Among other things, military spending has more than doubled. The actual Defense Department baseline budget has gone from $308 billion in 2001 to $534 billion this coming year, but to that number has to be added another $130 billion for “overseas contingency operations,” and another $350 or so billion for defense-related expenditures not in the DOD budget, and you end up with a cool trillion in real military spending.

We outspend the entire rest of the world combined. Chop out our major allies (UK, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Israel) and we out-spend the rest of the world over one and a half times. China is in the midst of a major build-up. We outspend them by between seven and nine times.

Yet we do not feel secure.

Consider the case of the navy. We have actually reduced the size of the navy in the last ten years. As Secretary of Defense Gates observed last year, “As much as the U.S. Navy has shrunk since the end of the Cold War, for example, in terms of tonnage, its battle fleet is still larger than the next 13 navies combined—and 11 of those 13 navies are U.S. allies or partners.”

Consider the case of carriers. Our NATO allies have, between them, four carriers with a combined embarked air group of about 100 aircraft.

The non- NATO navies of the world have today a total of four more carriers – and that’s really generous, since it counts the Russian Kuznetzov, which rarely leaves port and then only to limp around by itself for a while and then go home. But even counting him, the non- NATO world’s carriers have a combined embarked air group of about 100 aircraft total.

The US Navy has eleven Carrier Strike Groups (CSGs), each with an embarked air group of about 100 aircraft. Considering the quality of carrier-embarked aircraft on our carriers and everyone else’s, and the quality of USN pilots, I’d put my money on any one USN CSG against every non-NATO carrier in the world. And we have eleven of them.

And yet we do not feel secure. We know the Chinese are going to build a carrier – someday.

We have a margin of global material military superiority absolutely unprecedented in history. And yet, the newest trend in American politics is to get in touch with our inner fears and anxieties. Being “smart” on defense now means being afraid, being very afraid. A “can-do” attitude is evidence of naïve complacency. The world is full of danger and people who want to hurt us. And the people who like us — who’s to say they might not change their minds? Or maybe they just pretend to like us to find out where we keep our money.

You can’t be really serious about national security unless you understand that on our current course we are doomed, do you hear me? Doomed. The story of the current dialog on defense might easily be titled, “The Triumph of Fear.”

Remember that old saw about one definition of insanity being that you keep doing the same thing and expect different results? It’s the endless behavior loop of the addict. We’re caught in that loop right now. We’ve doubled what we spend, we outspend the rest of the planet combined, and we still don’t feel secure. I get that. It’s because nothing as simple as defense spending is ever going to turn the psychological clock back to pre-9/11.

What I don’t get is why the conclusion we draw from that is to spend more.

I’m not saying spend less on defense. I think a rational examination of our defense needs and how best to meet them would probably come to that conclusion, but I’m not wedded to it and I don’t have a number in my head. What I would like is to have us wake up and realize that we are chasing a high we remember, but will never find again. We are never going to feel as safe and good and confident as we did before 9/11, no matter how much we spend. So get used to it.

And let’s stop bankrupting ourselves chasing that rainbow with buckets of cash, because that sure isn’t going to get it back.

The Legion’s current strength is 7,699 officers and men in eleven “regiments,” which is to say eleven separate commands each of about battalion strength. These include infantry engineers, paratroopers, light armor, and various training and support commands. Here’s a link to the Legion’s official page.

The use of the term “men” as opposed to “enlisted personnel” is deliberate. The Legion is and always has been a male-only club, with one notable exception: Susan Travers.

Travers was a young British woman who drove an ambulance and then a staff car for the Free French in World War Two. She became the lover and driver of General Pierre Koenig, commander of the 1st Free French Brigade, shared the siege of Bir Hachiem with the brigade, and drove the lead vehicle in the night break-out through the German lines. Once the column reached British lines, they counted eleven bullet holes in her car. She later drove a self-propelled tank destroyer in Italy and France and was wounded when her vehicle was disabled by a mine.

After the war she submitted a formal application to join the Foreign Legion and listed her experience during the war but omitted her gender on the application. The officer in charge of approving enlistment applications that day had also served at Bir Hachiem, knew her and her accomplishments, and approved the application without further comment. She thus became the only woman who has ever served in the Foreign Legion. One disadvantage was she had to design her own uniform. She was assigned to Vietnam during the French Indochina War and there met her future husband, another legionnaire.

For her service to France in two wars, Travers received the Legion d’Honneur, Medaille Militaire, and Croix de Guerre. Her most cherished honor, however, was to be the only woman in history to serve in the French Foreign Legion.

Susan Travers passed away in 2003 at the age of 94. Here is a link to a nice article on her remarkable life.

First, here’s a link to a rundown on the Russian program. It’s a good article, but take a look at the comments as well for a very informed and informative debate. I don’t agree with all of it, and you may or may not either, but so what? Thoughtful people get to disagree.

Next, here are two articles about the Chinese project. It’s a little further down the road, so trying to foresee what the aircraft will look like has a lot to do with how the predictor views China. The China Brief piece has some nice survey results from Global Times on what Chinese readers think about China’s aerospace needs and priorities.

