U.S. Military Spending Dwarfs Rest Of World

The $682 billion spent by the U.S. in 2012, according to the Office of Management and Budget, was more than the combined military spending of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil — which spent $652 billion, according to the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database.

The CIA 'Manages' Mexico's Drug Trade

Spokesman For Chihuahua State Says US Agencies Don't Want To End Drug Trade

The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers", a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead "they try to manage the drug trade".

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico's most violent states - one which directly borders Texas - going on the record with such accusations is unique.

"It's like pest control companies, they only control," Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, told Al Jazeera last month at his office in Juarez. "If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs."

"The war on drugs is an illusion," Hugo Almada Mireles,professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez and author of several books, told Al Jazeera. "It's a reason to intervene in Latin America."

"The CIA wants to control the population; they don't want to stop arms trafficking to Mexico, look at [Operation] Fast and Furious,” he said, referencing a botched US exercise where automatic weapons were sold to criminals in the hope that security forces could trace where the guns ended up.

The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms lost track of 1,700 guns as part of the operation, including an AK-47 used in 2010 the murder of Brian Terry, a Customs and Border Protection Agent.  

"It's true, they want to control it," a mid-level official with theSecretariat Gobernacion in Juarez, Mexico's equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security, told Al Jazeera of the CIA and DEA's policing of the drug trade. The officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he knew the allegations to be correct, based on discussions he had with US officials working in Juarez.

Jesús Zambada Niebla, a leading trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel currently awaiting trial in Chicago, has said he was working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency during his days as a trafficker, and was promised immunity from prosecution.

"Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of [Jesus Zambada's] father, Ismael Zambada and 'Chapo' Guzmán were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tonnes of illicit drugs... into... the United States, and were protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels," Zambada's lawyers wrote as part of his defence. "Indeed, the Unites States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel."


The Sinaloa cartel is Mexico's oldest and most powerful trafficking organisation, and some analysts believe security forces in the US and Mexico favour the group over its rivals.

Joaquin "El Chapo", the cartel's billionaire leader and one of the world's most wanted men, escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 by sneaking into a laundry truck - likely with collaboration from guards - further stoking rumours that leading traffickers have complicit friends in high places.

"It would be easy for the Mexican army to capture El Chapo," Mireles said. "But this is not the objective." He thinks the authorities on both sides of the border are happy to have El Chapo on the loose, as his cartel is easier to manage and his drug money is recycled back into the broader economy. Other analysts consider this viewpoint a conspiracy theory and blame ineptitude and low level corruption for El Chapo's escape, rather than a broader plan from government agencies.

"There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking," US Senator John Kerry said at the time, in response to the series.

Under the Merida Initiative, the US Congress has approved more than $1.4bn in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges.  

More than 55,000 people have died in drug related violence in Mexico since December 2006. Privately, residents and officials across Mexico's political spectrum often blame the lethal cocktail of US drug consumption and the flow of high-powered weapons smuggled south of the border for causing much of the carnage.

Via: "Al-Jazeera"

4 Contradictions In Obama’s New Defense Plan

By Spencer Ackerman 
January 6, 2012 | 6:30 am 
Courtesy Of "Wired Magazine"


Many of the key points in President Obama’s new blueprint for the next decade of U.S. defense strategy are straightforward. More spy gear; more special forces; fewer land wars; Asia, Asia, Asia. Whatever you think of the merits of those points, at least they’re internally consistent.

Others… not so much.

Sometimes the analysis in the strategy suggests a policy choice that the strategy actually disavows. Sometimes it walks back controversial points. Sometimes it makes pledges that sound sensible at first blush — but don’t actually make sense the more you think about them. Here are four of the most glaring contradictions within the strategy.

The Military Should Leave Europe (But Won’t). The whole point of the new plan is to build “the joint force of 2020, a force sized and shaped differently than the military of the Cold War,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta boasted Thursday. But the U.S. just can’t vacate the Cold War’s primary battlefield: Europe. In fact, the plan makes a strong case for the Army to take its brigades home. “Most European countries are now producers of security rather than consumers of it,” the strategy says, bolstered byNATO’s success in Libya.

But the Pentagon won’t take its own advice. The closest it comes is to pledge that the military’s force structure in Europe will “evolve.” Asked if that means the U.S. will pull out of Europe 20 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Panetta replied, “Not only are we going to continue our commitments there, but we are going to maintain the kind of innovative presence there that we think will make clear to Europe, and those to those who have been our strong allies in the past, that we remain committed.”

Translation: maybe there will be another shave and a haircut to the U.S. military’s nearly 70-year European expedition, but not much more than that. Even though Europe is united, safe, at peace and the U.S.’ real security interests are halfway around the world.

“Limited Counterinsurgency”. One thing critics and advocates of counterinsurgency can agree on: it requires a lot of time, cash and, especially, people. So it’s baffling for the Pentagon strategy to say that U.S. forces will remain prepared “to conduct limited counterinsurgency operations.” What are limited counterinsurgency operations?

To give the Pentagon a generous interpretation, limited counterinsurgency operations might mean training partner militaries to wage their own battles against insurgents. That’s more properly called “security force assistance,” but whatever. Less generously, the Obama administration is trying to walk away from counterinsurgency without getting bashed by critics for scrapping the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Either way, after Thursday press conference, Pentagon reporters who tried to figure out what the term actually means were unable to reach a consensus. Several of us ended up more confused the longer we debated each other.

