by Hall Gardner
Stricter gun control laws might not prevent all kinds of violence and criminality, but blocking access to assault weapons, among other forms of weaponry, including controlling cop-killer bullet sales, can help limit some mass killings. The 1994 assault weapons ban had expired on September 13, 2004—and subsequent efforts to renew the ban or propose alternative legislation have thus far failed.
Given the significant social problems related to unemployment and underemployment, job discrimination, high levels of drug-related crime, and other forms of criminality, which generally involve the spread of guns, will Trump be able to obtain the trust of urban communities? Or will Trump be confronted by the outbreak of mass urban protests against police violence of the kind that confronted the Obama administration in a number of major US cities? Or will there be more protests like those that took place in Charlottesville, North Carolina, in August 2017—in which a man drove a truck into a group that was counterprotesting the “Unite the Right” demonstration, killing one woman and injuring many others?
Trump's so-called solution to the problems of criminality and “terrorism” inside American society has largely been to justify the right of people to bear arms—rather than to seek ways to control weapons that do not necessarily infringe on personal freedoms. Trump's rhetoric does not appear to recognize the dangers that an even wider spread of heavy weaponry and their bullets will cause—if these weapons are not properly managed and controlled. Trump's so-called solution to both domestic and external threats has been to produce more rifles, tanks, and nuclear missiles, and the like.
TRUMP AND THE MILITARY BUILDUP
One can only speculate how the populations of the world might have reacted to the Trump team's decision to deploy tanks and missile launchers for his inauguration parade—if that had happened. This is actually what Trump's transition team initially proposed in a symbolic effort to show off American military power—as is the case for democratic countries such as France, which is a major arms producer, but which is also endemic for authoritarian and militaristic countries such as Russia, China, and North Korea.
Trump's team evidently did not think about the destructive impact that such heavy military equipment would have had on already heavily traveled Washington, DC, roads and infrastructure. Military flyovers, involving the latest US fighter jets, were approved instead, but they were ruled out at the last minute, ostensibly because of poor weather conditions.33 Yet what message did Trump's team hope to convey by such a show of force? And how would those protestors, the American people, and the rest of the world, both US allies and rivals, have interpreted that message—if such a display of massive US military power—symbolic of the new America First nationalism—had taken place for the first time on the streets of the US capital, Washington, DC? And will Trump initiate a costly military parade for the future July 4th celebration of the Declaration of Independence, as he has indicated after his visit to France's July 14, 2017, Bastille Day celebrations?
It is clear that Trump's team believes that the United States must reassert itself on the global stage—if US interests and the “civilized world”34 (in Trump's words) are to be defended and if America's global hegemony is to be sustained. Trump's choice of Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate had already revealed his alignment with Christian conservatives who generally oppose domestic “political correctness” and “international cosmopolitanism.” In terms of foreign policy, Christian conservatism advocates Peace through Strength—and the ostensible need for the United States to show leadership and intervene militarily, even unilaterally, when deemed necessary, but not necessarily, “legitimate.”
Pence's formula for confronting Moscow, for example, can be summed up in his own words: “The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength…. We are going to rebuild our military. This whole Putin thing, look, America is stronger than Russia. Our economy is 16 times larger than the Russian economy. Our political system is superior to the crony corrupt capitalist system in Russia it every way.”35 Yet given the fact that the Russian GDP is roughly the size of New York State's, building up the US defense budget—ostensibly in order to negotiate with Moscow (among other states) from a position of strength—is not the way to deal with Moscow, which will continue to react with countermeasures.
As furthermore indicated by its “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,”36 the Trump-Pence administration believes that the United States must reassert itself on the global stage through greater defense spending. In mid-February 2017, Trump proposed a major arms buildup that, he believed, would be able to more effectively assert US interests versus its adversaries—while engaging more deeply in the Global War on Terrorism. Trump accordingly proposed to augment defense spending above the already major increase sought by President Obama, to more than $639 billion. (See discussion, this chapter.)
The Obama administration had already planned to spend around $1 trillion on modernizing the US nuclear triad (land, sea, and air forces) over the next three decades against Moscow, China, North Korea, Iran, and other potential threats.37 This military buildup involves the deployment of five new nuclear weapons systems and the deployment of new naval forces so as to better deter the possibilities of war with North Korea and China in the Indo-Pacific. Obama had initially intended to improve US force capabilities in the Indo-Pacific primarily. Yet Moscow's not-entirely-unexpected military intervention in Crimea and buildup of forces in eastern Europe in early 2014 forced the United States and NATO to look toward ways to build up military capabilities in eastern Europe as well as in the Indo-Pacific. (See chapters 5 and 6.)
