Imperial Folly Is an Expensive Vice
“Oh, don’t thank me. Thank an unprecedented eight-year military buildup.” - Bart Simpson
Two related stories crossed my screen yesterday. The first was this AP story about the first confirmed combat death in one of the military’s new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAP in government acronym-speak). The second was Chalmers Johnson’s latest at TomDispatch about the truly bankrupting nature of the military budget. The two stories compliment and reinforce each other in a grim way.
The MRAP is an armored truck that is the Pentagon’s reaction to the (headline making) American casualties resulting from a different acronym, the Improvised Explosive Device (IED). They do a better job of protecting their passengers from bomb laced roadways than do Humvees. According to the article, the MRAPs cost between $500,000 and $1,000,000 each. Given the way large organizations tend to distort their own unflattering information I’d bet that $1,000,000 is a lot closer to the average figure than $500,000, though there’s a pretty good chance that even the higher number is low. Whatever the total cost, it is a very expensive military vehicle that exists solely because our previously existing very expensive military vehicles have proved ill suited to combat in Iraq.
The article extensively quotes Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell defending the vehicle’s performance, despite the death. Morrell’s money quote, “That attack has not … caused anyone to question the vehicle’s lifesaving capacity. To the contrary, the attack reaffirms their survivability,” is probably true, as far as it goes. But it ignores an old military aphorism, “If you can see it, you can hit it; if you can hit it, you can kill it.” As long as our troops are in harm’s way in Iraq they will be killed, no matter how many new vehicles we design or how much money we spend.
The Johnson article is an analysis of our unsustainable military budget. It is a compliment to his book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. (It just came out in paperback and I highly recommend it if you feel optimistic about the prospects of a national rejuvenation with a newly empowered Blue government next year). The conclusion of both the book and the article is that our military budget is literally ruining us. So much money is spent on the military that our civilian economy has become warped and less able to compete with other countries.
That depressing conclusion casts the construction and deployment of thousands of million-dollar trucks, to patrol a country we have no legitimate business occupying, in an unflattering light. The short term result, fewer American casualties, is certainly a worthwhile goal. But in the long term those are dollars that serve little to no purpose and will ultimately be just another line on the long and futile bill for the Iraq war. It will take all of us, including the guys in those heavily armored beasts, decades to pay that bill.
This is an excellent example of the inherent contradiction of American military power. We are enthusiastic about war, witness the temporary surge in popularity any time one of our presidents starts one, but we are not comfortable sending our troops into a meat grinder for no tangible purpose. But that is precisely the nature of imperial projects like our half-assed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars have tremendous costs in human and monetary terms, you’ll even see gaudy and romantic terms such as “blood” and “treasure” used to represent them. In the end though it’s just squandered dollars and broken bodies and at some point, no matter what the armchair colonialists say, we will no longer be able to afford one or both.
(I came across this shortly before I went to post. Sometimes it helps to post late in the day.)