The Army Is Getting Cut (Until We Surge It). This one is more sugar-coating than outright contradiction. But one of the major implications of the new plan is “smaller conventional ground forces,” in President Obama’s words. (Panetta didn’t cite a number for how small the Army will get, but we’re hearing around 480,000 soldiers, a drop of nearly 100,000 from current levels.) No sooner did the Pentagon announce that, however, than it said: well, for now.

Plans for shrinking the Army (and the Marine Corps) will build in “reversibility,” Panetta pledged. Should unforeseen land wars arise — you know, like the two post-9/11 wars the Army didn’t anticipate fighting — the Army will be able to “surge, regenerate and mobilize… quickly.” True, it’s a lot easier to start recruiting more soldiers than it is to, say, build more ships or planes. But it also sounds like the Obama team is afraid of taking criticism for downsizing the Army rather than confidently defending a major aspect of its new strategy.

This Is The Pentagon’s Blueprint, Until It Isn’t. Even the fundamental purpose of the strategy isn’t free from contradiction, thanks to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It’s supposed to be the cornerstone for crafting the military of 2020, as Panetta put it. But Gen. Martin Dempsey, the military’s top officer, walked that back: the strategy is merely “a waypoint” for a “continuous and deliberate process” of building that future force.

Maybe it’s Dempsey’s Army background talking, but he sounded lukewarm on the document. “It’s not perfect,” he told reporters, and it’s open to criticism for slashing the military too deeply or not reorienting it enough to meet future threats. “That probably makes it about right,” Dempsey intoned, “for today.”

Should that change, the military would simply “adjust” what the strategy says, and it’ll have an opportunity to do so every year when it issues its budget, Dempsey said. Maybe that would be a mere tune-up; maybe it would be something more drastic. After all, the strategy effectively scraps the Pentagon’s last four-year plan, after only two years. It’s ironic that the Pentagon’s blueprint for the future might not be built to last.

The Real National Security Budget

The Figure No One Wants You To See

By CHRISTOPHER HELLMAN
March 1, 2011
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.

Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that's barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.

Take that in for a moment. It's true; you won't find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it's no misprint. It may even be an underestimate. In any case, it's the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for "security" is to go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up.

So, here we go. Buckle your seat belt: it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Fortunately for us, on February 14th the Obama administration officially released its Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 budget request. Of course, it hasn't been passed by Congress -- even the 2011 budget hasn't made it through that august body yet -- but at least we have the most recent figures available for our calculations.

For 2012, the White House has requested $558 billion for the Pentagon's annual "base" budget, plus an additional $118 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At $676 billion, that's already nothing to sneeze at, but it's just the barest of beginnings when it comes to what American taxpayers will actually spend on national security. Think of it as the gigantic tip of a humongous iceberg.

To get closer to a real figure, it's necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away.

Missing from the Pentagon's budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them. 

That money, however, officially falls in the province of the Department of Energy. And then, don't forget an additional $7.8 billion that the Pentagon lumps into a "miscellaneous" category -- a kind of department of chump change -- that is included in neither its base budget nor those war-fighting funds.

So, even though we're barely started, we've already hit a total official FY 2012 Pentagon budget request of:

$703.1 Billion Dollars.

Not usually included in national security spending are hundreds of billions of dollars that American taxpayers are asked to spend to pay for past wars, and to support our current and future national security strategy.

For starters, that $117.8 billion war-funding request for the Department of Defense doesn't include certain actual "war-related fighting" costs. Take, for instance, the counterterrorism activities of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the first time, just as with the Pentagon budget, the FY 2012 request divides what's called "International Affairs" in two: that is, into an annual "base" budget as well as funding for "Overseas Contingency Operations" related to Iraq and Afghanistan. (In the Bush years, these used to be called the Global War on Terror.) The State Department's contribution? $8.7 billion. That brings the grand but very partial total so far to: $711.8 billion.

The White House has also requested $71.6 billion for a post-2001 category called "homeland security" -- of which $18.1 billion is funded through the Department of Defense. The remaining $53.5 billion goes through various other federal accounts, including the Department of Homeland Security ($37 billion), the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion), and the Department of Justice ($4.6 billion). All of it is, however, national security funding which brings our total to: $765.3 billion.

The U.S. intelligence budget was technically classified prior to 2007, although at roughly $40 billion annually, it was considered one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. Since then, as a result of recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, Congress has required that the government reveal the total amount spent on intelligence work related to the National Intelligence Program (NIP).

This work done by federal agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency consists of keeping an eye on and trying to understand what other nations are doing and thinking, as well as a broad range of "covert operations" such as those being conducted in Pakistan. In this area, we won't have figures until FY 2012 ends. The latest NIP funding figure we do have is $53.1 billion for FY 2010. There's little question that the FY 2012 figure will be higher, but let's be safe and stick with what we know. (Keep in mind that the government spends plenty more on "intelligence." 

Additional funds for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), however, are already included in the Pentagon's 2012 base budget and war-fighting supplemental, though we don't know what they are. The FY 2010 funding for MIP, again the latest figure available, was $27 billion.) In any case, add that $53.1 billion and we're at:

$818.4 Billion.

Veterans programs are an important part of the national security budget with the projected funding figure for 2012 being $129.3 billion. Of this, $59 billion is for veterans' hospital and medical care, $70.3 billion for disability pensions and education programs. This category of national security funding has been growing rapidly in recent years because of the soaring medical-care needs of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, by 2020 total funding for health-care services for veterans will have risen another 45%-75%. In the meantime, for 2012 we've reached:

$947.7 Billion.

