Coop Scoop: Bi-Partisan Silence as Pentagon Set for $10 Trillion Decade (resend)

No "moderates" here concerned about cost.

December 2-3, 2021

By Marc Cooper

It was in June 1982, when an estimated one million people showed up in Central Park to demand a freeze on nuclear weapons.  The monster rally, bigger than anybody predicted, traced its origins to the late 1970’s and a growing social movement that opposed nuclear power and, of course, nuclear arms.  It was Randall Forsberg who fathered the Freeze writing in 1980 that there should be a “freeze on testing, production and further deployment of nuclear weapons.”  The Freeze was eventually adopted in eight state legislatures and in filed down form passed as resolutions in both the House and the Senate.

And yet, some 40 years later, with 19,000 nuclear warheads in the world, more than 5,000 in the U.S. and 6,000 in Russia, if you were to convoke another Nuclear Freeze rally anywhere in America I doubt if you could attract more than 100 lonely souls. Maybe.

The U.S. military budget continues to increase, with full Democratic support, any serious discussion of standing down nukes has evaporated and, worse, we are in the midst of trillion dollar plus long tern “modernization” program of our nuclear weapons, guaranteeing that your grandchildren and their grandchildren will most likely have to live in the shadow of the Doomsday Clock.

Let’s break some of this down and see how it affects us.  We are looking at two closely linked issues: overall military spending and on top of that, nuclear weapons.

The US is currently slated to spend more than $775 billion on the military over the next 12 months. Factoring in the current rate of budget increase and some of the fancy accounting that renders some Pentagon funding dark, we will spend a mind-bending TEN TRILLION DOLLARS or more on the military over the next decade, even though the Department of Defense flunked its last two audits.  

Just how much is this? Short answer: more than you can possibly imagine. The U.S. military budget is greater than the cumulative total of the next 15 countries’ military spending.  It’s more than three times the military budget of China, and THIRTY times that of Russia. To call it bloated, oversized or mammoth radically underestimates its scope.

Put simply, spending on the U.S. military is why we do not have affordable if not free medical care, why our social security benefits are anemic, why we do not have the transportation system, the educational system and so many other features of a highly developed industrial society.  We spend too much on empire and on a swaggering global image to sufficiently bolster the republic.

Putting this into sharper perspective, you can look upon the Pentagon budget as GUNS and domestic spending (including Biden’s $1.75T BBB package) as BUTTER and it becomes quite easy to conclude where this country’s rulers have put the priority.

The entire debate in the US Senate over the Build Back Better proposal, a debate still being prolonged by Joe Manchin who wants to “pause” passage of the bill has been bogus.  Totally bogus.  The U.S. can easily afford the whole bill, including in its original $3.5T form.  It would still tilt spending too much toward the military but not as egregiously.  I assure you that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and anybody else whining about the cost are bullshitting us.  They could not care less how much the cost is, their problem is not fiscal but rather purely political.

These conservative, indeed, reactionary Democratic senators are concerned only by what they deem the negative political optics of supporting increased safety net measures only because they do not want to be accused by their constituents that they are too soft on welfare and minorities.  If it was really cost they were worried about, they would be making some noise, at least saying something, about the 2022 Pentagon budget that they must approve before December 31. If Manchin thinks we need to trade parental leave in order to afford child tac credits, how about decommissioning half of our nuclear-armed subs and funding both social programs?

But nobody is saying anything about the pending Pentagon bonanza.  There is almost total bi-partisan silence on this pending bill that raises military spending more than 7% over Trump’s already elevated funding level.  Back in July, when putting this bill together, the Senate Armed Forces Committee, voted 25 to 1 to ADD another $25b to the military budget on top of what Biden had proposed.  Every Democrat on that committee voted to support the increase except Senator Elizabeth Warren.  Here’s that much vaunted bipartisanship at work in its most insidious ways.

"One has to wonder what is even the point of a Senate Democratic majority if they're going to not only continue Trump policies but work with Senate Republicans to undermine [Biden's] priorities," Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, wrote on Twitter at the time. "Utterly pathetic."  And with Joe Biden constantly beating the drum about China and the need for the U.S. to hold the line against Beijing, I don’t think most Democrats are much interested in a peace movement.

One supporter of the $25b increase said so much was being spent by the administration, that this was no more than a “rounding error.”  OK, then, imagine the possibilities here.  Imagine if  Democrats (forget Republicans) started to chew over the defense budget and began to weigh it against BBB and other options.  Imagine the boost to national security if the U.S. shaved that $25b or $50b off the military budget and instead funded an on-the-ground U.S.-led massive vaccination campaign in the Global South. Not to mention a similar effort here at home where Biden is still playing too much pattycake with the No-Vax-Know-Nothings.

Senator Warren and, certainly, Sen. Bernie Sanders are among the few Democrats expected to just vote NO on the upcoming military budget. Said Sanders last month:

"Somehow when it comes to the defense budget and the needs of the military-industrial complex, we just cannot give them enough money."

