Former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev urged Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to ban nuclear war in a TIME op-ed, lamenting the “militarization of politics” and indicating a “special responsibility” for the two leaders in preventing a new world war. However, Trump has committed to an enormous military spending binge in campaign statements and an executive order signed Friday.
Gorbachev effectively presided over the Soviet Union from 1985 until it collapsed in 1991. In 1986, the Soviet Union agreed to an arms reduction treaty with the US, and in 1988 abandoned the disastrous proxy war in Afghanistan fought against the CIA-supported mujahideen, members of whom later formed al-Qaeda, a group the CIA would find itself fighting less than a decade later.
Via Mises.org:
Meanwhile, the Pentagon doesn’t know what happened to more than six trillion dollars spent in recent years. And, the Pentagon’s own report admits the Pentagon wasted $125 billion (more than one-sixth of an entire year’s budget) in “administrative waste.” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As the Fiscal Times notes, “The Pentagon has never completed an audit of how they actually spend the trillions of dollars on wars, equipment, personnel, housing, healthcare and procurements.”
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Although defense spending has been falling since 2010, it remains in real terms well above where it was in the 1980s, back when the CIA was telling us how the Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse.
Unfortunately, in his effort to raise military spending above even the all-time highs, McCain may gain some traction with the Trump administration, because Trump himself has called for even more military spending.
Among Trump’s pet projects, it seems, is his call for big increases in spending on the Navy and other forces that are allegedly in decline. Back in September, Trump was already calling for a major military buildup in both personnel and naval equipment.
Via Washington Post:
Trump’s proposals for the military during his presidential campaign were drawn heavily from the conservative Heritage Foundation, and could cost between $55 billion and $90 billion per year, according to outside experts. The plan included adding tens of thousands of soldiers until the service reaches 540,000, expanding the Navy’s fleet to have at least 350 ships, adding about 100 Air Force fighter or attack jets until the service reaches 1,200, and increasing the number of Marine Corps infantry battalions from 24 to 36, which would include thousands of Marines.
The growth would have the most significant short-term effects on the Army, which shrunk under President Barack Obama from 540,000 soldiers in 2013 to 470,465 at the end of November — the smallest number since before World War II. Obama wanted to shrink the Army even more to 450,000 soldiers by fall 2018, but Congress stopped that with a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that directed the Army to grow to 476,000 this year.
Maj. Gen. John G. Ferrari, the Army’s director of program analysis and evaluation, said in an interview that his service is “shovel-ready” for growth in part because of the way it downsized. For instance, rather than completely ending the manufacturing of weapons like the M1 Abrams tank, the service continued to buy them in small quantities so the Army could keep open its plant in Lima, Ohio.
“We made some calculated decisions, the Army did, on how we were going to get smaller,” Ferrari said. “We really looked at how we were going to scale down so that we could scale up again.”