If you include the part of the foreign affairs budget not directly related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other counterterrorism operations, you have an additional $18 billion in direct security spending. Of this, $6.6 billion is for military aid to foreign countries, while almost $2 billion goes for "international peacekeeping" operations. A further $709 million has been designated for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, and clearing landmines planted in regional conflicts around the globe. This leaves us at:

$965.7 Billion.

As with all federal retirees, U.S. military retirees and former civilian Department of Defense employees receive pension benefits from the government. The 2012 figure is $48.5 billion for military personnel, $20 billion for those civilian employees, which means we've now hit:

$1,034.2 Billion. (Yes, That's $1.03 Trillion!)

When the federal government lacks sufficient funds to pay all of its obligations, it borrows. Each year, it must pay the interest on this debt which, for FY 2012, is projected at $474.1 billion. The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending.

Add it all together and the grand total for the known national security budget of the United States is:

$1,219.2 Billion. (That's More Than $1.2 Trillion.)

A country with a gross domestic product of $1.2 trillion would have the 15th largest economy in the world, ranking between Canada and Indonesia, and ahead of Australia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia. Still, don't for a second think that $1.2 trillion is the actual grand total for what the U.S. government spends on national security. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously spoke of the world's "known unknowns." Explaining the phrase this way: "That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know." It's a concept that couldn't apply better to the budget he once oversaw. When it comes to U.S. national security spending, there are some relevant numbers we know are out there, even if we simply can't calculate them.

To take one example, how much of NASA's proposed $18.7 billion budget falls under national security spending? We know that the agency works closely with the Pentagon. NASA satellite launches often occur from the Air Force's facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Air Force has its own satellite launch capability, but how much of that comes as a result of NASA technology and support? In dollars terms, we just don't know.

Other "known unknowns" would include portions of the State Department budget. One assumes that at least some of its diplomatic initiatives promote our security interests. Similarly, we have no figure for the pensions of non-Pentagon federal retirees who worked on security issues for the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, or the Departments of Justice and Treasury. Nor do we have figures for the interest on moneys borrowed to fund veterans' benefits, among other national security-related matters. The bill for such known unknowns could easily run into the tens of billions of dollars annually, putting the full national security budget over the $1.3 trillion mark or even higher.

There's a simple principle here. American taxpayers should know just what they are paying for. In a restaurant, a customer would be outraged to receive a check almost twice as high as the menu promised. We have no idea whether the same would be true in the world of national security spending, because Americans are never told what national security actually means at the cash register.

Christopher Hellman is communications liaison at the National Priorities Project in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was previously a military policy analyst for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Defense Information, and spent 10 years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues.

This article was originally published by TomDispatch.

Inside The $56 Billion ‘Black’ Budget

By Adam Rawnsley
February 18, 2011 | 9:56 am
Courtesy Of "The Danger Room"


The Pentagon dropped its $533 billion budget this week. Some line items get a thorough public debate — like stealth jet engines and soldier health care. Others have opaque names like “RETRACT MAPLE,” and are totally hush-hush. Welcome to the Defense Department’s classified, or black, budget. It appears to be about $56 billion, the same as last year, less some inflation.

This may only be the tip of an iceberg of secret funds (more about that in a sec). But we’d like your assistance in mapping out that icy tip. So, with help from the Center for New American Security’s Travis Sharp, we’ve put together this spreadsheet. Feel free to add, subtract and edit it — kind of like a classified cash Wiki.

Finding the Pentagon’s secret money in the budget involves a bit of document diving and some back-of-the-envelope calculations. A number of programs labeled “classified” are tucked away into the operations and maintenance, procurement and research development, testing and evaluation budgets. Find each budget’s classified total (about $19 billion each for operations and procurement and $18 billion in research), add them together and you’ve got a ballpark black budget.

It’s in research and development budget where you can find the bureaucratic poetry of black project code names at its most obscure. The services slap together the most random of nouns to make their code names. The Army’s fond of prefixing its black projects with “TRACTOR” (“TRACTOR JUTE,” “TRACTOR EGGS,” etc) and the Navy has a slight tendency for animal imagery with “COBRA JUDY” and “Pilot Fish.”

But don’t think that this is necessarily all of the Pentagon’s secret cash.

The pencil pushers in Arlington play all kinds of tricks with the line items to keep outsiders from guessing where, exactly, the black budget actually gets spent. Some of the National Intelligence Program, a component of the country’s intelligence budget, gets hidden away inside the Pentagon’s ledger. For years, the Department stashed a chunk of the CIA’s cash and its share of funds for the secret satellite makers at the National Reconnaissance Office in the blandly-named “Selected Activities in Other Procurement, Air Force” funding line. The NIP budget request was officially disclosed for the first time this year, and so you’re likely looking at some of its $55 billion in these line items.

With that kind of bookkeeping, it’s worth wondering if all of the Defense Department’s secret cash is stashed in the places we’re looking for it. As transparency guru Steven Aftergood tells Danger Room,”It’s designed to be obscure.”

Photo: DOD/Flickr

See Also:

• Secret Pentagon Funding Near All-Time High
• White House, Intel Chief Can’t Agree on Budget Secrecy
• Darpa Wants You To Build An Anti-Secrecy App
• Defense Budget Dreaming: Sensors, Audits, and Wal-Marts
• The Final Gates Defense-Budget Showdown Begins
• Obama’s Budget Combines Civilian, Military War Funds
• Cut the Defense Budget? Over My Cold, Dead Gavel

Undisciplined Spending In The Name Of Defense

By Gregg Easterbrook
JAN 20, 2011 06:00 EST
Courtesy Of "Reuters News"

Defense Secretary Robert Gates just proposed cutting the military and security budget  by $78 billion over five years — perhaps only a downpayment on coming further reductions. Secretary Gates’s list of proposed cuts includes high-profile projects and weapons. But he does not mention the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an exemplar of undisciplined spending in the name of defense.

