[Honolulu Civil Beat, Dec. 6] Military as Sacred Cow: Case Study in Hawaii (Fwd)

[아름드리 나무]

Honolulu Civil Beat

Dec. 6, 2012

Hawaii Monitor: Would Hawaii Welcome 'Peace On Earth?'

By Ian Lind

flickr: lrargerich/ Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawaii

We’re heading into the holiday season, where themes of “peace on earth, goodwill to all” can be heard in private homes and public spaces, from churches to shopping malls.

But if somehow peace were to miraculously break out, ushering in a new era of peaceful and cooperative international relations, would it be greeted as wonderful news by the powers that be? I doubt it.

It isn’t hard for me to envision city, state, and federal officials, along with union and business leaders, stepping forward to lobby for continued high levels of military spending, not because they are opposed to peace but, rather, because they are economically dependent on war.

It’s a policy stance that might make sense in purely economic terms, but would be much harder to justify in moral terms. But this would be nothing new. The same pressures have long constrained public discussion of military and defense issues in Hawaii.

The state’s war industry, euphemistically referred to as the “defense” sector, is a sacred cow, a very visible part of our community that has been largely exempt from mainstream questioning or criticism.

Public officials reduce the big issues of war and peace to matters of local economic interest. Any policy seen as boosting Hawaii’s share of federal military dollars is assumed to be good, and more would always be better. Economic blinders often blunt the progressive views of our representatives in Washington, who feel the practical pressures to protect island businesses regardless of their own political leanings. Governor Abercrombie was certainly a case in point during his two decades in Congress.

Even the news media shy away from much examination of the military, except when the reporting is in patriotic, adulatory tones or presented in flat prose of dollars-and-cents business reporting.

Economic Dependence

Defense, to use the polite term, is one of the state’s core industries. It includes the federal dollars spent to house, feed, and provide services to more than 100,000 military personnel and their dependents, along with the defense contractors and their employees involved in development of high-tech for ultimate use in weapons or command systems.

There is certainly no disagreement that in economic terms, the military’s local impact is substantial. In 2009, active-duty personnel stationed in Hawaii and civilian defense workers accounted for about 10 percent of total employment in the state, according to a RAND Corporation report. As Civil Beat’s Chad Blair recently reported, “federal defense spending accounts for 15 percent of Hawaii's gross domestic product ... the highest mark in the country and far above the national average of 3.5 percent.”

Even small variations in defense spending reverberate through our economy as their effects are magnified within certain geographic areas and economic sectors. It’s no wonder the potential impact of going over the so-called fiscal cliff, with its automatic cuts of some $55 billion annually to the federal defense budget, has created lots of uncertainty among local defense contractors and public officials.

Defense Cuts Are Inevitable

And even if we avoid the fiscal cliff, the bloated defense budget is an obvious target for the substantial cuts in federal spending that will be required in the long-term effort to reduce the federal deficit.

During FY 2011, the U.S. had by far the world’s largest military budget and stood alone at the very top of the 10 countries with highest annual military spending, according to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. We spent more than five times as much on defense as rivals China and Russia together, and about 50 percent more than the total combined military spending by other top-10 countries (China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, India, and Brazil).

“In other words, the US defense budget is not just dominant; it is operating at a level completely independent of the perceived threat,” the online trade publication AOL Defense reported earlier this year.

The fiscal cliff isn’t just a problem, it’s also an opportunity to realize that long-term cuts in the military budget, including the share that trickles down to Hawaii, are indeed likely. Factor in the loss within a few years of Dan Inouye’s clout in the U.S. Senate and his ability to steer federal dollars into Hawaii’s economy, and those cuts appear even more likely.

How do we move forward in a proactive way? The first task is to challenge the military’s status as a sacred cow, and subject the it to the same level of scrutiny given other major institutions in our community, including the costs, as well as economic benefits, of the extensive military presence. This is the prerequisite to all further changes.

With persistence, we can create space to debate and discuss the military’s economic role as well as it’s broader political impact, and begin developing plans for alternative civilian uses of at least some of the 118 separate military facilities and 230,939 acres of military-controlled land in the state.

This type of planning can end up creating a self-fulfilling prophesy, as contingency plans begin to demonstrate the viability of alternatives to continued military dependence. It’s at least a place to start.

 

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
            (207) 443-9502      
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/  (blog)

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.  ~Henry David Thoreau

(Fwd by Bruce K. Gagnon)