17th Jul 2022

Biden's Military Budget 2023

By Andre Damon

On Monday, the White House announced the largest US military budget in American history, focused overwhelmingly on preparations to fight a war with Russia and China.

The budget proposes spending $813 billion on the US military, up from $782 billion in 2022. When the costs of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the cost of debt from previous defense spending is added in, the figure rises to over $1 trillion. And that is not to mention the hundreds of billions spent on federal, state, and local police forces and the United States’ intelligence apparatus.

READ MORE: On U.S. Foreign Policy, the New Boss Acts a Lot Like the Old One (The New York Times)

The US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. Writing in Newsweek, Lindsay Koshgarian of the Institute for Policy Studies noted, “The U.S. alone already spends 12 times more on its military than Russia. When combined with Europe’s biggest military spenders, the U.S. and its allies on the continent outspend Russia by at least 15 to 1.”

Announcing the budget proposal, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, “We are requesting … more than $40.8 billion for sea power, to include nine more battle force ships, and nearly $12.6 billion to modernize Army and Marine Corps fighting vehicles. We are requesting more than $130.1 billion for research and development in this budget—an all-time high.”

The budget proposes to upgrade and modernize every single aspect of the US nuclear arsenal, from nuclear submarines to bombers and missiles. It includes $35.4 billion to “develop, procure, and modernize” the United States’ nuclear weapons, including:

  • $6.3 billion for the Columbia-class Ballistic Missile Submarine;
  • $5 billion for the B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber;
  • $3.6 billion for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, a new class of intercontinental ballistic missiles; and
  • $1 billion for the Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) Missile, a new generation of nuclear cruise missiles.

In addition, the budget allocates $56.5 billion for “Lethal Air Forces,” including the purchase of 61 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters at the price of $11 billion. It allocates another $25 billion for missile defense, $7.2 billion for “long-range fires,” including hypersonic missiles, and $27 billion for the “Space Force” created under former President Trump.

The 2017 defense budget, the last budget prepared by the Obama administration, amounted to $583 billion. In every year of his presidency, Donald Trump increased the military budget, despite presiding over a drawdown of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2018, under the supervision of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the US declared in its national security strategy that “Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of US national security.”

The document codified what had in fact for years been the dominant concept in Pentagon planning: that the US military should focus on preparations to fight a war with Russia and China. To this end, the Obama administration had already initiated a more than one trillion-dollar expansion of the US nuclear arsenal, a plan continued and intensified under Trump and now Biden.

Even Biden’s proposal is only the starting point. The actual budget as passed by Congress will likely be even larger than that proposed by Biden and the Pentagon.

On Wednesday, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe said that the budget does “not request the real growth we need,” calling on Congress to “do our due diligence and our constitutional duty” and provide even more funding.

This theme was echoed in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, which complained that “defense spending will still be about 3.1% of the economy” under Biden’s budget. The aim, according to the Journal, should be to increase military spending to at least 5 percent of the economy—that is, an increase of nearly two-thirds.

“NATO Needs More Guns and Less Butter,” Glenn Hubbard, the former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, demanding cuts in social programs. The phrase harkened back to the statement of Nazi leader Hermann Goering, who declared in 1936, as Germany was preparing for world war, “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.”

The corollary to massive military spending is cuts in everything else. The gargantuan military budget was announced as more than 1,000 Americans die every day from the COVID-19 pandemic. Key life-saving programs are being eliminated, due to the claim that there is no money to pay for them.

READ MORE: A Return to Permanent War Is Here: First It Will Bankrupt America, Then Destroy It By Chris Hedges

The United States, as the near-unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable COVID relief program. No respite from 8.3% inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the US GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d'être of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of "national security." The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts. NBC's "Meet the Press" aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the "Meet the Press" war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop "the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China's military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours."

Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler. There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level. The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Joe Biden has appointed these warmongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the State Department.

Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This military adventurism accelerates the decline, as the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and military clout of China.

These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality.

Its economic decline, with China's manufacturing 70% higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible. War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable," Thucydides noted in "The History of the Peloponnesian War."

There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam. The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which deindustrialized and impoverished the country.

The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic leadership to save their political careers.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the US is seeking to “weaken” Russia, and that the US is already in a “fight” with the country,

NATO is essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy. War means war.

The proxy war in Ukraine is emerging increasingly openly as a war between Russia and NATO, threatening to spill over into a war throughout the European continent. The United States has worked to systematically destroy any prospect of a peaceful settlement of the war and is instead doing everything to fan the flames to instigate the conflict.