Chine Brief

Flight Global

And none of these were Islamic extremists. These were all members of militant right-wing extremist anti-government groups.

There have been domestic terror threats from Islamic extremist groups as well. The May shooting of two US servicemen in Little Rock, AK (in which one died), the thwarted alleged attacks on the Air National Guard in Newbury, NY and on Fort Dix, NY, and other alleged attacks and planned attacks in the last year by domestic Islamic extremists are nothing to sneeze at.

But prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center, the overwhelming source of domestic terror attacks and deaths in the United States had been from the militant right. In the last twelve months the number of extremists and militant right-wing organizations, and the number of attacks planned and actually launched by their members, has increased dramatically. Here is a link to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the alarming growth of these hate groups. Their memberships dwarf the numbers in domestic Islamic anti-government groups, and to the extent that we suffer a domestic threat from extremist violence, it is far greater from right-wing militias than from Islam.

It’s time we woke up to that.

The salt-water school is interested in a blend of fiscal and monetary policy and supportive of the idea that government needs to regulate markets to obtain maximum benefit for society. The sweet-water school, on the other hand, has long championed the notion that government should stay out of markets because they were regulated sufficiently by a concept called My Imaginary Friend.

I’m sorry. Did I say that out loud? I meant, of course, The Invisible Hand. You may remember from a previous column of mine that the Invisible Hand is a concept which Adam Smith, in the massive 378-thousand words of his master work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, mentions exactly once, and which has since been preached as the central argument of The Wealth of Nations. It’s not, but that’s almost beside the point.

This central argument, as it is now articulated, is that if everyone in a market acts in their own self-interest, the market will respond in ways which benefit everyone. The real question is whether or not that’s true, and it is not – not the way the sweet-water guys need it to be.

Here is a simple, obvious, and relevant example from our everyday lives.

We are currently in an economic downturn. For the economy to turn back up we need revived consumer consumption. Consumer consumption will increase demand for goods and labor, putting more people back to work, generating more income which generates more demand, etc. But the smart move for every individual consumer in the current economy is to spend less, not more, maximize savings, and reduce debt – all behaviors diametrically opposed to those best suited to restarting economic growth.

That is not a trick example, or a special case, or an exception to the rule. It is at the very heart of how a market economy works. You can slice that onion any way you want to, but the stark, simple truth is that the sum of all self-interested acts does not necessarily and unavoidably produce positive results for the group as a whole. Forget ideology and just think quietly about that simple concept for ten seconds and you will know in your heart it is true. You will know it from the dynamics of every single group you have ever been a part of.

You aren’t alone. Alan Greenspan agrees with you as well. Finally.

When it came to western economics, for the living memory of man (well, modern man, complete with Attention Deficit Disorder) Alan Greenspan has been Consiglieri-in-chief. The former head of the Federal Reserve Bank was anointed by one president after another, democrat and republican, as the Dear Leader of our economy. And Greenspan, who once sat at the feet of Ayn Rand, was emphatically a sweet-water guy, undisputed head of that school of economics since the passing of Friedman in 2006 and arguably for a good deal before that.

Greenspan argued against more regulation of banking and the credit market, argued against any intervention to slowly defuse an obvious growing bubble in tech stocks, then housing, and most critically the credit market. And when the walls of the fairy castle came crashing down, to his credit he had the cajones to admit he had been wrong all those years. In October of 2008, when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings on the global financial meltdown, Greenspan was very forthcoming on his miscalculations.

“You found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right, it was not working?” the committee chairman asked.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan answered.

Wow. If Diogenes of Sinope were alive today, he could stop looking. There is an honest man.

So what does all this have to do with Chile? Glad you asked.

On March 1, two days after the magnitude 8.8 Chilean earthquake, the Wall Street Journal published a column by Bret Stephens entitled “How Milton Freidman Saved Chile.” In 1973, General Pinochet seized power in Chile in a bloody CIA-backed military coup which toppled the democratically-elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende and executed him. Friedman and his disciples from the University of Chicago, Stephens explained, became the new economic gurus of Chile and helped Pinochet launch an era of free market capitalism and spiraling wealth and prosperity heretofore undreamed of south of the Rio Grande. Along with it emerged a modern, far-sighted building code which insured that Chile’s infrastructure would be one of the best in South America and result in dramatically fewer earthquake deaths than in poverty-crushed Haiti. It was because of Friedman and Pinochet that Chile’s house was built of brick, while Haiti’s was built of straw. (Never mind that brick construction is terrible for earthquake zones; it’s a metaphor, okay?)

Since Friedman and the sweet-water guys have been taking such a beating lately, it’s no wonder the Wall Street Journal (sweet-water through and through, despite its location suspiciously close to the Atlantic Ocean) would jump at the chance to rehabilitate them. There’s only one problem with Stephens’ version of history: it’s not true.

