Will America’s military behemoth ever be dismantled?

An article in last Sunday’s New York Times provided an interesting analysis of the Egyptian military, one that holds some important lessons for America.

The article described the military in Egypt as “the single most powerful institution in an autocratic state facing its toughest test in decades, an imminent presidential succession.” The military, which has been the recipient of almost $40 billion in U.S. foreign aid for the past 30 years, has made it clear that it will not permit anyone to assume the presidency “without ironclad guarantees that it would retain its pre-eminent position in the nation’s affairs.”

The paper pointed out the big role that the military and military-industrial complex have come to play in Egyptian life: “The Egyptian military has turned into a behemoth that controls not only security and a burgeoning defense industry, but has also branched into civilian businesses like road and housing construction, consumer goods and resort management.”

Compare for a moment the American military. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, along with the Berlin Wall, the time had finally come to dismantle the huge U.S. military behemoth that had been constructed over the almost 5 decades of the Cold War. But the military and the military-industrial complex would hear nothing of it. Notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet threat and the end of the Cold War, they were as determined as the Egyptian military behemoth to preserve their pre-eminent position in American society.

Now, it’s true that the military behemoth in the United States doesn’t use its vast resources to engage in commerce and industry, as the one in Egypt does. But it spends its money in a way that the Egyptian military cannot — by maintaining an enormous string of expensive overseas military bases in more than a hundred countries, as part of the biggest overseas military empire in history.

[Excerpt of article]