“The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. … In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. … Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
— President Dwight Eisenhower, 1961, in his farewell address
My 20-year anniversary of leaving the U.S. Army came and went this July. My time as an enlisted soldier seems like a lifetime ago. I served during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 but didn’t see combat. I was assigned to guard a military hospital in Germany against terrorist threats, serving 12-hour shifts walking the perimeter of the hospital in Nuremberg in sub-zero temperatures.
I didn’t have much of an opinion about the first Gulf War, in terms of its justness or whether President George Bush the elder had followed appropriate diplomatic and legal steps in the run up to the brief war. My main concern at the time was whether I was going to be sent to the gulf to fight. I was told in basic training that as soon as we all finished our training we were “going straight to Saudi” to fight Saddam Hussein. Some of my platoon mates literally cried upon hearing this.
Fighting and killing, or potentially being killed, were not among my motivations for joining the Army. I joined after the end of the Cold War and it seemed to my young and naïve mind that the chances of us going to war after that major shift in world power were very slim. Lo and behold, while I was in basic training, Saddam invaded Kuwait and the gears of yet another U.S. war started churning.
When President George W. Bush the younger first started talking publicly about striking Iraq in 2002, my heart sank. Not again. That war really awakened my political consciousness, and I learned a ton about foreign affairs and U.S. politics in my many extended debates with friends and my copious reading at the time. I even marched down State Street in Santa Barbara against the war, to the bemusement of my peers at the law firm where I worked at the time.
Looking back, I think the first Gulf War in 1991 had decent justification, and the United Nations even approved it with a Security Council resolution, which means a lot to me now. At the time I barely knew what the United Nations was.
The second Gulf War, in 2003, did not obtain the U.N. imprimatur, despite the younger Bush’s efforts to gain this seal of approval from the international body. But he and his war team nevertheless stayed the course and entered into a massive war in Iraq that cost us thousands of U.S. soldiers’ deaths, many more thousands of soldiers injured, maimed and psychologically scarred, trillions of taxpayer dollars, and a million or more Iraqi deaths. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. And the alleged ties to the 9/11 attacks were thoroughly debunked. Iraq is far from being a democracy today. These were the primary justifications for the 2003 Iraq War, and none of them turned out to be true.
The 2003 Iraq War also led to the creation of ISIS, the new threat that President Barack Obama is citing as the casus belli for a third Iraq war in as many decades. ISIS was not only created by the power vacuum we left with our overthrow of Saddam, it was also more directly empowered through ISIS’ acquisition of U.S.-supplied weapons from fleeing Iraqi troops over the summer. The United States supplies the large majority of arms in the region and to the world (we comprise fully 75 percent of the global arms trade), selling to just about anyone who wants weapons. The Middle East is inflamed in large part because we have supplied the fuel.
It doesn’t matter to me that Obama is calling — for now — for only an airstrike campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. He has already stated that this effort will likely last years, and he has already sent more than 1,000 U.S. military “advisers” who don’t have an official combat role. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the nation’s highest-ranking general as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just told Congress that he may recommend combat boots on the ground if the current course of action doesn’t work. Dempsey also warned Congress that this is a “generational” fight, meaning that it will likely last decades.
Of course, we’ve seen this movie before and it often escalates into full-scale war before too long. But why? Why wouldn’t regional powers, like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, etc., take action against ISIS if ISIS is a major threat to the region? Why are we always at war?
This column examines why the United States fights so many wars. My next piece will look at the role of propaganda in convincing the American public to support these wars.
Eisenhower warned of the power of the military-industrial complex in 1961, and brought this major threat to democracy to the attention of the American public. Since his warning (quoted at the beginning of this piece), the power of what I’ll call the “war party,” which is generally quite bipartisan, has arguably continued to grow.
U.S. military spending peaked, as a share of GDP, during World War II, and we haven’t come close to that high since. We did see, however, a doubling of the military budget under the second Bush, in both dollar terms and percentage of gross-domestic product. Under Obama it has fallen as a percentage of GDP but has risen in dollar terms every year he’s been in office, except for remaining level in 2013 and finally dropping in 2014, due primarily to the sequester deal reached last year in Congress.
You may think that Obama has slashed the military budget, since this is the rhetoric we often hear despite the facts, but in most years of his two terms the budget has actually risen, as is the clear long-term trend.
We should keep in mind, too, that the figures in the previous chart don’t include the full U.S. military budget because it leaves out Veterans Affairs spending and the share of the national debt interest payments attributable to defense spending. Adding these obvious additional defense spending items in and our military budget already exceeds $1 trillion.
The United States spends about 40 percent of the global military budget, down from about 50 percent not too long ago. Our next closest rival is China, spending only about one-fourth of what we spend on the military.
The U.S. military spans the globe. According to the Defense Department’s Base Structure Report, we have 4,400 domestic bases and almost 600 bases (down from 6,000 and 700, respectively, a decade ago) in dozens of countries around the world. These are conservative numbers since many smaller bases (those below 10 acres) aren’t counted in this report because they don’t meet the threshold for reporting.
