$739 Billion

Fred Kaplan masterfully breaks down War Budget hijinks, courtesy of the Decider...

It's Actually $739 Billion

Scary stuff. I fear the militarization of American society has been going on so long (loosely, I'd drawn a line at 1947, when the Department of War was transformed into the Department of Defense as the time when we began to embark on this particular "slayride").

Monstrously, as the Pentagon Lockbox continues to grow, it's going to consume ever more of the American budget -- it's the secret weapon the GOP and related reactionaries would use to finally smash the so-called Welfare State. Keep enough hot wars going, and it becomes its own justification -- hack social spending to the bone, privatize/kill/maim/destroy Social Security and Medicare, and keep several wars going indefinitely, and you've basically got the GOP's plan for the future. Nobody's yet touched the true third rail of American politics: reinstating the draft.

Yet. But it's coming. This kind of insane, worldwide war-waging has decimated the all-volunteer army (which is now the all-volunteer and partially-privatized army). A draft will eventually come, just to meet manpower needs.

The inertia of it is frightening and devastating -- our country has been on a permanent wartime economy for so long, so much is bound up in the costly, dead end of military keynesianism, it's hard to imagine people stepping back. Especially with the GOP eager to point a finger and squawk about national security if anybody dares try to open the Pentagon Lockbox.

This runaway military spending is killing the future of America-as-we-know it -- the oft-cited "American Way of Life(tm)" that reactionaries claim to care so much about.

It's not making the US safer, and it's making the world a good deal more dangerous. The only beneficiaries of it is the defense industry. But actual debate on it is immediately derailed by "Support the Troops!" and "Support the War on Terror!"

This is the same death spiral empires always take; this is why the Founding Fathers feared standing armies. Empires crumble at home while their armies consume ever more. *sigh*

For all the scoffing of Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" -- like somehow the US was immune to the dynamic that has gutted superpowers before us, we're exactly on the track he laid out.

And I don't know if a new, invigorated Progressive movement (even if one existed) could stop it. The only thing that would likely stop it would be an economic meltdown, or (related, and perhaps worse) a political crisis at home.

Even a sham democracy should be fearful when its strongest national institution is the Army.