According to analysts, if the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media and Think Tank Complex gets its way, the total defense budget will reach $1 trillion by 2027. That’s not hard to imagine given that the budget request for 2025, which all includes our nuclear weapons programs and other defense related activities not under the DoD appropriations, is close to $900 billion already.
Considering that we gave Ukraine some $175 billion over the last two and a half years, it’s not a stretch to think we may get to that trillion mark even sooner.
So what are we spending it on? Aside from the pay and pensions and healthcare for active duty, retirees, and veterans, big ticket items that may or may not be efficient or even strategic are on the menu, year after year. The Navy’s Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine and Constellation-class frigate, the Air Force’s B-21 Raider, the Navy’s F-35, and the Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), are just a few of the big programs sucking away at your tax dollars today. There are big promises here, but the jury is out whether these programs, once complete, will rise to the hype or even meet the current moment.
Then there is the strategy and policy. In its newly released report, the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, a congressionally formed boondoggle that counts as its members the same Washington creatures who stand to make money hand over fist from their recommendations, say:
“The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare. They do not appreciate the strength of China and its partnerships or the ramifications to daily life if a conflict were to erupt. They are not anticipating disruptions to their power, water, or access to all the goods on which they rely. They have not internalized the costs of the United States losing its position as a world superpower. A bipartisan “call to arms” is urgently needed so that the United States can make the major changes and significant investments now rather than wait for the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11. The support and resolve of the American public are indispensable.”
The report complains that the 2022 National Defense Strategy’s “force construct does not sufficiently account for global competition or the very real threat of simultaneous conflict in more than one theater.” Instead they are proposing a “Multiple Theater Force Construct. This “reflects the likelihood of simultaneous conflicts in multiple theaters because of the partnership of U.S. peer or near-peer adversaries and incorporates the U.S. system of alliances and partnerships. The United States must engage globally with a presence — military, diplomatic, and economic — to maintain stability and preserve influence worldwide, including across the Global South, where China and Russia are extending their reach.”
It goes on from there. This means a lot of money, a lot of weapons, a lot of personnel, contractors, consultants, program people, you name it. Big, big big.
My guest this week is author Michael Vlahos, former professor of war & strategy at the Naval War College and Johns Hopkins University graduate program. He says all of this is part of an elaborate prepping for war and for big demonstrations of military superiority, but on the inside, this great spectacle of superpower is quite hollow. The elaborate theater of prepping for war keeps the ecosystem going. That includes political support for American primacy across the globe, keeping industry flush, the courtiers paid and fat, the pork flowing to the districts. But after years of show, what happens when it escalates into something more real, will the U.S. military be able to fight? Or will all of its overly-produced, techno fantasies of grandeur crumble under the weight of hubris, because none of it was really designed for battle but for the idea of battle — in other words, just a mirage?
More from Vlahos
The Ukrainian Army is Breaking
America’s Perilous Choice in Ukraine: How Proxy War Accelerates Great Power Decline
From Savior to Divine Trickster: The Theological Drive in U.S. Foreign Policy
Fighting Identify: Sacred War and World Change
DON’T MISS Mike’s previous appearance on the show!
I’m always aghast by the narrative that “the one major war… fought during the Cold War… was the Vietnam War” that blatantly gaslights the Korean War as if it never existed. I’m curious if that is a generational blind spot that continues to fetish the disaster of Vietnam which was really just a proxy war of far less significance and risk compared to the Korean War. In Korea, we saw significant direct engagement between China and the U.S., not to mention 300k+ Red Army forces and the Soviet Advisory Group stationed in North Korea. The Korean people endured a U.S. military command who seriously entertained the use of nukes but for Eisenhower in command at NATO, whereas in Vietnam we never engaged directly with China nor the Soviet Union. It seems to me that the Korean War is the prime Cold War example of how the U.S. is not capable of fighting and winning a complex and expanded land war against a large opponent half way around the world, whereas Vietnam was just a fetish perpetuation of war. It was during the Korea conflict that Eisenhower came to realize the metastasizing Industrial Military Complex, not Vietnam. Today I can buy consumer goods made in Vietnam which is likely more hospitable and presents less risk than China to U.S. offshore manufacturing base. I cannot buy anything made in North Korea.
Kelly, In regards to your comment on Russia’s intervention in the Civil War, and actual plans with US to link TransContinental and Trans Siberian railways over the Bering Straits (via Russias sale of Alaska). These plans failed due to the British backed assignation of both Lincoln and Czar Alexander IiII. The best source material recently is available at CanadianPatriot.org ( Matthew Ehret’s “The Clash of Two Americas volume 1-4). Suggest you do interview with Ehret on this topic.