We Are Blindly Worshiping the Military; Wasting Enormous Amounts on Useless Miitary Hardware

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/we-are-chickenhawk-nation-blindly-worshiping-military-wasting-enormous-amounts

It’s common knowledge that the U.S. devotes more money to our defense budget than any other industrialized nation. But just how much we spend is remarkable. This year, the nation is on track to spend over $1 trillion on national security, after factoring in nuclear weapons funding, military pensions and “overseas contingency funds,” in addition to the Pentagon’s $580 billion operating budget. In total, this figure accounts for about 4 percent of the United States’ income—double what most other countries spend. Yet all of this budgetary bloat has done nothing to advance our strategic interests in countries like Syria and Iraq. In an investigative piece in the most recent Atlantic, James Fallows explains why.

“The Tragedy of the American Military” convincingly makes the case that the deepening divide between the military and the American public is the reason we spend such absurd sums on the tools and technology of war. We have, Fallows argues, become a “chickenhawk” nation: blindly supportive of our troops and perma-ready to deploy them, yet distantly removed from the consequences of these costly geopolitical games. The vast majority of Americans don’t have personal ties with any service members, and politicians are petrified of the political risks of seeming unsupportive of the military (the House Armed Services Committee passed the most recent defense budget by a vote of 61-0). According to Fallows, this potent combination of emotional distance and hero worship means we avoid “the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other American institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money.”

The problem isn’t just how much money we spend on national security, but what we spend it on. In a tightly bound circle of favors, the military asks for a tremendous amount of funding, congressional leaders eager to gain new defense contracts in their districts grant it, and the contractors whose livelihoods depend on selling massive amounts of new weaponry rake in millions. This is why so much is allocated toward developing updated models of existing technologies, despite the Pentagon's lack of adequate funding for veterans’ care, training and pensions.

[pampango]

1. It always angers me when people complain about foreign aid (2/10 of 1% of our GDP) while ignoring

the "enormous amounts" spent "on useless military hardware". It is possible to spend plenty on the American poor and the non-American poor if we trim back military spending by even a few per cent.

Scandinavian countries take very good care of their own people and spend 5 times as much (per capita) on foreign aid as the US does.

Americans believe that as much as 28 percent of U.S. budget goes to foreign aid, which would be something.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/07/the-budget-myth-that-just-wont-die-americans-still-think-28-percent-of-the-budget-goes-to-foreign-aid/

[marmar]

2. K/R

[newfie11]

3. That doesn't include the money the CIA is dumping

Into the Middle East and God knows elsewhere.

I can only wonder what this world would be like if we we not pedaling arms, drugs, and God know what else to third world countries.

[Scuba]

4. All that dough might not advance our strategic interests or make us more secure ...

... but it does make some very rich fuckers richer, which is the whole point.

[xchrom]

5. +1

[daleanime]

7. Hell yes.....

[reddread]

8. in wealth transfer, occasional forays into sovereign countries just because we can

and always some bedlam, somewhere.

[elias49]

6. Hey! It costs money if world domination is the goal

and that's exactly the plan. US military in how many countries aross the globe? Hundreds? It's not for nothing that our presence is everywhere. The US is not about 'people', it's about power.

[great white snark]

16. We have large bases (1000+ personnel) in 13 countries.

Not sure why but your "world domination" comment almost sounds a little cartoonish to me..

[elias49]

18. Well, a quick Wiki search says this:

"US troops are spread across the globe: approximately 66,000 are stationed in Europe; approximately 80,000 in East Asia and the Pacific region; nearly 4,900 in North Africa, the Near East, and South Asia; over 1,600 in the Western Hemisphere;"

And I'll never forget what my Spanish instructor told us ten years ago when I took a night course at a nearby college. We were learning basic grammar about directions, place names and such. She drew a representation of a town on the blackboard...the library, the grocery store, little houses and things and one was marked "CIA". When asked about it, she shrugged and said something to the effect that 'Oh there are CIA stations in every sizable city. Everybody knows where they are but what are you going to do?' She was from Colombia.

[mountain grammy]

17. That certainly appears to be the case.

[JonLP24]

9. Forget the military

the real money is going to private defense contractors.

Forget mercenaries, the real problem is they employ slave labor to do most of the work.

After 12 years of war, labor abuses rampant on US bases in Afghanistan



A year and a half after President Barack Obama issued an executive order outlawing human trafficking and forced labor on U.S. military bases, a five-month investigation by “Fault Lines” has found compelling evidence that these abuses remain pervasive at U.S. facilities in Afghanistan.

“Fault Lines” traveled to India, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan to trace the journey of a typical migrant worker seeking a job at a U.S. military base. We found Department of Defense subcontractors and their recruiters colluding to profit directly from exorbitant fees charged to job candidates, who are sometimes left with no choice but to work for six to 12 months to recoup those costs.

