733. American turkeys voting for Xmas
That the Pentagon seeks to close 33 big bases right across America is not something it would want to do willingly. It has been told to do so by the Bush administration for financial reasons even though, in many instances, it is going to bring about tremendous hardship to many local communities which depend on the bases economically.
To save face, the Pentagon is rationalising this major cutback by saying that it wishes to bring about a more agile defence force. It doesn't mention that at least three major high-tech projects (including a stealth fighter, an advanced Abrams tank and an Internet-linked battle control system) have already been cancelled for cost reasons in the 2005/6 budget.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, mainly because of the burden of its defence expenditure (about 50-60% of its total GDP), America was also able to cut back (from about 20% of GDP to 15%). Now America is cutting back further. It cannot afford to maintain its occupation of Iraq and scores of other well-equipped bases around the world -- usually near oilfields and pipelines -- unless it reduces its domestic costs substantially. With a steady growth in long-term unemployment, a slackening consumer demand, a decline in middle- and working-class incomes and a yawning budget deficit, America stands on the edge of economic stagnation (as is already taking place in Japan and the European Union) and the Bush administration can do no other but to reduce government expenditure.
The decline of America as a military power is a significant sign of its concomitant decline as a centralised nation-state, such as those -- mainly West European -- which came to their peak from about 1870 and through most of the last century. Indeed, the immigration of large numbers of Mexicans into California (already comprising more than 30% of the state's population) will inevitably mean the breaking away of California as an independent governance in due course.
China is about the only exception to the economic malaise which is affecting all developed countries at the present time. (Even South Korea is becoming desperate.)But it is still not a developed country but a developing one and it has not been a nation-state ever since Den Xaioping and Zhu Rhongi managed to release the country from its Communist Party stranglehold in the late '90s and release the energy of its home grown entrepreneurs and laid out a welcome mat to its rich diaspora Chinese businessmen from all over Asia.
China still has a common written language and a past civilisation which will hold it together as a culture that is distinct from the rest of the world for a long time to come but it is fast losing its nation-state status which it gained during its fight against the Japanese occupation during WWII and its subsequent brief period as a communist regime. It is privatising its state industries (and also one of its state banks so far), reducing its armed forces and is welcoming senior Western bankers and financial experts to take over its banks and guide its stock exchanges.
But the clearest sign of all that China is not retaining its brief status as a nation-state is that its provincial and big city Communist Party governors have started to give way to entrepreneurial executives and mayors who take decisions independently from the central government. China now has six major economic regions based around the cities of Beijing, Dalian, Tianjin, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Hong Kong and Guanzhou which are competing for industrial development and trade against one another as much as with foreign countries. Keniche Ohmae, one of the leading management consultants of the world and a constant visitor to China, considers in his recent book, The Next Global Stage, that each of these regions has more potential than his own country which he now considers to be moribund due to bureaucratic over-control. He writes this sadly because he is still a proud and loyal Japanese.
The nation-state took hundreds of years to develop on the back of a succession of increasingly expensive military innovations which demanded more centralised taxation and governance each time, and probably came to its peak between about 1870 and 1970. But it's now on the decline. There can be no more terrible a military weapon than the nuclear bomb and so, today, the military lobby has nowhere further to go -- even if their patron nation-state politicians could afford new monster weapons -- and even if, as in America, the UK, Japan and Western Europe, there were enough young men who were willing to be recruited into their professional armed forces. The supply of credulous young men willing to die in foreign lands on the say-so of politicians is now drying up quite fast.
The last point is something else that the Pentagon has declined to mention.
Keith Hudson
<<<< PENTAGON SEEKS TO SHUT DOZENS OF BASES ACROSS NATION
Eric Schmidt
WASHINGTON, May 13 - The Pentagon on Friday recommended closing nearly 180 installations and offices, including 33 big bases, from Hawaii to Maine in the first major restructuring of the nation's vast military network in a decade.
Ranging from tiny Army Reserve centers to sprawling Air Force bases that have been the economic anchors of their communities for generations, the proposed closings, consolidations and reductions of more than 800 military facilities in all, which could cost several thousand civilian jobs nationwide, sent shock waves across all 50 states. The plan also underscored the Pentagon's far-reaching effort to revamp the armed services into a leaner, more agile force.
In the New York area, the Pentagon wants to shut the Navy's submarine base in Groton, Conn.; the Army's Fort Monmouth in New Jersey; and the Air National Guard Station in Niagara Falls, N.Y. The Groton base had the largest single loss of jobs in the proposal.
Other bases proposed for closing include some familiar names in military history, including Fort McPherson in Georgia, the Pascagoula Naval Station in Mississippi and Fort Monroe, Va. And in South Dakota, the state's second-largest employer, Ellsworth Air Force Base, would be shut.
The military also wants to move thousands of military and civilian workers out of leased commercial high-rise buildings near the Pentagon in Northern Virginia to more secure locations at bases around the country.
Closing bases, though, does not mean shrinking the military, just rearranging it.
"Our current arrangements, designed for the cold war, must give way to the new demands of the war against extremism and other evolving 21st-century challenges," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said. The plan is proposed to save $48.8 billion over 20 years.
The Pentagon sent its findings on Friday to the independent Base Realignment and Closure Commission, or Brac, which will spend the summer reviewing them in public hearings and installation visits. Mr. Rumsfeld will testify to the panel on Monday.
....
New York Times -- 14 May 2005 >>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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