Billions for a Military U.S. Won’t Use

Ever buy a new car and not want to take it out of the garage because you didn’t want to get it mussed up by actually using it?

America has a similar problem. We have a “new car” that costs us billions and billions of dollars every year. But we don’t want to use it; we don’t want to muss it up.

It’s called the American military. It’s called the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

And every time somebody suggests we actually use these very expensive forces for some practical purpose--fighting drugs, for instance--the military Establishment howls.

Right now, a good place to use our military would be in Colombia.

Colombia is a nation in the grip of giant drug cartels. These cartels have recently assassinated a presidential candidate, a judge and a police chief. They maintain well-equipped private armies.

Colombia has had little luck in fighting these cartels. You may recently have read about sweeping arrests, netting 12,000 people or more. There have been such sweeping arrests in the past. After a short time, the people are released. You may have seen on television how lavish estates of the drug lords have been seized. Lavish estates have been seized in the past. Quietly, after the TV cameras have left, the estates are returned to the drug lords. Now there is talk of extraditing drug kingpins to America for trial. Swell. But before you can extradite a kingpin, you have to catch him. And Colombia is very, very bad at catching them.

Most of the cocaine smuggled into the United States comes from Colombia. This cocaine destroys American lives, kills our young people and attacks the very fiber of our society.

But our President will not take decisive military action. Legality is not the problem. The government of Colombia could be persuaded to ask the United States to send troops. But we don’t want to send our troops.

Ever since our debacle in Southeast Asia, we have worried about something called the Vietnam syndrome. This was thought to be the fear on the part of the American people that U.S. military intervention could never work.

But the Vietnam syndrome has not affected the American people. It has affected the military.

Our leaders are afraid to commit troops to fight drugs because they are afraid these troops will not succeed. The troops are not cowards; they are not afraid of dying. They are afraid of failing. Since nothing we have done to fight drugs seems to have worked so far, nobody wants to take the point and try something new.

Our military leaders say drug enforcement is a police function and not a military one. And, when you are talking about city streets, they are correct.

But we are talking about vast regions of Colombia where private armies with planes and helicopters and advanced weapons stand guard. Attacking this is not a police function. It is a military one.

We need drug planes and drug ships intercepted. That’s military.

We need the growing fields destroyed from the air and the ground. That’s military.

And, unfortunately, we might need a few people shot. What’s more military than that?

But our military will not act. The Reagan Administration, which was supposed to be so tough on drugs, refused. Former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was called before Congress to testify about this. He said using the military to fight drugs would be like the effort of King Canute “to order the tides back.”

In other words, it was hopeless. Might as well give up. Too tough a job for our $285-billion-a-year defense Establishment. More than a quarter of the total federal budget goes for defense, but we can’t ever use it.

Why? Because we are waiting for a Soviet invasion. Frank Carlucci, who followed Weinberger as secretary of defense, said: “The armed forces should not become a police force, nor can we afford to degrade readiness by diverting badly needed resources from their assigned missions.”

We cannot “degrade readiness.” In other words, we can’t use even a fraction of our military strength because we have to stand guard against Russian troops pouring over the North Pole.

What utter nonsense. Today, Russia is having a hard time hanging onto Poland. An invasion of the United States is not high on the Soviet agenda.

But the American military must stand “ready.” Got to keep those shiny tanks and shiny planes and shiny guns all polished, just waiting for the day, a day that may never come, to use them against invaders.

Drug Invasion

Drugs invade our borders every day. But the military will not budge.

Fighting the drug lords was a major campaign pledge of George Bush. I was with him that day in New York in the spring of last year when he said he wanted death for “drug kingpins.” He said: “These people are dealing in death, and that’s what they should get.”

At the time, he meant American drug kingpins. But why do foreign drug kingpins deserve less?

We will not degrade the readiness of our armed forces by using the armed forces. We will not weaken America by using the military to stop the flow of drugs. We will strengthen America.

We already have the planes and ships and guns and men.

What we need now is the will.