by Ivan
Eland
The recent
North Korean missile tests raise questions about contradictions in
President Donald Trump’s national security policies. During his
campaign Trump implied that the United States should fight fewer wars
overseas and demanded that US dependents, Japan and South Korea, do
more for their own defense, perhaps even getting nuclear weapons. Yet
a recent article written by David Sanger, a national security
reporter for the New York Times, noted that Trump had tweeted that
North Korean acquisition of a long-range missile "won’t
happen" and that his administration was considering preemptive
military strikes on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs or
reintroducing US tactical (short-range) nuclear missiles into South
Korea, which were removed twenty-five years ago. So which is it –
demanding US allies do more or ramping up America’s efforts to make
them even more reliant on American power? And this is not the only
Trump policy contradiction.
If Trump is
demanding that wealthy allies – both East Asian and European –
put out more of an effort for their own security and if Trump wants
to fight fewer wars overseas, then why does the defense budget need
to be increased by a whopping 10 percent? That proposed increase is
roughly equivalent to the entire Russian annual defense budget. In
fact, couldn’t U.S. defense spending be cut to help ameliorate the
already humongous $20-trillion-dollar national debt?
Moreover,
the Department of Defense is the worst run agency in the federal
government, as demonstrated by its being the only department to
repeatedly fail to pass an audit – thus not being able to pinpoint
where many trillions of dollars over many years have been spent. In
2001, the departments comptroller admitted to me that the
department’s broken accounting system would not be able to pass
such an audit for a long time to come. Sixteen years later it still
can’t.
How does the
American taxpayer know that the already almost $600 billion defense
budget each year is spent wisely or even not stolen outright? Despite
this niggling elephant in the room, the Congress regularly gives the
department, and the military services with in it, almost a free pass,
because of "patriotism," political pressure from defense
industries, and the aura of secrecy surrounding this bureaucracy. Yet
the nation’s founders were almost universally suspicious of large
standing militaries – in the late 1770s, European monarchs used
them for external conquest and plunder and internal repression of
their own. Similarly, militarism covered by the veneer of
"patriotism" is as inauthentic and vile as it is prevalent
in twenty-first century America. Also, much of the shroud of secrecy
surrounding the military is overdone; many employees of the security
bureaucracies admit that much information is overclassified. That
includes threat information, which the department has a conflict of
interest in hyping, because it justifies more spending on research,
weapons, operations, maintenance, and all other things military.
Trump is
also hyping terrorist threats to justify stanching foreign travel and
immigration to the United States, as well as indirectly his higher
defense budgets. Yet leaked documents from his own Department of
Homeland Security say that discrimination by national background is a
poor way of identifying potential terrorists and that most people who
have committed recent terrorist acts in the United States were
radicalized long after coming here. Despite all the media hype,
terrorism is still a rare phenomenon, and North America has always
had fewer foreign terrorists than most other places, because it is a
long way away from the world’s centers of conflict – for example,
the Middle East. So much for the value of "extreme vetting"
of arriving individuals from selected Muslim countries and increasing
defense spending to combat terrorism.
Pressure by
the military-industrial-complex (MIC) is another major driver of
excessive defense spending. MIC lobbying has led to monumental
wasting of taxpayer dollars over the years. For example, according to
David Sanger, efforts to develop and field a limited national missile
defense system to protect against the likes of relatively primitive
North Korean missiles has cost taxpayers about $300 billion since the
days of Eisenhower but has given them a system that, even under
perfect conditions, can only hit an incoming missile 44 percent of
the time. And most analysts say real world conditions will rarely be
perfect. This effort should have been abandoned long ago, but the MIC
uses "the legacy of Ronald Reagan" to win conservative
support in seeming perpetuity, no matter the poor results of the
program.
There are
countless other weapons programs in the Department of Defense that
are underperforming, vastly exceeding original cost estimates, and
way behind schedule. Thus, taxpayers and their members of Congress
need to cast a jaundiced eye on Trump’s desired military spending
increase.
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