Do You Think The Military-Industrial Complex Needs To Be Dismantled?

Navy Builds A Boat It Will Never Need, But It Will Look Really Awesome Parked Off Coast Of Countries We Bomb

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “China spent around $150 billion on their entire military.  They have over a billion citizens that they theoretically would have to protect, thus the reason for an army or a military.  They spent $150 billion, I’m sure much of it from sales of Wal-Mart trinkets.  The Pentagon wants to fund the United States Navy at a rate that would then outpace the second largest spender of military hardware on the planet.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Listen to this.  I had not even heard this, so I read this with a lot of surprise myself.

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The $3.3 billion Zumwalt destroyer [Mike: How many of you know what a Zumwalt destroyer is?] uses all-electric propulsion, employs stealth features, carries a huge arsenal of guided missiles, and mounts advanced cannons that can hit targets 63 miles away.

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Mike:  The New York Times editorial board, this is what they say about this.  This is not me saying this.  This is what they say about this in this editorial today.

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Most likely it will never be tested in battle, because no other nation is even attempting to build a warship like the Zumwalt, which symbolizes the gigantic advantage the United States Navy enjoys.

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Mike:  So we have a battleship that probably won’t ever be used because it’s so large, so powerful that it’s not going to be challenged on the high seas.  The kind of warfare that is fought these days, especially against these ISIS-type clowns that so many of you can’t wait to start a new war with, does not call for much Navy power.  The Navy gets the supplies in and is responsible for a few other things.  The Navy is not utilized in war the way that – for example, in World War II there were many, many battles that were fought – I’m not breaking any news hears I don’t think – on the high seas.

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There are a bunch of movies that have been made out of them.  When’s the last time we actually had a naval battle?  I can’t remember in my lifetime if we’ve actually had – when I start thinking about naval battles, I don’t even think about a naval battle.  I think about the USS Cole being bombed by a bunch of terrorist madmen in a harbor in Yemen.

Back to the article.  They’ve now made a budget request.  This is how large an agency has become now.  It now requests its own money of Congress.  Congress doesn’t tell the Navy: Hey, we’re leaders.  Hey, we’re in the political class.  Hey, we’re elected to do this job.  We’re going to appropriate to you x-amount of dollars.  No, now the Navy tells us you will give us.  Nice work if you can find it.

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The Pentagon’s new budget request asks that the Navy receive a large increase: $161 billion for the 2016 fiscal year, versus $149 billion in the current fiscal year.

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Mike:  Let me try and put this in perspective for you, if I may, for just a moment.  The last year that I saw numbers for, military spending across the globe, China is second in military spending to the United States.  China spent around $150 billion on their entire military.  They have over a billion citizens that they theoretically would have to protect, thus the reason for an army or a military.  They spent $150 billion, I’m sure much of it from sales of Wal-Mart trinkets.  The Pentagon wants to fund the United States Navy at a rate that would then outpace the second largest spender of military hardware on the planet.  This would drive then the amount of money spent yearly for the United States military to over $700 billion.  Ladies and gentlemen, that is an astronomical figure.  That is an amount of money that is inconceivable to the human mind.  But it’s not enough.  You know why it’s not enough?

Just as we’ve predicted and talked about here over and over and over again on this show, once an entity becomes large enough that it’s making its own funding request now, like any other form of organic life, it’s going to fight to protect itself.  It is going to fight for life.  That’s what the military-industrial complex has become and that’s what it’s doing now.  We’re making ships that we don’t even need.  They’re making planes that we don’t even need.  But it doesn’t matter.  We might need them sometime.  Well, I suppose we might need a lot of things.

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Both houses of Congress are now under Republican control, with the Senate Armed Services Committee headed by John McCain, a Navy veteran. [Mike: So what do you think is going to happen? Is the Navy going to get the money? Of course they’re going to get the money.] Desire for a larger, more expensive Navy has been a Republican political theme since the Reagan presidency. The Republican presidential aspirant Jeb Bush, who favors higher military spending, has called Navy budget restrictions “really severe.” Another potential Republican White House candidate, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told the American Enterprise Institute in October that if cuts were made to the defense budget, “America will not have a global Navy anymore.” [Mike: Folks, that’s just malarkey.]

