Even Wonky Corporate Contractors Know: Military Spending Levels Are Dangerously Unsustainable

January 10, 2012 by IPB

Col. (ret.) Doug MacGregor

For those unaware, AOL has a defense news service, mostly for the benefit of Military-Industrial Complex insiders who want to know how many drones the U.S. can export with the help of Congressional subsidies to the corporate welfare state.

Recently, one of the service’s contributors, retired Army Colonel Doug MacGregor – now executive VP of the Northern Virginia-based defense consulting firm Burke-MacGregor Group, LLC – wrote a piece on the role of military spending in the U.S. fiscal crisis.

The piece buys into the idea that there exists a “U.S. national interest” that necessitates a dominant military force worth hundreds of billions of dollars. His main criticism is that those hundreds of billions are spent on outdated equipment and wars the U.S. loses, like Iraq. He also goes on to dabble in xenophobia with comments like this one:

“…the million dollars a year it costs to keep one American soldier or Marine on station in Afghanistan makes no sense when, for a fraction of the cost, the U.S. Army and other federal agencies could easily protect America’s borders from the wave of criminality, terrorism and illegal immigration washing in from Mexico and Latin America.”

But if there’s a takeaway, it’s that even solid establishmentarians are calling for reductions in military spending in the U.S. Check out the piece here.