The aims being pursued increasingly openly by the United States in this war inevitably involve the expansion of the conflict. There is nothing left of the fiction that the United States and NATO are not at war with Russia. In pursuit of regime change, the dismemberment of Russia and the plundering of its vast resources, American imperialism is risking nuclear war.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised in a Senate briefing the prospect that “Ukrainians should take actions that go beyond their borders”—clearly referring to attacks on Russian territory.

Truth is Treason in an Empire of Lies, because you can't tell the truth about what the government is doing.

From Wikipedia: Peace dividend

Peace dividend was a political slogan popularized by US President George H.W. Bush[1] and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the light of the 1988–1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, that described the economic benefit of a decrease in defense spending. The term was frequently used at the end of the Cold War, when many Western nations significantly cut military spending such as Britain's 1990 Options for Change defence review.

From Peace Dividend: 1992 … The Promise

For America itself, freed from the burden of military competition with the Soviet Union, it was suggested that the country and its citizens would be the beneficiaries of a “peace dividend”. All that money that had been going to making war machinery and keeping the military on high alert against the threat of annihilation, could now be directed to a renewal of the American Dream and making America truly the greatest nation in history.

Unfortunately, there were other powerful individuals who had a different idea.

But the empire builders — what we now refer to as the neoconservatives or ‘neocons’ — weren’t going to take a back seat. They had a plan. It wasn’t even a secret plan. It was published on the internet and in political journals as the Project for the New American Century, and in books such as The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski. America was declared the “exceptional” nation, chosen by destiny to lead the world into the new era of Pax Americana.

The strategy of the warmongers was simple. If you don’t have an enemy, create enemies. If you don’t have a war, start one or two or as many as you can handle at any given time. There are always some bad people out there. But the list of enemies even included former friends. We used to give Osama bin Laden millions in military aid. We funded Saddam Hussein, even provided him with chemical weapons so he could gas his own people. We had a black site deal with Syria and used to hire their security guys to torture people. We hated Gaddafi, then we were okay with Gaddafi, then we hated him again and had him killed. We loved Russia during the 90s when our capitalists were looting the country. Now we hate them. So we overthrew the legitimate government of Ukraine to drive a wedge between Russia and Europe. Putin is a new Hitler! The neocons do whatever it takes to panic the American public and fire up the war machine.

To get an insight into how ruthless and brazen the neocons became during the George W. years, just watch this video of General Wesley Clarke talking about the war plans circulating in the Pentagon, orders handed down from the White House.

Seven countries, Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, then finally Iran — this list should sound very familiar — all targeted for overthrow.

It was exactly what Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address as president:

“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.”

To get us to go along with their self-serving and sociopathic agendas, they lied to us, took hundreds of billions — trillions — of our tax dollars under completely false pretenses, then wasted our money buying military junk we don’t need to fight wars that never had to have happened.

The peace dividend was buried under mountains of debt and dead bodies.

From Forbes: What The End Of The ‘Peace Dividend’ Will Mean for Americans

In his State of the Union address, President Biden highlighted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and how the US and its NATO partners have coalesced to stop Russian aggression. However, he stopped short of indicating what a lengthy conflict would mean for Americans.

While investors currently are focused on the near-term impact of the invasion on the global economy and markets, the experience of the Cold War suggests it will also have significant long-term repercussions.

In December, he signed a $768 billion defense policy bill that represented a 5% increase in military spending. However, it was nearly $50 billion larger than his original request, as both Democrats and Republicans believed Biden’s proposal was insufficient to counter military advances by China and Russia. Now, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Republicans and some Democrats are likely to call for a larger allocation.

The bottom line is that a renewed cold war would have two adverse consequences for Americans. First, it would heighten the need to scale back social programs in order to fund increased military outlays. Second, it would make it more difficult to rein in inflation and would ultimately imply higher interest rates.

The U.S. government is extraditing Julian Assange in order to put him on trial for publicizing a video of U.S. troops committing war crimes in Iraq.

The US government has spent the last decade pursuing Assange while failing to pursue any of the war crimes by U.S. military personnel that Assange and WikiLeaks revealed in 2010.

Documents and videos about the Iraq and Afghan wars that WikiLeaks released in 2010, include footage of a U.S. helicopter killing [and laughing about] civilians in Baghdad.

If we allow the US to declare war on those who tell the truth, we have only ourselves to blame.

Do yourself a favor. Think for yourself. Be your own person. Question everything. Stand for principle. Champion individual liberty and self-ownership where you can. Develop a strong moral code. Be kind to others. Do no harm, unless that harm is warranted. Pretty obvious stuff...but people who hold these things in their hearts seem to be disappearing from the earth at an accelerated rate. Stay safe, my friends. Thanks for being here.

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