Whatever happened to national security?

I've been looking for it everywhere, and I finally found it. You'll never guess where.

I’ve been looking everywhere for subscriptions, too. Won’t you please subscribe?

Remember the fixation of the Republican Party on national security?  Remember them constantly beating the drum that the Democrats are out to destroy our national security by “cutting” defense spending?  Which by the way has never happened.  The growth of defense spending has been slightly diminished under some Democratic administrations, but total defense spending has been on the rise every year that I have been a sentient being on the planet.

The Republican Party has tied national security to defense spending over the years because it’s a convenient metric that everyone can easily understand.  If you want more national security, you spend more money on it, because everyone knows that spending more gets you more.  Left by the wayside, of course, are such suck-holes of excess and waste as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, into which we have poured $6.4 trillion of our national treasure since 2001, according to a study done in 2019 by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.  So you can probably add a few tens of billions on that number to bring it up to the 2021 total.

The geniuses who were in charge of our government on September 11, 2001 when 19 foreign hijackers flew three planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon concluded that it would be a good idea to attack some Muslim nations in retaliation.  So we spent quite a bit trying to do something about it.  And we killed a lot of people in the process. According to the same study by Brown University, 801,000 people have died as a direct result of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, including  335,000 civilians.  The fighting isn’t over in either country almost 20 years later.

That was one place I looked for our national security:  Iraq and Afghanistan.  I found thousands of Americans still assigned to those countries in the military and in civilian roles, but I couldn’t find our national security anywhere.  It wasn’t there when we launched our attacks into those countries in 2001 and 2003, and it’s not there now.

I also looked on the African continent, where according to a 2020 report by Nick Turse in The Intercept there are some 6,000 American troops stationed on 29 U.S. bases.  According to a 2015 report in Politico, we have nearly 800 military bases around the world.  A 2019 report in The Smithsonian magazine found U.S. troops assigned in 80 countries doing stuff like counterterrorism training, military exercises, running drone bases, and engaged in combat operations.  Eighty countries.  There are about 190 countries in the world.  That means we are engaged in one kind of military operation or another in almost 50 percent of the countries on the planet.  I looked at the map published by the Smithsonian in their 2019 report.  Despite a world liberally dotted with  American military forces, I couldn’t find our national security anywhere.

 

The last place I looked for our national security was right here at home in the good old U.S. of A.  Bingo!  Right off the bat I found a major attack us!  It happened on January 6, when thousands of American citizens supporting Donald Trump attacked the Capitol building in Washington D.C., and committed acts of theft and destruction of property, during which five people were killed, including one police officer.  About 140 police officers were wounded in the attack. According to a report last week by NPR, more than 250 arrests have been made, including 53 people linked to white supremacist and other extremist organizations and 41 people with either military or law enforcement backgrounds. 

Now we’re talking!  According to NPR, the FBI has 300 more suspects under active investigation.  More than 800 are estimated to have breached the Capitol building through doors and windows that had been broken into, and several thousand more are estimated to have breached the police defenses around the Capitol.  Both are violations of the law. 

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) very helpfully published a report last October on domestic threats to our national security.  According to a finding by the Department of Homeland Security quoted in the report, “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists—specifically white supremacist extremists (WSEs)—will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.”  An FBI report cited the same threat, saying that the “top threat we face from domestic violent extremists” is from racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremists, including white supremacists, according to the CSIS study.  Neither the FBI nor the Department of Homeland Security have released their data on domestic terrorism, however.  Could it be that every time someone starts talking about right-wing extremism Republicans go crazy, like they did in 2009 when the Department of Homeland Security released a study of that very problem?  Gee…I wonder…

So CSIS took data they had gathered around the country and came up with figures showing that “white supremacists and other like-minded extremists” were responsible for 67 percent of the terrorist attacks against the United States in 2020. “They used vehicles, explosives, and firearms as their predominant weapons and targeted demonstrators and other individuals because of their racial, ethnic, religious, or political makeup—such as African Americans, immigrants, Muslims, and Jews,” according to the CSIS report.  Incredibly, CSIS found that between 1994 and 2020, “roughly half” of the years had greater numbers of fatalities from domestic terrorism because of mass attacks like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168, and the 2016 Orlando attack on the Pulse nightclub which killed 49 and wounded 53.

Do we have a law making domestic terrorism a federal crime?  Are you kidding?  None of those arrested in the attack on the Capitol are charged with terrorism.  Their crimes happened on federal property, and are federal crimes, so all we’ve got to charge them with is stuff like illegal entry of a federal building, destruction of federal property, and interfering with the legitimate business of government.  (19 are charged additionally with conspiracy in the planning and/or carrying out of the attack.)

So with tens of thousands of American troops deployed around the world in some 80 countries, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year, all of them allegedly looking out for our national security, it turns out that the biggest threat we face is right here at home.

We spent $721 billion last year on the defense of our nation.  That’s the so-called “defense budget” for military spending.  The year before that, we spent $686 billion.  The year before that, we spent $639 billion.  The last budget submitted by the Trump administration for national defense was $740 billion.

Wouldn’t you love to know how much the Pentagon spent to deploy the 150 National Guard troops that were finally authorized to go to the aid of the Capitol police on January 6?  Now there’s a national security budget I think should be made public, because like the rest of the Pentagon budget, I think it might be a good candidate to be increased, don’t you?  Maybe a few less titanium fan blades for the broken engines of the F-35 fighter, and a few more National Guard troops for the next time the white supremacist Trump-loons decide it would be a good idea to attack the Capitol. 

What do you think?