Tag Archives: war

how a U.S.-China war could happen

A full-blown U.S.-China war seems so stupid for both countries and the entire world as to be unthinkable. But it is thinkable because both countries may think they have something to gain from brinksmanship, and the Trump administration seems willing to take a lot of risks and to be unlikely to back down. Here is a scenario described in Foreign Policy:

Consider the testimony offered by Trump’s Secretary of State pick Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, in his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 11, as he warned of a more confrontational South China Sea policy: “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.” There are only so many ways the Trump team can go about sending such signals given its vow to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which America’s allies had been hoping the United States would complete. By preemptively eliminating tools like economic statecraft from its foreign-policy toolbox, the Trump administration will be leaving itself with only hard power to counteract China’s ambitions. That would probably mean an attempted military blockade against the Chinese navy in the South China Sea…

Trump’s demonstrated willingness to toss out the rulebook on the one-China policy, with his phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, has already ratcheted up tensions with Beijing to a level not seen since 1996, when President Bill Clinton sent two carrier battle groups through the Taiwan Strait. The passage of China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait at the end of December was largely interpreted as a stern indictment directed at Taipei and the incoming Trump administration. The carrier group then transited past Okinawa, which hosts more than half of the 50,000 American troops in Japan, into the South China Sea. A simultaneous op-ed appearing in China’s state-affiliate mouthpiece, the Global Times, warned, “If the fleet is able to enter areas where the US has core interests, the situation when the US unilaterally imposes pressure on China will change…”

Moving more U.S. naval assets into the Pacific will add to Beijing’s perceptions of U.S. containment while increasing the odds that a minor accident or hostile encounter could trigger armed conflict. One could imagine China deploying underwater submarine detection defenses in the South or East China Sea to monitor U.S. Navy movements. If Washington were to seek to destroy these assets to preempt Chinese primacy or look to extend American military superiority in the region, Beijing would feel compelled to retaliate. Trump’s team might then be tempted to think a shocking use of force could deter Beijing from escalating conflict. It’s not clear at what point Trump would decide the costs of conflict outweigh the benefits of winning such a clash.

World Order 2.0

Richard Haas has a vision for what a new international order could look like.

Today’s realities call for an updated operating system—World Order 2.0 – based on “sovereign obligation,” the notion that sovereign states have not just rights but also obligations to others.

A new international order will also require an expanded set of norms and arrangements, beginning with an agreed-upon basis for statehood. Existing governments would agree to consider bids for statehood only in cases where there was a historical justification, a compelling rationale, and popular support, and where the proposed new entity is viable.

World Order 2.0 must also include prohibitions on carrying out or in any way supporting terrorism. More controversially, it must include strengthened norms proscribing the spread or use of weapons of mass destruction.

He goes on to talk about climate change, trade, health, cyberspace, and refugees. It all sounds good but there aren’t a lot of specifics here.

Afghanistan and the return of the “Great Game”

This BBC article talks about the post-occupation (the most recent U.S. occupation, that is) geopolitical intrigue, or Cold War II as I think of it, that is developing in Afghanistan.

In December 2015, a senior Russian diplomat declared that “the Taliban interest objectively coincides with ours” in the fight against IS and that his country and the Taliban “have channels for exchanging information”.

Taliban sources also confirmed that the group’s representatives met Russians inside Russia and “other” countries several times over the past two years.

But Moscow’s current assertiveness in Afghanistan can also be seen as a tactic to put pressure on the US and to enhance its role and regional influence.

Taliban contacts with Russia and Iran might also help Pakistan to distribute and dilute the international pressure it is under for hosting the Afghan Taliban leadership.

2016 in Review

Each month this year, I picked three scary, three hopeful, and three interesting posts or groups of post from the month. Now I’m going to pick one of those three to represent each of the months. The choices are fairly arbitrary and the main point is just to review what the media was saying and what I was thinking about over the course of the year. Then I’ll see if I can identify any trends or come up with any insights.

