A MODEST PROPOSAL

Posted on | by Ed

It does not take much to get the average American – particularly men – excited about military spending. That is why in the midst of a pitched three-month battle over a $90 billion/year piece of health care legislation Congress was able to pass a $700 billion dollar Pentagon budget with not one iota of public debate. And that's for 12 months. And that's not even close to enough, of course, and we'll be treated to numerous "emergency" and "supplemental" expenditures throughout the year. You can never have too many armor-piercing, bunker-busting, laser-guided doodads.
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Just think of all the great gun camera footage we can look forward to this season on The Military Channel.

I've got an idea. It will require about 0.001% of the military budget and, unlike the rest of it, might actually provide some benefits in the long run.
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So, Haiti. Tens of thousands dead, and all of the nation's hospitals destroyed. The international aid agencies, specifically Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, are out of supplies.
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Both the port and the airport in Port-au-Prince are destroyed, hampering any effort to bring in more. The Pentagon, like the iPhone, has an app for this.

Here is a piece of military hardware to get Ed all worked up: the USNS Comfort. It is a hospital ship with a helipad so it can serve areas without ports or airstrips. It is as large as a supercarrier and has the facilities to rival any hospital on Earth. Beds for 1000 patients. 12 fully equipped operating rooms. Four distilleries to make 300,000 gallons of drinking water per day. A complete pharmacy and radiology lab. Complete labs for dental, optometry, and trauma patients. Two oxygen-producing plants.

Oh my, I'm getting a little excited.


Not pictured: shit gettin' blowed up

Stationed in Baltimore, the Comfort can be ready to sail in five days and it'll take a couple more to reach Haiti. A lot of people who could have been saved will have died in the interim. So here's my idea. Let's build five of them. Staff them with medical students and military doctors, distribute them around the world (Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, etc.) and have them on duty 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Make calls in poor countries and provide medical care for people who have nothing. When disasters happen, the ships can be there in hours, not a week. You know, doing stuff that might make people around the world less likely to hate us. If we can maintain military bases in 30 different countries around the world we can afford a handful of ships. But without any guns, it would be a hard sell on both Congress and the public.

Isn't the military always going on and on about that "winning the hearts and minds" shit after they turn some nation into rubble? That might work – one of these decades. Or we could spend a tiny fraction of our obscene military budget on, you know, helping people. But that doesn't interest us. We want to do as we please and then find some way to make people like us afterward. It worked well in Vietnam and Iraq, so why change now?

32 thoughts on “A MODEST PROPOSAL”

  • Hank Roberts says:

    And a followon for rebuilding — a best-technology demonstration.

    Lose the nature lottery to a flood or earthquake?
    Get the best rebuilding the world knows how to do, as a way to show off the best stuff of the day, and a way to avoid putting bad building practices back on the ground for the next flood or quake.

    Not richie-rich wasteful rebuilding — best low-hanging-fruit efficient rebuilding.

  • ladiesbane says:

    If Cheney had had stock in this concern, we'd have a fleet by now.

    Let's sweeten the deal by offering school loan rebates to young doctors and nurses who give a year to staff them…let young engineers intern in the distillation plants…I love this idea. It just gets bigger in my mind the more I think about it.

    It's more expensive than it seems, of course, and dangerous, but god, the idea of doing something we could be proud of….

  • Hann1bal says:

    Something along these lines is already happening. The way it works, essentially, is that the Navy will deploy a ship loaded with doctors, engineers, and other specialists, then send it on a cruise around parts of the world that need some help. The Caribbean, Latin America, West Africa, the Pacific. It might be the Comfort or the Mercy, or it might be just a plain ol' "gator", or amphibious ship. If you go to http://www.warisboring.com, for instance, you can find several accounts of these voyages. As I understand it, also, the Navy has plans to expand these missions and dedicate more ships to them.

    Trivia: The Comfort also provided aid during the 1994 intervention in Haiti. This will be the ship's third emergency trip to Haiti. Isn't Wikipedia great?

  • j says:

    Could we please put one phallic 12" cannon on the Comfort for the triple overlapping purposes of appeasing neocons, scaring Somali pirates, and irony? (That's 12" caliber. Of course :)

  • Kulkuri says:

    The Navy is sending a carrier loaded with helicopters to Haiti.

    The only way you could get the Neo-Cons on board your plan is if after you heal the people then you kill them. For Neo-Cons there is nothing like advancing democracy with the muzzle of a gun.

  • comrade x says:

    Just brace yourselves for another round of neocon pundit rage at the victims of this earthquake. Limbaugh and Robertson are going to be only the tip of the iceberg once reptilian shitheads like Savage and O' Reilly start telling their legions of mouthbreathing followers about how ungratefull those dark skinned people are and how they should get nothing from the benevolent U.S.A.
    They did it after the tsunami, after Katrina, and they will do it now.

  • Mrs. Chili says:

    I was talking to my husband on the way to school this morning – and then to my freshmen and sophomores – about the opportunity for rebuilding that this tragedy has provided. If we (and by "we," I mean every country that has the know-how and the resources to help) don't rebuild Haiti to at least 20th century standards, we'd be behaving like criminals.

