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4. NATIONAL SECURITY: Arms & Immigration
PENTAGON & EMPIRE: written by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

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Peter Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

PENTAGON & EMPIRE:

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

Bill’s already told you about the disaster that is the defense budget. The related disaster I want to tell you about is the disaster of empire.

That is what America is today. In fact, I would assert that we are not the “new Rome.” We are the new empire in the world that history has never seen. We are not merely the “new Rome” but outdo Rome in historical-relative terms by a large magnitude. We have 750 and counting outposts in the world. The rest of the world—to give you some comparison, including Russia and China—has less than ninety.

In addition, we maintain some 150 “installations” and “bases.” Take Norway, for example, where the people are basically opposed to having U.S. military bases in their country. But given situations like the present crisis in Ukraine, the Pentagon simply builds the bases on existing Norwegian bases…and then don’t categorize them as military installations or bases. They will be “military facilities” that the U. S. maintains on Norwegian bases.

As a military professional for thirty-one years—and having served at the top of the military structure, if you will, with Chairman Powell for four years—I can tell you we could cut that entire overseas base budget by 75 percent tomorrow and not reduce our ability to project power or to maintain the security of the United States in any serious way.

Another emerging problem is something that the Pentagon is only now recognizing and something I’ve been working on, so far to no avail—that is the dissolution of the all-volunteer force, by which I mean the way we populate our military is falling apart. Recently, the Pentagon has acknowledged that recruiting shortfalls are so dramatic that they currently lack plans for how to find service people in the near future. For now, it’s paying bonuses up to $50,000 in order to sign up an instrument or a mortarman; the Air Force is paying $25-$30,000 in order to get people. As for the Navy, the idea that we could have a 355 ship fleet is ludicrous. We could build the ships, but we wouldn’t have the men and women to people them, to command them, to sail them.

Here’s some simple arithmetic: every year the Pentagon must recruit approximately 150,000 new service members in order to stay viable in its armed forces. Every year, approximately 4 million Americans turn eighteen years of age, 23 percent of whom can meet the minimum standards for military service (taking into account obesity, intellectual incapacity, criminal records, and so forth). That’s about 920,000 people.

This deficiency has only gotten worse with these endless, stupid wars we’ve been prosecuting. One major negative impact is on military families themselves, who previously have been the richest environment from which to recruit. They are now increasingly recommending that their children not serve—do not enlist, do not take that bonus. That’s really hurting recruitment. Of those 920,000 then, only 9 percent are motivated to serve, leaving approximately 83,000 both able and willing to serve. That’s a shortfall of 67,000 troops a year. This is a catastrophe.

At the same time that the all-volunteer force is becoming unsustainable, no one appears to be confronting this situation and foreign policy has become increasingly militarized. In fact, along with sanctions, military force is about all the United States has offered the world in the past twenty-plus years. But a new emerging threat might ironically energize recruitment to combat what is coming at us like a freight train—the climate crisis. We’re going to need recruits for all manner of missions from fighting forest fires that have dramatically increased, to dealing with inundated coastlines, including military installations, and to delivering medical care across our own country and the globe We’re the only country in the world that can project that sort of power to move medical care, whether it’s a hospital ship or a disaster relief operation by the Marine Corps.

We’re also going to need them for refugee control—some of the simulations we’ve run have shown 500-600 million-plus refugees in the world by mid-century or earlier; we already have 175 million refugees in the world right now, so a half-billion refugees is not improbable. So we’re either going to have to have a Civilian Conservation Corps like the one set up by Roosevelt, or we’re going to need to have the military vastly increase but with a totally different mission: not killing people on behalf of the state but ensuring our own survival, perhaps our own existence.

To put the current need for some 12 million recruits over ten years in context: in 1944-45 we had 12 million men under arms from a population of 140 million Americans. We have 330 million Americans now so 12 million might sound plausible. But it’s probably just a starting figure in order to deal with the crisis. I’m a member of the Climate and Security Working Group, which is retired DOD, DHS, and NASA professionals, and we all see this as a very serious issue that we’re going to have to deal with urgently. Do we have the courage, plans, concepts, or even the stamina to figure this out for a military that is falling apart?