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BS ‘n’ About…
Demilitarization
Virtually every country on Earth has a structured, disciplined force with the manpower, skills equipment, and funding to implement the wide-ranging infrastructure projects necessary if we are to successfully navigate the 21st Century. Unfortunately, as things stand now, these guys spend their days plotting how to kill their fellow man rather than help him, drain the national treasury rather than add to it. The biggest obstacle we face to ‘Peace on Earth’ is the standing armies that are strangling the economies of virtually nation in the world, none more so than our own.
It didn’t used to be this way. As recently as the dawn of World War II, we had virtually no standing military. Throughout history, countries mobilized troops in times of crisis, then sent them back to the farms once peace was achieved. Peace was the goal, not a constant state manufactured war. Before the days of defense contractor slush funds, Blackwater, black ops budgets, and deficit spending, it was impossible for a nation to remain in a constant state of military high alert and still thrive. If the sorry state America is in today is any indication, it obviously still is.
War used to require the support of the people. It no longer does. We hire mercenaries because a draft would have us marching on Washington. We don’t have to worry about paying for it because we’ve sent the bill to our great grandkids.
Standing armies no longer win wars. America spends as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. Yet for all our aircraft carriers and stealth bombers, we are being fought to a stalemate by Muslim extremists using the latest in boxcutter, pipe bomb, and underwear explosives technology. When the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world can be held hostage by an ‘axis of evil’ barely out of the Stone Age, then we need to seriously rethink things before we impoverish ourselves to the point of no return.
What may have started as a good intentioned effort to become the world’s policeman in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union has turned into a defense contractor feeding frenzy at the trough of congressional pork barrel politics. In less than a decade we have gone from presidential candidates talking about what they were going to do with “all that surplus” to amassing debts our great grandkids will still be paying off. Along the way we’ve fought two major wars without managing to truly win either one.
For all the national wealth we’ve poured down the defense contractor sewer we are not truly safer than we were on 9/11. For all the Maginot Lines we’ve built, we still have no defense against being blown up on the way to the grocery store. Mosquitoes can’t be killed with bazookas. We need to quit listening to the bazooka salesmen.
Tanks, airplanes, and aircraft carriers haven’t truly won a conflict since World War II. All they do is breed terrorists and make the defense contractors stinking rich. In an Information Age world, the military is no longer an effective instrument for exerting our foreign policy will. Our defense budget has never been higher, yet our international reputation has never been lower. There is a correlation there.
In our long and storied history, we Americans have never had this kind of hatred directed at us. We show up in Afghanistan, locked and loaded, looking like Darth Vader. China sends in engineers. We blow up bad guys along with a kid or two here and there. They build roads and schools. We are hated. Why are we so surprised?
The economics dictate that we are eventually going to demilitarize, whether we want to or not. Rome couldn’t do it. The Soviet Union couldn’t do it. We won’t be able to do it either. We might as well do it with a plan, hopefully one that will bring the rest of the world along with us. It won’t be as difficult as it sounds, as long as we find the national will to do it. Here’s why:
Even though most countries of this world have been sold about as much military hardware as they can bear, very few of them produce any of it on their own. And most of those that do give at least lip service to being our allies. All are tied together economically. Stop shipping the bullets and the guns become clubs. Stop shipping the parts and armies become junkyards.
Virtually every dollar spent on the military is a dollar wasted. It is where money goes to die. However, a dollar spent on education, infrastructure, science, or healthcare is an invested dollar that multiplies itself many times over.
If America and its G20 allies make the commitment to ‘Just Say No!’ to the defense contractors, mankind will enter a Golden Age that will, in and of itself, resolve virtually every open dispute endangering the world today. Every nation on Earth will have more money than it knows what to do with.
Diplomacy is needed to resolve most of the world’s disputes these days anyway, not armies. A majority of these disputes have arisen as a result of the piss-poor attempts at nation building that arose out of the break-up of the British Empire. A little bit of international gerrymandering by the UN would go a long way towards decreasing tensions and the perceived need for militaries. Kurds should have their own state. Sunnis shouldn’t be ruled by Shiites. Shiites shouldn’t be ruled by Sunnis. The Palestinians need a home. This stuff ought to be obvious.
With America leading the way, the armies of our world need to be transformed into Peace Corps on steroids capable of bringing water to the desert, food to the hungry, healthcare to the sick, and light into the darkness. Let the young of every nation learn discipline working in service to their fellow man. Trade in our guns for plows, our tanks for tractors, and our bombers for crop dusters. As World War II showed, we can gear up to obliterate our fellow man virtually overnight if we have to.
Is this a hopelessly idealistic viewpoint at odds with the entire history of mankind? Yes. But when you consider most armed conflict has an economic basis, it seems less so. The amount of wealth we waste rattling sabers at each other is just staggering. If this money were instead subject to the various education, infrastructure, and science multipliers it would be a vast amount indeed. We could probably have won the war on terror on 9/12 by sending a hefty stimulus check to every Muslim in the world to just stay home. We could make every Palestinian in the world a millionaire with the wealth we’ve wasted on that problem over the past half-century.
It is sad to think that we wasted ‘The American Century’ and that our star is already on the wane. All the signs are there: The rape of the middle class, a greedy, self-serving political elite, an army we can’t afford, growing civil discontent. The seeds of our own destruction have already been planted. Unless we are to follow the other great empires of history into the dustbin, we must change. We must learn from our mistakes and from those who came before us. If we are not already past the point of no return, we sure as hell can see it from here.
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