Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Fighting the Last
War with Borrowed Money
Bob
Hennelly
September
30, 2018
Salon
On Friday, while
the White House press corps was playing Dungeons and Dragons: the Judge
Kavanaugh edition, President Trump was signing an $854 billion dollar spending
bill with no reporters present. The almost $1 trillion package included an
obscene $674 billion defense budget.
The military
spending spree includes Lockheed-Martin’s troubled F-35 which Popular
Mechanics described as a “trillion-dollar” albatross. “For
over two decades, the F-35 has been the symbol of everything that's wrong with
mammoth defense contracts: behind schedule, over budget, and initially,
over-sold,” reported the magazine.
In April of
2016, former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain
(R-Ariz.) called the F-35 JSF program “both a scandal and a
tragedy with respect to cost, schedule, and performance.”
“In development
for nearly 17 years and seven years behind schedule, total acquisition costs
now exceed $406 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion,”
according to a report from Citizens Against Government Waste, a non-profit
government accountability group. “An April 2015 Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report noted that the lifetime operation and maintenance
costs of the most expensive weapon system in history will total approximately
$1 trillion.”
CAGW’s analysis
continues, “Unbelievably, the JSF program office, and members of Congress,
appear ready to repeat this mistake yet again. A June 5, 2018
GAO report found that major technological deficiencies still exist,
despite the F-35 nearing the October 2019 time frame when it will enter full
production. According to the GAO, in its “rush to cross the finish line, the
program has made some decisions that are likely to affect aircraft performance
and reliability and maintainability for years to come.”
Throughout the
2016 campaign candidate Trump blasted military contractor Lockheed-Martin track
record with the F-35 tweeting in December of 2016 “The F-35
program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved
on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.”
Trump’s military
build-up has been great for Lockheed-Martin. Its stock price closed at $239.27
the day before the 2016 election when all the “smart money” thought former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was on a glide path to victory. The day
after the stock of the world’s biggest military contractor climbed to
$253.46. This past Friday it closed at $345.96 a share.
News reports about
Trump signing the spending bills Friday credited the action with averting a
government shutdown and as a sign that Congress was getting its act
together because it had actually crafted budget bills not continuing
resolutions.
But with his
signature Trump made it much less likely we will effectively confront global
warming or prepare for the rising sea levels already upon us. This sets the
stage for an even greater loss of life and property in the near and long term
as storm surges come further inland with greater ferocity and we continue to
experience extreme weather events like Irene, Sandy, Harvey, Maria and
Florence.
It is not just
that the military is itself the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels and
emitter of greenhouse gases. Consider an F-4 Phantom jet burns 1,400
gallons of jet fuel per hour.
What looms even
larger is the huge lost opportunity cost we incur by not directing some of that
DOD money to the planet’s most clear and present danger right now, slowing
global warming and preparing for rising sea levels already underway.
Ironically,
climate change is something the military itself is taking very
seriously even if its Commander-in-Chief does not. In January of
this year the Department of Defense issued a report that assessed 3,500
sites they maintain around the planet. They found that 800 had been hit by
drought, 350 with extreme temperatures, 225 endangered by storm surges and 200
by wildfires.
Back in 2016 the
Institute for Policy Studies published “Combat vs. Climate-The Military
and Climate-Security Budgets Compared” making the case it
was time to align our spending priorities more in line with the actual security
risks we face. “The planet is heating up ”the report asserts. “Fifteen of
the sixteen hottest years ever recorded have occurred during this new century
and the near unanimous scientific consensus attributes the principal cause to
human activity.”
The IPS report
suggested trading the F-35 program for building wind farms to power hundreds of
thousands of homes.
As NPR recently
reported here in the United States major infrastructure like airports are
already at risk, with 13 major airports with at least one runway 13 feet from
current sea level. Bridges, tunnels, rail networks, highways, the
planet’s entire physical plant is at risk.
And yet, we are
still on Cold War autopilot still building tanks and jet fighters for an enemy
we strain to invent so we can justify the effort. And perhaps, the
greatest travesty of all is that we are borrowing trillions of dollars to pay
for it all.
Reprinted by
permission from the author.
Bob Hennelly has
written and reported for the Village Voice, Pacifica Radio, WNYC, CBS
MoneyWatch and other outlets. He is now a reporter for the Chief-Leader,
covering public unions and the civil service in New York City. Follow him on
Twitter: @stucknation
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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