Why does the United States need such a broad military reach? Well, we don’t. And, in fact, this type of global military empire is directly antithetical to the long tradition that held sway from our nation’s founding until the end of World War II. The long tradition was to avoid standing armies explicitly because of the corrupting influence of such standing armies. George Washington said it well in his farewell address to the nation in 1796 and his admonition held true as policy for more than a century: “We should avoid those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”
What happened during World War II? It’s a complicated history that I can’t recount in a single column, but here’s the very short version: the United States found itself as the world’s largest economy in the first few decades of the 20th century, enjoying the benefits of the ingenuity of its people, a capitalist economy, and abundant natural resources. As we became embroiled in the second world war, U.S. leaders seized the chance, as the expected victor in World War II, to create a Pax Americana to replace the Pax Brittanica that had faded since World War I.
The Pax Brittanica had held sway for more than a century, starting from around the mid-19th century. The British empire did very well economically while it also maintained a semblance of order at the barrel of a gun and, later in its imperial run, through economic policies designed to achieve its ends without overt violence.
In the world of international relations theory this concept is known as “hegemonic stability theory” and rests on the notion that world order can best be maintained with a single strong power (hegemon) at the center of the international system. So even though bodies like the United Nations might be created and maintained by the hegemon as multilateral institutions (the United States was the prime force behind the United Nations’ creation), real power still rests with the hegemon. This has indeed been the pattern since the end of the Cold War, in particular, since the only real rival to U.S. global leadership disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
My naïve 19-year-old self thought that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to a new era of global peace. What has actually happened is a new willingness to project U.S. military power all around the world because of the disappearance of the deterrent power of the Soviet Union’s unpredictable responses to U.S. actions.
But let me back up a little. The United States found itself in a position of overwhelming global power and influence in the wake of WWII, producing literally half of the global GDP and an unparalleled military capability. Over time, as Europe and Asia recovered from WWII, the U.S. share of GDP fell to “only” 25 percent by the 1970s and is today only about 22 percent. We are still by far the world’s largest economy, but China is nipping at our heels and is expected to become the largest economy within a decade or so (see David Shambaugh’s book China: A Partial Power, for an extended argument that even when China supersedes the United States in terms of the size of its economy China will remain a partial power for decades because it doesn’t have any of the other required elements to become a global power and won’t for many years).
Tracking the rise of U.S. militarism is a bit like detective work. There is no definitive history and debate is possible over almost every facet of this history. That said, there are a number of documents that offer good explanations of U.S. leaders’ intentions during the WWII years until the present.
President Harry Truman approved the NSC-68 planning paper in 1950. This document set forth the U.S. strategy of containing the Soviet Union through a long-term policy of U.S. permanent rearmament. It is widely regarded today as one of the key turning points toward a permanent large standing military. According to David C. Unger, author of The Emergency State, NSC-68 became the “(un)constitutional charter of the emerging security state.”
Another well-known paper from that era is George Kennan’s Policy Paper 23, which set forth his vision, as director of the policy planning staff, of how the United States should project power in the wake of WWII. A key quote gives a flavor of the explicitly amoral and “realist” approach to foreign policy that Kennan subscribed to and that arguably guided U.S. foreign policy for decades thereafter:
“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
Even if this memo wasn’t implemented literally, it is indicative of the mindset of key and influential policy planners at the highest levels of U.S. government.
A well-known planning document from the Council on Foreign Relations (Memorandum E-B19), whose authors shifted from this well-known think tank to become the key staff of the State Department after World War II, stated that the United States “must accept world responsibility. … The measure of our victory will be the measure of our domination after the victory.”
The same document states: “The foremost requirement of the United States in a world in which it proposes to hold unquestioned power is the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete re-armament.” This was the era that broke from the long tradition of military conservatism defined by Washington’s words from 1796. It was the beginning of the permanent military-industrial complex, which became so strong by the early 1960s that Eisenhower felt compelled to issue his own strident warnings in his farewell address to the nation that I quoted at the beginning of this column.
The first rule of journalism — the art of figuring out why things happen in the real world — is to “follow the money.” If we follow the money in examining the origins of U.S. militarism in the 20th century we quickly find an obvious answer: military budgets became bloated during and after WWII, creating a very strong ecosystem of companies and careers that depended on that pie growing over time, or at least not shrinking too much.
Our military spending was historically spent on our armed forces. In recent years, however, this has shifted significantly toward private contractors. The nearby chart shows the remarkable rise of defense contractor spending since the turn of the century, which now accounts for more than half of the total core military budget.
Creating this ecosystem of defense contractors also creates a powerful and perpetual lobbying army in Washington, D.C., that works every day to continue and expand the size of its trough. These interests are often antithetical to the interest of the American people as a whole.
It seems, then, that we may explain much of the rise of U.S. militarism by looking only to the increased military budget. It’s not that simple, of course, because there is no necessary linkage between higher budgets and a higher tendency toward using U.S. military power. But as Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, stated: “What’s the point of having this superb military … if we can’t use it?” It is almost inevitable that spending $1 trillion a year on our military would lead to a default position of using the tools we know: military force. For those who have the biggest and most numerous hammers, everything does indeed look like a nail.
So what’s the solution? How do we change the mindset of U.S. leaders, to induce them to stop seeing the world’s problems as nothing but nails to be hammered by U.S. military power? It seems to me that the only real solution to this long-standing and growing problem is to elect a president and congressional leaders whose primary mission is to reduce the influence of the military-industrial complex. Rand Paul anyone?
Recommended Reading
»Andrew Bacevich’s The New American Militarism
» Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire
» Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
» David C. Unger’s The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute National Security at All Costs.
— Tam Hunt is a lawyer based in Santa Barbara. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.