Most Frightening Stories of the Year

  • JANUARY: Paul Ehrlich is still worried about population. 82% of scientists agree.
  • FEBRUARY: 77% of jobs in China may be threatened by automation.
  • MARCH: An IMF official uttered the words “economic derailment“. That sounds like it could be a real train wreck. Meanwhile Robert Gordon has expanded his pessimistic article on future growth into a book.
  • APRIL: Robert Paxton says Trump is pretty much a fascist. Although conditions are different and he doesn’t believe everything the fascists believed. Umberto Eco once said that fascists don’t believe anything, they will say anything and then what they do once in office has nothing to do with what they said.
  • MAY: The situation in Venezuela may be a preview of what the collapse of a modern country looks like.
  • JUNE: Trump may very well have organized crime links. And Moody’s says that if he gets elected and manages to do the things he says, it could crash the economy.
  • JULY: The CIA is just not that good at spying.
  • AUGUST: A former U.S. secretary of defense thinks the risk of nuclear war is higher now than during the cold war. The Republic Party platform appears to be outright in favor of nuclear weapons, while the Democratic Party platform includes a tepid commitment to maybe “reducing reliance” and spending on nuclear weapons. Jeffrey Sachs says the Syria War has become essentially a U.S.-Russia proxy war.
  • SEPTEMBER: The ecological footprint situation is not looking too promising: “from 1993 to 2009…while the human population has increased by 23% and the world economy has grown 153%, the human footprint has increased by just 9%. Still, 75% the planet’s land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely intense, widespread and rapidly intensifying in places with high biodiversity.” Meanwhile, as of 2002 “we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green material) produced on Earth each year (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001). We consume 35% of the productivity of the oceanic shelf (Pauly and Christensen 1995), and we use 60% of freshwater run-off (Postel et al. 1996). The unprecedented escalation in both human population and consumption in the 20th century has resulted in environmental crises never before encountered in the history of humankind and the world (McNeill 2000). E. O. Wilson (2002) claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if every human consumed at the level of the average US inhabitant.” And finally, 30% of African elephants have been lost in the last 7 years.
  • OCTOBER: According to James Hansen, the world needs “negative” greenhouse gas emissions right away, meaning an end to fossil fuel burning and improvements to agriculture, forestry, and soil conservation practices to absorb carbon. Part of the current problem is unexpected and unexplained increases in methane concentrations in the atmosphere.
  • NOVEMBER: Is there really any doubt what the most frightening story of November 2016 was? The United Nations Environment Program says we are on a track for 3 degrees C over pre-industrial temperatures, not the “less than 2” almost all serious people (a category that excludes 46% of U.S. voters, apparently) agree is needed. This story was released before the U.S. elected an immoral science denier as its leader. One theory is that our culture has lost all ability to separate fact from fiction. Perhaps states could take on more of a leadership role if the federal government is going to be immoral? Washington State voters considered a carbon tax that could have been a model for other states, and voted it down, in part because environmental groups didn’t like that it was revenue neutral. Adding insult to injury, WWF released its 2016 Living Planet Report, which along with more fun climate change info includes fun facts like 58% of all wild animals have disappeared. There is a 70-99% chance of a U.S. Southwest “mega-drought” lasting 35 years or longer this century. But don’t worry, this is only “if emissions of greenhouse gases remain unchecked”. Oh, and climate change is going to begin to strain the food supply worldwide, which is already strained by population, demand growth, and water resources depletion even without it.
  • DECEMBER: The geopolitical situation is not good. If Russia did hack the U.S. election, it wouldn’t be the first election they have hacked. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not over, and the rest of the greater Middle East is increasingly a mess.

