Consider the idea of National Defense. America spends more on national defense than the next seven countries combined. The 2019 military budget is $686 Billion, around 15% of all federal spending. Republicans push for bigger military budgets, cutting social programs to pay for more weapons. The GOP loves to crow about a strong defense. But in the middle of a pandemic, national defense means healthcare. Why are Republicans holding back? your back pocket, Consider the idea of National Defense. America spends more on national defense than the next seven countries combined. The 2019 military budget is $686 Billion, around 15% of all federal spending. Republicans push for bigger military budgets, cutting social programs to pay for more weapons. The GOP loves to crow about a strong defense. But in the middle of a pandemic, national defense means healthcare. Why are Republicans holding back?
The entire Republican Party failed to plan for well-known, long-predicted disasters. A pandemic has been a known threat for more than a century. Ask the military, the civilian planners, or any damn historian. And yet Republicans didn’t just ignore the risk; they eliminated the existing mitigations. Smugly, the bastards. They couldn’t — wouldn’t — see the threat, just like the GOP can’t see climate change. Decades of record high temperatures? “Doesn’t look like anything to me.” Increasingly severe wildfires, hurricanes, floods, insect migration, and tornadoes? Dull looks. Melting ice and rising water? Nothing. It’s the same deliberate blindness sternly required of all orthodox Republicans. They’re obligated to avoid seeing heresy. Rather than change, they deliberately leave all of us unprotected. It’s what they do, a uniquely Republican betrayal.
National Defense is More Than Guns
I understand how all the war metaphors can blind you. When we think of national defense, we think of World War 2: we want planes, tanks, guns, armies, and other weapons of destruction. Even inherently peaceful threats are redefined in military terms: the War on Poverty, the battle for people’s minds, the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and on and on. Will the War on Christmas include field artillery?
The War on COVID-19
And now President Trump gives America his war on a damn virus. Look, having a strong military is essential, but that one idea of how to react isn’t always. Maybe we should branch out beyond ‘war’ framing.
How about this. Think about the threats we’ve seen this millennium so far. Here’s a list from Max Boot (“COVID-19 is killing off our traditional notions of national defense”):
- An asymmetrical terrorist attack by foreign cells (9/11),
- Endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq. (He doesn’t mention Syria, Libya, and the rest.)
- The 2008 financial meltdown.
- The Russian attack on our elections in 2016. (Boot doesn’t mention the continuing Russian attack in 2020.)
- Global warming (Boot’s description of the climate crisis), and
- The CoV SARS 2 pandemic.
Interestingly, Boot gives supposedly ‘natural’ disasters short shrift. Here are a few more from Wikipedia and TheStreet:
- 2018
- Camp Fire: 88 dead, $16.5 Billion in lost wealth.
- Hurricane Michael: 74 dead, $25B in lost wealth
- Hurricane Florence: 24 dead, $24B in lost wealth
- 2017:
- Hurricane Harvey: 107 dead, $125B lost.
- Hurricane Irma: 134 dead, $64B lost.
- Hurricane Maria, 5,740 dead, $91B lost.
- 2016:
- US Blizzard: 55 dead, $500M lost.
- Hurricane Matthew: 49 dead, $15B lost.
- The Great Smokey Mountain wildfire: 14 dead, $990M lost.
- 2015:
- Okanogan Complex Wildfire: 3 dead, $8B of our wealth lost.
- Three unusually high floods: 91 dead, unquantified wealth lost.
There are a ton more. I got to the five years of flooding in the Carolinas (hundreds of dead and hundreds of billions of dollars) and lost the will to keep digging.
Balance the Costs
All of these are awful disasters that cost us much more than we admit. Yes, I know we had natural disasters before this decade. We also know that climate change makes these weather-related disasters more frequent and more severe. And all the evidence shows that they’re only getting worse.
It’s weird how our leaders won’t spend much to stop or mitigate these risks ahead of time, but somehow, America gets stuck with the bill in the end. You’d think we’d eventually learn to balance the costs of prevention against the costs of cleanup.
Want another threat vector? Water. The military already predicted that declining amounts of freshwater for drinking and crops will wrack the planet in a decade. We’re not just looking at poverty, disease, and despair, consider the military chaos that follows.
How about rising seawater? Flooding and salt intrusion, with declining crop output and dying land. How about temperatures rising so high that people cannot survive in the summer? Think any of those threats will create climate refugees in the next decade?
