Defund Pentagon!
The defense budget drama has always been of interest to residents of Del Norte, Humboldt and Mendocino counties: the U.S. Navy’s nursery lies only 12 miles off our coast. This is where many of the weapons take their first baby steps of testing before deployment. As a requirement for approval of the Navy’s Environmental Impact Statement regarding these exercises, the Navy consults us every few years. This opportunity to confront Navy personnel has provided an opportunity to become acquainted with the environmental effects of these weapons, and, just as importantly, the menace their everincreasing lethality constitutes for life on earth.
Knowledge confers responsibility.
The messy, scrappy, unsatisfying, asymmetrical wars in the devastated Middle East have lost the interest of our warriors. Two worthier adversaries, China and Russia, have been conjured up. Although our budget comprises over 40% of the world’s military spending, and China and Russia spend one-sixth and one-tenth of ours, the Pentagon refer to them generously as “near-peers.”
China and Russia are not eager for these roles. We have had to prick them, like reluctant bulls in a ring: sailing warships within 12 miles of their shores, conducting military exercises in the South China Sea, Black Sea, and close to their borders, reviling them in the media, sanctions. They’re obliged to respond. Trump’s assertion that “we live in a hostile world of evolving threats” neglects to mention that we provoke those threats.
The National Defense Strategy of “full-spectrum dominance” requires military superiority on land, at sea, in the air and in outer space. Therefore, in anticipation of a “high-end” war with these “near-peers,” an exciting upgrade of our arsenals has been requested.
In preparation for seizing this dominance, in spite of entreaties from the United Nations, allies, and Russia and China themselves, we have withdrawn from multiple treaties: the Iran Nuclear Deal (2018), the U.N. Human Rights Council (2018), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF 2019), and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (2020). We will break the Open Skies Treaty in six months and will allow the START treaty to expire in 2021.
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 has been broken, in spirit at least, by the creation of the Space Force. VP Pence refused to say whether or not nukes would be deployed, an explicit violation.
According to the president, “if you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. It is not enough to have American presence in space, we must have dominance in space, … the ultimate high ground.”
Treaties stand in the way of our freedom to act.
We are bent on an aggressive upgrade of armaments, and will purchase tantalizing new technology: hypersonic weapons capable of speeds of 15,000 mph, awe-inspiring artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, 5G, “low yield” nuclear weapons, dramatic advances in cyberspace, and microelectronics which operate more swiftly by many orders of magnitude. For outer space, we have developed, in President Trump’s words, “some of the most incredible weapons anyone has ever seen.”
Defense Secretary Esper is enthusiastic about unmanned surface and subsurface vessels, some mounted with guns, some with cross-domain capacity for air land sea and undersea activities. Exercises employing unmanned killer robot surface combatants, swarms of which the Navy is eager to deploy, will likely take place off our coasts.
Congressional reaction to previous budgets has been typically ruinous. The 2020 military budget passed with only four senators and 48 representatives voting against.
It would not even take the AUMF, or complete freedom to attack, away from our unpredictable president.
The way we treat the rest of the world contains many of the same elements as the racism and violence the demonstrations in the streets are denouncing. The U.S. military has its knee on the throat of the world. We must stop being paralyzed by the shapeshifting enemy with which our overlords bewitch us, with their lies of “they hate our freedoms” or “they want to destroy our democracy.” Defund the Pentagon!
It would save millions of lives.
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 has been broken, in spirit at least, by the creation of the Space Force.