Thanksgiving 2010

I'm thankful that it only comes once a year. I've said this over and over again, to the point that my friends at the coffee shop groan when I bring it up. I'm not crazy about turkey and the six or eight types of mush that goes along with the thanksgiving meal.

This year, my son and his wife could not be home for thanksgiving, and all of my close friends were engaged with their families, so, faced with the prospect of just my wife, mother, and my self consuming this huge meal, I turned to the company of strangers. Not really strangers, but neighbors that Kathy and I did not know very well, but they seemed like nice people. We invited Doug and Kay, who have lived a few blocks up the street for about twenty five years, and Wade and Dawn, who have lived in Concord only a few years, and also live just up the street. Kay's brother, Bob, who lives in Georgia was coming to town, so we also invited him. These two couples did not know each other. I had a great time, and I hope everyone else did. Let me tell you about it.

Everyone came to the house about an hour and a half before dinner, and we had a few drinks and chatted about this and that. I guess we were all a bit stiff, and on our best behavior, but polite and friendly. We sat down to dinner and continued our conversation. You can imagine most of the conversation, a brief synopsis of our life histories. Where we were from, our children, what kind of work we did. Bob was an ex Air Force pilot, and he talked about his experiences in Vietnam, and Doug, Wade, and I talked about why we were not in the service. I'm pretty gregarious, so I like this kind of stuff, just getting to know a little about each other. I had promised myself that I would not talk about politics or religion, and I did pretty well until the coffee and deserts were finished. (I can imagine a collective groan from any of my friends that happen to read this.) Some how, (perhaps I brought it up) the subject of military spending came up, specifically, the cost of the new Joint Task Force Fighters soon to be built. As you can guess, a subject near and dear to Bob, the ex fighter pilot. Things tensed up a bit. We quickly jumped from the cost of the planes, to the need for the size of our military, to justification for the war in Iraq, to intervention in the Iranian nuclear program, and ultimately to the projection of American military might all over the world. Big wars always start small. Bob seems to be a reasonable man, and I generally am as well, so the whole discussion was pretty low key, although we were in most cases on opposite sides of the issues.

The problem though, is this. Even in a reasonable conversation, most of the dialogue consists of zingers and incomplete thoughts. It's impossible to have perfectly reasoned and erudite responses to each other's remarks. It's not like an episode of "West Wing". This is why I've found that I like to write this stuff down, even if no one ever reads it. Here's what I think about America's Military.

I'm not a naive left wing fool, I think that we need a strong military to protect our country, and our interests. I don't think that our military needs to be five or ten times stronger than any potential foe. I think that we are a danger to ourselves and to the rest of the world because of the force we can bring to bear.

Just as we destroyed the Soviet Union by out spending them in the arms race, we are financially destroying our selves with the ever increasing cost of our military. I looked this up; actually, direct defense costs in real dollars have been fairly constant since the mid sixties, but increasingly we are borrowing money to pay for that defense spending, and now, the debt burden is almost as much as the actual defense cost. In addition to the cost of simply maintaining our military, we have the astronomical costs of the the wars we have gotten ourselves into. Like I said, all wars start small. Advisers in Vietnam to half a million troops and fifty thousand American solders dead. Topple Saddam Hussein and more than eight years of occupation, plus a trillion dollars spent.

The biggest problem with our huge military is the potential to use it. Yes, Iran probably has a nuclear program, North Korea certainly does. Both countries exhibit bizarre behavior, but are not crazy to the point of inviting annihilation by provoking a nuclear attack by us if they were to explode a nuclear war head over us or one of our allies. We can deal with both countries the same way we dealt with Russia and China during the cold war. We assure mutual destruction if attacked, and we wait them out. Things change, leaders are ousted, our enemies become our friends. We have dealt with North Korea for sixty five years, and an adversarial Iran for thirty. So far, our leaders have not had the stomach to deal with either one of them militarily. The danger is that our military power might embolden our future leaders to leap over the precipice.

Of course, there is the real danger of a country like North Korea providing nuclear weapons to a third party in an attempt to damage us by proxy, but we already live with that danger in Russia and Pakistan. I can't see how a massive military option can protect us from that kind of danger.

I could go on with this, but it's almost time to go to the coffee shop, so I'll stop now.