Most Hopeful Stories of the Year

Most Interesting Stories of the Year

  • JANUARY: The World Economic Forum focused on technology: “The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.”
  • FEBRUARY: Titanium dioxide is the reason Oreo filling is so white.
  • MARCH: Michael Pollan urged us to eat food. not too much. mostly psychedelic mushrooms.
  • APRIL: Genes can now be programmed just like circuits.
  • MAY: The world has about a billion dogs.
  • JUNE: Switzerland finished an enormous tunnel through the Alps that took 20 years to build.
  • JULY: I was a little side-tracked by U.S. Presidential politics. Nate Silver launched his general election site, putting the odds about 80-20 in favor of Hillary at the beginning of the month. The odds swung toward Trump over the course of the month as the two major party conventions took place (one in my backyard), but by the end of the month they were back to about 70-30 in favor of Hillary. During the month I mused about NAFTA, the fall of the Republic, the banana republic, The Art of the Deal, how to debate Trump, and Jon Stewart.
  • AUGUST: Here is a short video explaining the Fermi Paradox, which asks why there are no aliens. Meanwhile Russian astronomers are saying there might be aliens.
  • SEPTEMBER: Monsanto is trying to help honeybees (which seems good) by monkeying with RNA (which seems a little frightening). Yes, biotech is coming.
  • OCTOBER: Neil deGrasse Tyson says “we might expect to find as many as 100 alien civilizations in our galaxy communicating with radio waves right now.”
  • NOVEMBER: New technology can survey and create a 3D model of a room in seconds.
  • DECEMBER: According to Bill Gates, “new genome technologies are at the cusp of affecting us all in profound ways”. But an article in Nature says we should not be too hopeful about living much past 100.

And now for trends and insights…

Serious long-term threats related to population, food, water resources, natural capital depletion, biodiversity loss, and climate change. These are all inter-related. In past years I probably would have suggested that these threats are so likely and so consequential that we should focus nearly all our efforts on them. But things have changed a bit over the past year. Now it appears that we face dire short term threats as well in the form of serious geopolitical instability, risk of war and global economic stagnation. If you don’t deal with short term threats you might not be around to deal with the long term ones. And voters have chosen leaders in the past year who have no intention of dealing with the long term threats. They make no serious attempt to understand their nature or root causes. In fact, they don’t even acknowledge that the threats exist in many cases.

War. The possibility of war is certainly the biggest short-term threat we face. If we get through the next 4-8 years without a war between major powers or any sort of nuclear detonation, we will have to consider that a win. The greater Middle East from North Africa to Afghanistan is dangerously unstable, and the U.S. has already been drawn into a proxy war with Saudi Arabia and its allies on one side and Iran and Russia on the other side. And it appears that Russia may have played a direct role in influencing the U.S. election. An accidental clash between U.S. and Russian forces in Syria, Eastern Europe, or over the world’s oceans could be enough to set off a series of escalations and miscalculations that leads to a war nobody wants or stands to gain anything from. A naval confrontation between the U.S. and China could be a similar risk.

The Great Recession. Although the U.S. economy has picked up, the overall global growth and employment situation is deeply concerning. Rather than just a cyclical downturn, it may be a long term trend driven by demographics, debt, and underemployment caused by automation. The automation trend is going to be relentless. The 2007-8 financial crisis caused by excessive risk taking in the U.S. finance industry may just have been the straw that broke the camel’s back and made the long-term trends obvious, and another financial crisis that severe at a time of weakness might be the one the world doesn’t recover from. Our new U.S. leaders are already working with big business to roll back the necessary but still inadequate protections put in place after the ’07-8 crisis. Costs and risks imposed by climate change are not going to make the economy any better.

Technology. Technology brings us grave concern over the employment situation, but also great hope that we could see a long-term pickup in productivity, and therefore our overall wealth and quality of life. Of course, an increase in overall wealth and quality of life may help only a small slice of society if that society is structured to concentrate rather than share the wealth, and the leaders we have chosen in the U.S. for the next few years are clearly committed to the former. Extreme concentration of wealth could lead us eventually to a situation of such instability that the only outcomes are armed revolution in the streets or else absolute authoritarian control.

But let’s optimistically assume that our political system eventually comes up with a consensus on sharing the wealth. Now a higher rate of productivity growth (within ecological limits) would be good for everyone. In this world, people whose jobs are displaced by automation would be quickly retrained for new jobs, and they would be educated in the first place so that they are very flexible and adaptable to changing conditions. Over time, we could become so rich that we simply don’t have to work so much, and we could devote more of our time to leisure activities, learning for the sake of learning, the arts, civic and social activities, etc.

