Preparing For The Wrong Wars--How The Defense Establishment Has Failed Us

The 2020 Pentagon budget reflects yet another increase, and is $658.4 billion for the base budget and an additional $71.5 billion for the contingency (war) budget.

Some nations put their trust in chariots and war horses,
but we will trust in the name of the Lord our Sovereign.
Psalm 20:7 

In his farewell address, George Washington warned against engaging in conflicts abroad, stating, 

"... a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."

In spite of Washington's counsel against "foreign entanglements," the US has, since WWII, become a virtual empire with over 800 military bases around the world, ranging from small radar installations to sprawling complexes housing thousands of troops.

But is this ongoing outlay of scarce resources really keeping us safer? Have our invasions of Vietnam (nearly 60,000 US troops killed and countless more maimed), and more recently of Iraq and Afghanistan, resulted in our really being better defended? And has our nuclear strategy of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) resulted in the world becoming more secure? 

Or have we actually created ever more enemies and become even more vulnerable as a result?

In spite of the trillions the nation has invested in its "national defense" we have recently found ourselves defenseless against a pernicious and more dangerous enemy than we were ever prepared for, the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In hindsight, what if the $11.4 billion in the current US Pentagon budget for Lockheed Martin's 79 F-35 Joint Strike fighters alone (the world's most expensive weapon) had been spent on helping prevent and combat future pandemics? And how much testing, how many face masks and other protective gear might those billions have funded? 

In the aftermath of World War I (in which France had lost over half of its armed forces) the French government built a 900-mile Maginot Line of concrete bunkers, tunnels and gun batteries involving 1.5 million cubic meters of concrete, 150 tons of steel and at a cost of over 3 billion pre-war francs. The most heavily armed section of this expensive wall was along its 280-mile border with Germany, since the France aim was to prevent an invasion of the kind they had experienced in the prior war.

For the record, Germany did not pay for this massive  wall along its French border!

Meanwhile, Hitler's Luftwaffe (air force) made the Maginot Line  far less relevant, and Germany chose to invade France by way of a tank-led campaign through Belgium and through a more easily  penetrable part of the Maginot Line. 

There should be a lesson in this for the US today, to be wary of preparing for wars in the way they were fought in the past, and to reinvest more in diplomacy, development and in addressing health and food crises around the world. 

Without some measure of justice everywhere there can be no lasting peace anywhere.