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Limitless Costs Of Perpetual War

If we focused on what is vital for our safety and independence, we could spend a lot less money. But if there is no limit to what we have to do to police and remake the world, there is also no limit to what we can spend. ~Steve Chapman This is one of the key […]

If we focused on what is vital for our safety and independence, we could spend a lot less money. But if there is no limit to what we have to do to police and remake the world, there is also no limit to what we can spend. ~Steve Chapman

This is one of the key things to understand about the Long War: its very amorphous, unlimited and endless nature makes for an outstanding justification for ongoing and ever-increasing spending, which then creates more and more interests that have a stake in keeping the flow of funding constant. For one thing, a war of “no exits and no deadlines,” and one that theoretically encompasses the entire planet in one way or another, is a perfect justification for a set of government programs that can never be defunded. If our national security strategy were primarily concerned with national defense, rather than with power projection and hegemony, our objectives would be relatively few, limited and achievable, but that would create some ceiling on spending. The very open-ended and global nature of the Long War means that no “defense” budget is ever really large enough, because no budget no matter how large could be equal to the unlimited nature of the project. This may help explain why the Long War’s most ardent supporters are not embarrassed to claim that Pentagon budget increases are cuts. When measured against the absurd demands their war of “no exits and no deadlines” makes on the nation, mere 9% annual increases in outlays probably barely register.

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