Letters to the Editor
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Standing Armies
What's to come to terms with? The Pentagon is the mightiest socialist institution on the planet, offering generous, egalitarian benefits to its members that, if it weren't directed entirely to the art of warfare, would infuriate conservatives as "Big Government" in action. Although the Bush League has certainly tried to bring capitalism to the military by way of privatization, it works best as a socialist system, as our problems in Afghanistan and Iraq attest. The following worries more than it reassures...
Recent polls suggest that Americans trust the military roughly three times as much as they trust the president and five times as much as their elected representatives in Congress. The tenacity of this trust is both striking and disturbing.
Isn't that how banana republics come about, how coups inevitably occur? The other institutions corrode into irrelevance and the only institution left with any semblance of credibility is the military, and eventually the military decides that the best way to fix the society is to take it over.
No doubt that's why the Founding Fathers were so fearful of standing armies -- once you get them, you can't get rid of them, and they're likelier than ever to get rid of you. They will stand, demanding ever-larger stores of "blood and treasure" until the society falls under the weight of them, or else be ruled by them. None other than James Madison offered a prophetic warning on it...
A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.... Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
We're well along that path, to the point that our military is "the indispensable institution" in our country. I doubt even if progressives were in power, that they would have any ability to stop its course. We've been on a permanent wartime footing since the Korean War; we're not going to stop any time soon.
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A few problems with those lines of argument.
First of all, the strawman argument in the third paragraph is strained. It's pretty easy for someone, of any political bent, to create a caricature of his or her opponent.
I was pleased to see the article admit that women are underrepresented, but what about homosexuals? Can an institution really be called egalitarian when it refuses to allow a segment of our population to serve openly? I think the article does not mention this because it completely undercuts the argument.
I liked the argument that liberals need to make an alternative. Of course we already have. They're called Americorps and the Peace Corps. Both were instituted by liberal American presidents. They need more funding and more attention but they're still around.
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US Military Budget
The US Military Budget is greater than the rest of the world's military budgets combined. The US economy cannot sustain this much money going to make things then blowing them up. China and Russia's military budgets together are about 25% of the US budget.
THIS is why I want to knock the budget down. I don't want to "disarm" the military. I want a sensible budget. It is the second largest item on our annual budget. Know what's third? INTEREST on our National Debt ($429 billion). One third of which belongs to Bush and the Neocons.
With this kind of money, the problem is not a monetary one, it is a MANAGERIAL one.
HEY MILITARY! LEARN TO MANAGE YOUR MONEY AND YOUR PRIORITIES. I am expected to manage mine. Generals have ZERO idea how to manage theirs. Well, I am wrong on that. They manage by going to the Congress and WHINING.
Oh, yeah... "Least elitist, most diverse"... well, except for the rich. I noticed the symp who wrote this forgot to mention the really rich. They don't join. They have better things to do. Like hire mercenaries.
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As much as I wish it not to be so...
...we have real enemies, and need people who are seen by them as impossibly dangerous to their designs.
Our military has, for the most part, served the US well, in good times and bad. War is a nasty business, and while we must never choose it as a first course of action, sometimes circumstances leave us no choice. Then, we need professionalism and dedication.
From Lao Tzu:
"Weapons are instruments of fear, they are not a wise man's tools. He uses them only when he has no choice. Peace and quiet are dear to his heart,
And victory no cause for rejoicing. If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing."
Adding to that would be presumption on my part.
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Just to clarify...
John Kerry might not be a superb public speaker, but he definitely wasn't insulting the troops. As he explained later, the line he spoke was supposed to read (before he mangled it), "Education -- if you make the most of it and you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get *us* stuck in Iraq."
A reference to Bush, not to our men and women in uniform.
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Way to do Fox News job for them!
This article had every liberal stereotype the right wing ever concocted, right down to the ever popular catch phrases "elitist" and "academia"! This article works from the assumption that every progressive has a problem with the military, exactly what the right wants to see. The truth is I have no opinion on the military other then that every country needs one of some sort.
I think our buggest complaint is how it's used, as a conquering force for big business such as with the war in Iraq. Or to prop up a double standard foriegn policy such as with Israel and Palestine or China and Cuba. Something that is hardly the military's fault. That is a huge difference then simply saying we have problem with it or, as this article suggests, believing we think that everyone who joins is some kind of knuckledragger!
The right wing isn't very smart as is, let's not make their job any easier.
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My take...
I agree with most of this article. For what it's worth, I spent five years in the Marines, then got out and started using my GI bill money. Now I'm a year into my PhD, so I've seen both of the environments being compared. Racially and class-wise, the military is way more diverse, and it remains one of the best ways for those from the "wrong" demographics (read: poor people) to travel the world or get an education. I certainly couldn't have done either without it.
That being said, I think the SYSTEM of the military is incredibly flawed. Military recruitment operates on the same incentive/punishment system as commission sales, but the shark-like recruiters (who had been good marines and good guys before they got into the recruiting gig) almost exclusively target naive kids who are finishing high school. Is it any wonder that they can trick these poor guys and girls with a sales pitch depicting the military as a good way to party, get laid, and be macho?
This wouldn't be such an atrocity, in my opinion, if the military wasn't contract-based, and the contracts weren't years long. In some other countries, there are no contracts. The soldiers get a pension based on how long they've served. This seems like a better setup to me, with some reasonable policies in place to keep everyone from quitting as soon as there is some fighting to do.
By the way, since I've left the marines, I've become pretty left-wing, but it still pisses me off when people disparage the troops because they're frustrated with the war or the current administration. I haven't seen it much--certainly not as bad as I've read Vietnam was--but I've seen it on campus a little bit, and on some blogs, and it seems to be getting worse.
Sorry to hijack the thread with my long-winded soap-box.
Ike