Romney defense plan throws money at Pentagon
It's true that China is increasing the size of its navy in hopes of operating more freely in the waters off its coast and perhaps the contested South China Sea (with its energy reserves), but it is hardly engaged in a drive for global domination. It's not as if Beijing is capable of deploying aircraft carriers off the coasts of California and Alaska. In the meantime, Romney's shipbuilding fetish doesn't add up. It's as ludicrous as it is expensive.
© 2012 TomDispatch Romney is also a major supporter of missile defense -- and not just the current $9-$10 billion a year enterprise being funded by the Obama administration, primarily designed to blunt an attack by long-range North Korean missiles that don't exist. Romney wants a "full, multi-layered" system. That sounds suspiciously like the Ronald Reagan-style fantasy of an "impermeable shield" over the United States against massive nuclear attack that was abandoned in the late 1980s because of its staggering expense and essential impracticality.
If the development of Romney's high-priced version of a missile shield were again on the American agenda, it would be a godsend for big weapons-makers like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, but would add nothing to the defense of this country. In fact, it stands a reasonable chance of making things worse. Given the overkill represented by the thousands of nuclear warheads in the American arsenal, the prospect of a nuclear missile attack on the United States is essentially nil.
As arms experts like Dr. Theodore Postol of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have pointed out, in the utterly unlikely event of a massive nuclear missile attack, Romney's plan would be virtually useless. There's just no way to provide a near-perfect defense against thousands of warheads and decoys launched at 15,000 miles per hour. The only reasonable defense against nuclear weapons would be to get rid of them altogether, a course suggested by scores of retired military leaders, former defense officials, and heads of state. Even Henry Kissinger has joined the "go to zero" campaign, supporting a far more sensible approach to the nuclear dilemma than Romney's fantasy technical fix.
The Romney anti-missile program would, however, do more than just waste money. It would restore the Bush administration's plan to emplace a long-range anti-missile system in Europe officially aimed at Iran but assumedly capable of taking out Russian missiles as well. Given that the Obama administration's far more limited plan for Europe has already caused consternation among Russia's leaders, imagine the harsh reaction in Moscow to the over-the-top Romney version. It could put an end to any hopes of further U.S.-Russian nuclear reductions -- a significant price to pay for a high-tech boondoggle with no prospect of success.
Ensuring a Cost-Overrun Presidency
If you were hoping that, with an eye to fighting yet more disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East like the $3 trillion fiasco in Iraq, the U.S. would raise ever larger armies, then Mitt's your man. While Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's latest plan would reduce the Army and Marines by about 100,000 over the next five years -- essentially rolling back the increases that were part of the post-9/11 buildup -- the former Massachusetts governor would double down by adding 100,000 more troops to present force levels.
His rhetoric and the bona fides of his neoconservative advisors suggest that one place President Romney might send those bulked up forces would be to Iran as "boots on the ground." He has repeatedly claimed that, if President Obama is re-elected, Iran will get a nuclear weapon, and has asserted that if he is elected it will not. He has mocked the president for not being "tough enough" on the Iranians and implied that a Romney administration would consider force a go-to option against that country, rather than a threat meant to back up a diplomatic strategy.
Keep in mind that if Romney were to follow through on these costly undertakings and others like them, it would only add to the good old-fashioned waste and fraud that's the norm of Pentagon contracting these days. As former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen pointed out, the post-9/11 national security spending binge played havoc with any sense of fiscal discipline at the Pentagon, eliminating the need to make "hard choices" or "limit ourselves" in significant ways. In his former position as Pentagon procurement czar, Under Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter acknowledged (PDF) that "in a decade of ever-increasing defense budgets... it was always possible for our managers... when they ran into a technical problem or a difficult choice to reach for more money."
Romney's Republican math would ensure that this will continue. Defense giants like Lockheed Martin, whose F-35 combat aircraft has more than doubled in price over original projections, must be salivating at the prospect of another cost-overrun presidency, which would result in soaring profits and few punishments.
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William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of "Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex". (To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hartung discusses how to manipulate Pentagon budgets, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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Our only mistake is letting them have ANY say in our society. We must work to marginalize them and keep them away from elected office. We must study them more to see if we can help cure some of them.
Whatever happened to fiscal conservatives in the republican party?
It has also been shown by independent studies to not be that efficient at creating jobs. Every billion dollars the Defense Department gets generates 11,600 jobs, whereas that same investment would produce 17,100 in clean energy jobs, 19,600 in health care jobs and 29,100 in education jobs. Even a $1 billion tax cut would produce significantly more jobs than money spent at the Defense Department.
So, don't buy any tired old rhetoric about increasing defense spending. It won't fix our nations economic woes.
Millions of americans are cutting cost, why not the DOF?
Vested interests are behind this madness.
1. We now outspend China 9 dollars to 1 dollar annually. Are the Chinese that much more efficient?
2. We now have over 800 military installations overseas. Most to protect our "allies". Why do we not cut back on these and let our "allies" defend themselves? BTW, these include England, Germany and France.
Everyone has to suffer but the military industrial complex and rich corporations.
Typical W Bush Style Republican