Demilitarize Democracy

Mandy Smithberger and William D. Hartung writing in The Nation:

It’s certainly one of the stranger phenomena of our era: After 20 years of endless war in which trillions of dollars were spent and hundreds of thousands died on all sides without the US military achieving anything approaching victory, the Pentagon continues to be funded at staggering levels, while funding to deal with the greatest threats to our safety and “national security” – from the pandemic to climate change to white supremacy – proves woefully inadequate. In good times and bad, the US military and the “industrial complex” that surrounds it, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned us about in 1961, continue to maintain a central role in Washington, even though they’re remarkably irrelevant to the biggest challenges facing our democracy.

… both former President Trump and President Joe Biden have identified the military as a key future player in distributing the Covid-19 vaccine, something that could and should be handled by public health institutions, if only they, like the Pentagon, had adequate resources. …

In the Covid-19 moment, it should be clear that relying on narrowly defined notions of national security harms our democracy, a subject that none of those military or former military figures are likely to deal with.