I ' m also very, very concerned about the military.
Very concerned ! Romney has said some things that he can ' t possibly fulfill , but he could make a start on them and really make things bad.
And what I ' m talking about is , if you look at his projected military budget, you ' re talking about not only increasing spending beyond the highes t spending years of the Cold War, you ' re talking about doing it by orders of magnitude! I ' ll shall you how high the military budget is right now.
We ' ve had thirteen straight years of increases. I f you let sequestration take place , and cut about a trillion dollars out of the Pentagon ' s budget over the next ten years, you would still only return spending to 2007 levels, and that ' s in inflation adjusted dollars. So , that ' s how much we ' ve increased military spend ing. Our military spending right now is about forty to forty-five percent of the entire world ' s military spending.
We ' ve dwarfed everybody else in the world.
You could combine twenty six of our allies, including Japan and Germany , the United Kingdom, France , and you still wouldn ' t have our defense budget .
You add the Intelligence budget to that, you add the Homeland Security budget to that , you add the Veterans administration budget to that , you add the Nuclear budget to that and the Department of Energy , and you ' ve got over 1.2 trillion dollars in fiscal year 2010 , for example .
T hat ain ' t chump change! A nd we need to be cutting that budget in order to commit to shape the military
commensurate with the threat in the world, a nd we also need to be paying some of that money to deficit reduction. And I don ' t see Romney doing that at all. Now I don ' t think he ' s going to be able to do what he says he ' s going to do.
I think he ' s lying. B ut politicians lie sometimes and sometimes they actually carry out some of their lies . And in this case if Romney carries th is out, we ' ll have a military so bloated, and so screwed up, and so misconceived, that if anybody does come along down the road like say a China or whatever, we ' re going to have a real problem with it.
So that ' s frightening to me! I mean I spent thirty one years in the Army .
T hat ' s frightening to me !
Rob Kall: Now, Rachel Maddow wrote a book earlier this year called " Drift ' , that was about how the military has gotten so big it ' s really out of control, that nobody really can control.
Lawrence Wilkerson:
Excellent book!
You may have noted that I commented on the book inside the cover.
Rob Kall: Ah! Okay. No, I didn ' t notice that.
Lawrence Wilkerson:
She sent the galleys to me, and I told her , " e xcellent book ' . She ' s spot on . S he ' s right.
I wish she ' d gone even deeper into it.
It ' s something that happens to E mpire almost automatically, and it something that happens to empires that get into fiscal problems, fiscal as in financial and economic, even more often.
So , the two things kind of go hand - in - hand.
And also if you look at history, and you look at what empires do when this sort of thing happens to them, more often than not, rather than retrench ing and revisiting their polic ies, and cutting back, the y usually just reinforce the failure . And again, as I said, that ' s scary, that ' s very scary . We do not need to be frittering away our power on the peripheries of our empire, by engaging our military in things like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and so forth.
Rob
Kall: Now,
as
being
engaged
as
you
were
in
the
Joint
Chiefs
of
Staff
when
Colin
Powell
directed it
and
you
were
his
assistant,
do
the
Joint
Chiefs
of
Staff
have
a
control
over
the
military? Does anybody?
Part 2 of the interview continues here.
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