Never heard of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency? You’re not alone. A fair guess is that nine of 10 Washington pundits and political insiders don’t know the NGA exists, while perhaps one in 100 can describe its function.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has 16,000 employees — nearly as many as Google  — and a “black” budget thought to be at least $5 billion per year. The NGA is building a new headquarters complex with the stunning price of $1.8 billion, nearly the cost of the Freedom Tower rising in Manhattan. That new headquarters, near Fort Belvoir, Virginia, will be the third-largest structure in the Washington area, nearly rivaling the Pentagon in size.

The NGA has current touches, possessing a marketing slogan — “Know the Earth, Show the Way” — calling the Defense Department and CIA bureaus that receive its work product “customers” or “partners,” and posting photos of staff receptions on Flickr. But what the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency does for the most is part classified. About all the agency will say is that it supplies “geospatial intelligence support for global world events” and “can create highly accurate terrain visualization,” phrases that don’t explain much.

This is what the NGA does: take detailed aerial pictures of the Earth’s surface — mainly of cities, including America cities — then overlay them with other forms of data, such as maps of streets and power lines. Think there are drone aircraft only in the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan? Drone aircraft controlled by the NGA have been crisscrossing the skies of the United States for several years, photographing minute details of roads, houses and campuses. Supposedly this is a counter-terrorism measure: good luck explaining how extremely detailed images of individual homes will deter terrorists. If you were sunbathing nude when an NGA drone passed above your backyard, agency files contain a photo you’ll hope not to see on Flickr.

The NGA also merges pictures with satellite imagery from the National Reconnaissance Office, itself a little-known agency; the NGA is in the process of acquiring imaging satellites under its own control. The goal is a kind of ultimate TomTom for much, perhaps eventually all, of Earth’s surface.

NGA topography could help during natural disasters. More to the point, it could direct soldiers down the correct street during battle, or cause GPS-guided bombs to hit the correct building, or allow a cruise missile to fly underneath bridges before striking not just the right building but the right part of the right building. The agency’s super-maps could also be used to invade privacy. Put a tarp or tent above anything you do outdoors that you don’t want to run the risk of this agency having photos of, because there’s no privacy-protection cross-check.

Like many agencies in military, security or counter-terrorism roles, the NGA has a growing budget never subject to public scrutiny and rarely questioned by Congress.  Even subtracting for the costs of the war in Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan, and adjusting to current dollars, U.S. military and security spending has increased 68 percent in the past decade. Within this runaway spending is a tremendous amount of pure waste, coupled to many programs and agencies with valid missions but no cost discipline.

On the same day last August that Defense Secretary Gates led the nation’s newscasts by announcing an initiative to “reduce excess overhead” in defense and security spending, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency quietly signed two contracts that increase defense overhead. The NGA will pay nearly $1 billion each year to GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, start-up firms, for more spy photos of cities, taken from satellites the companies own or will launch.

Given the National Reconnaissance Office already has numerous imaging satellites, why does the country need spy satellites under a duplicative agency? Given the NGA already has 16,000 employees, why does it need to spend billions of dollars on contractors? Since this is all stamped SECRET, there is no discipline or accountability.

Here is the kicker: most of the photography and topographic information generated by the NGA at great expense to taxpayers is very similar to what Google and Microsoft give away for free.

This Google view of the current headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, available free, differs only a little from what the NGA produces at fantastic expense. Zoom in: the image is good enough to count the cars in the NGA headquarters lot, inspect the small wood to the west where employees stroll, determine that NGA communication and power cables are buried. (No satellite dishes or utility poles.) There is ample resolution to select which of the four current NGA structures a targeting planner wants the cruise missile to hit. Here is the Microsoft Bing view, which even shows condensate rising from the HVAC station.

Google and Microsoft are doing nothing wrong by posting these images — unless it’s wrong to take aerial views, in which case the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is in the wrong, too.

The key point is that Google and Microsoft are able to give away topographic information, or sell it at low cost — for $399, Google Earth Pro offers better resolution — while a defense agency spends billions of dollars to do the same. As free-market entities, Google and Microsoft are concerned with cost-effectiveness. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, exempt from cost controls and public scrutiny, wants to run up the price: its bureaucrats benefit from empire-building.

This is everything that’s wrong with defense spending in a nutshell.

Good reading: This excerpt of the important new book “Unwarranted Influence,” by James Ledbetter, describes how President Dwight Eisenhower, a former five-star general, became wary of the military-industrial complex.

Photos, Top: NASA satellites image of the Australian wildfires in southeastern Australia taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on February 9, 2009. The red boxes indicate the location of the fires. REUTERS/NASA/Handout

Bottom: This satellite image, taken February 26, 2009 and released March 9, 2009, shows the North Korean missile facility at Musudan. REUTERS/GeoEye Satellite Image/Handout (KOREA)

What's A "Strong" Defense?

By Christopher A. Preble

July 13, 2010

Courtesy Of "Budget Insight"

It has been one month since the Sustainable Defense Task Force released its report, Debt, Deficits, & Defense: A Way Forward. My fellow task force member Laura Peterson posted an excellent discussion of the substance of the report here last month, so there is no need to repeat that here.

