ENMAYUSCULA, (AMY GOODMAN AND DENISMOYNIHAN).- Faced with pressure from interest groups based in Washington, DC, President Joe Biden's Build Back Better economic stimulus plan, which envisaged spending 3.5 trillion dollars over the ten years, it was reduced to an outlay of 1.75 billion dollars. However, the United States House of Representatives approved, without major objections and in a climate of bipartisan harmony, a large annual defense budget of 768,000 million dollars. That equates to about $8 trillion over ten years, an amount significantly larger than the amount allocated for the Build Back Better Act. The National Defense Authorization Act is now in the Senate, where additional spending amendments to this deemed “must have” legislation are being pushed through. If budgets are an indicator of a society's values, then it's clear what's important to America: guns and war.
The Pentagon budget approved in the House of Representatives exceeds by 24,000 million dollars the amount requested by the Biden Government and, according to the Political medium, is "a key step to get rid of obsolete weapons and help the Pentagon move towards the so-called emerging weapons technologies. The military-industrial complex will surely be very pleased with this news.
Reports abound in the media about high-tech weaponry being tested and deployed by Russia, China and other perceived adversaries. Russia has just tested a satellite destroyer missile, which managed to directly hit one of its disused satellites. China has reportedly tested a "hypersonic" missile capable of launching a pre-emptive surprise nuclear strike against the United States.
“The United States spends [on arms] ten times more than Russia and about three times more than China,” he said on Democracy Now! William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. Hartung is the author of a recent report titled “Arming Repression: US Military Support for Saudi Arabia, from Trump to Biden.” He has also written the book “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.” In his conversation with Democracy Now!, Hartung continued: “[The United States] has 13 times more active nuclear warheads in its arsenal than China. We have eleven aircraft carriers of a type that China does not have. We have 800 US military bases around the world, while China has three. Thus, the idea that China and Russia are military threats to the United States is primarily an invention to increase the country's military budget. So far, unfortunately — at least in the halls of Congress and within the Biden administration — that story has been successful.”
The military budget includes an amount never requested to date for research into new weapons systems, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence and the development of killer robots. Steve Goose, director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch and co-founder of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations that seeks to stop the use of these robots, told Democracy Now!: “The Killer robots are a thing of the future, but not the distant future. [In these weapons] it is not the human being who decides what to aim at and when to pull the trigger; it is the armed system itself that does it through artificial intelligence, sensors and algorithms. It's not just a new type of weapon; it is a new form of war, which will not be exactly pleasant for humanity”.
The United Nations will hold a conference on conventional weapons in Geneva next week to discuss the rules that will govern the use of killer robots. On the position that the United States has on this issue, Steve Goose states: "[The United States] rejects the provision of prohibitions or restrictions on the development and acquisition of fully autonomous weapons."
At a conference this week, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said: “The country that masters artificial intelligence, integrates it into military operations, and combines it with robotics is going to have an extraordinary advantage. And he added: “Our ability to fire accurately from long range is unprecedented. We can strike anywhere in the world, with very refined levels of precision."
Unfortunately, the constant claims made by the Pentagon and its adepts about precision weapons, the so-called “smart bombs”, have been proven false time and time again around the world. This is indicated by the corpses of civilians killed by US weapons, dehumanized and described as "collateral damage".
The New York Times recently reported on a March 2019 airstrike in the Syrian city of Baghuz, which was initially said to have targeted Islamic State fighters. On that occasion, a 226-kilogram bomb was dropped on a gathering attended by women and children. Minutes later, the survivors were attacked with two bombs of 907 kilos each. The attack, ordered by a secret special operations unit known as Task Force 9, killed at least 80 people. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered a full investigation into the attack.
Airwars - a non-profit organization that tracks military actions and the harm they cause to civilians in conflict zones such as Syria, Iraq and Yemen - has recorded nearly 60,000 civilian deaths in the last 15 years, a figure that only counts the officially reported air strikes.
After the US House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act this week, newly elected New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman, a member of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, posted on Twitter: “In a vote of 363 votes For and 70 against, the House of Representatives just easily approved $770 billion for the Pentagon. It's amazing how quickly Congress passes gun-related funds, but we can't get it to pass funds to ensure access to housing, health care, and justice for our veterans, or invest in strong employment programs for districts like the Own".
Rebuild better or build more bombs? The choice is clear.