"Day after day, here on the floor of the Senate and back in their states, many of my colleagues talk to the American people about how deeply concerned they are about the deficit and the national debt," the Vermont senator said Wednesday. "They tell us that we just don't have enough money to expand Medicare... We just don't have enough money to do what every other major country on Earth does, and that is guarantee paid family and medical leave."“

"At a time when the scientists are telling us that we face an existential threat in terms of climate change, we are told that just don't have enough money to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel and create a planet that will be healthy and habitable for our kids and future generations. Just don't have enough money," he continued. "Yet today, the U.S. Senate will begin consideration of an annual defense budget that costs $778 billion—$778 billion for one year.

These are compelling reasons why a peace movement, a movement that seriously tackles U.S. military spending is about a whole lot more than a satisfying moral position.  Most of the political debate we have in this country is about money and where it should get spent – except for the Pentagon which continues as the number one drain on social progress and future development. And as we saw in Vietnam, the anti-nuke social movement had real and positive consequences. As my now departed former Nation colleague Jonathan Schell wrote in 2007:

The reasons for the decline of the antinuclear movement are full of paradox and, in the last analysis, possibly unknowable. In part, it became a victim of its own success. Few riddles are harder to untangle than the relationship of the success of the freeze movement and the simultaneous success of its antagonist, President Reagan. It is a matter of record that the movement powerfully undercut public support for Reagan’s nuclear buildup. According to a CBS/New York Times poll, between 1981 and 1985 support for increases in military spending dropped from 61 percent to 16 percent. It is a matter of record, too, that in response Reagan returned to nuclear arms negotiations with the Soviet Union.

But even more important, in March 1983, in part for the same reason, he startled observers, including most of the top officials of his own Administration, by proposing his Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars, to defend the United States from nuclear attack. When that was accomplished, he added in a second bombshell, the two superpowers, finding their nuclear weapons now “impotent and obsolete,” could do away with them. The motivation for co-opting the freeze is well documented, yet so is the sincerity of Reagan’s fervent desire not just to freeze but actually to abolish nuclear weapons. That sincerity was put on spectacular display at the summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, between Reagan and Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, also a nuclear abolitionist. As memorandums of the summit show, the two leaders came within a hair’s breadth of agreeing to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Thus, in a sense the spirit of June 12 reached a high point and expired at Reykjavik.

The aftermath has been dispiriting. Arms control resumed and had some successes, but no fresh or bold initiative to deal with the nuclear danger has been launched. No heir to either the freeze movement or Reagan has arisen. The end of the cold war, seemingly the greatest opportunity to lift nuclear danger since 1946, was wasted. Instead, the whole issue fell into a shocking state of neglect, as if people believed that a mortal illness could be dealt with by forgetting about it.

Not much has changed in the 14 years since Schell wrote those words.  The anti-war activities in the early phases of the Afghan War and later in the War in Iraq were blown to the wind, leaving no real infrastructure behind (mostly because liberals ceded the leadership of those two movements to a narrow, sectarian crew who failed at any real outreach).

Even more alarming, we are now in the midst of a “nuclear modernization” program that is costing as much as $1.2T and that is getting even less ink, less debate, and no resistance from almost anyone. As a paper earlier this year from the Center for Strategic & International Studies summed it up:

“Currently, there are ongoing efforts in the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to modernize nearly every aspect of the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the next two decades. This includes all three legs of the nuclear triad and their associated delivery systems, an overhaul of the nuclear command and control architecture, the replacement of the air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) with the long-range stand-off weapon (LRSO), and a range of warhead modernization and refurbishment efforts. Additionally, NNSA plans to produce at least two new warheads for the stockpile: the W93 and the Future Strategic Missile Warhead.”

Allow me to translate that into plain English:  The U.S. will still be in the business of developing and manufacturing nuclear weapons for at least the next two decades.

Lost in all the Strangelovian discourse since 1945 is that there is absolutely no logical way to justify stockpiling 5,000 nuclear warheads and fully deploying some 1800 of them.  Nothing has changed since the 1960’s when we could say, with total honesty, that any serious nuclear exchange would doom civilization as we know it and that could be accomplished with no more than a handful or two of nuclear strikes. Somehow that simple formula has been sent down the memory hole, to the degree that anybody thinks about nukes anymore.

There is some weak resistance to the nuclear modernization program in the form of the SANE Act being pushed by Senator Ed Markey (D-MA).  This bill would modestly slow and scale down the modernization program, perhaps cutting 10-20% of its cost but it has about as much chance as being passed by the Democrats as does any of the other reform items bottled up by conservatives.

We are headed for some very rough weather as the Biden administration remains stymied and confused.  There is no certainty that the BBB bill will pass in any form given the latest rumblings of Joe Manchin. But as the media once again begins to focus on the faux debate over funding this package, keep in mind that at the same time the Senate is going to push through the 2022 Pentagon spending bill that will keep us on the domestic austerity track that has become routine.  It might be worth a phone call to your local congress person and Senator to tell them how you’d rather spend money on butter and not guns. 

You might also think about how we get out people interested again in taking down nukes, calming the international waters, and re-adjusting our national spending priorities.  Let me know when you get that part figured out. +

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