Climate threats aren’t new. Think back. When was the last big climate disaster in America? The Dust Bowl. It was partly natural but partly man-made. Remember how we treated the Oakies? I can’t pretend we’ll do better when the first climate refugees try to leave Phoenix.
A New Virus Threatens our Nation
We’ve just done a face-plant in the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s taken Republicans by surprise that national defense means Healthcare. That’s silly. We’ve known the pandemic playbook for decades.
Planning for Medical Threats
- Plan ahead. Examine the past and present with an eye toward possible future health threats.
- Stockpile the specialized materials and trained personnel who will be critical during an outbreak.
- When the epidemic begins, identify the infected.
- Separate the infected few from the uninfected, especially the asymptomatic infected hidden in the general population.
- Treat the infected with the best standard of
care, so that you don’t motivate other infected people from hiding.
- Work on better treatments.
- For the population, keep the re-infection rates
low enough not to blow out the limited medical space.
- Work on expanding any unexpected treatments outside the plan.
- In the long term, work on long-term protections
for the population.
- Develop new drugs or better treatments for the disease.
- Increase population immunity (vaccines).
That’s how we defend the population during a pandemic. Sure, these are medical issues, but in an epidemic, national defense means Healthcare. You can quibble here and there with priorities, but that’s the gist of most plans.
Planning for Military Threats
Compare that medical list to military thinking.
- Plan ahead. Examine the past and present, identifying possible future military threats.
- Build and stockpile the specialized hardware and trained personnel who will be critical in case of a war. (Nobody holds off on buying ammo until after the shooting starts.)
- When the conflict begins, identify the combatants.
- Capture or restrict the combatants, especially those hidden in the general population.
- Treat the captured combatants with care, so that you don’t incite future outbreaks.
- Work on reducing the causes of future combat.
You get the idea. The approaches are similar for good reasons.
Rethink Our National Defense
America is willing to spend a massive amount of our blood and treasure in our military. And yet we won’t make anything like that investment for the other threats looming over our nation. It’s not as if we can’t predict the future risks from climate change, evolving diseases, weather disasters, and so on. Why do we spend hundreds of billions on the military, and trillions of dollars propping up the stock markets, but almost nothing on the federal response to climate, disease, and common disaster?
Honor the Oath
Everyone in the federal government above a certain level has to take an oath. Here’s the Senate oath of office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.
Other oaths differ, but they start with the same idea. The American government’s primary purpose is to defend the Constitution — America — from threats, foreign and domestic. They do lots of other stuff, but protecting the nation is definitely number one. People don’t take an oath to keep stock prices high. Every single Republican has said those words, and they’ve all betrayed their oath of office. They did not protect us or defend us from known threats. They did it for politics, political advantage, and personal gain.
Republicans simply won’t defend the country from a whole category of threats. They refused to plan for this wholly predicted pandemic. They’re working, even now, to make the climate crisis worse. They’re ignoring the consequences of shrinking aquifers.
And when reality intrudes? That nagging problem of inconvenient facts? The only Republican defense is shriek hysterically that none of it is real. “They’re not sick! All those people with pneumonia? They’re not sick. They’re pretending! They’re deep-state crisis actors who hate Republicans!”
Similarly, “The ice isn’t melting!! That’s a liberal conspiracy promoted by China!! Fake news!!!”
I wish this was satire.
The entire GOP just loses their shit with each new report. They’ve known about the threat early enough to dump their stocks. They know the risks, they believe the disease is real, and they know what the experts recommend. And given what common sense would tell a duck, Republicans did the opposite of everything good or useful. Then, reliably, they lie about their earlier lies.
In an Epidemic, Defense Means Healthcare
Here’s the macroeconomic truth: we all pay the costs in the end. Doesn’t matter if the money comes from hospitals, insurance companies, manufacturers, drug companies, the National Treasury, or your bank account. America pays the full cost of every disaster. Every hurricane relief effort is money out of our schools, out of our future, and out of your wallet. The money comes from us.
So if we want to save some of that money, we need to re-examine our requirements for national defense. Mitigation is cheaper than the cleanup bills. And guess what? If nothing else, Healthcare is defense. Just like the climate effects national security. Republicans won’t protect us from these threats, but they’ll surely leave us with the bills. Facts only solidify their opposition. Reality will not move them an inch from their predetermined path. They cannot move.
Um, GOP? Yeah, y’all standing over there, not doing anything? Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out of power.
