#93 WAR & PEACE
FINAL PART OF A THREE PART SERIES
WAR AND MONEY BECOME PART OF THE GREATER MANIFEST DESTINY OF NATIONS
MONEY
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
T
ime moves forward with the soldiers, for sure, but the players never forget the history of civilizations having clashed and generally gotten involved in a lot of struggle, often quelling internal strife as much as maintaining the union to defend against foreign aggressors.
The battlefield of humanity has no room for forgiveness.
War also occurs to expand territory and to maintain trade routes for a more prosperous life during peacetime at a global cost of about $1 trillion dollars per year to America alone.
The morally just war has become so expensive in this century as to bring into doubt the morality of governance at home whether during the war that never ends or during domestic pursuits during peacetime.
The inner economy of the military spreads so much wealth among a power elite that officials find ignoring the plight of the poor easy, regardless of the richness of the plunders of empires.
Great wealth can disappear in the instant explosion of a missile attack, but poverty lingers and drips off the broken backs of the poor for an eternity. The poor see no end to the misery except if marshalled to the battlefield made by much better off people.
The Great Depression was brought to an end by an economy funded by the government. And nowhere was there more government funding than to fight the Japanese and the Italians and the Germans as the snare drum rattled the soldiers to arms from about 1937 until 1945.
The Military Industrial Complex obtains government financing through the peaceful democratic political system that can produce more money for war but not so much for peace. This close working relationship between the Pentagon (war) and the US Congress (democracy) and arms manufacturers (capitalism) has also been referred to as the Iron Triangle.
THE IRON TRIANGLE
Politicians earn electoral points by taking the moral high ground on a just war knowing full well the list of defense contractors likely lined up to benefit from the outcome.
This political points system not only begins with the good justification for government involvement in war and other military exercises, such as maintaining a permanent presence around the globe with hundreds of military bases.
America moves forward through history as a capitalist democracy.
Russia moves forward as a communist dictatorship.
China an autocracy.
Land became not so important to the world powers as spheres of influence became after World War II – once the new borders were set in indelible ink. Europe became resolved to join together as one economic political union within a fixed territory so as to avert another war on the continent between individual competitors. Paris had survived. Dresden would be rebuilt. The Holocaust is remembered. But the old ways of European empires was abandoned.
America and Russia fought toward a military stalemate in the rest of the world by influencing foreign governments politically and economically more than militarily. This phase of world power play became known as the Cold War requiring a massive stockpile of weapons, and a lot of espionage, a la James Bond.
And more and more proxy wars were fought over the expansion of either the capitalist democracies or the communist dictatorships.
Korea and Vietnam become ideological battlegrounds involving live munitions.
The horrors of the two world wars from last century justified an arms race with peaceful nations tooling up in the latest military technology as a defensive measure.
Nuclear weapons for example were used on Japan to end the war in the Pacific, but these bombs were crude renderings of the highly sophisticated technology used in multiple tipped nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles that arc into space before reaching a destination on Earth of today.
Everyone scrambled to create a missile shield, as a result, something Israelites rely on to be able to sleep a few hours at night. So now the technology being developed is for the supersonic missiles, no doubt, to become exponentially faster than the lazy speed of the patriots used for the Iron Dome air defense system.
Everything got a bit more complicated after the terrorist attacks on New York City on 9/11. The dark world of the Internet was still in an infancy, but accelerating quickly, allowing for staged coordination of independent terrorist cells.
But the targets of peaceful worlds adapted, and developed the cyber worm to mine information and locate terrorist threats before the plots to kill westerners could be played out.
This terrorist overwatch by big government intel machines running silent on-line came with a cost to the civil liberties of law abiding citizens.
BIG GOVERNMENT INTEL MACHINES
When analysist talk of the Military Industrial Complex, experts typically mean the manufacturers of guns, planes and nuclear weapons, perhaps a patriot missile or two and a nuclear powered submarine who have control in the backrooms of Washington DC.
But the reality is that the mining of meta data to find security threats has become a justifiable extension of military life during peacetime.
A biased logarithm could shape a person’s outlook just as much as a military parade might by.
War is officially not happening, but billions of tax dollars go to the development and manufacturing of munitions.
These military contractors also develop civilian applications, just as the public enjoys the cyber community during peacetime while the intel worm gathers the meta data about on-line usage.
Boeing manufactured and tested the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-29 Superfortress bombers for World War II in the same Seattle airfields that the luxury airliners have been developed. Military jet fighters are also manufactured by space technology companies.
