Chalmers Johnson: "Unfortunately, The MIC Is Run Just Like GM"

(Map Shows Locations Of Global USer Military "Presence;" Click To Enlarge)

Unfortunately for those who cling to USer 'military superiority' for solace in a dangerous world. (MIC = Military/Industrial Complex, more accurately described as the Military/Industrial/Congressional/Intelligence/National Security regime.)

The problem is that, as US industrial and monetary policies have let--even encouraged--USer industrial might decline, off-shoring of vital skills, and displacing talented workers, the weapons on which our Imperium depends have become less and less well-made, as the proficiencies needed to manufacture them has been shipped overseas...

Vide (h/t to A Tiny Revolution) this recent Tomdispatch:

The Looming Crisis at the Pentagon
"How Taxpayers Finance Fantasy Wars"
By Chalmers Johnson

Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles, and much earth-moving equipment -- and that's to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service, and fuel economy, among other things.

A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and criminals looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.

Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.

There's more.

As Tom writes:

If you want to get a taste of what that means, then click here to view an ad for that ... potentially embattled boondoggle, the F-22, the most expensive jet fighter ever built. What you'll discover is not just that it will "protect" 300 million people -- that's you, if you live in the USA -- but that it will also employ 95,000 of us. In other words, the ad's threatening message implies, if the Obama administration cuts this program in bad times, it will throw another 95,000 Americans out on the street. Now that's effective lobbying for you, especially when you consider, as Chalmers Johnson does below, that for any imaginable war the U.S. might fight in the coming decades, the F-22 will be a thoroughly useless plane.

Defense cuts? You must be joking...These guys got us all by the short-and-curlies...and its mostly a waste of money. Now that's funny...