Before Pinochet came to power, Chile already had the best health and education systems in South America, a strong industrial sector, and a growing middle class. Pinochet and his sweet-water advisors knew better. Deregulation became the new watchword, along with privatization of the public sector. The result was steady de-industrialization, soaring unemployment, enormous shift of wealth to the upper class, and eventually a debt bubble so alarming Pinochet fired his sweet-water advisors and was forced to step in and nationalize some of the country’s largest financial institutions. I leave it to others to draw the obvious parallels.

But what about the building code? Ah, yes. Here’s the thing – the building code which instituted so many of these far-sighted changes was adopted in 1972, under the socialist administration of Allende, one year before Pinochet took power, not after. So we should expect the Wall Street Journal, now that the facts have been corrected, to say, “Hey, maybe socialism isn’t such a bad idea. After all, facts are facts, no matter which way they cut.”

Right?

Sure.

So what have we really learned today, class? Maybe just this — you can prove anything you want to with history if you’re willing to make the history up.

Here’s a link to The Nation, where Naomi Klein with help from the Center for Economic Policy Research blows the whistle on Stephens.

As we’ve talked about here before, Iran has lavished considerable time and resources on dealing with the rising tide of unrest represented by the Green Movement. Central to suppressing the Green Movement has been the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has gained new powers and considerable technological resources to enable it to support the regime. But those assets may also make it able to supplant the regime.

Is the government in Tehran riding a tiger?

The United States government thinks so, as Secretary of State Clinton made clear in a speech in Qatar Monday. Iran may be in the grip of a “creeping coup” by the Guard Corps, one which the central government is blinded to by its preoccupation with the protest movement. If so, Iran is in for some bad times.

Here is a report on Clinton’s speech.

Here’s a link to read more about it.

Of course, Americans aren’t the only ones dying there. Of every 10 Coalition combat deaths in Afghanistan, 60% (1007) are U.S., 15% (266) are British, and the remaining 25% (394) are divided among 24 other Coalition nations. Among the other nations, Canada has the highest death toll (140) followed by France (40). Afghan casualties are hard to pin down, but the UN estimates somewhat over 6,000 civilian deaths to date.

Here’s a link to a detailed breakdown of coalition casualties in Afghanistan.

On a related note, eight U.S. service personnel have died so far in Iraq this year. That’s about eight more than I’m comfortable with, but it’s a big improvement over a year ago.

And on a personal note, Let me congratulate my friend Timothy Broome on celebrating his 22nd year in military service and his safe return from a tour in Iraq. Welcome home, pal, and thanks for your service.

And things need to get broken free. Unless you are a hard-core anarchist, odds are you have experienced frustration over the inability of Congress to do anything lately. Public opinion polls show frustration across the political spectrum, and no wonder. If this sort of obstructionism means the current Congress cannot pass anything, then what are the odds that the current minority, whenever it becomes the majority again, will be able to do any better? Somewhere between slim and none.

How bad is it? According to a recent report in The Hill, the House has passed 290 bills which have gone to Senate and quietly died there. The list includes, “healthcare reform; climate change; food safety; financial aid for the U.S. Postal Service; a job security act for wounded veterans; a Civil War battlefield preservation act; vision care for children; the naming of a federal courthouse in Iowa after former Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa); a National Historic Park named for President Jimmy Carter; a bill to improve absentee ballot voting; a bill to improve cybersecurity; and the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.” The House is actually getting things done; it’s the Senate where things have stalled.

But this last week things seem to be changing, and it is due in part to an unlikely new player: the brand new junior senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown. Brown crossed the aisle to vote to end the filibuster against the President’s $15-billion jobs bill, two other Republicans followed his lead, and the final bill passed 62 – 30. There’s talk Brown and other moderate Senate Republicans, such as Ohio’s George Voinovich, may join with “Blue Dog” Democrats and form a centrist “third force.” If so, the Senate may start doing its job again.

That would be nice.

It is corruption.

All of the problems I mention above are tractable; there are solutions available to them, but a good plan and the resources necessary to carry it through are not enough. If the local institutions upon which we rely to make the end product work are corrupt, all our efforts may be for naught. We see this now in Afghanistan – if the central government in Kabul were not riddled with corruption, this fight might not be a slam dunk, but its outcome would be a good deal more predictable.

Nowhere is this looming problem with corruption more apparent than in China. China is poised to explode onto the world scene as the economic superpower of the Twenty-First Century. As standards of living rise, a more pluralistic form of governance – if not exactly a liberal western democracy – is likely. But all of that is at risk from rampant governmental corruption.

China has traditionally had problems with corruption. In the last ten years at least some members of the central government have recognized the problem and taken steps to address it. China has an impressive array of anti-corruption laws on the books. Enforcement is a different matter. Despite some highly-publicized prosecutions and convictions, the rate of government corruption has grown in the last ten years, not declined. By some estimates it has grown exponentially.

The result has been growing dissatisfaction with the government and the real possibility that the economic engine of job and income growth could derail, with enormous implications for internal unrest.

Here are three good reading links.

BBC Report

Carnegie Endowment Report

The Age Article