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Call the U.S. Defense Budget what it is – the War Budget

Stop Calling the Military Budget a ‘Defense’ Budget,   https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/10/05/stop-calling-military-budget-defense-budget To call the Pentagon’s massive and escalating budget a “defense” budget is nothing less than internalized corruption of language that undermines our capacities to think clearly and talk straight.

NORMAN SOLOMON, October 5, 2021  It’s bad enough that mainstream news outlets routinely call the Pentagon budget a “defense” budget. But the fact that progressives in Congress and even many antiwar activists also do the same is an indication of how deeply the mindsets of the nation’s warfare state are embedded in the political culture of the United States.

The misleading first name of the Defense Department doesn’t justify using “defense” as an adjective for its budget. On the contrary, the ubiquitous use of phrases like “defense budget” and “defense spending”—virtually always written with a lower-case “d”—reinforces the false notion that equates the USA’s humongous military operations with defense.

In the real world, the United States spends more money on its military than the next 10 countries all together. And most of those countries are military allies.

What about military bases in foreign countries? The U.S. currently has 750, while Russia has about two dozen and China has one. The author of the landmark book “Base Nation,” American University professor David Vine, just co-wrote a report that points out “the United States has at least three times as many overseas bases as all other countries combined.” Those U.S. bases abroad “cost taxpayers an estimated $55 billion annually.”

As this autumn began, Vine noted that President Biden is “perpetuating the United States’ endless wars” in nations including “Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Yemen” while escalating “war-like tensions with China with a military buildup with Australia and the UK.”

All this is being funded via a “defense” budget?

Calling George Orwell.

As Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay, political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” In 2021, the hot air blowing at gale force through U.S. mass media is so continuous that we’re apt to scarcely give it a second thought. But the euphemisms would hardly mean anything to those in faraway countries for whom terrifying and lethal drone attacks and other components of U.S. air wars are about life and death rather than political language.

You might consider the Pentagon’s Aug. 29 killing of 10 Afghan civilians including seven children with a drone attack to be a case of “respectable” murder, or negligent homicide, or mere “collateral damage.” Likewise, you could look at numbers like 244,124—a credible low-end estimate of the number of civilians directly killed during the “war on terror” in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq—and consider them to be mere data points or representing individuals whose lives are as precious as yours.

But at any rate, from the vantage point of the United States, it’s farfetched to claim that the billions of dollars expended for ongoing warfare in several countries are in a budget that can be legitimately called “defense.”

You might consider the Pentagon’s Aug. 29 killing of 10 Afghan civilians including seven children with a drone attack to be a case of “respectable” murder, or negligent homicide, or mere “collateral damage.” Likewise, you could look at numbers like 244,124—a credible low-end estimate of the number of civilians directly killed during the “war on terror” in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq—and consider them to be mere data points or representing individuals whose lives are as precious as yours.

But at any rate, from the vantage point of the United States, it’s farfetched to claim that the billions of dollars expended for ongoing warfare in several countries are in a budget that can be legitimately called “defense.”

You might consider the Pentagon’s Aug. 29 killing of 10 Afghan civilians including seven children with a drone attack to be a case of “respectable” murder, or negligent homicide, or mere “collateral damage.” Likewise, you could look at numbers like 244,124—a credible low-end estimate of the number of civilians directly killed during the “war on terror” in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq—and consider them to be mere data points or representing individuals whose lives are as precious as yours.

But at any rate, from the vantage point of the United States, it’s farfetched to claim that the billions of dollars expended for ongoing warfare in several countries are in a budget that can be legitimately called “defense.”

Until 1947, the official name of the U.S. government’s central military agency was the War Department. After a two-year interim brand (with the clunky name National Military Establishment), it was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949. As it happened, that was the same year when Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” appeared, telling of an always-at-war totalitarian regime with doublespeak slogans that included “War Is Peace.”

Today, the Department of Defense remains an appropriately capitalized proper noun. But the department’s official name doesn’t make it true. To call its massive and escalating budget a “defense” budget is nothing less than internalized corruption of language that undermines our capacities to think clearly and talk straight. While such corroded language can’t be blamed for the existence of sloppy thinking and degraded discourse, it regularly facilitates sloppy thinking and degraded discourse.

Let’s blow away the linguistic fog. The Pentagon budget is not a “defense” budget.   

NORMAN SOLOMON

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death“ (2006) and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” (2007). 

October 7, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Why USA needs a fundamental reappraisal of nuclear weapons policy

Why we need a fundamental reappraisal of nuclear weapons policy, The Hill, BY WARD WILSON, OPIN— 10/03/21 The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, a Biden appointee who apparently was intent on challenging status quo ideas, recently was forced out of the Nuclear Posture Review process in a “reorganization.” The move led some to conclude that new ideas and innovative thinking are being excluded, some to have even sharper reactions, and inspired Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) to fire off a letter to the president asking eight pointed questions and expressing concern that the move “will result in a draft Nuclear Posture Review that reflects the Cold War era’s over-reliance on nuclear weapons.”

This move to force out a proponent of new ideas is disappointing because the need for a fundamental, realistic reappraisal of nuclear weapons policy is unmistakable — not because recent policies were obviously flawed, although they do seem to have failed to avert a second nuclear arms race. The problem goes back to the origins of nuclear weapons policy and the peculiar fact-free nature of the field………
if U.S. nuclear weapons policy is not based on fact, on what is it based? It is based on assumptions. The people who first made policy about nuclear weapons did the best they could using intuition, judgment and what little experience they had. The problem is that it is easy to get assumptions wrong. In the case of nuclear weapons, there is every reason to believe that at least some of the assumptions that underpin thinking about these weapons are mistaken.

It’s likely, for example, that early judgments were skewed by fear. Nuclear weapons policy was first formulated during the Cold War, a time of uniquely intense anxiety, paranoia and continual fear of nuclear war. This is a problem, because people don’t do their best thinking when they are afraid. Strong emotions almost certainly distorted early thinking about nuclear weapons.

Another likely source of error is what happened in Hiroshima, Japan. Over the past 15 years, the meaning of that one real experience has come under scrutiny. There are now credible reasons to doubt that the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki played a significant role in Japan’s decision to surrender at the end of World War II. Some believe it is even possible they played no role at all……….https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/574383-why-we-need-a-fundamental-reappraisal-of-nuclear-weapons-policy

October 4, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, weapons and war | 1 Comment