This might seem like a utopian vision, but it has happened in the past. People used to work incredibly long, hard hours to grow just enough food to survive, and they didn’t live all that long at that. Later people used to work long, hard hours in factories and sweat shops. Technology, cheap energy, and the wealth they have brought have made huge changes in working hours and life expectancy for most of us. With technology seemingly advancing all around us, the puzzle is why we aren’t seeing similarly spectacular advances today as we have seen in the past.

Advances like the tractor and electricity were enormous changes at the time of course. Maybe today’s technological advances, even though they seem impressive to us, simply aren’t as dramatic as these advances were in their time. That is the basic thesis of Robert Gordon, who I mention above. The World Economic Forum and Nouriel Roubini articles I mention above have good summaries of the advances we are seeing. Roubini categorizes them as:

  • ET (energy technologies, including new forms of fossil fuels such as shale gas and oil and alternative energy sources such as solar and wind, storage technologies, clean tech, and smart electric grids).
  • BT (biotechnologies, including genetic therapy, stem cell research, and the use of big data to reduce health-care costs radically and allow individuals to live much longer and healthier lives).
  • IT (information technologies, such as Web 2.0/3.0, social media, new apps, the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality devices).
  • MT (manufacturing technologies, such as robotics, automation, 3D printing, and personalized manufacturing).
  • FT (financial technologies that promise to revolutionize everything from payment systems to lending, insurance services and asset allocation).
  • DT (defense technologies, including the development of drones and other advanced weapon systems).

Roubini acknowledges the argument that these advances are not the equivalent of past advances, but also suggests that we may be in the lag phase between when technological advances happen and when they begin to have obvious effects on productivity. I think I said it pretty well in my post so I’ll repeat what I said:

Although the plow, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, etc. were game changing, the game didn’t change as soon as they were invented. They had to catch on, infrastructure had to be built, resistance to change had to be overcome, and it took awhile. Each successive revolution happened faster though, which is why I am skeptical that this time is different… I think there is a lag, and it just hasn’t hit yet. If and when there is a sharp technology-driven surge in productivity, it doesn’t mean everything is going to instantly be great for everybody. As we produce more with less effort, there will be winners and losers, haves and have nots. And there will be a lag between when that starts and when it gets resolved. And just to beat a dead horse, we can’t just keep producing and consuming more forever unless we figure out a way to do that without growing our ecological footprint. And, we need to watch out for those defense technologies.

The information technology is all around us now, and the biotechnology is just starting to take off. 2017 could be the year when we have the same excitement in the popular imagination about biotech as we saw with the internet in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it will take a few years.

It is possible that our technology could advance so fast that ecological limits will cease to be relevant before they begin to exert a major drag force on our global economy and society. I don’t think it is safe to put all our eggs in that basket though. I am also saddened by the extreme and seemingly accelerating destruction of our planet’s ecosystems as we have known them throughout human history. We can try to preserve some of what is left, but even if we are successful it will be more like a museum or zoo recording what we used to have than a real, large-scale functioning planetary ecosystem.

There, I ended on a pretty pessimistic note. That’s how I feel at the moment. Not all stories have to have a happy ending. (This is exactly why King Lear is my favorite Shakespeare play, because the bad guys do bad things and get away with it, and sometimes real life is like that.) I just don’t want to get my hopes up about 2017. Come on 2017, maybe you will pleasantly surprise me.

December 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • The climate situation is not good. Concerns about food continue to surface, including from Bjorn Lomborg.
  • The water resources situation is not good. Asia may be headed for serious water shortages. 100 million trees have died in California during the current drought there. Drought and fire in the U.S. Southeast are an increasing problem and the region is unprepared.
  • The geopolitical situation is not good. If Russia did hack the U.S. election, it wouldn’t be the first election they have hacked. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not over, and the rest of the greater Middle East is increasingly a mess.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • Scientists can synthesize proteins that could be incorporated in silicon-based life.
  • According to Bill Gates, “new genome technologies are at the cusp of affecting us all in profound ways”. But an article in Nature says we should not be too hopeful about living much past 100.
  • Maybe fish are not as stupid as we thought.

Middle East Quagmire

How many troops does the U.S. have in Iraq? According to The Daily Beast:

Officially, there are now 3,650 U.S. troops in Iraq, there primarily to help train the Iraqi national army.

