HIGH TIME FOR THE PENTAGON TO GIVE THE WORLD – AND ITSELF – A BREAK
Peace Quest Cape Breton Renews Its Call for a ‘Pentagon Vacation’
In May 2003, in the wake of America’s illegal invasion of Iraq, Peace Quest Cape Breton embarked on a satirical quest to persuade the Pentagon to take a vacation, to stall its restless, gargantuan war machine for just two weeks, saving enough money to actually make the world a safer place: to save and improve, rather than take and ruin, countless lives. Inspired by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s complaint to the House Armed Services Committee that his Department could hardly be expected to discharge its duties while spending only $42 million each hour, we calculated that each fortnight – or 336 Pentagon Hours (PHs) – the US military would burn through $14 billion.
Such a sum, according to a 2002 study by The World Game Institute entitled ‘What the World Wants: and How to Pay For It Using Military Expenditures,’ would have been nearly enough to provide safe, clean drinking water for everyone on Earth ($10 billion) and eliminate illiteracy globally ($5 billion). We conveyed this good news in letters to both Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush, modestly proposing that Cape Breton would be the “perfect place for a short but invigorating vacation” for some (if not all two million) of the Pentagon’s employees. For whatever reason, perhaps the many demands of occupying Iraq, they did not reply.
The Pentagon is the world’s biggest government department, administering a military empire including over 750 overseas bases (with more on the way), and a bureaucracy so unwieldy and unaccountable it has never passed an audit. In 2003, the Pentagon budget – which excludes the tens of billions spent on America’s nuclear weapons programme by the Department of Energy – was $379 billion. Twenty disastrous, war-torn years later, the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), due to be signed into law by President Biden by the end of the year, allocates – in the course of 3,700 pages – $841 billion to the Pentagon, well over a third of total global military spending and more than the next ten largest military budgets combined. The Pentagon will soon be spending $2.3 billion each day, $96 million each hour, $1.6 million a minute, over $26,000 a second, meaning a two-week break would save (minus holiday expenses) over $32 billion, or, to be chillinglly exact, $32,257,534,246.6.
By comparison, the combined budget for the State Department and US Agency for International Development (USAID) will be $63 billion, $5 billion less than one month’s Pentagon spending. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will receive $11.5 billion, $4.5 billion less than the Pentagon spends each week. And this in the age of COVID, a disease which has so far claimed over a million American lives – one seventh of the global death toll – with a per capita death rate (341 per 100,000) far higher than most developed countries. (Canada’s per capita death rate is 135 per 100,000; Costa Rica’s – a nation which abolished its armed forces in 1948 – is 181 per 100,000.)
What real, human security could a fortnight of Pentagon spending – $32 billion – buy today? Well, less than a quarter of it, $7 billion, would help the World Food Programme (WFP) feed all 45 million people currently facing starvation: “people,” as WFP Executive Director David Beasley recently said, “that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them. It’s not complicated.” By odd coincidence, the money needed, according to UNICEF in April, to “achieve universal literary” in the 29 countries “with the lowest literacy rates” by 2030 is $14 billion, the Pentagon vacation figure from 2003. In 2021, UN humanitarian agencies and partner organizations requested from UN member states $37.7 billion to provide aid to 174 million people in 60 countries: they received only $17.2 billion. A similar gap remans, while the number of people and nations in desperate need of assistance has grown, principally due to the ravages of war and climate breakdown, itself gravely exacerbated by the massive carbon footprint of modern militarism.
While such examples could be multiplied a hundredfold, the strong expectation is that the Pentagon budget (and US nuclear weapons budget) will continue to soar, smashing through the trillion dollar barrier long before the end of the decade, in a notoriously corrupt budget appropriations process uniting the great majority of both parties in Congress, many with links to the armed forces and military-industrial complex and thus benefiting, politically and financially, from the mindboggling contracts awarded. As a 2021 report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University noted: “weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years, more than one for every member of Congress.” And all those lobbyists – and appropriators – will publicly declare that such enormous Pentagon budgets are money well spent to make America and the ‘free world’ more prosperous and peaceful.
Really? Please, give us a break.
