A Simple Observation

Based on Presidential decisions, we committed to a military intervention in Vietnam that lasted from 1954 to 1973 at a cost of what would have been trillions in today’s dollars. The troop level commitments varied but by 1967 were estimated at 500,000. There are 58,195 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial of those who lost their lives. The estimate on wounded and disabled is upwards of 150,000. It is estimated that as many as 500,000 vets of the 3,000,000 who served over the years of engagement suffer from post-traumatic stress. It is estimated that civilian lives lost in Vietnam were at least 1.5 million and another 600,000 in Cambodia. This was to insure against the “domino theory.”

We invaded Grenada, an island (surrounded by water). We supposedly needed to rescue 800 American students. We sent in about 10,000 troops and spent approximately 150 million dollars to subdue a population of 91,000. We subsequently spent another 85 million dollars to repair the damage we did once they had a government we considered appropriate.

We went to war with Iraq (never declared a war by Congress) believing there were weapons of mass destruction. In 2007 there was a study done by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes that this war was costing 720 million dollars a day. The initial invasion involved 248,000 troops and was supported by another 120,000 troops of U.S. allies, most notably British. According to iraqbodycount.org there have been 268,000 lives lost directly related to our presence since 2003.

We are now being told (not asked) that we will be upgrading our force in Afghanistan. We have been fighting this war since 2001. The financial cost for the post 9/11 wars is estimated to be about 4.8 trillion dollars with the death count to civilians and servicemen in the millions. According to recent reporting by Vice News, things are worse for everyone involved in both Iraq and Afghanistan than they were before 9/11.

The point that this all hopes to make is that we do not hesitate to place troops in harm’s way and devote almost unlimited resources bought with borrowed money to effectively kill people. According to Google, the pentagon related budget of $598 billion was about 54% of the fiscal year 2015 U.S. discretionary budget. Whether you believe these efforts justified or not and whether you agree with increasing the military budget, it seems that everyone would agree the image of the American military, when focused properly, can accomplish anything man can envision and that it could benefit from a marketing program that portrayed it as a rebuilding force as well as an effective killer. As President Obama said in 2010 when he committed the American military to the Haitian earthquake catastrophe, “Our nation has a unique capacity to reach out quickly and broadly and to deliver assistance that can save lives. That responsibility obviously is magnified when the devastation that's been suffered is so near to us." Time magazine described this response as a “Compassionate Invasion.”

With this as a mantra, the proposal could be to bring the entire resource of the U.S. Armed Forces to rebuilding Puerto Rico where a third of the population have no clean water. The empathy optics that would come with this type of restoration would be good image for the administration that put it in play. The nationalist maxim that none should be left behind would be reinforced. A bi-partisan, joint resolution by the executive and legislative branches to bring this to bear would be the type of leadership all Americans are desperately looking for.

The other dynamic with this catastrophe is that this is the only solution to this catastrophe that has any chance of being meaningful, yet this doesn’t seem to be on the table.