Many of today’s Republihawks are not cast-in-stone neocons. Many of them have been drawn into supporting the hawkish warmongering of the American right through decades of Pentagon-MIC brainwashing (think of all those fighter-jet promo videos that people watch on YouTube), through calculated twisting of core American values by the neocons (e.g. Limbaugh, Kristol, Murdoch) and by 9/11 and the post-9/11 “the terrorists are gonna git ya!” narrative.
The War on Terror was fabricated out of whole cloth just like the War on Drugs on which it is modeled. The wars on terror and drugs are virtual reality at its most virtual and its most real.
Ironically, most of these same Republihawks/wannabe-neocons are also utilitarian mercantilists who mistake themselves and their pet pundits to be advocates of the free market. Fortunately, this gives a tactical opening to pit one contradictory value against another to expose the inherent irrationality of their views.
What I have in mind is making an appeal to military strategy based on economic exhaustion. The advent of total war in the late 19th century arose alongside the modern, democratic state which identified government and society. Every productive capacity of a nation became a tool in the hands of the military complex of that nation and every productive capacity of enemy nations became legitimate targets. The entire productive capacity of a nation was turned to the annihilation of the productive capacity of its enemies.
Total war shows that effective military strategy necessarily entails consideration of the economic staying power of a nation involved in a total war scenario. All this gold-plated defense spending is predicated on the appeal of space-age jet fighters and robotic UAVs to the imaginations of average Americans. The hypothetical, future, comic book war unfolding in the minds of Republihawk Americans between a presently non-existent superpower enemy and the United States military is precisely what makes our $2 trillion war budget, in peacetime, possible.
However, should we ever really be caught in such a conflict (our present foreign policy actions make this ever more likely), the exhaustion of our economy on gold-plated military spending during peacetime will have made us weaker and more susceptible to defeat through economic exhaustion. The reason is in two parts and so simple that it hardly needs to be explained. First, the current levels of military spending are redirecting a significant part of our economic product (as much as 15% of our GDP, which is really much worse than it even sounds) to military spending and this makes us weaker in the event of outbreak of a total war with foreign powers - we’re starting from a position of lower economic growth which means that the enemy can break our economy faster than we can break theirs. Second, the makeup of our military spending is primarily on centrally-controlled, offensive capabilities rather than on distributed, defensive hardening of the American public.
Once hostilities have resumed, the American military will have to either win the war immediately or face eventual defeat as its multi-billion dollar B2 stealth bombers become useless to stop foreign invasion of US cities and foreign takeover of American territory. Our military has long been free of fiscal discipline (the Pentagon announced it had lost track of $2.3 TRILLION on Sep. 10, 2001). Perhaps, despite our military spending being many multiples of that in other countries, we are getting much less for our dollar. If a foreign power (or powers) attacks us and they defend their home territory more cost-effectively, dollar-for-dollar, then we will be less effective in crippling their economy and shutting down their offensive capacity than they will be in crippling our economy and shutting down our offensive capacity. All the technology in the world is of no use if we can’t afford to put fuel in our space-age miracle-aircraft and robotic UAVs that are supposed to be able to slaughter enemy forces in droves because we can’t afford to keep our refineries and oil wells going because our economy has been in a slump and all our oil-hands were laid off years ago and went into different industries (or whatever, the specifics are unimportant).
Utilitarian, nationalist Republihawks should be able to understand that it is in our own interests to squeeze as much defensive value out of each dollar we spend on defense. What if we took some of that $2 trillion defense budget and bought bullet-proof vests for every US citizen? Or what if we followed something similar to the Swiss model and made it easy for interested individuals to go in and get weekend training in exchange for a government-issued AR and Beretta with no contractual commitment to military service for the Pentagon’s adventurist wars? What if we took some of that $2 trillion and spent it on creating, maintaining and staffing home-deployed medical and evacuation units that could evacuate, feed, and medically treat US cities from an invading power? How much offensive, forward-deployed capacity could be eliminated if we did this? If we thought about potential wars from an economic point of view, we could position ourselves to easily economically exhaust any belligerent power without breaking a sweat.
Of course, this is essentially Ron Paul’s message, just translated into other words. A cynical observer might even wonder if our enemies are among the ranks of MIC lobbyists, sapping the economic strength and staying power of the US public, making us more vulnerable to defeat and, therefore, more cooperative with the demands of all the other tyrannies of the world.
Clayton -