Antiwar.com Blog » Military spending

Do as we say, not as we do: gasoline edition

Tim Swanson — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:49:51 +0000

Earlier today President Bush said “people should conserve and be wise about how they use gas and energy.”

This is ironic in part because the US military is a large player in the oil economy. If the US military was a country it would be the worlds 38th largest consumer of oil. Yet despite its large appetite and soaring crude prices, its operations will continue unabated.

Every year untold quantities of jet fuel are dumped into the ocean by Naval aircraft prior to landing due to weight restrictions. Main battle tanks are notorious gas hogs, with a thirsty M1 Abrams getting about .56 mpg. The Humvee doesn’t fare much better, cruising at 4 mpg in the city, or 8 mpg on highways. And according to SDUT, “an F-16 warplane consumes more fuel in one hour than an average car does in two years.”

Plus, threatening to attack the petroleum infrastructure of another country would certainly not help conserve gas and energy — even if someone plans to siphon the crude off the killing fields.

Feeding the Gravy Train One Big Pipeline at a Time

Tim Swanson — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:10:55 +0000

If you have a chance be sure to read the latest TomDispatch piece from the Highlights section.

Researcher Frida Berrigan copiously details the geometric rise of the Pentagon’s budget and omnipotence through the concerted efforts of the current administration. As Tom notes, it is perhaps the most powerful and concise overview on the breadth and scope of the evergrowing military complex.

And while frequent readers of AWC will not be surprised with the revelations, perhaps most troubling is just how meddlesome the Defense department has become in diplomatic affairs, superseding the relatively dovish State department in all negotiations. For instance, why bother talking through civilian channels when the real decision making ultimately takes place through viceroys operating at a Unified Combatant Command?

As the title suggests, the Pentagon really has taken charge and as Berrigan unfortunately notes, no matter who is elected president it is a trend that shows no sign of abating.

Other things you could have blown $6 trillion on

Tim Swanson — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:38:01 +0000

Scifi author Charlie Stross recently discussed other alternatives for the monies that funded the Iraq war. He noted that using current technology the bounty could have created and staffed a colony of 500 astronauts on Mars or enabled the construction of tens of gigawatts in nuclear energy throughout the US. Or even helped build cities for 600,000,000 people in China to live in.

Arguably the fairest solution would be to have simply returned the money to the original taxpayers thereby removing the incentive for the Fed to expand the credit supply to fund the current war.

However, regarding a hypothetical mission to Mars, at the very least none of the astro guys would be kinetically detonating onto population centers.

An entire region of the globe comprising a billion people wouldn’t be annoyed with the West for lofting 500 rocket scientists onto a barren rock. The same can’t be said for 500 pound bombs.

Speech at UT Austin

Scott Horton — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:22:34 +0000

The Libertarian Longhorns have invited me to speak at their meeting this Monday, the 28th at 8:00 PM on the subject of America’s biggest big government program: Empire.

The room is Mezes 1.306 (the Mezes Auditorium). Here is the link to the campus map.

Hope to see you there.

I Lied and I’m a Coward

David Henderson — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 19:13:18 +0000

I’m not a big fan of the New York Times, but today’s front-page investigative report on the Pentagon’s managing of the news is absolutely first-rate. One of the Pentagon officials, Torie Clarke, the Pentagon’s main propagandist, said her goal had been to achieve “information dominance.” In other words, she wanted the Pentagon’s message to get out and crowd out the independent information from others. To do this, the Pentagon recruited retired military officers and fed them select information that was often at odds with reality. Wow! I’m already sounding like a spin doctor. What I mean in the earlier sentence is that the Pentagon lied.
The payoff for many of these retired officers was that various “defense” contractors for whom they worked got a better shot at military contracts. [Why "defense" in quotation marks? Because most of what the Department of Defense does has nothing to do with defense: it's offense, much of which makes us less safe.]
Interestingly, some of the retired military knew they were being lied to and passed the information on as truth nevertheless. In other words, they lied. One, General Paul E. Vallely, a FOX News analyst from 2001 to 2007, stated, ““I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south [in Iraq.]” But on his return, Vallely told FOX’s Alan Colmes, “You can’t believe the progress,” and predicted that the number of insurgents would be “down to a few numbers” within months. Of course, it wasn’t. And it turned out that Vallely didn’t “believe the progress.”
How did they rationalize their lying? Take Timur J. Eads. Please. Eads is “a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.” Eads said he had withheld the truth on television for fear that a four-star general would call and say, “Kill that contract.” I’ve heard of people running from battle because they might be literally killed. And I’m sympathetic. But lying because the consequence of telling the truth is that your employer might lose business and you might get fired? Wowee. Pretty scary.
The whole article is well worth your time.

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money

Tim Swanson — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:13:51 +0000

Senator Everett Dirksen, a hawk during the Vietnam era, is credited with coining the sarcastic phrase.

However, forty years later, it should be updated to read a trillion here and there. For instance, one of the articles highlighted in the Viewpoints section today details the ever expanding blackhole that is the accounting system(s) used by the Defense of Defense: “The Pentagon’s $1 Trillion Problem.”

It is arguably a depressing piece if for no other reason than to serve as a sobering update to a 3-year-old SFGate report, “Military waste under fire - $1 trillion missing.”

While the details of either investigation may not surprise the readers of AWC, the fact that these problems not only continue but geometrically grow could arguably serve as yet another empirical case-study of how socialism cannot calculate. The military, a bastion for the purest form of socialism, has neither the incentive, the knowledge, nor the ability to price goods and services — let alone produce accurate records of its own nefarious activities.

In many cases it is the sole consumer of vehicles and armaments whose existence is entirely alien to the market-based world that must satisfy wants and needs by providing useful and productive services to potential customers.

And in other instances its insatiable appetite distorts the market-clearing price for commonly used goods such as oil.

Even if a unified, common accounting system was implemented, institutional inertia comprised by secret committees, kleptocratic planners, and politically-controlled technocrats will perpetually fail to coordinate a Byzantine bureaucracy that inherently cannot communicate or calculate.

And there is little reason to believe that the engine for state growth - the health of the state - will be muted or diminished in the coming decades.

See also: Socialism, by Ludwig von Mises
The Security-Industrial-Congressional Complex, by Robert Higgs