How the American Military Machine Endangers the Whole World

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http://www.alternet.org/world/156180/how_the_american_military_machine_endangers_the_whole_world_/

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Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began. Certainly, a smaller percentage of us -- less than 1% -- serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans.
And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate. The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s might.

In the post-9/11 era, the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the rubric of “privatization” and now goes to war with the Pentagon. With its $80 billion-plus budget, the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded. There are so many competing agencies and outfits, surrounded by a universe of private intelligence contractors, all enswathed in a penumbra of secrecy, and they have grown so large, mainly under the Pentagon’s aegis, that you could say intelligence is now a ruling way of life in Washington -- and it, too, is being thoroughly militarized. Even the once-civilian CIA has undergone a process of para-militarization and now runs its own “covert” drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere. Its director, a widely hailed retired four-star general, was previously the U.S. war commander in Iraq and then Afghanistan, just as the National Intelligence Director who oversees the whole intelligence labyrinth is a retired Air Force lieutenant general.

In a sense, even the military has been “militarized.” In these last years, a secret army of special operations forces, 60,000 or more strong and still expanding, has grown like an incubus inside the regular armed forces. As the CIA’s drones have become the president’s private air force, so the special ops troops are his private army, and are now given free rein to go about the business of war in their own cocoon of secrecy in areas far removed from what are normally considered America’s war zones.

Diplomacy, too, has been militarized. Diplomats work ever more closely with the military, while the State Department is transforming itself into an unofficial arm of the Pentagon -- as the secretary of state is happy to admit -- as well as of the weapons industry.

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1. The Military Industrial Complex Is Hurting America More Than Ever

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-misguided-focus-of-the-us-military-industrial-complex-2012-7

***SNIP

What we are interested in is how the world works. And we notice that the world of military spending works just like the rest of the world. That is, it obeys the law of declining marginal utility. You can put more in…but you don’t necessarily get more out.
But first, our dear reader above missed the point. First, we’re not criticizing the military. We’re not criticizing the uniform, that is; we’re criticizing the man in it. He will always do what comes naturally — when he can get away with it; he will aggrandize his own position at others’ expense. He is a lazy, foul, half-witted, opportunist…always trying to do the least work for the most reward possible. That is to say, he is just like the rest of us.

Second, when the next real shooting war breaks out, we’re not likely to thank the Pentagon; we’re more likely to curse it. We’ll be sorry we spent so much money to produce such a fat, coddled and incompetent military industry.

Why incompetent?

Strategically, the proper job of a defense department is to defend the country…not to waste its resources stirring up trouble all over the world. It is meant to protect the nation against enemies, not create them.
It is also incompetent in a tactical sense. So much money, time and effort is spent fighting make-believe enemies — ‘terrorists’ or ‘insurgents’ — that it will most likely lack the equipment and the know-how to fight a real one. We don’t have to know in detail how the US military will fail. Instead, we know that power and money corrupt…and enfeeble. You see, military power — like almost everything else you can mention in a family publication — is subject to the law of declining marginal utility…aka the law of diminishing returns. At some point, you can spend more…and get less. And when the real test comes, we predict, the US military will fail…it will be too corpulent, too slow, and too out-of-date to meet the challenge.


Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/dailyreckoning/~3/vmF4i8q-3YU/#ixzz1zqKglqn2

[malaise]

2. K & R n/t

[RadiationTherapy]

3. ...and 374,000 barrels of oil daily.

[Overseas]

4. K&R. Privatization has made our military so much more expensive. And less accountable.

It is so painful, as a citizen, to hear our legislators talk about cutting vital assistance to the poor and middle class, instead of cutting the military budget that is full of waste. Even after lots of military contractor misconduct has been exposed.

http://www.contractormisconduct.org/

[stockholmer]

5. welcome to Rome, circa 400 A.D.

The wages of empire are always its death, in the long run.

[HIlton Brackett]

6. Cutting Defence Spending must be part of any platform I support

The Military Budget must be cut in half. Closing half of the Bases around the world is paramount. We must stop giving the soldiers, that do all the dirty work, Food Stamps. Double their wage. Fighting not in the name of Freedom, but a Crusade of Global Conquest deserves more that a fruit pickers wage.

[deaniac21]

8. Cutting defense spending would help too!

[raouldukelives]

7. Perpetual war is great for guaranteed profits.

Just have to make sure you keep a good stock of manufactured enemies on hand then donate your outdated manufactured weaponry to them. Ensuring continued unabashed trough sloshing for the corporations and their assorted parasitic backers gleefully licking up all the overflow.
Bill Hicks made a remark once how we are like the worlds Jack Palance character from the movie Shane. Insulting sheepherders and then tossing a gun at them. Goading them into picking it up so we can shoot them down and claim self-defense. Always seemed apropos.

[L0oniX]

9. K & R