Yet no naval expansion is needed. The Navy has 10 nuclear-powered supercarriers – 10 more than the rest of the world. No other nation is even contemplating anything like the advanced nuclear supercarriers that the United States has under construction. China possesses one outdated, conventionally powered carrier, and is believed to be building to other carriers, neither of which is a nuclear supercarrier capable of contesting the “blue water,” or deep open oceans, where the United States Navy dominates. In aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, naval aviation, surface firepower, assault ships, missiles and logistics, the United States Navy is more powerful than all other navies of the world combined.

Some commentators engage in fearmongering regarding China’s carriers, new submarines and its anti-ship ballistic missile. But the carriers are modest compared with America’s, the submarines far less capable than ours. And there’s no evidence that its anti-ship missile has had a realistic test. [Mike:  This editorial goes on to flesh out some of the details here.]

For many centuries, naval rivalry was a central aspect of great-power relations. Yet for more than half a century there has been no great-power naval rivalry – because the United States Navy rules. [Mike: That’s why I asked the question: If you’re a Navy guy, do you think that the Navy is superior? I think the consensus would be yes, it is superior.]

Since Navy operations take place far from home, Americans may be unaware of their country’s nautical strength and of the progressive role the Navy plays in world affairs. Many Americans have never seen an active-duty United States warship; ships can’t march in Fourth of July parades or fly over football games.

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Mike:  Just think about that number for just a minute, $161 billion per year.  But it’s not enough.  My point is that’s enough that they’re complaining about it.  Then we have this from the – the talk of war, this is what a highly civilized people do.  They spend all their time in political discussions talking about war, talking about making war, how to make better war, how to make bigger war.  A new book out called Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen – remember that Risen was one of the guys that worked for the New York Times.  No, that’s James Rosen.  Risen was the one that broke the story about the camps, I believe. This is a review that’s written by a former CIA officer.

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During my early years at the Central Intelligence Agency (2003-05), I would occasionally stop by to chat with friends and colleagues who manned the ramparts in the Office of Iraq Analysis (OIA). Here, Langley’s best and brightest pontificated over ways to weed out “former regime elements” and divined the optimum solution to foster a united and democratic government in Baghdad. [Mike: I think we can conclude that whatever it was that they recommended, it didn’t work. Geniuses.]

One office meme, in particular, captures the can-do spirit of those days: the “Freedometer.” The Freedometer was a circular cardboard cutout with a pivoting arrow, posted conspicuously for all to see in that particular cubicle platoon. And with all the fun and seriousness of a game of spin-the-bottle, it measured ”freedom” on no particularly observable basis.

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Mike:  This is your bureaucrats at work here.  Make-work and having fun while soldiers, men, actual bodies, not boots on the ground, men were deployed in a foreign land.  It was all big fun and games inside the CIA.  I don’t think we realize how close we are to becoming that which we fear and that which has been historically regarded as being dangerous regimes that huge, horrific wars have been fought to stop.  We’re close, folks, very close.

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In recent years, the government’s freedom rhetoric has proven to be as shallow as that of the OIA’s Freedometer. The government has wire-tapped Americans’ phones without warrants, carried out extrajudicial killings of American citizens suspected of joining al-Qaeda, and spent billions of American tax dollars on an ever-expanding national security establishment.

In Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with the New York Times, examines the development of the “homeland security industrial complex.” This work is essential to understanding the profit motive, and overall does a solid job at getting to the bottom of one important question: Cui bono? [Mike: That’s who gets the gift, who benefits?]

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In fact, Risen claims that while the majority of Americans were giving up freedoms and privacies in the name of the War on Terror, an entire “mercenary class” was being rewarded with immense wealth by these same conflicts. He includes people like Dennis Montgomery, a self-made defense contractor who convinced the CIA and high-ranking officials in the Bush administration that he had developed a technology to detect hidden al-Qaeda messages in Al Jazeera broadcasts. In early 2013 that “technology” led the Bush administration to ground dozens of passenger flights from France before proving to be a scam. (Montgomery, however, continued to be awarded contracts worth up to $1.9 billion under both the Bush and Obama administrations.)

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Of course, Montgomery is a small fish in an ocean of contractors looking to profit from America’s fears.

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Mike:  This is why it’s important for ISIS, Boko Haram, etc. to make big headlines and why big media plays such a huge role in this.  You have to have a population that is mortified of something.  You have to be horrified of something in order to justify the ever-expanding military class, the ever-expanding national security state.  The two are linked.

End Mike Church Show Transcript