More Than Bombs And Bullets

From 1789 to 1947, the United States had a Department of War. The name was pretty straightforward. The reason for the department was to oversee the war fighting aspects of the United States, starting shortly after the formation of the current U.S. government through the end of World War II. To that point the U.S. in general would sharply curtail the size of the military after fighting a war and then build back up for the next.

That changed around the same time that the War Department was retired in1947 and a new office opened up called the The National Military Establishment which was renamed two years later to the Department of Defense. The final Secretary of War was Kenneth Claiborne Royall who would later be ousted as the Secretary of the Army for refusing to follow Truman’s order to desegregate the Army. History has vindicated Kenneth Royall as the U.S. has not won a near-peer war since the military was racially desegregated.

What changed was that the U.S. went on what was essentially a perpetual war footing from the end of World War II onward. Rather than downsizing, we acted as if we were always at war and did our best to find enemies to defend against. See, now it isn’t about war, it is about “defense”. Ironically we haven’t used our military to defend the actual U.S. since the War Department became the Department of Defense.

Since World War II, the “good war”, we got ourselves into two wars in Asia, first in Korea starting in 1950 and running until 1953 and then in Vietnam in the early 1960s through the fall of Saigon which had it’s 50th anniversary this week, April 30th 1975. We lost both of them.

Of course during all of this time we had the threat of the Soviet Union and nuclear war, with NATO and the Warsaw Pact staring at each other across Europe and smaller shadowy proxy wars occurring all over the globe. That itself provided the pretext for a permanent war footing and enormous spending on behalf of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 we needed a new enemy to justify spending hundreds of billions a year on “defense” and in stepped “militant Islam”. The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 followed by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing helped to pivot the fickle attention of the American people away from Moscow and toward the Middle East. Then came 9/11 and the Global War On Terror (GWOT) and the military-industrial complex was looking at a 20 year stretch of limitless spending.

Something else changed post-World War II. During the Second World War, the war effort was a whole-of-society collective effort. Americans were urged to not eat meat or sugar certain days so it could go to the troops, to collect and recycle metals for the war effort, to grow “Victory Gardens” to allow commercial produce to be sent overseas. The whole nation was deeply involved in the effort even as the war didn’t directly touch mainland U.S. soil.

Korea and Vietnam introduced war as a spectator sport with nightly news footage of the fighting. The first Gulf war gave us live, real-time action. People my age remember the correspondents giving live updates as air raid sirens were going off in Baghdad and the crushing victory of America forces with Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf giving updates like a coach at halftime.

“Defense” became all about the cool toys, cruise missiles and stealth bombers and other hyper-advanced weaponry. That is where we focused our spending and attention and when it failed to account for the savagery of on the ground street fighting like in Mogadishu and Fallujah? Well we just needed even more advanced toys.

While we were told that we needed to “fight them over there so we didn’t have to fight them here”, that excuse grew pretty stale quickly. Either 9/11 was the greatest example of someone getting lucky in human history or there was a lot more going on than just some goat humpers hijacking planes (spoiler: it is the latter). The GWOT was all about military adventures “over there”.

Along the way to where we are today we forgot that defending the nation is far more than just building more and better bombs. For decades we have invested in our enormous carrier fleet that dwarfs the rest of the world combined. Aircraft carriers are not for defending the homeland, they are about projecting power around the globe. Most American military spending is offensive in nature, targeted first at a massive land war in Europe and then shifting to fighting in the Middle East.

That brings me to the point I am trying to make. John Wilder ran a post earlier this week, Tariffs: How’s That Going For You?, looking at tariffs and what they mean on a larger scale. Most people don’t understand the topic at all, it becomes either Orange Man Bad wants tariffs so they are the worst thing ever or Trump says we need tariffs so I am for them. But what is the real point of these tariffs?

While we were building a massive and sustained war machine for fighting in Europe and the Middle East, we permitted our industrial base to be shipped overseas. The same with the pharmaceutical business to the point that we get much of our critically needed meds from overseas from a nation that is our only serious geopolitical rival, one that has designs on pushing the U.S. off our perch as cock of the walk in the Pacific.

Worst of all, our agricultural industry is also deeply infected with Chinese influence. One of America’s greatest strengths is that we are separated from Europe and Asia by oceans and we have some of the world’s most productive farm ground in unparalleled quantity. We can raise enough food to feed everyone in America and then some. Not to mention our access to natural resources like coal, iron, copper and petroleum.

As Germany learned twice last century, having an awesome army isn’t worth much if you can’t feed your people or fuel your Panzers.

The Big Idea of tariffs as I understand it is to reorient the global marketplace away from Americans as consumers and Asians as producers and back to a place where most of the goods in the American marketplace are made in America. Will that cause goods to cost more? Yes it will. Then again are we really benefitting from cheaper goods when they don’t last? I often order shoes for Amish kids, from Nikes to Skechers, and they are junk no matter the price. I remember my dad, who wore suits to work as a doctor every day, wearing the same dress shoes for most of the years I was growing up because they lasted. Would a well made shoe that lasts for years cost more? Sure but is it really cheaper to keep buying new shoes that come apart after six months?

Shoes are one thing but what about critical infrastructure like power transformers? Or the steel to make new tanks? Oil and coal to drive those tanks and keep the lights on at home?

Of course this also means controlling who comes into your country and who is living here. Right now we can level entire cities anywhere in the world without breaking a sweat but we can’t even account for the tens of millions of people living in our own cities illegally.

Real national defense starts with being able to provide for your own people. That is far more important than the precious GDP or the quarterly profits of some globohomo corporation. A nation that is self-sufficient is much harder to manipulate than one dependent on rivals and adversaries for essential goods. An America that makes our own stuff, secures our borders and controls who lives here and only spends half of our current military budget is far more secure than a nation with a trillion dollar military budget that can’t make socks or pills.