Politics

Selfridge A-10 Fight Is Really About Protecting Macomb's Military-Industrial Complex

March 03, 2014, 5:10 PM

When Five-Star General-turned-President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the potential danger of the “military-industrial complex,” he wasn’t so much worried about a psychotic Dr. Strangelove so gung ho for nuclear war.

No, if you re-read Eisenhower’s words, you’ll find the military-industrial complex is personified by a less deranged, far more banal sort of villain — the sort of unassuming figure who looks a lot like The Macomb Daily’s Chad Selweski.

Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel — a decorated Vietnam veteran and former Republican senator—announced the Obama Administration’s plans to trim defense spending. Selweski was outraged, as was a bipartisan gaggle that includes Candice Miller and Carl Levin, because those plans include cutting Selfridge’s A-10 squadron.

What is the military case against these cuts to Michigan’s Air National Guard, you ask? Here’s Selweski’s answer:

Macomb Daily: The sprawling air base features a strategic location that houses all five branches of the military (including the Coast Guard) plus a high-tech Department of Homeland Security center that works with area law enforcement officials to protect the Northern Border.

Yet, the Pentagon’s apparent indifference toward guarding the world’s largest source of freshwater, the Great Lakes, remains a mystery.

Let us for a second consider the absurdity of A-10s protecting the Great Lakes from some nefarious enemy. Unless that enemy is Canada — and it would not be Canada — we can assume no armored divisions will be rolling through the Great Lakes region anytime some. It’s hard to imagine a single possible scenario in which the tank and bunker-busting A-10s would be required to protect Lake Huron from a heretofore-undefined attack.

If that’s the best reason anyone has to maintain the A-10s, then we should strip those plane down down and sell them for scrap right now.

As Selweski acknowledges, Hagel’s military overhaul “places more emphasis on special ops, cyber warfare and new high-tech weapons systems.” That seems rather prudent considering Chinese cyber-terrorism is more plausible threat than Soviet tanks rolling through the heartland in 2014.

Even if Selfridge shuts during the next round of base closures, the Coast Guard and other legitimate U.S.-Canada border operations located at Selfridge won’t be outsourced to Malaysia.

Somewhat off-topic, but it’s also probably time to question whether the border security apparatus expansion that followed 9/11 is truly necessary to protect us from whatever threat may come from or through Canada. More and more, the security state seems more about pork barrel spending than protecting Americans from legitimate foreign threats.

And, once one cuts through this absurd fantasy about aerial supremacy over the Great Lakes, it’s hard not to conclude that pork is the real, unspoken reason Selfridge is so vital to Macomb County’s Serious People.

It takes about 30 seconds on Google to understand just how significant Macomb’s leadership class believes military spending is to the county’s economic health. Selfridge is central to that effort.

Macomb Daily (9/12/13): The [2012] proposal would have essentially eliminated the 107th at Selfridge, which flies 24 A-10 aircraft, and would have wiped out 560 military and civilian jobs at the base.

Macomb Daily (5/29/13): The Macomb County Department of Planning and Economic Development has received a $231,000 grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation to launch a statewide strategy for support of existing defense companies and to also attract new defense firms to the state.

According to the county executive’s office, planned activities for this marketing campaign include a new website, promotional video, participation in targeted national defense events and development of a cluster of robotics companies.

Macomb Daily (3/9/13): At Selfridge, some 650 personnel from the Air National Guard’s 127th Wing face furloughs. According to Sgt. Dan Heaton, another 500 people on the base who work for other branches of the military or the Department of Homeland Security will be hit with a lost payday every week.

Heaton said the reduced pay among the 127th Wing personnel alone will remove $6 million from the Macomb County economy.

Macomb Daily (5/8/11): County Executive Mark Hackel took the initiative in February when he announced the creation of a task force to push Macomb’s dominance in the defense industry to new heights. That declaration came as officials began to appreciate new research that shows Macomb County defense contracts represent a $24 billion-a-year boost to the local economy.

Sorry, but the United States military does not exist to pad the economic development numbers of third-rate local political hacks, nor is it supposed to be a jobs program. As patriots, we should happily accept a doubling of unemployment if it stems from the rightsizing of our military’s size and purpose. Instead, ordinary and otherwise reasonable men and women cheer ever-growing defense industries and ever-expanding armies for economic, rather than national security purposes. 

Maybe it’s good business for Macomb County to have national policy that spends (as Hagel once put it) “blood and treasure” on a military budget larger than the next 18 nations combined, but the implications to our republic are grave when we become so economically dependent upon national security and military spending, as Ike rightly concluded:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

It’s unfortunate that Macomb County’s Very Best People would place county above country and economic boosterism above national security, but this is precisely the “misplaced power” Ike warned us about so long ago.


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