With the Largest, Most Expensive Military in the World, America Can’t Produce the Weapons It Needs for the Future.

The congressionally approved military budget for 2025 amounts to $883.7 billion dollars, or 53% of all discretionary spending. One can go nuts trying to decipher what portions of the U.S. budget are mandatory and which are discretionary, but I will do my best.

Of $3.8 trillion in mandatory federal spending, the majority went to Medicare, Medicaid, interest of the national debt and Social Security. Add to that, support assistance programs like unemployment and SNAP, retirement programs for civilians and military personnel, and veteran support programs. It’s a bunch, about 60% of the total, and can’t be messed with.

The rest is discretionary, such things as R&D for agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy Office of Science, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and National Science Foundation. Agricultural subsidies get a bunch, as well as education, highways, the electric grid and other infrastructure. Stuff that hasn’t yet fallen apart doesn’t get much attention in a Congress where elections are always a first concern.

In a national economy where the military takes up all the oxygen, why are we short of weapons?

More weapons wouldn’t have defeated enemies in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. We dumped more junk on the Vietnamese than in the entire Second World War, but still left in shame, hanging off the helicopters we ran off in.

We spent twenty years and $2.3 trillion in Afghanistan and beat a retreat, leaving $7 billion in military equipment behind for the Taliban.

The entire Marshall Plan that rebuilt a destroyed Europe after World War Two, cost $150–$173 billion in today’s money

The cost of our four lost wars during the reign of the Military-Industrial Complex amounts to $4 trillion. That’s twenty-three times the total of what Harry Truman and George Marshall spent to rebuild a destroyed Europe and Japan.

No matter, it seems the Pentagon is going begging, hat-in-hand, to Australia and Great Britain for weapons. This is the same same Pentagon that has been unable to confirm a congressional audit for a single year of their existence. They’re not off by a few thousand bucks, they can't account for 63% of nearly $4 trillion in assets. Part of what Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, called “known unknowns.”

Is it possible we’ve been on the wrong path for the past six decades?

Is it conceivable that spending to build is more cost effective (by 2300%), and popular than spending to destroy?

I know that may not be the mind-set in those industries that make enormous profits from selling us shit that doesn’t work, but 40,000 Palestinians might be alive today and feeding their lost and crippled children, if we hadn’t cheered on Netanyahu in his criminal activity. Perhaps we do not need more failed peace accords. America might have a far better image in the Middle East if we had gone ahead and built a prosperous Palestine. Yeah, us, all by ourselves.

Essentially, we might stop trying to beat two intransigent enemies into an agreement neither wants, in order to build the dream in one and caution the other to shut the hell up. The Arab states want a prosperous Palestine. Why not let them have it?

This is not pie in the sky, it’s a helping hand where one is needed

We must stop selling the world guns and hoping no one shoots. We tested the Marshall Plan template sixty years ago and then forgot the recipe. Albert Einstein said, “doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result, is madness.”

We’ve been doing just that, a madness proven just as he predicted. But it remains the theory of the military-industrial crowd that arming the world will bring peace (along with enormous profits). Einstein had something to say about that as well.

“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d be willing to sign up for that.