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July 28, 2023

In 1949, the U.S. War Department changed its name.

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Branches of the armed forces were then administered under the new name ‘Department of Defense.’

This newly defined mandate of defending the United States should have been a relatively easy and inexpensive task. Geography and history render the U.S. the most defensible country in the world. Canada and Mexico, good trading partners of the U.S., have not demonstrated a threat to American territorial integrity; nor would they have the military muscle to do so.

More importantly, there are no overseas countries that pose a serious conventional warfare challenge to U.S. security. The enormous logistical operations needed to invade the United States, in the Western Hemisphere and across the world’s largest oceans, would be beyond the naval and maritime capabilities of any country or military alliance of countries.

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The “loss of strength gradient” is a rule in military logistics – armed forces weaken with increasing distance from their supply base. Extrapolating from combatant numbers in Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia during World War II, an undertaking of that magnitude would require possibly ten million troops, hundreds of thousands of pieces of heavy equipment, millions of tonnes of ammunition and fuel, field hospitals, repair facilities and the many other necessities of warfare. In all, a logistical impossibility.

Moreover, any naval armada assembled for that purpose would be visible to American spy satellites and subject to missile attack. The large size of the U.S. would make it very difficult to conquer, and occupy if conquered. Also, the 200 million privately owned firearms in the U.S. would be a strong deterrent to any would be invader. The United States is not prone to conventional armed attack and invasion by any force.

The extraordinary level of current American military spending cannot be explained in terms of real defense needs. Now and in the past, other less justifiable reasons account for the militarism, wars, lost lives, violations of international law and the money spent. The latter at the expense of pressing domestic needs.

The paradox of the American military is the enormous amount of money spent in its support. The military budget of the United States in 2023 was $842 billion. With a population of 336,000,000 this is a cost of $2,506 for each U.S. resident. The military budget of the U.S. is more than the GDP of 90 percent of all countries. There is no real threat that would justify this level of expenditure on defense.

Former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a prescient warning of an obscure but powerful alliance in American politics – the Military-Industrial Complex. This real but almost invisible complex has a threefold purpose: to maintain war industry profiteering, crush socialist governments and movements across the world and to secure global supplies of oil, gas and other profitable commodities. None of these goals has been publicly acknowledged but are patently obvious in detailed studies of U.S. military interventions.

Most of the many U.S. wars, over more than a century, have occurred on the other side of the world, across vast oceans, where it also maintains 750 military bases at an enormous cost. Also, the United States Navy has 11 carrier strike groups. Each has an aircraft carrier and several supporting vessels. They do not defensively patrol the coasts of California or the Eastern Seaboard but rather ply the distant oceans of the world projecting American power.