Georgia Republicans seeking their party’s U.S. Senate nomination met in Macon over the weekend for a debate. Among other things, they were asked about the potential for the closing or downsizing of Georgia military bases, a crucial issue in the Macon area given the economic importance of nearby Warner Robins Air Force Base.
U.S. Rep. Paul Broun offered his typical rambling, illogical response:
“Under the Constitution, a strong national defense should be what we’re spending money on. And we’re not…. We don’t have enough Marines. We don’t have enough ships in the Navy. We don’t have enough planes in the Air Force. We don’t have enough brigades in the Army. We’re not focusing upon our troops. President Eisenhower warned us of the military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex must stop dictating our military policy.”
Railing against the influence of the military-industrial complex while pledging total loyalty to the agenda of the military-industrial complex — that may make sense inside Broun’s head, but not in mine. And if spending more on defense than the next 14 nations combined — most of whom are our allies, not our enemies — isn’t enough, you have to wonder whether we’re doing something wrong. I know we live in a very dangerous neighborhood, with Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, but how much is more than enough?
And when his turn came, U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston wasn’t to be outdone:
“As somebody who serves on the defense (appropriations) committee and who has represented five out of our eight military installations, I have a consistent record making sure our soldiers, sailors and airmen never have to fight a fair fight … I don’t want to kill a fly with a sledgehammer. I want to kill a fly with five sledgehammers, because you need to be safe, and they need to come home safely.”
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help but hear an unspoken but unmistakable subtext in Kingston’s remarks. If expressed honestly, that subtext would go something like this:
“I want those five sledgehammers as long as at least two of them are built in my district. I want those five sledgehammers even if the Pentagon points out that using sledgehammers to kill flies is pretty darn dumb, and using five sledgehammers to kill a single fly is really really really dumb. I want those five sledgehammers because the defense contractor that builds them contributes heavily to my campaign. I want those five sledgehammers even if they cost 20 times as much as sledgehammers built for the civilian market. And I demand those sledgehammers in the name of patriotism, even as I also demand reductions in the taxes that are needed to pay for them.”
Of course, Democratic politicians are no more honest about the issue than Republicans. Assuming that Michelle Nunn wins her party’s nomination for the Senate, she too will pledge to protect and if possible expand the missions of Georgia military bases, just as her father did during his four-plus terms in the Senate.
However, keeping bases open after they’ve outlived their mission and keeping hugely expensive weapons programs in production long after the weapons have become outmoded is not patriotism. To the contrary, such steps undercut national security by leaching resources that ought to be used for more critical defense needs.
The tank, to cite a prime example, is now considered close to obsolete by the U.S. military. It isn’t quite as outdated as the horse cavalry in World War I, but that’s where it may be headed. The tank is too difficult to deploy quickly, too slow to maneuver and too easily destroyed by modern weaponry. But even though the Pentagon has told Congress that it doesn’t want to spend any more of its budget on building or updating tanks, Congress has insisted, forcing the Defense Department to spend hundreds of millions of dollars that would better be spent elsewhere.
The reason is jobs. Decades of fat budgets have lulled us into treating the Pentagon budget as a federal jobs program poorly disguised as patriotism, and the hypocrisy has gotten a little thick. It leads us to think that we can’t take federal money to buy health care for Georgians, but we will fight like crazy to keep bases that might not be needed or to build weapons our troops can’t use.
