Chalmers John­son, noted polit­i­cal sci­ence scholar has described in great detail the full extent of the mil­i­tary indus­trial com­plex, its price on the Amer­i­can peo­ple and clearly lays out how our present course is unsus­tain­able. Not only does our mil­i­tary spend­ing exceed that of any other nation on the planet but so also does our trade deficit.

The world’s top 10 mil­i­tary spenders and the approx­i­mate amounts each coun­try cur­rently bud­gets for its mil­i­tary estab­lish­ment are:

1. United States (FY08 bud­get), $623 bil­lion
2. China (2004), $65 bil­lion
3. Rus­sia, $50 bil­lion
4. France (2005), $45 bil­lion
5. Japan (2007), $41.75 bil­lion
6. Ger­many (2003), $35.1 bil­lion
7. Italy (2003), $28.2 bil­lion
8. South Korea (2003), $21.1 bil­lion
9. India (2005 est.), $19 bil­lion
10. Saudi Ara­bia (2005 est.), $18 billion

World total mil­i­tary expen­di­tures (2004 est.), $1,100 bil­lion
World total (minus the United States), $500 billion.

What we have sac­ri­ficed to bring about this self destruc­tive pol­icy amongst other things is man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs. What we now suf­fer is mas­sive depen­dence upon for­eign resources to main­tain our exor­bi­tant mil­i­tary budget.

On May 1, 2007, the Cen­ter for Eco­nomic and Pol­icy Research of Wash­ing­ton, DC, released a study pre­pared by the global fore­cast­ing com­pany Global Insight on the long-term eco­nomic impact of increased mil­i­tary spend­ing. Guided by econ­o­mist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an ini­tial demand stim­u­lus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased mil­i­tary spend­ing turns neg­a­tive. Need­less to say, the US econ­omy has had to cope with grow­ing defense spend­ing for more than 60 years. He found that, after 10 years of higher defense spend­ing, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a base­line sce­nario that involved lower defense spending.

Baker con­cluded:

It is often believed that wars and mil­i­tary spend­ing increases are good for the econ­omy. In fact, most eco­nomic mod­els show that mil­i­tary spend­ing diverts resources from pro­duc­tive uses, such as con­sump­tion and invest­ment, and ulti­mately slows eco­nomic growth and reduces employment.

The US is crum­bling as befit­ting a nation that invests in non pro­duc­tive enter­prises such as defense as opposed to edu­ca­tion, renew­able energy and local man­u­fac­tur­ing and resources man­age­ment. Even Japan, which must import 100% of the raw mate­ri­als required for man­u­fac­tur­ing retains…

$88 bil­lion per year trade sur­plus with the United States and enjoys the world’s second-highest cur­rent account balance.

Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Pow­ers, ( a book rec­om­mended to me by a hand­some and bril­liant young Air Force offi­cer I met while protest­ing at the Pen­ta­gon ), describes how through his­tory how each empire, once it begins to invest so heav­ily in defense is doomed to fall. We have to start work­ing locally, toward cor­rect­ing our own smaller, pos­si­bly more man­age­able trade imbal­ances before the empire crum­bles into dust.