    I LOVE your idea of the hospital ships; let's do it.

  • Erin says:

    Last time I saw the Comfort, it was pre-positioned at Diego Garcia (I was there in March of 2004).

    Another reason Neo-Cons won't want more hospital ships is because the Officers and Crew will be members of the single biggest threat to the world economy: Unions.

    Thinking about Neo-Cons is why I drink. They anger me.

  • mothra says:

    Hell, we need one of them hospital ships off of each of OUR ports providing medical care to the citizens…

  • waldo says:

    Turning the good ship US Military/Media/Corporate complex around and launching the US Kind/Caring/Thoughtful would by appeasement, encourage our enemies and bring Hitler back from the dead, you cheese-eating, latte-sipping surrender-monkey. We let 'em die in N'Orleans, hell they're still living hand-to-mouth in trailers! Why would we help 'em in Haiti? America is Strong and Exceptional and we don't need no stinkin' compassion, except when we're in election mode, spruiking crap for the rubes .

    Bomb bomb bomb, bombomb Everywhere!!!!1!

  • DB says:

    Erin Says:
    January 15th, 2010 at 4:07 pm

    Last time I saw the Comfort, it was pre-positioned at Diego Garcia (I was there in March of 2004).

    I was there Christmas day '76 on a USO tour. 100 SeaBees and 6 officers total population. Believe it or not, one of them was a guy I grew up with. Went into the small mess hall after we dropped off luggage in the metal huts, set my tray of food down at the only open seat only to lift my head and see a face from home. Amazingly small world sometimes.

  • DB says:

    BTW, Eric, after our show in the outdoor amphitheater, one of the SeaBees broke into a shed, stole the keys to the only bus on the island, and we went into the jungle – fending off coconut crabs. The guys had 'gladiator fights' in a garbage can, and races down the aisle of the bus. Good times! LOL

    Diego Garcia, that year anyway, looked like a remote WW2 radar station. Something right out of Michener's 'South Pacific'.

  • JohnR says:

    Here in Beautiful Balto, the word this morning was that the Comfort was heading out ASAP and should be at Haiti in a matter of days.

  • Erin says:

    @ DB-

    It's changed a bit! Now, British Navy, US Navy and Merchant Marines (why I was there) get to hang out with the chickens and coconut crabs. It's a pretty amazing place. I always liked the confused looks I got from Customs officials in every country wondering "what the hell is a Diego Garcia?" my passport.

    We were anchored in the harbor with about 23 other LMSRs (Long-range, Medium-Speed, Roll-on, Roll-off) and it got pretty rowdy. Imagine Donovan's Reef except with more British MPs with dogs

  • Danny B says:

    Erin Says:
    January 15th, 2010 at 11:32 pm

    @ DB-

    It's changed a bit!

    Sounds like it! It was a very remote, spartan place in '76, and really like stepping back in time. No dock, no ships, no nothing but sailors and coconut crabs. Like a small radar company on a remote Pacific atoll in WW2. Just the runway, mess hall, outdoor amphitheater, and enough huts to sleep 110 military residents (there were 4 British officers, 6 American, and 100 SeaBees.

    The coconut crabs were something else! In the jungle I'd guesstimate there were two coconut crab per square yard. It was like woodstock. Sneaky little bastards too!! Scamper off the trail and then rush back for your achilles tendon.

    On a sidebar, I got so stinking drunk from the 'mojo' concoction of booze my friend and the other 8 sailors who ventured into the jungle after our show I passed out in the last row of seats on that single bus Diego Garcia had. They sent a search party looking for me. I woke up as the rest of our act boarded the bus – eyes as red as a fire engine. It was a looooooong flight from there to Hickham in Hawaii. Ouch my head hurt !! I was officially initiated as a sailor that night booze-wise. LOL

  • Danny B says:

    "…I woke up (the next morning) as the rest of our act boarded the bus (on the ride to the chopper that took us to our C-141 for the ride to Hawaii).

    I'll never forget how many stars there were on such a remote island. Just about as far as one can get from other civilization on Earth.

    Cool ….

  • Danny B says:

    Another highlight that sticks in my mind from that USO tour was in the U.N. Joint Security Area at Panmunjom, Korea. Before entering the Armistice Building where you can walk around the table into North Korean territory they warned us to not get near the doors or windows. The North Koreans had been pulling people out of them and into North Korea!

    That was shortly after North Koreans stormed across the Freedom Bridge and axed a few U.S. soldiers to death who were cutting down a tree blocking the view of the bridge from the Western allies side. A very tense time all the way to Seoul, which was under martial law complete with sandbagged machine gun nests on busy street corners.

  • Aslan Maskhadov says:

    And why exactly would the US ever do this? Sure they'll send hospital ships and aid, on the condition that such country's privatize their entire infrastructure, and always remain ever bent over for corporate interests. In other words, so long as they remain in a state which makes the occasional visit of a hospital ship necessary.

  • Graham says:

    America really is an irony-free zone when it can send one G.W. Bush, he who failed to supply aid to disaster-struck louisianna, as aid envoy to disaster-struck Haiti.

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