What could happen to the military if the US defaults on its debt?

As the United States stares down the barrel of a deadline to raise the national debt ceiling, past and current Pentagon leaders are sounding the alarm on how such an event could be deeply damaging to the country and those who keep it safe.  

Disrupted pay for service members, late benefits checks for veterans and a hit to US national security are only a glimpse into what could come.  

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made that much clear this week, telling lawmakers that the Pentagon won’t, in some cases, be able to pay our troops with any degree of predictability,” should a default come to pass. 

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley said such an event could also embolden China and increase risk to the United States.  

The debt limit is the dollar figure up to which the Treasury Department can borrow to pay for congressionally approved spending decided through the annual appropriations process. 

The Biden administration and the GOP are at a standstill on the matter, with congressional Republicans demanding cuts in exchange for lifting the ceiling. The White House, however, has stood firm that the limit should be raised now, and spending cut negotiations will be handled separately. 

With the deadline approaching in a manner of week, the brinkmanship between the White House and congressional leaders to avoid a default so far has not made progress. 

The Treasury Department has warned the country could default, an unprecedented event in modern times, as soon as June 01, 2023.

And the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report Friday that estimated the federal government’s deadline could now be the first two weeks of June. 

The Treasury has never been incapable of paying US debt obligations – the one exception being in the War of 1812 when parts of Washington were burned, including the Treasury building – it’s not exactly clear what the effect would be on government payments.  

As the matter depends on how the Treasury Department decides to prioritize US bills, it’s to be seen what takes precedence. Ongoing obligations that deal with national security, however, require a big chunk of that change. 

The Defense Department expends multiple billions of dollars every day for military, civilian and contractor pay; fuel to run bases and keep ships at sea; maintaining US nuclear deterrents; keeping production lines running; and Social Security, Medicare and retirement payments for veterans. 

It would not just be a huge stain on US credibility in a very dangerous and unstable world; it would be the equivalent of a government shutdown of our national security.

The government could use whatever revenues it takes in if the debt ceiling is not raised, but those amounts would be woefully insufficient to support normal operations. 

On military salaries alone, the US is due to pay out about US$4 billion on June 15, according to an analysis released earlier this week by the Bipartisan Policy Center. 

On June 01, another US$12 billion is supposed to go to military and civilian retirement payments and US$12 billion towards veterans’ benefits.  

This isn’t the first time past and current Pentagon officials have raised alarms on how a default would affect the military. 

In a letter released in October 2021, the last time Washington neared the ceiling, Austin warned that a default would undermine the economic strength on which our national security rests and that it would also seriously harm our service members and their families. 

“I would have no authority or ability to ensure that our service members, civilians, or contractors would be paid in full or on time,” he wrote at the time. 

Austin noted that benefits for 2.4 million military retirees and 400,000 survivors would be at risk, federal contractors could have their payments delayed, and America’s international reputation and the stature of the US dollar would be at risk. 

Seven of Austin’s predecessors, in a separate letter to Congress, said that should a default halt payments to members of the military, it is unclear whether they would ever be repaid.  

Congress eventually raised the debt limit to roughly US$31.4 trillion in late 2021, but not without months of drama. 

Lawmakers are back in a similar situation this spring, as the GOP-led House has held firm on not raising the debt ceiling without significant spending cuts.  

President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this week sat down with other congressional leaders to find a way forward, but no major movements have happened.  

For now, Pentagon leaders are making sure Congress understands the consequences should a debt default come to pass. 

“There’s just a number of things that we’re working with allies and partners on that would come into question as to whether or not we’ll be able to execute programs, but most important, this will affect the livelihood of our of our troops and our civilians,” Austin told lawmakers on Thursday. 

 

US wages almost 400 military interventions

Since I have started writing blogs, one of my assertions has been that United States is the biggest warmonger as well initiator of regime change programs around the world. This agenda is aimed at serving producers of lethal arsenal in the United States as well foreign policy objectives.

The United States has waged nearly 400 military interventions since its founding in 1776, according to a new research published lately. According to the study by the Military Intervention Project, A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019, half of those conflicts and other uses of force occurred between 1950 and 2019. 

More than a quarter of them have taken place since the end of the Cold War. Out of the nearly 400 military interventions, 34% have been in Latin America and the Caribbean; 23% in East Asia and the Pacific region; 14% in West Asia and North Africa; and 13% in Europe and Central Asia.

The authors find that US interventions have increased and intensified in recent years. While the Cold War era (1946 – 1989) and the period between 1868 – 1917 were the most militaristically active for the United States, the post-9/11 era has already taken the third spot in all of US history and most of that military adventurism has been in West Asia. 