Of more interest is the reaction that the report has elicited. There have been a number of interesting analyses in the media and the blogosphere, including Foreign Policy’s “Reality Check” and on the op-ed pages of the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. There have also been some ridiculous commentaries that have mischaracterized the report or otherwise misread its core arguments.

The most common response has been some sympathy for our argument that military spending should be subjected to the same scrutiny that should be applied to other government spending. There are still a fair number of people, however, who share our concern about the deficit, but who counter “But I want a strong defense.”

Who doesn’t?

The task force report was written with a single consideration in mind: in what ways, and where, could we make cuts in military spending that would not undermine U.S. security? It is our contention that much of what we call “defense” spending isn’t really essential to U.S. defense, and that unnecessary or wasteful spending is also harmful to U.S. security.

This is hardly a new concept. Dwight David Eisenhower warned about the burdens of excessive military spending on the wider economy. Robert Gates, channeling Ike, has said “The United States should spend as much as necessary on national defense, but not one penny more.”

A leading conservative in the Senate, Tom Coburn (R-OK) wrote that deficit reduction commission “affords us an opportunity to start some very late due diligence on national defense spending… [as well as] reduce wasteful, unnecessary, and duplicative defense spending that does nothing to make our nation safe.”

The subjective matter is what constitutes “excessive.” “Unnecessary” is a similarly elusive concept. Entire books are written on such questions (shameless plug). I’m not going to resolve them in a blog post.
But, suffice it to say, and paraphrasing Gates here, if we “can’t figure out a way to defend the United States on a budget of more than half a trillion dollars a year,” then we have some pretty big problems.

In real terms, the United States spends more on its military than at any time since World War II. More than during Korea, more than during Vietnam, more than during the Reagan-era buildup in the early 1980s.  National security spending, which includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has grown 86 percent in real terms since 1998.

We are spending this much on our military at a time when our primary national security threat ostensibly comes from a terrorist organization – not a nation state in possession of a massive army, a massive navy, and thousands of nuclear weapons.

At some level, it seems utterly absurd to be spending so much money to counter such a threat.

So I’ll close on one final note, respecting shares of global military spending today relative to where we were during the Cold War: “In 1986, US military spending was only 60% as high as that of its adversaries (taken as a group). Today, America spends more than two and one-half times as much as does the group of potential adversary states, including Russia and China. This means that if the United States were to cut it’s spending in half today, it would still be spending more than its current and potential adversaries – and the balance would still be twice as favorable as during the Cold War.” (SDTF Report; emphasis in original.)
The SDTF report’s savings, totaling nearly $1 trillion over ten years, constitute just under 16 percent of projected military spending over that same period. In the unlikely event that we manage to cut military spending at all, we will obviously be very strong militarily.

What all that military strength actually contributes to our security is still an open question.

---

Dr. Christopher A. Preble is the Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute and a member of the Sustainable Defense Task Force.  He and Benjamin Friedman authored the “Strategy of Restraint” chapter of SDTF’s report.

Is Military Spending Saving Or Enslaving?

By Michael Edwards

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Courtesy Of "The Activist Post"

The latest announcement that the Pentagon's military research division, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), has created shape-shifting robots sounds like another Terminator sequel, but this is mainstream news.  Sure, this is still theoretical, as these robots are just half a millimeter thick, but it portends a future where, "it will be used to create full-sized cars and aircraft that morph as they move, or robots that can 'flow' like mercury into small openings, or multipurpose military uniforms that can adapt to different environments."  There is no discussion in the article about the benefits to mankind, only the military applications.

Whether or not the categories listed below were conceived of by individuals who had a desire to contribute to Humanity's progress, the fact remains that  between 45%-90% of American taxpayer money now goes to military spending.  The U.S. has set the stage, but many other governments certainly have received their marching orders.  The relationship between the foreign battlefield and civilian life at home can be traced back to the advent of world wars, as private research and development was often subsumed into the military mission.  In our modern era of perpetual war on nebulous terror, it might be worthwhile to ask:  Is our support of military spending helping humanity or enslaving us?  

Surveillance -- Spy technology was naturally a military creation.  One could certainly argue that every country has real enemies, and it would be profoundly naive not to conduct surveillance against potential saboteurs.  However, the citizens of the world who have paid the bill for this technology have clearly had it turned upon us.  The ways we are being tracked, traced, and databased certainly makes it seem like we the people are the enemy.

Communications --  High-tech surveillance is at its core pure communications.  The military enhanced telephone, radio and TV technologies long ago.  A joint working relationship with communications companies led to the eyes in the skies of satellite technology, which initially was designed to communicate with military units.  It eventually had wide applications in the early space program.  Radar is ubiquitous; another military application.  And, yes, the Internet was conceived in a DARPA think-tank; it became a vehicle for secure communications between universities and military research sites in the early '60s.  Since then, the Internet has positively affected the lives of billions of people, offering freedom to communicate to anyone, anywhere in the world.  However, the new Cybersecurity Act calls for government oversight of not only the infrastructure, but of citizen-created content as well (noted in the bill as "data").  