Over the past decade, the U.S. military has outsourced its overseas base-support responsibilities to private contractors, which have filled the lowest-paying jobs on military bases with third-country nationals, migrant workers who are neither U.S. citizens nor locals. As of January 2014, there were 37,182 third-country nationals working on bases in the U.S. Central Command region, which includes Afghanistan and Iraq — outnumbering both American and local contract workers.

hese laborers do the cooking, cleaning, laundry, construction and other support tasks necessary to operate military facilities. In Afghanistan they primarily come from India and Nepal and are employed by subcontractors for one of two large American companies, Fluor Corp. and Dyncorp International, which manage U.S. bases in Afghanistan under the Department of Defense’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. Dozens of subcontracting companies, mostly headquartered in the Persian Gulf, work on Fluor and Dyncorp contracts.

South Asian workers are at the bottom of the social hierarchy on U.S. bases. They earn far less than American or European contractors, work 12-hour days with little or no time off and, on some bases, aren’t allowed to use cellphones or speak to military personnel. On the base we visited, Camp Marmal, most were surprised and nervous when we approached them, concerned that talking to journalists could get them in trouble. One young man’s face contorted in terror when asked whether he had paid a recruiting fee. He shook his head no, fearful of any reprisals. “To come here, you have to use an agent,” another worker told us. “There is no other way. So we pay money to come.”

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/7/after-12-years-ofwarlaborabusesrampantonusbasesinafghanistan.html

Although military privatization in Iraq and Afghanistan has received extensive coverage, the stereotype of the wartime contractor as a gun-toting white American working for Blackwater is in some ways misleading: The overwhelming majority of the military’s contractor work force in the Middle East consists of local workers or “Third Country Nationals” (TCNs) from India, Uganda and dozens of other countries. Hundreds of thousands of TCNs perform much of the manual labor on US bases in war zones, from food service to armed guard duty. They are recruited through the same networks that have pulled workers from across the Indian Ocean region and elsewhere to the Gulf in recent decades. As with migrant labor in the Gulf more generally, stories of exploitation and abuse are common. And reform efforts, as “America’s War Workers” shows, have borne little fruit.

Despite Al Jazeera’s frustrating decision to block its videos from being viewed online in the United States (the video will go online for non-US viewers on March 12), you can read an excellent account by Kamat and her colleague Samuel Black detailing their findings. They interviewed workers on a NATO base in Afghanistan, in worker transit camps in Dubai and in villages in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Posing as subcontractors of US corporations, the journalists caught a labor recruiter on tape offering them bribes to hire his workers -- bribes paid for out of the thousands of dollars each worker must pay as a “recruitment fee” for the job opportunity.

Migrant workers on US bases frequently report taking on enormous debts to cover recruitment fees, which then require months (if not years) to pay off. The Obama administration has outlawed the use of recruitment fees, while Congress is okay with them as along as they are not “unreasonable.” The workers interviewed by Al Jazeera explained the limits of such reforms:

“We’ve already paid the agents for the job,” explained a man named Kumaran, who said his agent -- after collecting a hefty fee -- made him sign a declaration stating he had not paid anything. “If we tell the US military that we paid a fee, they’ll just send us back and we’ll lose everything.”
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/7/after-12-years-ofwarlaborabusesrampantonusbasesinafghanistan.html

[newfie11]

10. +1!!!!!!!! Nt

[JonLP24]

12. Thanks

I've mentioned this for years but I find it remarkable how little people are interested or care but when Qatar using the very same labor system for the World Cup the defense contractors use was heavily reported by the western media people were outraged. The probably didn't know the US does the same thing.

[Scuba]

13. Thank you for posting this JonLP24.

[vanlassie]

11. This is why we can't have nice things.

[Scuba]

14. If we can't afford to educate our children, to heal our sick or care for our elderly ...

... just what is it the defense budget is defending?

[SamKnause]

15. The RICH and POWERFUL.

[xchrom]

21. + a bazillion xs. nt

[Adrahil]

23. I agree... But...

Let's be careful to not just include social welfare in our nations needs. We also need to fund science (NASA, NIH, ETC) and the arts. We cannot be content to merely "care in place." We must strive to better our world.

I work for the DoD as an R&D engineer. But I'll tell you what, I'd much rather be working on getting humans to Mars, or something equally as awesome.

[MsLeopard]

19. We give them so much they can't even keep up with it all

$9 billion vanished in Iraq and it was shrugged off; the Pentagon couldn't account for $3 triillion in the last audit and we don't even talk about it. It's all part of the funneling of money from the taxpayer to .01%. We are truly screwed.

[The Wizard]

20. It can be argued that

squandering the nation's resources on military hardware knowingly headed for the scrap heap is a threat to national security and also lowers living standards except for the wealthy elites who profit from selling junk to the military. Many huge contracts are offered to contractors in states and congressional districts because a Congressman or Senator has to pay back a "campaign contribution" or worse, a bribe sent to an off shore money laundry.
It will be corruption and greed rooted in squandered resources that takes down the United States. The ism of the day is just an excuse to squander resources and drain the Treasury of tax dollars.
This needs to be discussed and thrown in the media's face on a regular basis.

[phantom power]

22. the military industrial complex is the only 3rd rail in modern politics