are happy to try to deep-six anything that smells vaguely commie even if it is in the defense appropriations. Moar and better Dems in congress, plz.
Harry
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
In other words, the parasite has wormed it’s way into the brain, making it quite hard to remove without killing the victim.
Mike G
All part of the Unquestionable Repuke Magical Stupid – cutting taxes raises revenues, and we never spend enough on the Pentagon.
Whose massive budget is, somehow, not “big government spending of taxes stolen from freedumb-loving Murkans” but magically delivered by patriotic eagles from the sacred slopes of Mt. Reagan.
NCSteve
I probably tend to be a bit more likely to favor military action in some circumstances than many here. I was totally onboard with the Libya thing and I deeply regret that President Gore wasn’t there to put the boots on the ground necessary to block the passes the Taliban and AQ were retreating through in 2002 when Bush was diverting resources to his idiot war.
But the idea that now, at this point in history, we need to spend more on defense is so staggeringly stupid that I almost hope Mittens is looking at it as the only kind of Keynesian boost he can get the idiots in his own party to support. Because the alternative is to believe that he’s as stupid as he appears to be every single time he tries to sound like he know’s jack shit about defense and foreign policy.
In particular, his naval ship numbers obsession is just fucking insane. The U.S. Navy has as much tonnage afloat as the next seventeen largest navies after us. And if all of them (including the eleven with whom we have a formal treaty of military alliance) banded together against us, the qualitative difference between their fleets and ours is such that in the end, they’d be artificial reefs and we’d have the only navy left.
mdblanche
@terraformer: Dial the self-pity down a notch. The whole reason the MIC is being so vocal about defense spending right now is that last summer during crunch time on the debt ceiling debacle the Republicans agreed to sequester defense spending starting next year. Now they’re just whining to try to get a do-over. Oh, and do you know what isn’t being sequestered? Social security.
@Captain C:
FTFY
Captain C
@mdblanche: Yeah, that’d be the first impossible obstacle they’d have to surmount. Not that such logic can penetrate the anti-reality forcefields surrounding the brains of either the bedwetters who fear such an assault or the con artists who manipulate them for fun and profit.
Caz
I agree, we don’t need to increase defense spending. We should cut our defense budget by at least 50%. A lot of that can be accomplished by withdrawing all troops and equipment from all other nations, such as Germany, Japan, Spain, S. Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc. We need a military stationed in the U.S. to protect the U.S. from foreign threats. That means is some country attacks us or threatens us, we have the means to crush them. It means all other countries need to defend themselves, and we need to stay out of other countries’ business. Iran can’t nuke us even if they had a nuke, so it’s not a threat to us. Syria is not a thrate to us. Neither is Iraq, Afghanistan, or Egypt.
But why aren’t you calling for cuts across the board on govt spending?? You must realize that this spending spree can’t continue, that at some point we will literally be bankrupt. Our fed. govt. has gone way beyond its authority and means. The Constitution sets out 18 things the fed. govt is allowed to be involved with, and they are currently involved in thousands. We should be cutting the scope and size of govt by a significant amount, at least 50% across the board.
Romney will increase the defense budget, but it’s not like Obama has been frugal. He has spend more on defense than any other president ever, and has us engaged in numerous military situations, none of which involve a threat to the U.S.
So bash Romney if you want, but there is already a current, ongoing problem with spending, defense budget, and military intervention, and it’s the fault of Obama.
It’s hilarious when someone throws around the word “austerity,” as if there has been any of that here. I can’t remember the last time our leaders cut spending on something, and I don’t forsee it happeneing anytime soon.
Increasing spending by 20% instead of the originally planned 30% is not a 10% spending cut. But that’s how the liberals define it, and that’s how they lie and convince people all is well and then they continue to increase spending and move us toward bankruptcy. And you fools buy it, hook, line and sinker, every time.
Vote for Gary Johnson!
El Cid
15 CENTS! I WANTS IT! NAOW!