Wholesale Disarming of America Proceeds, Quietly and Unprotested
Manchester Union Leader
June 19, 1998 Richard Lessner
Defense spending will plummet to zero by 2020 if current budget trends continue.
Zero.
This was the conclusion reached by defense analyst Baker Spring and economist John Barry in a study for the Heritage Foundation.
Since 1990, spending on the nation's defenses has fallen from $300 billion annually to $271 billion, a reduction of 26 percent in real terms.
At the same time, entitlement, social and non-defense discretionary spending has grown at rates well above inflation. Entitlement spending has ballooned in the 1990s, rising from $605 billion to $880 billion, an annual growth rate of 5.5 percent.
The only way to sustain this pace of self-indulgent growth in entitlement spending is to raise taxes, re-open the deficit or, as we have been doing, continue to siphon funds from the military and divert them into the social programs.
The Heritage study that turned up this disturbing -- even frightening -- conclusion was run on a super computer as powerful as those number-crunchers used by the Congressional Budget Office and the best econometric firms.
The trends are obvious. When current social spending, especially in Medicaid and Social Security, is plotted along with growth in the interest payments on the national debt, and then compared to even the most optimistic predictions of revenue growth, national defense withers to zero in 21 years.
Zero.
This is not to suggest that this projection is carved in stone and that the military budget actually will plummet to zero. Rather, this projection illustrates what the outcome will be if future Presidents and Congresses stick to existing spending priorities.
The deterioration of our national defenses rapidly is reaching crisis proportions. Yet few in official Washington seem in the least concerned.
In Congress, both parties compete for the voters' loyalty by shamelessly bidding for their support through more social spending, more government programs, more goodies for all at the expense of the defense budget. It's as though you held a yard sale and sold your burglar alarm and door locks so you could buy valuable works of art for your house.
In the Pentagon, careerist officers, gelded by the most anti-military President in the nation's history, preside over the evisceration of the nation's defenses without a peep of protest.
Meanwhile, our draft-dodger, peacenik President prepares to sip plum wine and dine on Beijing duck with the most murderous Communist regime left on the planet, even as he is busily selling these thugs the military means by which they one day will threaten us with a new atomic Cold War.
And in the nation's great financial centers, the Moloch idol of international trade is worshipped. Even as we were assured that commerce would tame Hitler and neuter Uncle Joe Stalin, so we are told that "constructive engagement" will make Jeffersonian democrats of Mao's gangster heirs.
All the while, the wholesale disarming of America proceeds, quietly and unprotested.
A few courageous souls on Capitol Hill are deeply worried about our rush into disarmament and occasionally they speak out about their concerns.
Most, however, are unwilling to raise a public alarm. Without an enemy, an immediate, obviously apparent threat to the nation's security, they say, advancing increased defense spending is a dead-bang loser at the ballot box. Soccer moms want to hear about day care, not bombs and bombers, and baby-boomer dads are more concerned about Social Security than national security.
Yet it is precisely at such times that leaders of courage are most needed. Any fool can sound the alarm once the barbarians have encamped before the gates of the city.
As were the 1930s, this is a time for truth-telling, not fickle froth and chatter. This is a time for prophets, not panderers.
It was for good reason that Churchill referred to the 1930s as his "wilderness years." Like John the Baptist, he was a voice crying in the wilderness. For raising the alarm about Britain's pathetic lack of military preparedness and the growing danger of Nazism, Churchill was reviled, mocked, called a warmonger and worse.
And after World War II, Churchill was summarily rejected by an ungrateful people who, again, refused to heed his warnings about the new dangers of Soviet Communism festering behind an Iron Curtain.
On the eve of his most humiliating election defeat, Winston Churchill defiantly declared that "This is no time for windy platitudes and glittering advertisements. The Conservative Party had far better go down telling the truth and acting in accordance with the verities of our position than gain a span of shabbily-bought office by easy and fickle froth and chatter."
Yes, there is a price to be paid for truth-telling, as Churchill warned on the eve of his bitter defeat in 1945. Even so, better to go down telling the truth, he said, than cling to a power shabbily-bought.
Are there Churchills among us today? Will prophets rise up in the land? Where are those leaders who are willing to go down, if it comes to that, rather than stay the truth?
The world may not appear as dangerous today as it did just a few years ago, but it would be a mistake, possibly a fatal mistake, to assume that all threats have receded and that we can now lay down our arms.
One day, perhaps, we will be free to beat our swords into plowshares, but the fulfillment of Isaiah's vision of God's peaceable kingdom is, I suspect, still some distance in the future, all the wishful thinking, windy platitudes, froth and chatter notwithstanding.
Manchester Union Leader
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