The Joys of Perpetual War
October 21st, 2009
Posted on TomDispatch.com, October 20, 2009.
Cashing in the War Dividend
By Jo Comerford
So you thought the Pentagon was already big enough? Well, what do you know, especially with the price of the American military slated to grow by at least 25% over the next decade?
. . .
The tired peace dividend tug boat left the harbor two decades ago, dragging with it laughable hopes for universal health care and decent public education. Now, the mighty USS War Dividend is preparing to set sail. The economic weather reports may be lousy and the seas choppy, but one thing is guaranteed: that won’t stop it.
The United States, of course, long ago captured first prize in the global arms race. It now spends as much as the next 14 countries combined, even as the spending of our rogue enemies and former enemies — Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria — much in the headlines for their prospective armaments, makes up a mere 1% of the world military budget. Still, when you’re a military superpower focused on big-picture thinking, there’s no time to dawdle on the details.
And be reasonable, who could expect the U.S. to fight two wars and maintain more than 700 bases around the world for less than the $704 billion we’ll shell out to the Pentagon in 2010? But here’s what few Americans grasp and you aren’t going to read about in your local paper either: according to Department of Defense projections, the baseline military budget — just the bare bones, not those billions in war-fighting extras — is projected to increase by 2.5% each year for the next 10 years. In other words, in the next decade the basic Pentagon budget will grow by at least $133.1 billion, or 25%.
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Read More at:
www.tomdispatch.com/post/175129/jo_comerford_three_cheers_for_the_war_dividend
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