"Why Trump's America First Doesn't
Require a $1 Trillion National Security Budget"
by David Stockman
Excerpt: "If Donald Trump’s "America First" focused foreign policy means anything at all, it’s that the current $1 trillion national security budget is double the size that a muscular homeland defense shield actually requires. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in relentless pursuit of its own self-serving aggrandizement, the military/industrial/intelligence complex has massively inflated America’s Warfare State into an "extra-large" when what is really needed in the world of 2024 is a snug-fitting "small."
The basis for that stunning disconnect goes back deep into cold war history and its aftermath. The post-WWII policy of collective security, extensive alliances through NATO and its regional clones and globe-spanning military power projection capabilities and a network of 750 foreign bases was an epic historical mistake. It fostered the opposite of America First and permanently broke faith with Thomas Jefferson’s wise admonition urging, "…peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none."
At length, Washington became the War Capital of the World and the seat of an Empire First policy regime embraced by both elected officialdom and the multitudinous nomenklatura of the Warfare State that took up permanent residence on the banks of the Potomac. In fact, the Empire First policy regime became so deeply-rooted that even 33 years after the Soviet Union disappeared into the dustbin of history, it refuses to go quietly into the good night.
The reason, of course, is that America’s elephantine Warfare State never was grounded in an objective external threat. Even during Soviet times, the exaggerated girth of America’s military machine was based on vast threat inflations emanating from a resource-heavy national security bureaucracy seeking to secure its own future funding and to relentlessly expand its missions and remit.
That Washington’s trillion-dollar Warfare State is rooted in internal self-perpetuation rather than external threats is evident from the post-cold war dog that didn’t bark. That is, the Soviet archives are now open, but there’s absolutely nothing there to validate the cold war axiom that the Soviet Union - along with the affiliated menace of Maoist China - was hell-bent on world military domination, starting with western Europe, Japan and then extending to the lesser lands all around them.
In fact, the Soviet archives make clear that Moscow never had a plan or even faint aspiration to fortify and offensively unleash the Red Army toward Bonn, Paris and London. The closest thing to a plan for military mobilization westward was the "Seven Days to the Rhine" blueprint, but that was a defensive action plan explicitly formulated as a contingency plan to respond to a theoretical NATO first strike.
According to the plan, if NATO were to launch a nuclear attack on Poland, the Warsaw Pact would respond with a massive counterattack aimed at quickly overwhelming NATO forces in Western Europe. The goal was to reach the Rhine River within seven days, effectively splitting Europe and preventing NATO reinforcements from reaching the front lines in Eastern Europe and potentially embarking upon yet a fourth post-1800 invasion of Mother Russia.
Indeed, what the Soviet archives actually show is not the deliberations of a menacing Colossus, but the record of a chronic struggle to hold together with economic bailing-wire and bubble-gum a lumbering communist state that didn’t function and couldn’t last.
Nevertheless, it was the false fear of a red tide descending over Europe and ultimately the Western Hemisphere, too, that enabled Empire First to trump the natural and proper tendency of Washington politicians and policy-makers to retreat behind America’s secure ocean moats after WWII. In fact, for a brief interlude a sweeping military demobilization did occur, when the peak $83 billion defense budget of 1945 plunged to just $9 billion by 1948.
But that sensible attempt for the second time in the 20th Century at post-war demobilization and a return to peacetime normalcy was reversed in 1949 when the Soviet Union got the A-bomb, and Mao won the civil war in China. Thereafter, the spread of bases, troops, alliances, interventions and Forever Wars proceeded relentlessly on the grounds that the rickety communist states domiciled in Moscow and Beijing posed an existential threat to America’s survival.
They did not. Not by a long shot. As the great Senator Robert Taft held at the time, the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with - An overwhelming strategic nuclear retaliatory capacity that would have deterred any possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail.
A Fortress America conventional defense of the continental shorelines and air space that would have been exceedingly easy to stand up, given that the Soviet Union had no Navy worth speaking of and China had devolved into industrial and agricultural anarchy owing to Mao’s catastrophic experiments with collectivization.
That eminently correct Taftian framework never did change through the end of the Cold War in 1991, even as the technology of nuclear and conventional warfare evolved apace. For modest military spending Washington could have kept its nuclear deterrent fully effective and maintained a formidable Fortress America defense of the homeland without any of the apparatus of Empire and no American boots on foreign soil, at all. And after 1991, the requirement would have been even less demanding.
In fact, the case for a true America First policy - that is, returning to the 1948 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture - has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades. That’s because in today’s world, the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear blackmail. That is to say, the threat of an adversary with a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal and effective that it could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.
Fortunately, there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first. After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s - all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.
For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.
So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located and neutralized before any would be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the "Where’s Waldo?" aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find or take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.
And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, thereby further compounding and complicating an adversary’s First Strike calculus.
Needless to say, there is no way, shape or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case for drastically downsizing America’s military muscle. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.
That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget as detailed on a system-by-system basis in the table below. Thus, in 2023 the nuclear triad itself cost just $28 billion plus another $24 billion for related stockpiles and command, control and warning infrastructure.
Moreover, the key component of this nuclear deterrent - the sea-based ballistic missile force - is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade. That’s only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline for that period."
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