It says, “These interventions have only increased and intensified in recent years, with the US militarily intervening over 200 times after World War II and over 25% of all US military interventions occurring during the post-Cold War era.”

Until the end of the Cold War, US military hostility was generally proportional to that of its rivals. Since then, the US began to escalate its hostilities as its rivals deescalate it, marking the beginning of America’s more kinetic foreign policy.  

The study reads, “Some scholars have explained such increasing interventionist trends as part of the new norm of contingent sovereignty, which explicitly challenges the traditional principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. Particularly regarding the US, one perspective is that the country is evolving past its Cold War doctrine.”

The study notes, “US military interventions to promote geopolitical interests cannot explain the dynamics of the post-Cold War era. If the US primarily intervenes when its security interests are threatened, we expect the US to intervene less in an era void of peer competitors where fewer vital interests are arguably at stake.”

The authors point out that other researchers have asserted the US uses force abroad without a clear organizing principle and thus its military missions have had disastrous long-term and unintended consequences.

In 2018, a co-author said, “Current patterns of US military engagement as kinetic diplomacy, diplomacy solely through armed force,” the research says, in the past years.

While US Ambassadors are operating in one-third of the world’s countries, US special operators are active in three-fourths. 

A challenging aspect of measuring military interventions is how to define an intervention, the research notes. The study highlights that the definition of US military intervention may fall under any of the following categories.

The movement of regular troops or forces of one country inside another one in the context of some political issue or dispute. To separate higher intensity interventions from minor skirmishes, this definition excludes paramilitaries, government-backed militias, and other security forces that are not part of the regular uniformed military of a state. 

Similarly, “Events must be purposeful, not accidental.” Inadvertent border crossings are not included in this definition and neither are unintentional confrontations between planes or naval ships. The definition excludes soldiers engaging in exercises in a foreign land, transporting forces across borders, or on foreign bases. Furthermore, the definition categorizes international military interventions by temporal guidelines so that interventions are continuous if repeated acts occur within 6 months of one another.

Instances in which the United States has used its Armed Forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes...Covert operations, disaster relief, and routine alliance stationing and training exercises are not included here, nor are the Civil and Revolutionary Wars and the continual use of US military units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States.

The political use of military force involving ground troops of either the US Army or Marine Corps in an active attempt to influence the behavior of other nations

Use of armed force that involves the official deployment of at least 500 regular military personnel (ground, air, or naval) to attain immediate term political objectives through action against a foreign adversary

Routine military movements and operations without a defined target like military training exercises, the routine forward deployment of military troops, non-combatant evacuation operations, and disaster relief should be excluded

Militarized interstate disputes are united historical cases of conflict in which the threat, display, or use of military force short of war by one member state is explicitly directed towards the government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state

 This recent pattern of international relations conducted largely through armed force, it noted, has increasingly targeted West Asia and Africa. These regions have seen both large-scale U.S. wars, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and low-profile combat in nations such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, and Tunisia.

The authors say “the U.S. has increased its military usage of force abroad since the end of the Cold War. Over this period the U.S. has preferred the direct usage of force over threats or displays of force, increasing its hostility levels while its target states have decreased theirs. Along the way, the regions of interest have changed as well. Up until World War II, the U.S. frequently intervened in Latin America and Europe,” but beginning in the 1950s, the U.S. shifted its focus to West Asia and the North Africa region.

The data comprises confirmed covert operations and low-profile interventions by Special Operations forces, however, it points out that US government secrecy and scrupulous sourcing standards of the public database it studied guarantees that the post-9/11 tally is an undercount.

The post-9/11 era appear to be the third most active for US interventions of relatively higher hostility levels. In this era, threats of force are absent, while the use of force has been overwhelmingly commonplace. Since 2000 alone, the US has engaged in at least 30 military interventions. 

Experts say that the Pentagon has likely used secretive authority to carry out combat beyond the scope of any authorization for the use of military force or permissible self-defense.

They point out that while secretive “127e” programs in Somalia and Yemen for instance overlap with well-known US military interventions, other uses of the authority, such as in Egypt and Lebanon, may not. The same goes for even lesser-known programs like “Section 1202”.  

US military conflicts have provided American arms manufacturers with ample opportunity to make a profit and prolong the country’s history of violence based on its founding. 

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Global military expenditure is estimated to have been US$1,917 billion in 2019, the highest level since 1988. 

With a military expenditure of US$732 billion, the US remained by far the largest spender in the world in 2019, accounting for 38% of global military spending. The US spent almost as much on its military in 2019 as the next 10 highest spenders combined.

Today, SIPRI puts the cost of the US military at more than US$800 billion annually, accounting for almost 40% of global military spending.