Them Vultures Robbin’ Everything, Leave Nothin’ but Chains

That five-sided fist-a-gon

That rotten sore on the face of Mother Earth gets bigger

The trigger’s cold, empty your purse

– RATM

In defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of conversation. Americans should not confuse that talk with reality. Any cuts exacted will at most reduce the rate of growth. The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history.

The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War — this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a “peer competitor.” Evil Empire? It exists only in the fevered imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a rust-bucket Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously the ravings of radical Islamists promising from deep inside their caves to unite the Umma in a new caliphate.

…The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.

But let’s not fail to mention an overemphasis on military expenditures and unused industrial areas, Orlov insisted, describing them as mis-investments made by both empires.

“To this day, the former Soviet Union is littered with abandoned or semi-abandoned industrial sites just as the United States is,” he noted.

By Orlov’s estimation, the US military will never voluntarily quit being the world’s largest oil consumer and largest polluter. Moreover, any plans suggested to the military to end its oil dependency in 30 years are an act of “desperation,” he said.

“They have set their hair on fire and are running around in circles. That’s their drill right now,” Orlov quipped.