In his telephone call to Russian President Putin in February 2017, President Trump denounced the 2010 New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), a treaty that had been negotiated by the Obama administration—as a “bad deal,” just after Putin had raised the possibility of extending that same treaty. New START permits both countries to possess no more than 700 deployed and 100 non-deployed land-based intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers and heavy bombers equipped to carry nuclear weapons. The treaty also limits each side to no more than 1,550 deployed warheads.38
Putin has asserted that Moscow has no intention of reneging on New START and on other arms control obligations. And yet Washington has accused Moscow of deploying a new intermediate-range ground-based cruise missile in violation of the 1987 INF treaty that bans the deployment of US and Russian land-based intermediate-range missiles. This, from a strategic perspective, would provide Moscow with an advantage in a military confrontation, as Russian intermediate-range missiles could be fired against targets in Europe and Japan, while Moscow would hope to protect itself from US retaliation with the threat to strike the US continent with its new intercontinental Topol’-MR (or RS-24 Yars) missile, which Moscow claims possesses multiple hypersonic warheads that can avoid missile defense systems.39 In 2016, Washington had previously accused Moscow of adding more warheads and missiles, thereby surpassing the 1,550 warhead limit set by New START. But Moscow has until February 2018 to comply. (See chapter 10.)
This new buildup of American military capabilities has accordingly been aimed to cover a number of possible contingencies. Such capabilities would, it is believed, be sufficient to handle two major wars or “major regional contingencies” (MRCs) nearly simultaneously.40 Trump also claims that he intends to develop a state-of-the-art missile defense system that includes the modernization of US naval cruisers with such antimissile capabilities. As part of this new military buildup, the Pentagon has been urging the Trump administration to consider a review of the US nuclear arsenal and force posture. The Pentagon also hopes to make the United States more capable of prosecuting a “limited” nuclear war—whether against North Korea, the Islamic State, Iran, Russia, China, or others—even if it is dubious such a war would remain “limited.”41
For these scenarios, the US Army would need to increase in size to about 540,000 active-duty soldiers. This would re
present an actual increase above the 460,000 active soldiers that the Pentagon itself called for in its $583 billion budget proposal for FY2017.42
In May 2017, Trump sent Congress a finalized proposed budget request for FY2018 of $639.1 billion. It would spend $574.5 billion for the base budget and allocate $64.6 billion for the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget, which is not included in the official defense base budget. The latter account pays for operations in Syria, Iraq, Northern Pakistan, and other regions. This overall budget request was $52 billion above the defense budget cap demanded by the Budget and Control Act (BCA) of 2011, and it does not fully include other defense-related costs to be discussed in this chapter.43
REAL DEFENSE COSTS
In 2016, official US defense spending for the base budget was already an astronomical $597 billion—almost as much as the next fourteen countries put together. China's budget of $145.8 billion, for example, was less than a third of the US budget.44 Official US defense spending was thus roughly $385 billion more than China, $500 billion more than Saudi Arabia, and $530 billion more than Russia.45
But these official figures do not tell the whole story. To obtain total defense spending, one needs to add onto the Department of Defense budget those items related to defense spending in other government agencies. These include: veteran affairs (in the Veteran's Administration); military retiree payments and interest payments on money borrowed to fund previous military programs (in the Treasury budget); military aspects of the space program (in the NASA budget); energy programs that go for secret defense and nuclear weapons research, testing, and storage purposes (in the Energy budget); and foreign military aid in the form of weapons grants for allies (included in the State Department budget). Other defense costs include sales and property taxes at military bases (in local government budgets), plus the hidden expenses of tax-free food, housing, and combat pay allowances. One also needs to add on the costs of maintaining seventeen intelligence agencies, including Homeland Security, that are involved in international intelligence gathering and operations. If one adds all of these, the figure grows much higher, way above 20 percent of the total federal budget. And it averages per fiscal year about double what the Pentagon officially reports.46
But even then, the yearly DOD base budget does not account for the fact that the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria represent supplemental spending, which is placed in the separate Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, as mentioned above. The overall costs of these wars (plus other expenses that are not included the official DOD budget) from 2001 to 2016 added up to some $4.8 trillion in 2016 and are still rising.47 And the costs of these wars would have been even greater if US interest rates had been higher since 2001.
QUESTION OF INTEREST RATES
The US Federal Reserve's controversial decision to keep federal interest rates artificially low in the period from 2002 to 2004 during the George W. Bush administration made the costs of borrowing for the Global War on Terrorism relatively much less expensive than what might have been the case otherwise. The Federal Reserve Bank is supposed to be independent of the US executive branch of government, yet the low interest rates at that time (whether or not they were made low “accidentally on purpose”) just happened to make borrowing for the Global War on Terrorism in 2001 and the subsequent US-led intervention in Iraq in 2003 much cheaper. This is an issue that should be investigated. In the view of many economists who argued that interest rates should have been raised at the time of the dot-com crisis of 2000–2002, these low interest rates eventually had a severe impact on the economy. They represent one of the major causes of the 2008 global recession, as low interest rates provided cheap money to both China and US consumers, which in turn fueled the housing market bubble and its collapse, as illustrated in the subprime and “liars’ loan” crisis, while assisting China's financial boom in the longer term.48
SOCIAL COSTS OF HIGH DEFENSE SPENDING
In order to help cover for the increase in defense spending, Trump has promised to cut governmental nondefense spending—instead of cutting the fat off military spending. Trump's proposed budget cuts include cuts in the State Department and foreign aid by some 30–37 percent, in addition to cuts in environmental protection programs, among other areas.49 At present, roughly 60 percent of foreign aid goes to economic and development assistance, and 40 percent goes to security concerns. These cuts could impact US relations with a number of strategically important countries. The highest aid recipients in 2016 include Afghanistan, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Pakistan, then Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Ethiopia.