The Saturn V Rocket technology that propelled Americans to the Moon originated from the first intercontinental ballistic missiles or V-2 used by the Germans on London during the Blitz.
Similarly to a super computer navigating the space rockets, a military fighter jet has thousands of components sometimes contracted from hundreds of designers and manufacturers. This trickledown effect from space and military tech creates thousands of high paying jobs.
Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Hewlett Packard sell technology driven machines for life during peacetime and also for the military industrial complex during war. Northrop Grumman (B-32 Stealth Bomber) comes in third among the top three defense contractors with $16.6 billion in contracts during 2006, the same year Mexico manufactured my German designed 2.5 liter 5 cylinder Volkswagen Jetta with an MSRP of about $33,000 CDN, if I were to get the mag wheels instead of the hubcaps, which I did.
Bill Hewlett and David Packard invented the garage start-up for Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California circa 1939. HP did more than $100 million in government contract work in 1968.
Lockheed Martin designed and builds the F-35 Lightning II military aircraft.
And does the pork ever flow with top military officers finding employment with established defense contractors and company executives finding positions in the Whitehouse. And then they go back again. The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighter jet costs $350 million per each of 183 planes ordered.
Economies all around the world slowly ground to a halt after the First Great War ended – following ten years of economic boom and luxury spending during the Roaring 20s. The Great Depression of the 1930s was complicated by massive, long lasting droughts that put farms out of operation.
Governments had no choice but to start spending cash to circulate wealth – a mode of economic operation not done before. People before were largely on their own in agrarian economies with little government assistance.
America and Germany embarked on massive public works programs, building transportation networks to last centuries beyond the day the government money would run out. Germany also created a massive army from the rag tag troops left over from Kaiser William to a 6 million soldier army equipped with aircraft, tanks and personnel transports, as well as the odd donkey and horse cart.
This time of massive armies fighting with machines resulted in a massive death toll while countries had to tool up to defend against German advances. Aircraft for example was continually improved upon during the war which eventually gave rise to the development in peacetime of the jet airliner.
War creates rapid change for peacetime. Consecutive world wars with millions of husbands and brothers sent off to battle meant that the housewife had to go to the factory to build the military equipment. And when the war was over, the massive casualty count among the male population meant that women could stay out of the home and in the workforce as factories were retooled from making artillery shells to making blenders and mixers and other household appliances.
No surprise that the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with a penultima reversal within the civil rights movement in America. The poor black boys going to war in Southeast Asia while the rich, educated white boys stayed in college was the ultimate insult in the race war brewing on the city streets.
The sense of outrage in the black inner cities grew organically as the unequal treatment in the city was underscored further when thousands of body bags began arriving from Vietnam with dead black men inside.
WAR, WASTE AND LOT OF HAND WASHING
Civil rights have been similarly underscored with the need for cyber security. People become self-aware of their rights when those rights are glaringly limited by the prospect of the war on terror during peacetime.
War during peacetime is a result of people having to live in a perpetual state of fear. The war may or may not be perpetual, but the fear of war definitely is.
When the war drum beats, the politicians take the moral high ground so as to obtain the misinformed consent of the voters and the taxpayers paying for the military budget. War proves over and over again that governments have plenty of money, and that the resources are just decidedly not allocated toward poverty central.
Money should be spent on keeping people fat and happy during peacetime rather than thin and miserable, and full of fear in wartime. With perpetual war, war during peacetime keeps people perpetually thin and fearful.
But life has to be this way because we must be Moses and Jesus climbing the mountain regardless of the peril to bring light and justice to the dark places around the world.
In 1969, as the Vietnam war became increasingly escalated, 22,000 defense contractors stood in line for non-competitive military contracts.
The military was not the only one spending. People discovered the high cost of taking a shit inside government buildings with toilets costing upwards of $22,000. War, waste and a lot of hand washing occurs.
Governments tend not to want to cede military authority to the United Nations Peacekeepers because from afar there are geopolitical considerations, and from within there are issues with what to do with all that cash flowing in every which way.
The permanent war economy keeps humming along on the inside during peacetime.
Concepts of freedom and the need to hold on to the moral imperative provides justification.
The power elite are good team players with the legislatures pitching a manifest destiny for the nation and the manufacturers gladly fulfilling orders for just such a purpose, but the Military Industrial Complex keeps people looking away from the corruption, the misdirection of tax dollars and misapplication of God’s word in the halls of Washington DC.
Military Industrial Complex, by Sidney Lens, Philadelphia, Pilgrim Press & The National Catholic Reporter, 1970.
The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, by Nick Turse, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2008.