The poverty rate in the United States is currently 13.4% percent. To put that into perspective, there are about as many people living in poverty in America as there are Black people. The water in Native American reservations is loaded with arsenic and petroleum was recently found in Hawaiian drinking water. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki mocked the idea of giving all Americans free COVID-19 tests, claiming that it would be too expensive. These issues are costly and extremely large undertakings.

Yet, despite all this, Congress felt that it would be appropriate to pass a $768,000,000,000 military budget.

Many Americans have been conditioned to believe that the U.S. military is a completely benevolent force that is incapable of wrongdoing, and thus deserves all of the funding it receives. This view is backed up by our public school system, which often fails to critically assess U.S. military actions, but by sweeping the ugliest parts of American militarism under the rug we will continue to fail to learn from our mistakes and will continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year funding them.

The U.S. military has and continues to serve corporate interests, not to protect freedoms. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 in an attempt to find weapons of mass destruction. Less than a year later, the Bush administration announced that there were no WMI’s in Iraq. Despite this, the U.S. stayed in Iraq until 2021, operating Guantanamo Bay-like torture camps for Iraqi civilians and killing roughly ​​200,000 Iraqi civilians. It immediately became clear that the goal of the invasion of Iraq was not to find WMI’s, but rather to find and profit from Iraqi oil reserves. Since the war on terror began, in 2001, the U.S. government has engaged in indiscriminate drone strikes and bombings in residential areas that have resulted in the deaths of 363,000 middle eastern civilians. The U.S. military continues to deviate further and further from its initial purpose of preserving civil liberties as it does things like billions of dollars to the apartheid state of Israel. Currently, no foreign nation poses a threat to the security of the U.S., and as such, such a massive military budget is unnecessary and wasteful.

The proposal of defunding the military begets the question, where would the reallocated funds go? How would the U.S ensure the safety of its citizens without a massive military? The answer is simple: by investing in American social programs using reallocated military funds, we can ensure that every American gets to live a life of dignity. It is currently estimated that it would only cost $25,000,000,000 to end hunger in America, roughly 3.2% of the total military budget. The U.S. is one of few developed countries without paid maternity leave, even though it would cost only 29% of our military budget. Even ending homelessness would barely make a dent in the military budget, only costing $20,000,000,000 (2.6% of the total military budget). An 11 year, last dollar, government-funded free college program would only cost the government $415,000,000,000, or 54% of the military budget. Surprisingly, implementing Medicare for All in the U.S. would save the government $2,000,000,000,000 in 10 years. Implementing universal free college, free housing, paid maternity leave, and ending homelessness would cost only 88.8% of the U.S. military budget. That would leave the U.S. military budget at $85,248,000,000, making it the second most heavily funded military in the world (behind China, with a budget of $225,000,000,000).

The thing is, none of these reforms will happen anytime soon because the American government has an affinity to bending to the wills of corporations, like private lenders or healthcare companies. An example of this can be seen in the way that Americans file their taxes. To file their taxes, one must know how much money they made over the course of the year (minus deductibles) and pay according to their tax bracket. Failure to pay the appropriate amount is a crime and can land you in prison. The thing is, filing your taxes doesn’t have to be as complicated as it currently is. The IRS already knows your income and could send you an itemized bill that explicitly tells you how much you owe (like they do in Japan). However, companies like TurboTax have lobbied the government to make filing taxes as complicated as possible to stay in business. Free healthcare, housing and food for all Americans isn’t some utopian pipe dream, the only thing preventing it is corrupt politicians and business owners. I’m not advocating for an immediate dissolution of the military, but the current military spending budget is excessive and would be better spent elsewhere. 

The U.S. military has, and will continue to be used to inflict harm upon countries and revolutionaries in the global south. I want to make it very clear that this issue does not lie with troops or other military personnel. The issue lies with the decisions being made at the top. The issue lies with the quintessentially-American idea that profit should be valued over the lives of civilians.

The U.S. military was created to protect the freedoms of the American people and to reject British rule. And now the military exists to create the same suppressive environment that the British Crown did in America, in places like Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Philippines and in Native American reservations. The U.S. military operates in the global south the same way that police operate in black communities, and it’s only logical that we defund (and eventually dissolve) both.

Humanity has existed long before the invention of the concept of war, yet we will likely cease to exist shortly thereafter. As put by MLK, “It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.”