But in reality, there are already about 4,450 U.S. troops in Iraq, plus another nearly 7,000 contractors supporting the American government’s operations. That includes almost 1,100 U.S. citizens working as military contractors, according to the latest Defense Department statistics.

And I think we can expect the number to increase:

“We’re looking for opportunities to do more and there will be boots on the ground and I want to be clear about that,” Secretary of Defense Ash Carter told CNBC last month. “But it’s a strategic question whether you are enabling local forces to take and hold rather than trying to substitute for them. That is a strategic intention that we have.”

The next U.S. administration has publically committed to large defense spending increases. It has already lifted a long-standing rule intended to require a civilian to head the Department of Defense. A retired general has been put in charge in homeland security. An executive from the oil industry, which is just fine with taxpayer funded boots on the ground advancing its interests in the Middle East, is going to run the State Department.

We also have boots on the ground in Afghanistan, of course, plus Syria and Libya. Of course, we have advisors in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, and are participating with Saudi Arabia in a proxy war against Iran in Yemen. In 2012 Seymour Hersh told us that U.S. Special Forces are actively involved training proxy forces inside Iran itself, a claim which official and media U.S. sources quickly shot down. I have no evidence to the contrary, yet Seymour Hersh has some past experience telling truths that the government and media find inconvenient.

I’ve rambled a bit here. But my basic thesis is that we can expect the oil industry and the military-industrial complex to be running our country’s foreign policy for the foreseeable future. They seem increasingly to be drawing us into a proxy war with Iran and Russia on one side, and the Gulf Arab states on the other side. Maybe this is the way Cold War II will unfold. There is no sign of the checks and balances we all learned about in elementary school. The only checks that matter are the ones the public writes to the IRS, and the only balances that matter are the ballooning ones on our credit card statements. This won’t change until the public feels poor and realizes why they feel poor. Well, we do feel poor but we are buying into propaganda that it is mysterious foreign and internal enemies that are the problem, and not the worsening global economic and geopolitical climate our actions are continuing to destabilize. Not to mention the actual climate.

Obama and Israel

This is not a blog about Israeli-Palestinian politics. But there is some speculation that Obama could take some last-minute action, or more specifically, not taking the usual action of vetoing resolutions introduced by other Security Council members. This would obviously be a big deal,

The most likely scenarios for Obama action in the [United Nations Security Council] are variations of the following three:

● First: unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state within specified or approximate borders following the 1948 armistice lines where no Palestinian state ever existed. In virtually all world forums, this would more juridically move the status of Israel’s administrative presence in Judea and Samaria from disputed to occupation.

● Second: abstain from vetoing a pending French resolution that would impose settlement lines and/or recognize a Palestinian state within 18 months absent agreement by the parties.

● Third: impose a territorial settlement within a two-year deadline if the parties do not craft one themselves.

November 2016 in Review

Sometimes you look back on a month and feel like nothing very important happened. But November 2016 was obviously not one of those months! I am not going to make any attempt to be apolitical here. I was once a registered independent and still do not consider myself a strong partisan. However, I like to think of myself as being on the side of facts, logic, problem solving, morality and basic goodness. Besides, this blog is about the future of our human civilization and human race. I can’t pretend our chances didn’t just take a turn for the worse.

3 most frightening stories

  • Is there really any doubt what the most frightening story of November 2016 was? The United Nations Environment Program says we are on a track for 3 degrees C over pre-industrial temperatures, not the “less than 2” almost all serious people (a category that excludes 46% of U.S. voters, apparently) agree is needed. This story was released before the U.S. elected an immoral science denier as its leader. One theory is that our culture has lost all ability to separate fact from fiction. Perhaps states could take on more of a leadership role if the federal government is going to be immoral? Washington State voters considered a carbon tax that could have been a model for other states, and voted it down, in part because environmental groups didn’t like that it was revenue neutral. Adding insult to injury, WWF released its 2016 Living Planet Report, which along with more fun climate change info includes fun facts like 58% of all wild animals have disappeared. There is a 70-99% chance of a U.S. Southwest “mega-drought” lasting 35 years or longer this century. But don’t worry, this is only “if emissions of greenhouse gases remain unchecked”. Oh, and climate change is going to begin to strain the food supply worldwide, which is already strained by population, demand growth, and water resources depletion even without it.
  • Technological unemployment may be starting to take hold, and might be an underlying reason behind some of the resentment directed at mainstream politicians. If you want a really clear and concise explanation of this issue, you could ask a smart person like, say, Barack Obama.
  • According to left wing sources like Forbes, an explosion of debt-financed spending on conventional and nuclear weapons is an expected consequence of the election. Please, Mr. Trump, prove them wrong!

