The United States is not the first nation to spend itself into military oblivion. The late, unlamented, Soviet Union did just that a couple decades ago. Of course, the United States was the motivating cause, menacing the Soviets into their foolishness. Pretty shrewd gambit on our part, actually. Our own military buildup purposely played into the hands of Russian munitions bureaucrats whose personal empires de-pended on producing more war machinery.

Various European countries have historically fallen into a similar armaments trap, from the Crusades to the Spanish Armada to Napoleon to Hitler.

Now it’s our turn. Not only is the United States conducting a ruinous shooting war, but it still sustains a ruinous weapons budget larded on top of that conflict. Our 2005 spending (the war is only partially included) was $518 billion. The next biggest spender was China at $81 billion.

Other nations disbursed much less, and besides, they’re our friends, mostly. In fact, the United States paid out about as much for its military as all other countries combined.

The dangers of this policy are plain enough. For one thing, it causes a huge deficit, thus cheapening the dollar. You may have noticed. It also starves civilian services, thus weakening our society in ways often mentioned in the press.

And internationally it makes other nations fearful and angry about how we might use all that power. Can’t imagine why they’d worry about that.

Today some concerned folk take comfort from the fact that our current aggressive political dynasty may come to an end next January. Surely that would be worth cheering. We may not start any more wars for a while.

But that other pillar of the defense budget – The Military-Industrial Complex – has no intention of pulling in its horns. It did just fine under Bill Clinton and feels no concern that the current crop of timid Democrats will do anything to trim its sails. Remember that even Donald Rumsfeld had to spend enormous political capital just to scratch one outdated artillery weapon.

In my state of Connecticut, America’s Arsenal of Demo-cracy, that same big-weapon mentality runs rampant. “We’ve built submarines for 100 years, by God, and we’re not going to let them stop us now,” our local military-industrial conclave says.

That may be true. The new defense budget did indeed just increase sub production in yet another supreme insult to all common sense. Even otherwise reasonable Congress members went along. Nor is our state congressional delegation any more rational when it comes to equally pointless super-duper fighter planes.

Other states have their pointless pets too. Aircraft carriers for one, cruisers for another, tanks, transports, bombers, missiles, nukes, bullets…the whole arsenal. Every weapon has its own set of champions in the form of corporations, workers, subcontractors, banks, stores, media, and Congress members. These lobbyists are often more fervent than the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And even the top Pentagon brass sometimes gets trapped. Having persuaded Congress to fund a new weapon, what do you do years later when it’s out of date? By then, it has its own powerful constituency that’s deeply invested in continued production.

So now, we’re in the fix of which President Dwight Eisenhower once warned. While ruling the waves militarily, we’re sinking beneath them financially. China is smarter. It’s not bloating its army. Rather it is putting its effort into economic development, threatening one day to make the United States a commercial backwater. India is following suit.

Meanwhile our tax money keeps submarine workers happy locally and investors happy everywhere. Thus is “National Security” perverted for profit, while real security withers in want.

William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Conn. Material courtesy of www.MinutemanMedia.org.