By Caitlin Johnstone
The US Senate has passed its National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA) military spending bill
for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget
at an astronomical
$778 billion by a vote of
89 to 10. The bill has already been passed
by the House, now requiring only the president’s
signature. An amendment to cease facilitating
Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in Yemen was
stripped from the bill.
“The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page
military spending bill were negotiated behind closed
doors and passed the House mere hours after it was
made public, meaning members of Congress couldn’t
possibly have read the whole thing before casting
their votes,” reads a
Politico article on the bill’s passage by
Lindsay Koshgarian, William Barber II and Liz
Theoharis.
The US military had a budget of $14
billion for its scaled-down Afghanistan
operations in the fiscal year of 2021, down from $17
billion in 2020. If the US military budget behaved
normally, you’d expect it to come down by at least
$14 billion in 2022 following the withdrawal of US
troops and official end of the war in Afghanistan.
Instead, this new $778 billion total budget is a
five percent increase from the previous
year.
“Months after US President Joe Biden’s
administration pulled the last American troops out
of Afghanistan as part of his promise to end the
country’s ‘forever wars’, the United States Congress
approved a $777.7bn defence budget, a five percent
increase from last year,” Al Jazeera
reports.
“For the last 20 years, we heard that the
terrorist threat justified an ever-expanding budget
for the Pentagon,” Win Without War executive
director Stephen Miles told Al Jazeera. “As the war
in Afghanistan has ended and attention has shifted
towards China, we’re now hearing that that threat
justifies it.”
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Upon the removal of US troops from Afghanistan,
President Biden
said the following in August:
“After more than $2 trillion spent in
Afghanistan — a cost that researchers at Brown
University estimated would be over $300 million
a day for 20 years in Afghanistan — for two
decades — yes, the American people should hear
this: $300 million a day for two decades. If you
take the number of $1 trillion, as many say,
that’s still $150 million a day for two
decades. And what have we lost as a consequence
in terms of opportunities? I refused to
continue in a war that was no longer in the
service of the vital national interest of our
people.”
You would think a government so grieved over the
loss of “opportunities” for the American people due
to Afghanistan war spending would be eager to begin
allocating that wealth toward providing
opportunities to Americans at the end of that war.
Instead, more wealth has been diverted to
the US war machine.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp
reports:
The NDAA passage comes amid heightened
tensions between the US and Russia, and the bill
includes $300 million for military aid to
Ukraine, $50 million more than what the Pentagon
requested. According to The Wall Street
Journal, at least $75 million of the
Ukraine aid will be “lethal,” meaning it will be
spent on offensive weapons, such as Javelin
anti-tank missiles the US has already provided
to Kyiv.
With the Pentagon focused on countering
China, the NDAA includes $7.1
billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI).
The PDI is meant to build up US forces in the
Asia Pacific to better confront China. Part of
the plan is to establish a
network of long-range missiles near China’s
coast.
Americans are being scammed.
A sane military (if there is such a thing) would
be bolstered in times when a nation needs to defend
itself and scaled down during peacetime. With the US
military it’s completely backwards: it’s taken as a
given that the budget must keep expanding, and then
reasons are made up to justify doing so by making
“peacetime” nonexistent. The military budget isn’t
set to serve existing conditions, conditions are set
to serve the military budget.
Before it was the Russians and the Chinese it was
terrorists, and before it was terrorists it was the
Soviets. After the fall of the USSR, there emerged a
popular notion of a “peace
dividend” in which defense spending could be
reduced in the absence of America’s sole rival and
the abundant excess funds used to take care of the
American people instead. The only problem was that a
lot of people had gotten very rich and powerful as a
result of that cold war defense spending, and that
money and power was used at some key points of
influence. Less than three months after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union we learned of
the Wolfowitz Doctrine from
The New York
Times saying the US had resolved to prevent the
rise of another superpower at all cost, and a few
years later the neocons found their way into the
George W Bush administration to usher in an
unprecedented new era of military expansionism and
wars of aggression.
The military-industrial complex Eisenhower
warned about in his farewell address as
president became inevitable as soon as the US
government espoused imperialist ambitions. War
profiteering is what you get when you mix capitalism
with a globe-spanning power structure that must
labor continuously to maintain unipolar planetary
domination, which can only be done with ceaseless
violence and the threat thereof. It was inevitable
that an industry would not only arise to meet that
demand, but begin using the wealth it generates to
push for more warmongering. The war industry
surfs on the war-fueled empire like dolphins on the
wake of a freight ship, except in this case the
dolphins are also able to help propel and steer the
ship.
And meanwhile that insane, mindless juggernaut is
hurtling toward a direct confrontation with Russia
and China, who are
growing increasingly intimate and unified
against their common enemy. These are forming
the head of a
rapidly coalescing group of powers who have
refused to be absorbed into the folds of the
US-centralized power alliance, and you don’t have to
be a historian to understand that world powers
splitting into two increasingly hostile alliance
groups can lead some very ugly places. Especially
now in the age of nuclear weapons.
And meanwhile that insane, mindless juggernaut is
hurtling toward a direct confrontation with Russia
and China, who are
growing increasingly intimate and unified
against their common enemy. These are forming
the head of a
rapidly coalescing group of powers who have
refused to be absorbed into the folds of the
US-centralized power alliance, and you don’t have to
be a historian to understand that world powers
splitting into two increasingly hostile alliance
groups can lead some very ugly places. Especially
now in the age of nuclear weapons.
The human species has some very daunting tests
ahead of it. I hope we pass.
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