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

Trump and the military-industrial complex

This article published in Forbes the day after the election pretty much says it all: For The Defense Industry, Trump’s Win Means Happy Days Are Here Again. So much for “draining the swamp” and sending the special interests packing. (By the way, this isn’t fair to swamps. Before Washington D.C. was drained and became a cesspool of legalized corruption, it was a highly productive wetland ecosystem. And what I just said isn’t really fair to cesspools which are a low-tech but highly cost-effective means of treating wastewater. How about we just go with shit-pile? But that’s not really fair to shit-piles, which contain valuable nutrients…)

First, Trump has repeatedly stated that he will modernize the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal, which consists of missile-carrying submarines, land-based missiles in Midwestern silos, and long-range bombers.  The Obama Administration has nuclear modernization plans, but it hasn’t explained where the money will come from.  Now, it is sure to come.  Big winners: General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls Industries which make subs, Lockheed Martin which makes sub-launched missiles, Northrop Grumman which is building a new bomber, and Boeing which builds tankers and airborne command posts to support the nuclear force.  One of these companies will also be tapped to replace land-based Minuteman missiles.

Second, Trump has proposed significantly increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, which will require major equipping initiatives.  Vehicle makers BAE Systems and General Dynamics will benefit not only from new production, but also upgrades to the existing fleet making it more lethal and resilient.  Helicopter makers Boeing and Lockheed Martin will almost certainly get more money, as will companies like BAE Systems and Raytheon that provide radios, electronic warfare gear, and ground-based air defense systems.

Third, Trump has stated an intention to expand the Navy’s fleet to 350 warships from less than 300 today.  That probably means buying aircraft carriers and surface combatants faster, which would be good news for General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls Industries — the nation’s two leading producers of warships.  The Obama Administration already has programmed fairly robust spending on Virginia-class attack subs (not to be confused with ballistic missile subs) which are built in partnership by GD and Huntington; Trump’s win will do nothing to undermine that plan, and may expand it.  If the Marine Corps grows, Huntington Ingalls will also be building more amphibious warships.

Apparently, a lot of this assessment comes from a report card on the military by the Heritage Foundation, which rates our nation’s military as “marginal” and the army in particular as “weak”, despite the fact that we outspend our “enemies” by orders of magnitude.

A think tank from the opposite end of the spectrum called Center for International Policy had this to say in 2011:

Current reductions must also be measured against the unprecedented growth in Pentagon spending over the past 13 years. Since 1998, the Pentagon’s base budget has grown by 54% (adjusted for inflation).4 Moreover, with the country turning the page on a long decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the planned reductions represent a historically small drawdown when compared with those following the end of Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War…

We spend more on the Pentagon and related military activities than all of our potential adversaries combined – over four times what China spends – and roughly double what we spent in 2001. 6 Defense spending includes not just the Pentagon’s budget, but also intelligence, veteran’s affairs, defense-related atomic energy programs, defense-related interest on the national debt and other defense-related agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security. Altogether, this constitutes 23% of the entire federal budget, more than half of discretionary spending, or $832 billion…

Our conventional and nuclear forces are more capable, better equipped, and better trained than any other military force in the world.14 For example, as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates explains, with 11 large, nuclear-powered carriers, the U.S. Navy can carry twice as many aircraft at sea as the rest of the world combined, and the Marine Corps is the largest force of its type, exceeding in size most nations’ armies.

