“Another $40 billion down the rathole,” Secretary of the Treasury Gordon Humphrey used to sigh, contemplating the Defense Department’s annual budget requests under the Eisenhower administration.1 But that was then. Now we’re up to $2 trillion!
Well, on the one hand, that $2 trillion, to update our nuclear deterrent, will be spread out over 25 years, so it’s really only about $80 billion a year! (For 25 years) On the other hand, it’s a complete waste, since we don’t need to spend a dime!
Gordon’s complete thought on military spending, as described in the second volume of Robert Ambrose’s admiring biography of Ike, ran as follows: “we’re throwing away forty billion in capital every year—on the dump heap—serves only our security for that year, then on the dump heap.” But the massive revamp of our nuclear “triad”, demanded by the Pentagon and swallowed whole by the painfully submissive Biden administration, only makes our security worse, before it goes on the “dump heap”!
Slate’s Fred Kaplan, who’s been on this $2 trillion trainwreck/holdup for some time, has the ugly details, reading through the Pentagon’s 2022 “Nuclear Posture Review”—which he describes uncharitably as a “slog of cliches”—so we don’t have to. Unfortunately, as Fred also tells us, the cliches aren’t the bad part, or at least not the really bad part:
More than that, it’s a sign that another casualty of the war in Ukraine and various other messes in the world is the suspension of creative thinking about nuclear strategy—and, with it, the splurging of hundreds of billions of dollars on new nuclear weapons, many of which are unnecessary.
Well, I don’t know when the U.S. was thinking creatively about the use of nuclear weapons. Fred sure didn’t seem to think we were back in 2018, when he came up with the following post: Mattis Goes Nuclear Trump’s secretary of defense has recently adopted some dubious and dangerous ideas about nuclear strategy.. Sighed Fred,
James Mattis has fully joined the nuclear tribesmen.
As recently as 2015, Mattis urged Congress to reassess the need for the triad, the long-standing practice of placing nuclear weapons on three types of platforms—land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and long-range aircraft. He even advocated dismantling the land-based missiles. He argued that their hair-trigger posture increased the chance of nuclear war.
Fred bemoaned the fact that the once sensible-sounding Jim had gone native, and I did some of my own sighing as well, in my post, Fred Kaplan: So sadly so right, even outsighing Fred, as a matter of fact, as I am often wont to do.
Fred, dewy-eyed optimist that he is, was as hopeful about Joe as he was about Jim:
[T]here was some chance that Biden might decide not to “modernize all three legs of the nuclear Triad”—i.e., to build all-new replacements for our aging intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, bombers, and cruise missiles. Obama had been manipulated into agreeing to fund them, at least in the short run, in exchange for getting the Senate to ratify the New START arms-reduction treaty, and Biden knew that Obama had regretted doing so. Biden could reverse that move, since these weapons were all in their early stages of research and development.
“Some chance,” huh? Some chance that a Democrat will stand up to the Pentagon! Joe did that, of course, when he withdrew from Afghanistan, and he still carries the scars. And with the state of inflation, the border, and crime, I’m sure Uncle Joe ain’t feelin’ too brave.
Which is more than a shame. As Fred complained in an earlier post, new weapons, high-speed ICBMs, which travel at 18,000 miles an hour, are, well, just a bit dangerous, because once they’re gone, well, they’re gone, and so is Beijing, or whatever it was we were aiming at, and so are the rest of us. I agree completely, and have repeatedly suggested getting rid of long-range bombers as well, because they’re no damn good!
Since I agree so strongly with Fred on this one, it pains me to note, as I must, for duty calls, that he’s a total pill when it comes to the Progressive Congressional Caucus’ recent, ill-starred, and sadly withdrawn letter to President Biden urging him to actually, you know, show some thought as to how the bloody war in Ukraine might be ended—a letter whose intent and purpose I wholeheartedly agree with as well.
Now, Fred himself proposed a plan to end the war in Ukraine back in March of this year. Fred began that post with the following paragraph:
One thing is increasingly clear about the war in Ukraine: It will end badly for everyone, regardless of who wins. If Russia captures Kyiv and installs a puppet president, he will face a massive, well-funded insurgency, which could last for years and kill still more Russian troops. If Ukraine keeps successfully resisting the invaders, Vladimir Putin will step up the bombing, massacring hundreds more civilians and forcing hundreds of thousands more to flee as refugees.
In later posts—Fred has been following the war pretty closely (you can find all his posts here)—Fred has concluded that both Ukraine’s continued resistance and Putin’s increasing fury at his offensive’s failures has greatly reduced the possibilities of an “acceptable peace” for either side any time soon, and I agree. But the war has to end somehow. Fred says here that “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has victory in his sights, perhaps not unreasonably.”
“Perhaps not unreasonably”! That’s not an endorsement I’d want to take to the bank. And yet after that slippery non-thumb’s up, Fred goes full bore for a “solution” that I never would have imagined him endorsing—regime change! Yeah, that Putin could be on shaky ground! Could be! Might be! You don’t know!
In short, the fastest way to peace, at this point, is to make sure Ukraine keeps up the pressure, accelerates its advances, throws the Russian army into disarray. At the moment, Moscow propagandists are blaming various generals or intelligence officers for the failures on the battlefield. At some point, they will run out of scapegoats. Their gaze of reproach may turn, at first hesitantly, then with increased ferocity, on the man in the Kremlin who is truly in charge.
Fred, I think I may be excused for thinking, perhaps not unreasonably, that you’re speculating all too freely with other people’s blood. I think it’s time to leash your inner General Patton and stop thinking like a 13-year-old boy. And I think it’s time to stop trashing the CPC for daring to suggest that we don’t always get what we want.
Afterwords
I haven’t even mentioned the worst of Fred’s crimes. In his takedown of the CPC, he descends to this:
Whatever this group of progressives’ intentions in writing or signing the letter, Putin would certainly take it as encouragement to hang on and keep fighting.
That’s right, you’re helping the enemy! You’re practically traitors! In fact, you really are traitors! Never question the president! Never! During the Vietnam era, we used to get this a lot. It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit now.
