My Memorial Day plans having fallen through, I've decided to celebrate the day by saying something that needs to be said, something both paradoxical and constructive.
Our country's extreme love of its military has long been unhealthy, not just for us, but for the world. While our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and special forces deserve praise, their service is also being abused. The praise for them has been monetized to expand Defense spending that has long been ludicrous.
It isn't just that trillions of dollars poured into the Pentagon that's been lost and unaccounted for. The one inherent problem with a huge peacetime military is that “peacetime” disappears. Our military is a modern wonder of the world.
But every president faces a problem: what do we do with it? Do we just let it rust? Simply because its so large and so expensive, there's always going to be the irresistible temptation to make it pay off. Otherwise, the money is just wasted. Nobody wants to spend that much for nothing. Even the most peaceful presidents have ended up using the military to intervene with other countries, most with the best intentions.
Worse, the impressiveness of our soldiers equipped with state-of-the-art weapons leaves our leadership prone to thinking our military can do anything. This is the most dangerous error. Our excursions into Afghanistan and Iraq show the failure of this thinking. The invasions and initial victories were marvels of military prowess. However, the art of nation-building, that so shaped our reconstructions of West Germany and Japan, had been lost. The wartime prowess had eaten the peacetime skills. With so much spent on our military, there's nothing left over for anything like a Marshall Plan.
Moreover, our leaders might not even accept military defeats as possible. Most people learned from Vietnam that “War is hell,” “Give peace a chance.” But the Neocons who took us in Vietnam drew a totally different conclusion. They thought that our military wasn't allowed to fight to its capacity. Protesters, the press, and left-wing politicians conspired to undercut our war effort. Never mind that there really wasn't much in Vietnam to capture, and that a whole hog invasion would have led to direct military conflict with China and Russia. Never mind also that we couldn't bomb the North Vietnamese into the stone age when the country was there anyway. The NeoCons thought Vietnam could be done right.
Therefore, they tried to “do it right” in Afghanistan and Iraq. To prevent the same morass, Conservatives saw to it that reporters were embedded in units so their lives depended on what they wrote; Neocons leaned on the then-consolidated national press to make sure it didn't report on war protests. For students, the solution had been already implemented in '80s when they switched from grant-based college financial aid to a loan-based system. People in debt are not as likely to engage in protests and arrests that might hurt their future income.
President Donald Trump promised he'll use the military only for America's interests. Yet, he's a liar. We still have troops in 177 countries (yes that number stuns me as well), and we could only find out what they're doing from the foreign press because both the White House and the Pentagon now don't give press briefings. Prior to that, Trump gave the top brass free reign to accomplish their missions. So, now we have renegade operations everywhere, with no hope of getting them under control while General Bonespur is President.
Trump brings into play a whole new danger: a would-be dictator who willingly gives the military anything it dreams of having in exchange for its personal loyalty to him. A Commander-in-Chief who deals out cheap praise and flattery that can make you forget that all of it is empty. Despite his draft-dodging history, it's clear that Trump gets a hard on for hard power, and our military exudes hard power. Trump is not, by any stretch, smart. But he has a tyrant's attraction to power and all its trappings. How ironic if Trump uses the military, the protectors of our freedom, to overthrow the Constitution. It's clear from all his violations that he doesn't understand the document anyway, and doesn't care. I seem to remember he swore to uphold it.
Last, I do love our troops, and I'm awed bravery as much as anybody. Yet, it's that admiration that leads to other young men and women to join the military. Without wars we can't have heroes, and so do we go to war to create heroes? What would so many young people do with their lives otherwise?
To our military of all branches, ranks, and rates, I salute you today, but warn you you're being used and it's about to get worse.