Let’s look at a few more numbers. I’m piecing together numbers from multiple sources and years here so I don’t expect them to be highly accurate, just to give a general idea.

  • U.S. federal government spending is about $3.85 trillion for 2016. (Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com, which sounds like an official government website at first glance but is obviously not.) $916 billion of this is for Social Security. $595 billion on Medicare. If I can do math, this leaves $2.3 trillion for everything else.
  • So let’s take that $832 billion estimate from above for all security related spending. 22% of all federal spending, and 36% of spending outside of Social Security and Medicare, which are funded mostly by their own dedicated taxes rather than income tax. In other words, more than a third of our federal income taxes go to support the military and national security.
  • The federal budget deficit in 2016 was $587 billion. This sounds bad at 15% of federal spending, but sounds less bad at about 3% of GDP. Our creditors (which include ourselves) don’t worry too much because we could probably cut spending and/or increase taxes by this amount if we absolutely had to. Just like my mortgage, my creditors don’t actually want me to pay it off, they just want to know that I could if I had to.
  • The nuclear weapons “modernization” program (this is a code word for new nuclear weapons) has been estimated to cost a total of $1 trillion over 30 years. Ignoring inflation, interest, and all principles of finance and accounting, this is $33 billion per year, which doesn’t sound so big next to the other numbers above. It is a diabolical fact that nuclear weapons are relatively cheap compared to conventional weapons. This is one thing that makes them so hard to get rid of – we could never afford to replace them with an equal amount of conventional power, so to get rid of them we would have to give up some power relative to the other countries of the world.

So, let me come up with some of my naive policy prescriptions just for fun:

  • The Army and Marine Corps obviously do the same thing. Get rid of one of them. I would tend to get rid of the Army since the Marines have more experience riding on boats and getting from the boats to the shore.
  • Keep the Navy the way it is or even strengthen it a bit, as it is probably the branch of the military most likely to be needed.
  • Two out of three branches of the nuclear “triad” are completely useless – land based missiles and bombers. Get rid of them. If you can’t just throw them away, cancel the modernization program and retire them as they become obsolete. Store them safely or use them to generate carbon-free electricity in developing countries under UN supervision.
  • Keep the submarine-based missiles for the time being. Use them as bargaining chips and retire them little by little as we convince other countries to give up their own nuclear weapons.
  • The Air Force will have less to do now that it doesn’t have any nuclear weapons. Get rid of that part of it. Also get rid of most of its airplanes because the Navy has plenty of those. It will still have some satellites and what-not to take care of.
  • Change the Constitution so military-industrial companies can’t buy politicians and write the nation’s laws in their favor.
  • Change the Constitution so income tax revenues can be spent on the military only up to 2% of GDP. If the political system agrees to more funding, fund it through a national sales tax on everything the citizens buy, with a message printed on every receipt telling them exactly how much of every purchase goes to the “war tax”. Let them puzzle over why there is a war tax if there is no war.
  • Reform the Security Council by giving up the veto in exchange for everyone else giving up the veto and replacing it with some kind of rational consensus process.
  • Grow the economy, reduce the deficit, create jobs, build great infrastructure, provide great education, protect the environment, help the poor, etc.

October 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. electric grid is being systematically probed by hackers working for foreign governments.
  • According to James Hansen, the world needs “negative” greenhouse gas emissions right away, meaning an end to fossil fuel burning and improvements to agriculture, forestry, and soil conservation practices to absorb carbon. Part of the current problem is unexpected and unexplained increases in methane concentrations in the atmosphere.
  • The epidemics that devastated native Americans after European arrival were truly some of the most horrific events in history, and a cautionary tale for the future.

3 most hopeful stories

  • New technology can read your heartbeat by bouncing a wireless signal off you. Mark Zuckerberg has decided to end disease.
  • While he still has people’s attention, Obama has been talking about Mars and zoning. Elon Musk wants to be the one to take you and your stuff to Mars.
  • Maine is taking a look at ranked choice voting. Ironically, the referendum will require approval by a simple majority of voters. Which makes you wonder if there are multiple voting options that could be considered and, I don’t know, perhaps ranked somehow? What is the fairest system of voting on what is the fairest system of voting?

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