Blogs > The Solo Arms Race

Dec 27, 2003

The Solo Arms Race



I was struck, or perhaps should say "smart-bombed," by Gregg Easterbrook's "Week in Review" piece on the total, overwhelming, and apparently permanent military superiority the U.S. now enjoys.  Nobody else is even trying to catch up, and when they do have to face us, they tend not to risk their most expensive stuff, like their air forces. (Iraq and Serbia did not let their planes take off in the recent wars.)

Most of the world's nations are stuck with Cold War era equipment and even those with more modern militaries (like Britain and France) have only a fraction of what we've got.  U.S. dominance in sea and air power is almost comic in its dimensions. We have 10 supercarrier groups to everyone else's none. We three different stealth planes to everyone else's none, plus two more in development. It seems that no other country has kept up the massive program of weapons development and procurement we have maintained despite the disappearance of the enemy, the Soviet Union, that we were arms racing with all those years. "Last year American military spending exceeded that of all other NATO states, Russia, China, Japan, Iraq and North Korea combined, according to the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan research group that studies global security."

Easterbrook points out that this lopsided balance of power may have consequences we will not like. Nations who feel threatened may scramble for a few nasty nuclear or biological weapons just to keep us at bay, as we are in North Korea and may be for a long time, unless we are prepared to liberate many more civilians till they don't get back up, North Korea being a much more densely populated country. Thus the one-time pride of U.S. weapons research drive has become a low-cost alternative to building a military machine, kind of an arms race by a Wal-Mart.  

My question is, what exactly is our outsized military for at this point, when a half or a third of what we have would obviously be just as overwhelming? Why are we still developing more weapons? Who do we plan to fight with our 9000 Abrams tanks that usually take one shot to destroy an enemy vehicle?  Does the Pentagon know something we don't, perhaps a coming attack by the mole people? Do other countries know something that we don't, perhaps that post Cold War conditions almost demand that civilized nations stop diverting so much of their wealth to procuring the means of killing people and breaking things?  

It's all enough to make one mutter, in spite of one's level-headed, conspiracy-debunking self about the influence of the Military-Industrial Complex and the "merchants of death.  Certainly seeing that D.C. area defense concerns are having a boffo year while other industries languish does not help. It's also quite true that it is Republican constituencies which both support aggressive use of military action and benefit from increased defense spending. 



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