By Nathan Traini

Online Managing Editor

Is the US military spending your money wisely and do they use it only to do what’s best for the American people? The short answer is no, on both accounts, and very easy to prove. The military, and the industries that support it, have gotten out of hand and nothing has been done to reel in their unchecked waste and power.

In Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address he highlighted one point which stood out from others in his speech. He warned of a new partnering between a permanent industry of war and military. A marrying of private interests and public interests in the arena of war was never done on the scale America did it, at that time. He was worried that if the citizenry wasn’t “alert and informed” the military industrial complex would overstep its democratic constraints.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex,” said Eisenhower.

Let’s start with the first accusation that the military is just wasting/hiding money. According to a report from 2002 a Pentagon audit in 2001 found that the military could not account for 25% of what it spends, given that, in 2001, with a budget of $305 billion, the military couldn’t account for roughly $76 billion.

This is a big problem because the money isn’t in some super secret program, with proper oversight. If it was then it would be accounted for, because there is a place in the budget where money goes to such programs.

Is all the money wasted or is it being intentionally syphoned off, hidden, used, or what? These are questions that haven’t been answered. The reason is that the largest military in the world has never been fully audited.

In that CBS report from 2002, a military accountant Jim Minnery, from the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, tried to find $300 million of that missing $76 billion. His supervisor asked him “Why do you care about this stuff?” Minnery was obviously confused at why his supervisor would not want an accountant to account for missing tax dollars. Minnery went on to say that “We know it’s gone. But we don’t know what they spent it on.”

That’s just one example; things like these accounting errors, waste, and vanishing money continue through to today. A 2013 Reuters report found that the military would order thousands of the same parts it already had a 14 year supply of, at much higher cost than what they bought the originals for.

A report from the Business Insider found the Pentagon paid $8,000 for helicopter parts that cost less than $500. Cited in that same report they found $3 million worth of boats, ordered for landlocked Afghanistan, sitting in a warehouse. They found $6.2 million spent on vehicle maintenance for vehicles that don’t exist.

The Washington post also acquired an internal Pentagon study that found 125 billion in bureaucratic waste and over priced contracts that was buried by the Pentagon in fear of budget cuts

If the money is intentionally being used then it’s a very expensive project that is so secret that black budgets aren’t secret enough. If the money is all waste/incompetence then there needs to be cuts. Either way the American people deserve to know where their money is going by the billions.

Whenever we use our tax dollars for war we are all responsible for the actions our military takes on our behalf. A just military victory is our just victory but a military genocide and cruelty is our genocide and cruelty.

When Americans look back on our past, we all want to say that we were always a force for good in the world. More often than not America has turned into what it revolted against England for, being an ruthless empire.

Salon has an article listing all the countries where the US has “worked with fascists, dictators, drug lords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world.” The list is 35 countries long, here a few examples. The US helped Pakistan and Saudi Arabia overthrow Afghanistan, which was a socialist government advancing women’s rights and education.

The US “ordered the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia in 1969, American pilots were ordered to falsify their logs to conceal their crimes. They killed at least half a million Cambodians, dropping more bombs than on Germany and Japan combined in World War II.”

There’s the 1980s El Salvadoran civil war where CIA trained government operatives killed thousands in a popular uprising against their already brutal government and thousands more disappeared.

In 1999, we bombed Yugoslavia without any justification. It is illegal under international law to attack another country unprovoked.

In 2009 the US helped establish the government after a coup in Honduras which is now murdering its own people.

The invasion of Iraq was seen as payback for 9/11 under the assumption they had weapons of mass destruction. It turned out we knew Iraq didn’t have those weapons and had nothing to do with 9/11, but we invaded anyway.

Many more examples of this can be found on Salon’s website. The last example is one of a declassified document from the George Washington University National Security Archive titled “Justification for Military Intervention in Cuba.” In it, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were planning to fake an incident that would make it look like Cuba attacked the US, therefore justifying a war with Cuba. There were many suggestions on how to accomplish this false flag attack on ourselves. We would have “friendly Cubans in uniform over the fence to stage an attack on base.” Or the US could set up “A ‘remember the Maine’ incident where we would ‘blow up a ship in Guantanamo bay and blame Cuba.” Many other fabricated events were thought up to make it seem like a MIG type aircraft shot down a U.S. civilian or military plane.

We know that this document was talking about illegal activities and was kept secret because in the recommendations, it states the paper should not be distributed to commanders of unified or special command, NATO, or the United Nations. The reason being that if these plans went into place the United Nations and others wouldn’t give the U.S. the green light for a war of self defense that the U.S actually started.

Why don’t we know about all of these terrible things done in our name? Dozens of examples like this exist but we aren’t told about them in school, or in the news. Are we so embarrassed of these atrocities that we would rather strike them from history than deal with what they have to say about our society?

These instances of terror and barbarism by the United States are not the bug in the system of the military industrial complex, but the feature. More war and bombs being made and more people killed whether they be civilian or military is what drives profits for companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Skunkworks, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. They are war profiteers- plain and simple. These companies wouldn’t exist without your hard earned tax dollars.

Is it acceptable that your military wastes, hides, and spends money to overthrow democratically elected governments and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians? Will you permit a government to continue these kinds of atrocities and waste of human lives and potential?

With a 15% reduction in the $523 billion we spend on the wasteful and imperial military today we could pay for free tuition at public colleges and universities for over a year. Ultimately every dollar spent on the military’s wasteful and cruel budget is a dollar not spent on our crumbling infrastructure.

It was better put by Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”