The United States is a large and wealthy country. Everyone knows that. That is why my jaw dropped during an ABC Nightline broadcast this Sept. 11. Describing the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, reporter Terry Moran asserted, “It could all be lost unless the international community puts more boots on the ground and more dollars in the pipeline.”
This statement was incredible. Has the most economically and militarily powerful nation on earth really become a military Blanche DuBois, “dependent upon the kindness of strangers”? Or rather, are we simply a nation unwilling to devote resources to match our rhetoric in the “global war on terror”?
History suggests the latter. Compared with other wars in the past century, we have barely begun to mobilize our nation’s population or economy. Allies in a war are always welcome. However, handling the current situation in Afghanistan is well within our nation’s resource capability. It is political and civic will to use those resources that is lacking.
In fiscal 2006, defense outlays total $536 billion. That is about one-fifth of all federal spending and 4.1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. In 1944, the last full year of World War II, defense spending was 87 percent of federal outlays and 38 percent of total national output.
In 1953, Korean War spending amounted to 69 percent of the federal budget and 14 percent of GDP. Fifteen years later, in 1968, at the height of fighting in Vietnam, defense outlays accounted for 46 percent of federal spending and 8.5 percent of GDP.
Moreover, the per capita incomes of 1968, adjusted for inflation, were less than half of what they are now. Despite much whining about tax burdens today, the taxes paid by the average household during these earlier wars were much more likely to take a bite out of the household’s ability to meet real needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Nor are we tapping our human resources to the extent we did in earlier wars. Out of a total population of about 300 million, just under 1.5 million people are serving on active duty. That is one-half of 1 percent. In World War II, 13 million Americans, or nearly 10 percent of the total population, served in the military. Our armed forces grew from 540,000 in 1940 to 9 million by mid-1943.
Over 3 million Americans were in uniform during the height of the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, even though the U.S. population was only one-half and two-thirds, respectively, as large as it is now.
If we fail and Afghanistan becomes a failed state or one ruled by jihadists, it will not be because the international community failed to help when U.S. capabilities were stretched to the breaking point. It will result, rather, from a failure of leaders to match rhetoric with action and of citizens who remain complacent about worsening conditions abroad as long as taxes stay low and they need not see their own children leave for basic training.
© 2006 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.