Most people I meet in my daily strike for peace on campus are unaware that making and selling weapons has been America’s top industry since 1950, that we have sustained this weapons-based economy by sponsoring, supplying and creating more than 200 wars in 55 years, and that about 310,000 companies and 350 colleges are on the Pentagon’s payroll.
My refusal to study inside classrooms, after three years of intensive research, is part of a terminal project goal to draw attention to disordered national priorities that concern all Americans. (For the record, I am the only peace studies student in the United States licensed to use the RAND Corporation’s defense database, and I spend approximately 200 hours a year accessing the Pentagon’s Statistical Information Analysis Division. I study year-round without traditional breaks; I am completing all coursework outside of class, and I completed my grading requirements long ago.)
My graduate project is an information outreach campaign to make us safer with a reasonable defense so we don’t send our citizens to wars created for profit and waste our future wealth.
I came to the University to get away from wasteful Pentagon programs that flooded companies for which I worked. In my 15 years in Silicon Valley, I refused security clearance (and higher pay) three times because our taxes were not making America safer or more prosperous. I received my Bachelor of Arts here, and began graduate studies after Sept 11. In my third year, I found Pentagon combat programs in development at our schools, including the University.
The European Union develops its technology for alternative energy and medical advancements and then for a reasonable defense. The United States develops its technology for battlefields first, at tremendous detriment to domestic prosperity. Nearly every problem our planet bears is caused, exploited, or worsened by this priority.
While I strongly support research, even some weapons research, I am just as strongly against wasteful spending, and America’s “defense” is excessively offensive. Research should benefit people first, and funding education should reflect that priority.
I sincerely doubt that those who conduct Pentagon- funded research on our campuses have taken the time to study our National Defense Strategy and the Pentagon’s Future Combat Systems program-the primary beneficiaries of such research. Secondary benefits come at too great a price.
If the Postal Service started issuing billion-dollar stamps and began mailing weapons around the world for huge sums of profit for itself, Americans would demand change. The Pentagon receives and wastes more taxpayer dollars than other U.S. agencies combined-all the more reason Americans should be in control of what it exports, and what it engenders: declining domestic prosperity and much more.
Our founders taught us that when government strays from serving us we have a duty to alter or abolish it and institute new government to protect our future security. If we adopt a people-based American economy, our problems can be addressed.
The CampU.S. Strike for Peace Campaign urges citizens to recognize that addressing symptoms, while necessary, falls short of effecting change. People must demand a change in America’s priority, from weapons for profit to human prosperity, or the out-of-control misspending of our wealth will deliver us the same fate that befell the Soviet Union.
History’s greatest lesson tells us to take the profit out of war, and until we do that, we will increasingly suffer from the misdirection of our advancing technology. Both major parties have sustained the war industry for 55 years; both are saturated with corruption. Changing administrations without changing priorities will not alter our course. America cannot be a peace-loving nation-nor can its people ever truly prosper-as long as its top industry is making and selling weapons.
Only by focusing popular demand on the single greatest cause of our problems will we prevail over our problems. We are all cogs in the war machine unless we stand defiant against it or actively support those who do.
(The author, Brian Bogart, has been invited by members of Parliament to attend the December 2005 International Peace Conference in London as one of 1,000 delegates from the United States, Britain and Iraq. To contribute to The London Fund to make his journey possible, please visit the Help Us page at strikeforpeace.org.)