Attempting to Reach Perfect Security Destroys Economic Foundation—Leaving No Security

We are spending $900B a year—that’s 30 percent of expenditures, but 52 percent of revenues (because we borrow and deficit spend)—on “Defense.” To “defend” our nation from what may sometimes seem just a couple thousand religious fanatics, a lot of whom are hiding in caves in Pakistan, and many of the rest we may be creating by policies of economic and political exploitation? And making a lot of American multinationals and contractors rich in the process? And forgetting that all that money for “Defense” was taken from the productive sectors of the economy (or worse, borrowed), because government isn’t itself an economic producer but is instead a consumer?

I say this not because we need to bash government anymore; nefarious forces have been doing that enough for their own immensely selfish and twisted reasons, and we do need government to reassert our will against them. And we do need to defend ourselves from real threats; they are out there. No, I say this because we need to do it far smarter, far less frivolously, and far more strategically, and in the process we need to face fiscal reality, something we are not doing by any relevant yardstick (or meter-stick, for the rest of the world who have jumped to the intuitively and scientifically superior metric).

Our Framers would be aghast at the size and decades we have had this much and this kind of military, and how much money we have spent. A few of the many reasons they and those who followed them shrunk the thing after every war before the 20th century was both its economic impact and its danger of warping the democratic process and foreign and domestic policy (the Framers were great students of history). While we may have had good reasons for making different decisions than they would have, we do not give ourselves the hard review. We have become too accepting of “how it is.”

We need a new strategic plan for the country, one that all people are aware of (at least in general) and behind, and we need to get cracking on implementing it. We have narrowly defined "defense" and "security" for far too long. It is time for a more holistic approach, one that recognizes that economics and environment are FOUNDATIONS of security. And maybe, just maybe, that also means thinking about the collective good.