Transportation --  The military academy, West Point, was the first engineering school in the United States.  It was denounced early on as being incompatible with democracy, as its graduates became key civil engineers and educators in every part of society.  Those four-lane highways that we all love, as we cruise down them in cars that have come to signify American independence, were created by an Eisenhower directive in 1956 to accommodate military transport and escape from atomic attack.  Naval passage has had wonderful uses, but funding by taxpayers has still led to "stealth, speed, and firepower"  as an enduring submarine slogan.  The first practical helicopters were used by the Germans in WWII.  The Wright Brothers are American legends, but they had their military connections as well.  We need only to compare the flight technology used in commercial travel vs. what was announced the other day by the British military: Taranis.  Taranis (pronounced: Tyrannis, of course) is an unmanned stealth fighter that can hit any continent in the world and, "is built to carry out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance on enemy territory using onboard sensors."  The cost is £143 million during the worst economic crisis of modern times.

Weapons and Security -- Tasers and sound cannons, are just two of the myriad weapons of modern war.  And, yet, these torture technologies are now routinely appearing where citizens attempt to peaceably assemble.  This militarization of domestic security functions can create an adversarial relationship between law enforcement and the people they are sworn to protect.  One only has to walk through a naked body scanner at the airport, under the auspices of the abusive TSA, to learn what it feels like to live in a war zone.

Science -- Scientific research has always been the thread that binds all of the disciplines of modern warfare.  The history is a byzantine one, but had its official origins in the Council of National Defense, 1916, which coordinated industry for national defense.  This mindset led eventually to The Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941.  Vannevar Bush, the director of The Carnegie Institution at the time, was bothered by the "lack of cooperation between civilian scientists and the military."  He was an early computer genius, a proponent of technocracy, and he advocated a system of connectedness called The Memex that was an absolute blueprint for the functions of the Internet that we see today.  In short, a scientific dictatorship has been imagined, beta tested, improved upon again, and activated.  Consider this quote from Bush in 1945:

  

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. 

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk. 
      - Vannevar Bush; As We May Think; Atlantic Monthly; July 1945.

This is how behind the times we are as recipients of information from the elite circles.  Perhaps, when we hear that terrahertz surveillance blimps are hovering above us; or that nanotech particles can control our minds from a distance; or there is a military-UFO connection in China; or weather modification arrays can ignite the atmosphere, we might do well not to immediately laugh at such "crazy" claims, but to investigate them.

Dwight Eisenhower succinctly warned us 50 years ago of a "Military-Industrial Complex."



Do we in fact have a military-industrial complex today?  This list of companies fulfilling military contracts certainly is indicative.  Maybe the question shouldn't be:  Is military spending enslaving us, but are we enslaving ourselves when we support the concept of war itself?

The Hidden Wealth Of The Catholic Church

Financial Scandals

By Anna Catherin Loll and Peter Wensierski
June 14, 2010
Courtesy Of "Der Spiegel Online"

Photo Gallery: 4 Photos

DPA

The Catholic Church in Germany, already struggling to cope with the sex abuse scandal, has been hit by revelations of theft, opaque accounting and extravagance. While the grassroots faithful are being forced to make cutbacks, some bishops enjoy the trappings of the church's considerable hidden wealth.

Shortly before Pentecost, Pastor S. received an unexpected early morning visit, not from the Holy Ghost, but from the police.

For the authorities, the words of the Gospel of Luke came true on that morning: He who seeks finds. More than €131,000 ($158,000) were hidden in various places in the rooms of the Catholic priest, tucked in between his laundry or attached to the bottom of drawers. The reverend was arrested on the spot. After several weeks in custody, Hans S., 76, is now back at the monastery, waiting for his trial.

And lo and behold, the proliferation of cash may have been even more miraculous than initially assumed. The public prosecutor's office in the southern city of Würzburg now estimates that S. may have embezzled up to €1.5 million from collections and other church funds. The members of his flock in a wine-growing village in the northern Bavarian region of Franconia are stunned. They had blindly trusted their shepherd, who always seemed so humble and modest.

The Catholic Church is currently being shaken by a number of financial scandals, not only in Franconia but also in Augsburg, another Bavarian city, where Bishop Walter Mixa's dip into funds from a foundation that runs children's homes recently made headlines.

More than €40 million have gone missing in the Diocese of Magdeburg in eastern Germany, €5 million have disappeared in Limburg near Frankfurt, and it was recently discovered that a senior priest in the Diocese of Münster had 30 secret bank accounts. And while parishes throughout Germany are cutting jobs and funds for community work, many bishops are still living on the high horse. A brand-new residence? An ostentatious home for their retirement? Restoration of a Marian column to the tune of €120,000? None of these expenditures presents a problem to high-ranking church officials from Trier in the west to Passau in the southeastern corner of Bavaria, whose coffers are brimming with cash.

In many places, this blatant disparity, along with reports of mismanagement, misappropriation and pomposity have prompted the faithful to challenge church officials. They are accusing many bishops of just covering up the problem, as they did in the sex abuse scandal. They are determined not to allow anyone to see behind the curtain into their parallel world of bulging bank accounts and hidden assets, which, in some cases, have buttressed their power for centuries. The only aspect of church finances that is public is the diocesan budget, which derives its funding from the church tax -- but the church's true assets remain in the shadows.

Growing Questions About Church Funding

Now all of this wealth is becoming a political issue, however. The unemployed, recipients of housing assistance, families, communities, businesses, the military -- in the coming years, the federal government plans to deprive them all of billions of euros. But the church, of all things, is being spared, and hardly anyone questions the generous support it receives from the government.