Through such cuts, to a certain extent resisted by Congress, Trump has hoped to achieve a total reduction in federal spending by $10.5 trillion over ten years. In the past, increases in the Pentagon's budget have generally been financed by cuts in nonmilitary public spending, by borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund, and by debt and deficit spending—and at a tremendous cost for the overall economy. At the same time, this excessive government expenditure is justified by sustaining US superiority in arms and in arms sales to US allies so as to partially amortize the costs of public expenditure for the US military-industrial complex.
In 2015, the United States led in arms transfer agreements worldwide, making agreements valued at $40.2 billion (50.29 percent of all such agreements), up from $36.1 billion in 2014. The United States also led in the actual transfer or delivery of arms: In 2015, the United States ranked first in the value of all arms deliveries worldwide, making nearly $16.9 billion in such deliveries, or 36.62 percent of arms transfers. US arms sales have outpaced Russia's for the past eight years, with France in third place.50 Yet even these sales do not amount to the total overall public costs of maintaining the military-industrial complex.
Coupled with the fact that defense spending is roughly double what is officially reported, assuming all defense budget categories are added up in their entirety, it is clear that the high costs of the defense program cut significantly into social needs. Trump's proposed cuts in nonmilitary affairs appear all the more absurd given the fact that defense spending dwarfs the mere 2 percent spent on the State Department (which also includes foreign military aid in the form of weapons grants for allies) and on international affairs—at a time when the United States and the world needs more diplomacy, with quality leadership at the head of the desks in key State Department positions. And defense spending furthermore dwarfs the amount the United States provides each year to the United Nations for peacekeeping, environmental protection, refugees, public health, and so on. The State Department should have been taking the lead in foreign affairs, but over the years, the military and intelligence agencies have gained predominance within the US governmental bureaucracy—much as President Eisenhower warned.51 (See chapter 10.)
THE FAILURE TO MAKE SAVINGS
The Pentagon purportedly squashed a major study to restructure its approach to business operations. That 2016 study proposed that the United States could save $125 billion over five years and even more in the future. This could be done by streamlining bureaucracy, cutting back on the amount of high-priced contractors, and by making better use of information technology without necessarily reducing military forces or firing administrators.52
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also reported that the Pentagon could save tens of billions of dollars over the next ten years alone by delaying, reducing, or canceling deployments of a number of weapons systems.53 These weapons systems include Columbia-class nuclear-armed submarines; a new intercontinental missile, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent; the new nuclear cruise missile, the Long-Range Standoff Cruise Missile (LRSO); and the Long-Range Strike Bomber. It is also possible to reduce or eliminate the numbers of B-61-12 “tactical” nuclear warheads (with 480 now scheduled for production by 2020). These weapons can be carried by the F-35 and the Long-Range Strike Bomber—in addition to already-existing fighter jets and bombers.54 All of these systems can be questioned on both strategic (unneces
sary or provocative) and financial grounds (excessively costly).55 A number of these powerful weapons systems could be unilaterally reduced or eliminated, or else bargained down, as part of a general arms accord with Moscow and possibly with China. But to do that, the United States will need to engage in truly peace-oriented diplomacy.
During his presidential campaign, Trump had stated that he opposed the congressionally mandated sequestration process of the 2011 Budget Control Act that was aimed at cutting defense spending. From Trump's perspective, sequestration cut both wasteful and necessary military spending by equal percentages. This meant that absolutely necessary budget cuts due to excessive military spending might not necessarily make strategic or even practical sense.56 At that time, before he became president, Trump claimed that he would not seek an across-the-board military buildup, but instead would build only those weapons systems that are truly “needed” by the military—and that are not pushed on the military by demagogic congressional demands of what should be called the “military-industrial-congressional complex.”57
Once he became president, however, in seeking to abolish the sequestration process, Trump consequently tried to claim personal credit for reducing excessive expenditures on the F-35, for example. The F-35 advanced fighter is one of the most expensive defense boondoggles in US history, and is expected to cost upward of $1.45 trillion over its fifty-year life span.58 But contrary to Trump's boasts, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated that the fifth-generation fighter still faces over $1 billion in cost overruns in FY2017 and is officially estimated to cost $10.3 billion in FY2018.59 And there is some dispute about F-35 capabilities versus the Russian SU-35 and integrated air defenses. In fact, the United States, Russia, India, and China are all having both technological and cost problems with stealth fighter jets. And F-35s could also prove vulnerable to Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles, such as the S-400.60