Financially speaking, Germany's dioceses are in excellent shape. "The Catholic Church claims that it's poor, but the truth is that it hides its wealth," says Carsten Frerk, a Berlin political scientist who, after years of research, is publishing "Violettbuch Kirchenfinanzen" (The Violet Book of Church Finances) this fall. Frerk estimates the cash assets of the church's legal entities at about €50 billion. The Catholics, who are not releasing their own figures, accuse Frerk of being a prejudiced, atheistic critic of the church.

The assets, accumulated over the centuries, are invested in many areas, including real estate, church-owned banks, academies, breweries, vineyards, media companies and hospitals. The church also derives income from stock holdings, foundations and bequests. As a rule, all of this money flows into the accounts of the so-called bishop's see. Only a bishop and his closest associates are familiar with this shadow budget, which tax authorities are not required to review. The public budgets of dioceses consist of far less than their total finances.

This complicated web is handled with such secrecy that not even the financial department heads of all dioceses openly discuss their finances with one another. Seemingly baroque structures make these finances even more difficult to fathom. Depending on the diocese, the administrators of the church's funds can be members of a church tax council, a diocesan tax panel, a financial board or an administrative board. Sometimes assets are also spun off into foundations.

Of Germany's 27 Catholic dioceses, 25 refused to provide information in response to a SPIEGEL survey, noting that this information "is not made public." Only two dioceses, Magdeburg and the Archdiocese of Berlin, which was on the verge of bankruptcy a few years ago, were somewhat more accommodating, probably because they have so few assets to hide in the first place.

Secret Assets

The vicar general of a well-heeled diocese, on the other hand, said: "Yes, the assets in the bishop's see are secret. But perhaps it would be better if you wrote: confidential." When asked to explain this secretiveness, a spokeswoman of the Diocese of Limburg responded: "That's just the way it is." Finally, a representative of the German Bishops' Conference said: "I don't want to talk to you about this."

Elected lay representatives at the base are hardly more successful. They face a wall of silence, even when they are responsible for financial supervision in their diocese. One of them is Herbert Steffen, whose congregation appointed him to the diocesan council in Trier. Steffen, 75, is not exactly a fierce critic. A former furniture manufacturer, he comes from an arch-Catholic family of entrepreneurs in the Moselle River region. His concern was as straightforward as it was conservative: He wanted to make sure that his diocese was in solid financial shape.

The businessman was irritated by his experiences in the diocesan council. "I was surprised by the small size of the budget. It was something I thought we ought to look at," he says. At a council meeting, he asked a confidant of the bishop whether this was the entire budget. "There is also the budget of the bishop's see. But it isn't intended for the public," the official replied. When Steffen asked, "are you telling me that we can't see it, either?" the official said: "No!"

Trier, Germany's oldest diocese, is a good example of the Catholic divide between rich and poor. Bishop Stephan Ackermann, who also oversees sex abuse cases for the German Bishops' Conference, can be quite generous in financial matters, particularly when they involve prestigious projects adjacent to his bishop's palace. For example, the diocese currently has €1 million earmarked for a planned renovation of the square behind Trier Cathedral. Local church authorities want to make sure that the area looks its best, just in case the pope decides to lead an annual pilgrimage to the "holy robe" in 2012, joining the faithful in worshipping a robe that supposedly contains scraps from the robe Jesus wore.

Part 2: Cuts in Catholic Social Services

On the other hand, subsidies for youth organizations and community centers are to be radically cut or eliminated altogether. Under the diocese's proposed cost-cutting program, a number of facilities would be shut down, including Catholic adult education offices, the Catholic Academy of Trier and Catholic student societies in Trier and the nearby cities of Saarbrücken and Koblenz.

Those who would be affected by the cuts are outraged. "Our goal is to make the church more accessible," says Guido Gross, a pastor who ministers to university students, "but now they want to get rid of the entire field of activity." Lukas Rölli of the Confederation of Catholic Student Societies adds: "I will renounce my faith if the bishop signs this." For Rölli, the Catholic Church creates the impression that it "is trying to withdraw from society more and more, and back into the vestry."

In Cologne, one of the world's wealthiest dioceses, there is also a wide gap between appearance and reality. Grassroots Catholics there have had to struggle to stay afloat financially. Churches have been closed while a shrinking number of priests have had to minister to bigger and bigger congregations in line with strict requirements outlined in austerity programs. Meanwhile, the Archdiocese of Cologne has a large budget of €863 million, and the assets of the archbishop's see are estimated at several billion euros. According to church critic Frerk's calculations, the diocese's holdings in a group of companies known as the Aachener Gesellschaften, which consist of about 26,000 residential and commercial units, were worth more than €1 billion in 2003.

But the archbishop's financial officer makes little mention of all this good news. If he did, would the faithful be quite as willing to support all the cutbacks and cheerfully donate their money to pay for a new stained-glass window in the cathedral by the artist Gerhard Richter? For the archdiocese, it is always preferable to have others foot the bills, even when it comes to paying the archconservative Cardinal Joachim Meisner. Based on a centuries-old agreement, the government pays the diocese the cardinal's monthly stipend of about €11,300, which hasn't stopped Meisner from repeatedly attacked his sponsors for their godlessness and various "failings."

Taxpayers' Money For German Churches

Meisner and many of his fellow ministers aren't the only ones to receive public stipends. Year after year, both the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church in Germany receive generous payments from the federal, state and local governments. Not as well known as the church tax (about €10 billion a year) are the annual subsidies to the church, both direct and indirect, which in 2000 amounted to an estimated €17 billion.

The government pays substantial sums of money for the maintenance and constant renovation of cathedrals and other church buildings. It pays the salaries of religion teachers and foots the bill for the altar wine used in church services for the military. Some benefits, such as the annual firewood deliveries a few southern German towns make to their bishop, are based on 200-year-old entitlements that politicians have never reviewed.

Despite the constitutional separation of church and state in Germany, substantial subsidies are paid for church conferences, church libraries, pastors who minister to police officers, inmates of prisons and psychiatric institutions, and the military. The government even helps to pay for the employment of conscientious objectors, and for the maintenance of offering boxes and wayside crosses.

The church likes to point out how much it does for the poor and the weak, and to promote social cohesion, and it has a valid argument. Nevertheless, the government foots the bill for many of these activities. The German government pays the bulk of the German Caritas Association's estimated annual budget of €45 billion, while the Catholic Church pays only a fraction.

In guidelines published on March 15, the diocesan financial board in the Bavarian city of Regensburg, which manages the assets of the bishop's see, even specifies the conditions that must be met before it will contribute financially to the renovation of church-run kindergartens and shelters -- namely that it will only contribute if the local government "has contractually agreed to pay" two-thirds of total production costs" and is willing to guarantee payment of at least 80 percent of a potential operating cost deficit for "at least 25 years."

Apparently the diocese is only interested in church-run kindergartens if the government assumes most of the cost. Does that mean the diocese would quickly abandon its compassionate care for the children of God if public funding were to dry up? In other dioceses in Germany, Catholic hospitals, schools and retirement homes are even fully government-funded.

Church Pays No Taxes and Is Unsupervised

In return, the church is not even required to pay taxes: no property tax, no corporate tax and no capital gains tax. Everything it does as a public corporation in Germany is considered charitable, benevolent and tax-exempt. Unlike other public corporations like universities, the church is not subject to any state supervision.

According to church law, "the Catholic Church has the innate right, independently of secular power, to acquire, own, manage and sell assets for the attainment of its own purposes." Defending this "innate right" and the billions backing it is one of the central functions of bishops.

Complicated financial structures and secret coffers only become somewhat more visible to the public when perfidious administrators abuse them.

This is a particularly glaring issue in the Diocese of Limburg at the moment. A few weeks ago, the head of a church financial administration, who had embezzled about €5 million, was sentenced to more than six years in prison. The man, who was also the managing director of the Catholic congregation in Limburg, had unimpeded access to church funds.

"The embezzlement was surprisingly easy," the judge remarked. The problem was only discovered when the diocese recently began to introduce a new commercial accounting system. Until then, the Limburg bishops and their confidants could apparently dispose of their funds as they saw fit. The current Bishop of Limburg, Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, had to admit that mistakes were made during financial audits.

A Palace Fit For A Prince

The diocese could easily afford such a careless approach to its finances, because the bishop's see appears to have plenty of cash. It is currently planning to build a new residence for the bishop, partly with funds from the bishop's see. Residents of the small city refer to the hill above Limburg, where the bishop will live behind the tall stone walls of a former aristocratic estate, as the "Acropolis."

"Our bishop wants to be a prince again," the locals say mockingly. By contrast, his predecessor, Bishop Franz Kamphaus, chose to live modestly in a two-room apartment in the seminary instead of the old bishop's residence, which he turned over to a family of Ethiopian refugees for several years.

What architects have designed for Tebartz-van Elst on the "Acropolis" is far more than a generous apartment with an on-site chapel. As part of the project, adjacent buildings will also require extensive renovation and conversion. New quarters will be needed for an order of nuns that will be moving in to ensure that His Excellency is well taken care of. And as part of a new security system for the cathedral museum, relocating one of the museum's emergency exits will cost €1.5 million alone. As an added benefit, it will be harder to disturb the bishop in his refuge in future.

Meanwhile, the bishop has ordered his flock to live by the motto "Save and Renew." Limburg is one of the dioceses cutting back on parishes, masses and priests. In the surrounding villages, the faithful are hard at work collecting donations for the most urgent maintenance work on their churches. "The saving is happening at the base, while the renewing takes place elsewhere," says Henny Toepfer of the local chapter of the reform movement "We Are Church." She has trouble understanding why millions of euros are available for a new residence, but not to pay for buses to bring elderly Catholics from the villages to church services.

The Lure Of Financial Markets

For some time now, the old-fashioned vices of pomposity and wastefulness have been joined by a thoroughly modern temptation for the financial administrators of the bishops' sees: the promise of turning a profit in global capital markets.

Take, for example, Magdeburg. Hoping to solve its financial problems, the poverty-stricken diocese, which also has relatively few members, established a stock corporation called Gero AG. To increase earnings from interest and compound interest, Bishop Leo Nowak's confidants invested in real estate deals, ship partnerships, biogas plants and even controversial research into genetically modified plants. A priest in the administration of the diocese even blessed a greenhouse intended for use with genetically modified plants, in hopes that the church's pious investment would flourish.

Today the bishop faces a financial mess. His diocese claims to have lost more than €40 million, while the press estimates the losses at about €100 million. Now the new executive board of Gero AG plans to restructure the ailing network of companies and holdings. The corporation has already sued its former managing director for damages.

Why do the princes of the church refuse to be held accountable to their congregations? And why are they so careful to keep the government, which supports them so generously, out of their financial affairs?

A former spokesman of a diocese has spent a lot of time thinking about these questions. He attributes the current problems to the pre-modern world of diocesan ordinariates and residences, which revolved around royal courts. "The bishops and prelates, with their colorful titles, feel superior to the Western world and shield themselves against it," he says. "The confessional stands in the church, not the offices of the tax authorities."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan