Eugene Jarecki: The American Way of War

Eugene Jarecki: The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (2008, Free Press)

Jarecki is a filmmaker who's produced a couple of documentaries on American wars: The Trials of Henry Kissinger and Why We Fight. This picks up a lot of his interests and some of his leads from the latter film -- e.g., a focus on Dwight Eisenhower's critique of the military-industrial complex. He looks into the culture of militarism that emerged from WWII and wrapped us up in the Cold War, but he doesn't lean toward either economic or mythic explanations. One thing that does concern him is corruption, and he finds that in ordinary politics, reaching a nadir with the George W. Bush administration.

Introduction: Mission Creep

1. The Tip of the Spear (p. 13):

In 1998, PNAC [Project for a New American Century] published an open letter to President Clinton warning of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and advocating preemptive action to overthrow him. Clinton rejected the call, emphasizing the next day in a message to Congress that his focus was instead on the rise of "terrorists who threaten to disrupt the Middle East peace process." Clinton's disagreement with the neoconservatives was, though, more one of degree than of principle. Indeed, his decision to involve America in the conflict in Bosnia took a page directly from PNAC's "benevolent hegemon" playbook.

As Kristol himself affirms, "we supported President Clinton when he intervened in Bosnia in December 1995, antagonizing some conservative Republicans who didn't like President Clinton. Then we ended up through most of the late nineties becoming critical of Clinton and what we regarded as his somewhat weak and wishful multilateralism."

Jarecki offers a list of signers of the 1998 PNAC letter later appointed to positions in George W. Bush's administration (p. 14):

• Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
• Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense
• Stephan A. Cambone, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
• Abram Shulsky, director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
• John R. Bolton, Under Secretary of State and later ambassador to the UN
• Peter W. Rodman, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security
• Eliot A. Cohen and Devon Cross, members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board
• I. Lewis Libby, Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney
• Dov Zakheim, Defense Department Comptroller
• Zalmay Khalilzad, head of Bush-Cheney DoD transition team and U.S. ambassador to Iraq
• Elliott Abrams, special assistant to the president and later deputy national security adviser for Global Democracy and Strategy
• Francis Fukuyama, member, President's Council on Bioethics
• Bruce Jackson, president, U.S. Committee on NATO
• Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State
• Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board
• Robert Zoellick, Deputy Secretary of State
• Paul Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs

(pp. 20-21):

Fukuyama, Wolfowitz, and Perle all trace the foreign policy dimension of neoconservatism instead to Albert Wohlstetter. A mathematician trained in the intricaties of the method of strategic analysis known as game theory who worked at the influential RAND Corporation think tank during the 1950s and 1960s, Wohlstetter was skeptical of teh doctrine of massive retaliation -- Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) -- that guided U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. While at RAND, he wrote a number of policy papers outlining new strategic approaches to fighting the Cold War with a specific focus on the nuclear arms race. [ . . . ] America's strategic advantage should instead lie, he argued, in developing precision weaponry and engaging in more limited wars, conducting preemptive strikes only if it was deemed strategically advantageous. Wohlstetter was a proponent of the development of both "smart" weapons and smaller-scale nuclear weaponry that could actually be used, and he objected to the constraints on the development of new nuclear weapons imposed by arms limitations treaties.

(p. 25):

Decrying what he calls "the myth of American innocence," [Robert] Kagan charges that many of the neocons' critics have a naive view of American history. In contrast to the "realism" with which the neocons identify themselves, he sees these naive critics as believing both that the outside world is safer than she is and that America has historically been more isolationist than she has. Only under such illusions, argues Kagan, could anyone see the neoconservative policies that led America into Iraq as an alarming departure.

"Far from the modest republic that history books often portray," Kagan asserts, "the early United States was an expansionist power from the moment the first pilgrim set foot on the continent; and it did not stop expanding -- territorially, commercially, culturally, and geopolitically -- over the next four centuries."

Jarecki comes up with a list of American doctrines, what he calls "widening horizons": Manifest Destiny, The Monroe Doctrine, The Roosevelt Corollary (to the Monroe Doctrine), Wilson's Fourteen Points, The Great Arsenal of Democracy [FDR], The Truman Doctrine. Then he introduces The Bush Doctrine. (pp. 31-32):

Despite episodic modifications by Truman's successors from Eisenhower to Reagan to Clinton, the Truman Doctrine dominated U.S. foreign policy for the latter half of the twentieth century, until it was displaced by the Bush Doctrine after September 11, 2001. By asserting the right to use preemptive military force against a potential adversary, the Bush Doctrine has expanded the Truman Doctrine's commitment to defend free people anywhere from a clear and present danger to the far more liberal commitment to use force even in the absence of such clarity. As such, it liberates the nation to start wars with far less evidence of danger, and with equally little scrutiny of the potential consequences.

2. The Arsenal of Democracy (pp. 39-40):

While no rational person can second-guess FDR's extraordinary achievement in thwarting the ravages of fascism in Europe and Asia, it can be fairly noted that unprecedented power was concentrated in the executive branch during his presidency, and that this power shift -- as anticipated by the framers -- was facilitated by the political and economic pressures of wartime.

World War II was an international triumph shadowed by domestic irony. The irony is deepened by the fact that, though Roosevelt is widely and justifiably seen as a heroic figure, it was on his watch that the nation underwent significant constitutional upheaval. His presidency thus teaches us that war itself -- whether just or unjust -- exerts disfiguring force on the republic's structural integrity. Even when a war is carefully considered, entered into as a last resort, and justified by external threats, it can still undermine the checks and balances, greatly empowering the executive while also making future war more likely. In this context, one can begin to see George W. Bush, his wars, and the vaulting power they have concentrated in the executive branch as both a fulfillment of Madison's and Jefferson's worst fears and as an aftereffect of the prerogatives assumed by Roosevelt.

(p. 41):

The isolationism FDR faced in his first years in office was less an organized ideology than an generalized apathy toward foreign engagement. Over time, though, as tensions in Europe and Asia rose, that apathy morphed into a more pointed opposition toward American entry into the war. This shift was facilitated by the America First committee, a pressure group that galvanized the spirit of isolationism into a powerful national movement. A September 1939 Gallup Poll (taken within days of Hitler's invasion of Poland) found that 90 percent of American adults wanted to keep out of the war. By 1940, this figure had dropped only slightly, to 88 percent; isolationist sentiment was resilient.

As Donald E. Schmidt writes in his 2005 book, The Folly of War, FDR's management of the country's disposition toward war through the late thirties was an increasingly delicate balancing act. "Walking on eggs," as he called it in a letter to the governor general of Canada, FDR developed a clever strategy to kill two birds with one stone. As a prelude to war itself, he undertook to make America "the great arsenal of democracy." This entailed marshaling America's population, resources, and industrial capacities not only to build defensive capabilities but to become the leading supplier of weapons to the British and other Allies.

Section called "If Roosevelt had a Richard Perle" (pp. 44-47):

It would have to have been Commander Arthur McCollum, a foreign policy adjutant who vigorously promoted entry into the war. In 1940, while serving as an officer in the Far Eastern section of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), McCollum wrote an "eight-point plan" that called for the United States to provoke Japanese aggression in order to turn public opinion in favor of entering the war. It has come to be called the McCollum Memo. [ . . . ]

McCollum's 1940 memo advocated the following eight foreign policy measures, designated, in his words, to compel Japan "to commit an overt act of war":

1. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
2. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
3. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-Shek.
4. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
5. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
6. Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.
7. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
8. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

According to [Robert] Stinnett [in Day of Deceit], FDR implemented all eight measures, and this haunting fact serves as the basis for Stinnett's thesis that FDR conspired both to provoke an attack by Japan and then to cover up having done so.

(pp. 52-54):

The term "American way of war" was used by British historian D.W. Brogan in 1944 to describe what he saw as America's innovative contribution to the history of warmaking in World War II. Before Pearl Harbor, FDR's "great arsenal of democracy" made America a supplier of arms to America's allies. Following the attack, the arsenal turned inward, becoming an invincible tool for America's own prosecution of the war and, ultimately, the driving force in a far-reaching transformation of American society. In both the Pacific and in Europe, FDR's mobilization of the American people, economy, and industrial capacities not only proved decisive for victory but set the stage for America's international posture for the latter part of the twentieth century. [ . . . ]

At its best, the American way of war represented the harnessing of America's industrial strength and large population for the fight against fascism. Following World War I, the United States had demobilized to the point that by 1939, the country had only 180,000 troops, the lowest level of enlistment since the end of the Civil War. To remedy this, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall requested the first peacetime conscription in the nation's history. Under what became the Selective Service Act of 1940, millions of Americans were drafted. By the war's end, the number of those serving had skyrocketed from roughly 180,000 to 12 million. Alongside this meteoric increase, U.S. industry also experienced an unprecedented boom. [ . . . ]

Nowhere was this more poignantly demonstrated than in the enormous advantage America reaped through the employment of female and minority labor in the war effort. Between 1940 and 1945, the female workforce grew by 50 percent, from 12 million to 18 million. During these years, the number of jobs for black Americans in the Army also jumped dramatically, from 5,000 to 920,000.

(p. 55):

The wartime prosperity of a state and, by extension, its people was determined by the degree to which the state's industrial base was applicable to military purposes. When the war was over, industries that had sprung up did not just close their factory doors but instead adapted their products to service the postwar moment. This led to the perpetuation of a wartime economy. In a spirit of postwar military Keynesianism, many defense industrial products were simply refitted to serve postwar civilian uses (radar, duct tape, jet aircraft). These modern marvels were seen as happy by-products of military-industrial research and innovation, making defense development seem indispensable even to the peacetime progress of the nation.

This phenomenon has become a self-perpetuating one in the years sine, diverting an ever-increasing disproportion of national resources from vital areas of national need into the most blunt instrument of national power: the military. As Eisenhower and others have warned, this diversion risks weakening from within the very country the defense spending seeks to defend from without. The longer this cycle continues and the more parts of the system adapt to fit it, the harder it is for the country to extricate itself from its implications.

3. Fear in the Night In 1947, with the Soviets consolidating their hold on eastern Europe and HUAC hunting communists at home; much of this chapter is based on interviews with Lawrence Wilkinson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell (pp. 76-77):

[Undersecretary of State Dean] Acheson explained that six days earlier, British officials in Washington had alerted the State Department that war-ravaged Britain could no longer provide financial support to the governments of Greece and Turkey and asked the United States to provide such aid in their stead. The British leadership believed the Communist guerrilla rebellion in Greece was an extension of Stalin's policy of expansion and oppression. Furthermore, if the Soviets gained control in Greece and Turkey, they would also gain access to the eastern Mediterranean, and from there to Western Europe. After two-facing the United States at Yalta and imposing an iron fist over Poland and Eastern Europe, Stalin seemed a major threat, no longer to be appeased. However, legitimate these concerns, the request by British officials for U.S. assistance to Greece and Turkey held both great symbolic and practical implications. It was an implicit admission by the British that they had been replaced by America as a power of global scope, a kind of passing the torch of empire. [ . . . ]

Declaring that the "very existence" of the Greek state was at risk and that Turkey's security was vital to the "preservation of order in the Middle East," Truman made Acheson's domino theory the foundation of his argument for a new U.S. foreign policy. "I am fully aware of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey," he said. "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

Thus began thirty years of US support for Greek dictatorships. Also in 1947, this led to the National Security Act (pp. 90-91):

The Pantagon has virtually exploded in scale over the past sixty years. According to its own Web site, the DoD "manages an inventory of installations and facilities" consisting of "several hundred thousand individual buildings and structures" at home and in over 163 foreign countries, covering "over 30 million acres of land." The sheer scale of the department in personnel, physical breadth, and economic wealth explains at least in part how it is able simply to overwhelm other departments within the executive branch (e.g., State) and to exert irresistible pressures upon policymakers.

Magnifying this power further is its concentration into the hands of a single civilian, just as critics feared at the time of the act's passage. This issue was one of the most heated points of contention in the debates of 1947, with the act's congressional opponents citing the danger of creating an "American Gestapo" and domination by a group of military professionals." Yet power was concentrated even further in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and within the bureaucracy of the Pentagon, when the act was amended in 1949.

(p. 98):

Indeed, so greatly did the CIA expand the president's power that Truman himself would be led in his twilight years to write a 1963 op-ed in The Washington Post decrying its shift of focus. "For some time," the former president wrote, "I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment." [ . . . ]

"Before and up through World War II, most good strategic intelligence was coming out of the State Department," Wilkerson explains. "Truman didn't like this. He felt that when the State Department (or any other agency) gave him intelligence it came with that agency's bias and prejudice. So he wanted something that was responsible only to him. And so they created the CIA and the Director of Central Intelligence.

For Truman, though, this decision produced its own problems that emerged over time, as the CIA became what he came to call "an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government." Putting the finest point possible on his concern, Truman declared in 1963, "I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. . . . I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President. . . ."

(pp. 102-103):

American support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan illustrates the extent to which the CIA has outdone Truman's worst possible "cloak and dagger" fears in becoming a proactively operational and policy-making instrument. Contrary to what he calls the "official version of history" that the U.S. armed the mujahideen in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then-national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has since startlingly claimed that the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan preceded and in many ways precipitated the Soviet invasion. "We didn't push the Russians to intervene," Brzezinski confessed to Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, "but we knowingly increased the probability that they would." In other words, he and President Carter sought strategically to lure the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. With the rise in power in Afghanistan of a pro-Soviet communist government under Noor Mohammed Taraki in 1978, the country was to become a staging ground for yet another satellite skirmish of the Cold War. The mujahideen were anticommunist by virtue of being opposed to Taraki's pro-Soviet government. They thus found themselves aligned almost by default with the United States, which, by supporting them, sought to undermine Soviet influence in the region. Brzezinski's astonishing revelation has been confirmed by then-CIA director and current secretary of defense Robert Gates in his 1996 memoir From the Shadows. Recounting a meeting on March 30, 1979, Gates recalls discussion of "sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire," a reference to what Brzezinski calls "giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."

Osama Bin Laden and the rise of al Qaeda represent a uniquely compounded case of blowback, in which long-term consequences of America's initial covert action in Iran came to fuel the anger separately produced by America's covert action in Afghanistan to produce a series of anti-American attacks culminating on 9/11. That this tragedy was in turn used by the Bush administration to beat a tortuous and highly secretive path to war in Iraq has created the prospect of longer-term blowback whose full scope is not yet known. What is clear, though, and ominously so, is that the Iraq War has already served to strengthen the recruitment of possible terror operatives by al Qaeda.

(pp. 105-106):

"My worst memories of Henry Kissinger," recalls former National Security Council member Roger Morris, "are of him pandering to the president's worst instincts on Vietnam, misleading both Congress and the press, deliberately manipulating both his staff and the rest of the American government." Morris had worked as chief of staff to Dean Acheson after earning his doctorate at Harvard, and he had joined the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson. Initially asked by Kissinger to remain on the council after Nixon took office, Morris felt compelled to resign after Kissinger's decision in 1970 to begin bombing the neighboring country of Cambodia without the knowledge of Congress of the American people. Throughout the war, Cambodia had functioned as a kind of neutral neighbor to the unfolding conflict. Then, in 1970, Cambodia's king Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown in a CIA-supported coup. Irrationally, this event set off what Morris calls "a chain reaction inside the American government, in Richard Nixon, and in Henry Kissinger." Perceiving a challenge to American resolve and convinced that the events in CAmbodia could jeopardize their desire to secure an honorable American exit from Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger began secretly bombing Cambodia.

"I decided to resign . . . because I felt that the Cambodian invasion was a betrayal of the president's pledge to seek an honorable and just peace in Vietnam," recalls Morris. "The Cambodian invasion destroyed all of that, devastated it, for years to come and literally cost tens of thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian lives. I thought it was one of the great crimes of the century." From a constitutional perspective, the more one reads of the relentless secrecy and vigor with which Kissinger pursued his secret foreign policy activities, the more one sees a precursor to events of the Bush years. The more secret his and Nixon's activities became, the more paranoid the two men became toward those around them -- not only in Congress but inside the executive branch itself.

4. Big White Men On Eisenhower's farewell address warning of a "military-industrial complex" (pp. 122-123):

The words were meticulously chosen and disarmingly candid. "Military-industrial complex," the phrase he introduced to the nation that January night, has in the years sine become a hot button, praised by the left as prophecy and dismissed by the right as the work of some overzealous speechwriter. To left and right alike, the Farewell Address seemed a radical departure for such a central figure of the Cold War -- like Al Capone denouncing organized crime. [ . . . ]

Before trying to divine Eisenhower's motivation in delivering the address, I wanted to settle a nagging question. Some weeks before visiting with John [Eisenhower, the president's son, interviewed by Jarecki for Why We Fight], I was disturbed to hear Richard Perle express contempt for the Farewell Address, echoing popular right-wing doubts over its authorship. "I think the Eisenhower warning about the military-industrial complex was silly at the time," Perle scoffed. "It was the work of some speechwriter."

The history of the address disproves Perle's aspersion. Though Eisenhower employed speechwriters, he was known for taking a particularly active hand in the drafting of speeches, what presidential scholar Charles Griffin calls Eisenhower's "'hidden hand' rhetorical style at work." Eisenhower's feverish handwritten notes over countless drafts of the Farewell Address attest to his active role in its formulation. According to his chief speechwriter, Malcolm Moos, Eisenhower had first approached him about the speech some two years before leaving office. "The president," Moos recalled, "Was in a philosophical mood one day, and turned to me and said, 'By the way, Malcolm, I want to say something when I leave here and I want you to be thinking about it.'"

(p. 134):

A week after Eisenhower delivered his 1961 Farewell Address, The New York Times published a collection of alarming statistics revealing the extent of federal investment in scientific research. "Four-fifths of planned Federal expenditures for research and development next year will be directed to national security needs," the Times reported, adding that more than 60 percent of all research in the United States was being funded by the federal government.

That was in 1961. But according to Jacobs, federal funding was actually at a relatively low point during Eisenhower's stay on campus [i.e., when Eisenhower was president of Columbia University]. Seven years before that, however, Columbia had been the birthplace of the Manhattan Project (hence the name), a case study in the explosive potential of federally guided research. By 1943, most atomic coordination and development had moved to the national laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. But in late 1942, early development work was still taking place at Columbia, with vast quantities of uranium stored in warehouses all over Manhattan.

(p. 140):

Less than three months into office and just one month after Stalin's death, Eisenhower delivered his "Chance for Peace" speech, in which he underscored the senseless tragedy of the Cold War. Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, he accused the Soviet Union of spending vast sums to develop weapons and thus compelling the United States to follow suit. He also asserted that, whatever its purpose, the arms race was diverting America's resources and energy disproportionately toward defense at the cost of other aspects of her national life. "Every gun that is made," he declared, "every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

In 1935, Marine Major General Smedley Butler published a book called War Is a Racket (p. 145):

Six years after the book's publication, in 1941, then-senator Harry Truman established a congressional committee to investigate fraud and corruption in the defense sector. The Truman Committee held more than four hundred hearings on the corrupt activities of war profiteers, whom Truman himself called "treasonous." The hearings led to hundreds of firings, and in one investigation of corrupt practices by the aerospace firm Curtiss-Wright, an American general was jailed. At the time, Wisconsin senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., called these profiteers "enemies of democracy in the homeland.' Truman's hearings catapulted him into the national spotlight and were responsible for his selection as Roosevelt's running mate in the 1944 election.

5. John Boyd, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Meaning of Transformation (p. 162):

The transformation ideal is commonly associated with the late maverick Air Force colonel, John Boyd, a household name among military brass, who is all but unknown to the mainstream. Yet a close analysis of Boyd's career by those who knew him reveals that while Rumsfeld's war plan for Iraq may have employed the kind of high-tech air power commonly associated with Boyd, it fundamentally violated John Boyd's larger vision of American war strategy. To those who knew Boyd, Rumsefld's plan -- and notably its failure -- is a case study in how the military-industrial forces Eisenhower feared may not only prove disfiguring to the nation's balance of power and its spending priorities but even distort U.S. military strategy in the field. As such, they fuel a self-perpetuating cycle of overzealous militarism and gross miscalculation, with spiraling consequences.

(p. 163):

[Colonel Richard] Treadway sees the MIC [military-industrial complex] as the engine of all that is great about the American way of war. "The military-industrial complex," he glowingly explains, "was a creation during the Eisenhower years when it was understood that the way to address the overwhelming military might of the Soviet Union was to create an industrial capacity in the United States to produce the weaponry, the ammunition, to carry out the American way of war." Though America is by no means the first country to develop a military industry, Treadway argues that it has done so on an unprecedented scale and in its own unique way.

"The American way of war," Treadway declares, "has historically been described as 'overwhelming firepower supported by overwhelming logistics." The tooth-to-tail ratio. The fact that for every shooter out there -- every man with a gun -- there are hundreds behind, supporting, providing the food, the ammunition, the boots, the fresh water, the gas for the tanks, the oil. The great logistic tail that goes into the biting tooth up front." Treadway argues that such military industrialization has shaped not only America's warmaking but its civilian life as well. "The great industries that have become some of the foundations of modern America -- General Dynamics, Lockheed-Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Bell Aerospace, and Boeing -- many of these companies have also in the intervening years created much of what is great about American industry for civilian uses."

(p. 171):

John F. Kennedy had campaigned for the presidency in part on the platform that Eisenhower had relied too heavily on nuclear deterrence for America's security and thus let its conventional forces founder. Kennedy felt that the "massive retaliation" doctrine, while possibly deterring nuclear conflict, at once made conventional war more likely and America less prepared for it. America needed to reinvigorate its conventional capabilities, he argued, and develop a more credible approach to warfighting. Along with his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, Kennedy undertook to replace the "massive retaliation" doctrine with what they called "flexible response."

(pp. 185-186):

In this light, "shock and awe" becomes a high-tech fireworks show based on a deficient strategy. Despite its precision weaponry, transformational tactics, and the hype about penetrating "decision cycles," the war plan was fundamentally undermined by its planners' failure to account for the necessity of understanding their adversary and winning him over to their cause.

How did this happen? How did Rumsfeld, a seasoned executive and two-time defense secretary, seek to realize the transformational vision of John Boyd, and end up instead with a clumsy, unwinnable, and tragic set-piece battle of old ideas delivered with the hollow sound and fury of high-tech weaponry?

A glimpse at the answer may lie in Rumsfeld's own words spoken on January 31, 2002, just a few months after 9/11, to a military audience at the National Defense University. "The notion that we could transform while cutting the defense budget over the past decade," Rumsfeld confessed, "was seductive, but false." With this simple sentence, the secretary of defense who had made "transformation" his operational mantra conceded that some part of that agenda might have to be reined in. In other words, the events of 9/11 produced a level of fear and paranoia that made the canceling of outdated defense systems and a wholesale rethinking of Pentagon priorities politically infeasible.

Into the post-9/11 vacuum stepped the neoconservatives, for whom 9/11 provided a once-in-a-lifetime moment. By their own recognition, their vision of a "New American Century" needed just such a "new Pearl Harbor" to be launched. The adoption by the administration of neoconservative foreign policies post-9/11 brought with it their vision of a "revolution in military affairs" in which precision air war figured centrally with no corresponding emphasis on the challenges of attempting "regime change."

Rumsfeld, meanwhile, had staked this latter chapter of his career -- and made early enemies -- on transformation. Rather than lose face by retreating from so bold a commitment, he simply allowed its meaning to blur. Rather than the total overahaul of strategy, tactics, and technology as a catchall for the simple use of any number of high-tech defense systems and unconventional battle strategies for this new kind of war, the "war on terror."

Jarecki seems to think that Boyd was right and Rumsfeld just dumbed him down. I see at least two problems here: one is that the high-tech didn't (and probably could never) live up to the hype; another is that the problems don't fit the solutions (even the ones in the hype). A third, which even Rumsfeld would agree with, is that the institutions couldn't think their way through transformation (or anything that challenges their presuppositions).

(p. 187):

Defense expert Joseph Cirincione concurs. "After September 11, every single weapons program that should have been cancelled was just relabeled," he says. "Instead of trimming the military, instead of reorganizing the military, we just threw money at it. Everything was funded. Even though we're talking about fighting a war against terrorists in caves, we're buying weapons designed to pulverize an advanced industrial nation. So suddenly things like the B-2 bomber -- a bomber that costs $2 billion a copy and was designed to penetrate Soviet radar -- was being justified as an antiterror weapon. You re-label an F-22 fighter aircraft from something that would kill Soviet aircraft to something that will kill terrorists. You just repackage it as the 'new military thinking' weapon. Wrap the flag around it. Keep the program going."

6. The Missing "C": An Insider's Guide to the Complex (pp. 207-208):

In the case of the F-22, its construction was contracted and subcontracted in forty-four states. This means a majority of the Senators on Capitol Hill have been given a vested interest in perpetuating the program.

As a watchdog over Pentagon waste, Spinney saw frontloading and political engineering firsthand as strategies to thwart his efforts to challenge the legitimacy of systems like the F-22. "Let's say, hypothetically, that Chuck Spinney in the Pentagon wants to kill the F-22," he explains. "So I do a study that says the Cold War's over and we don't need the F-22 anymore. While I am doing this, word will get out, and I become a threat to the welfare of people working on the F-22 -- the contractor's employees, the Air Force sponsors, and the people on the Hill who benefit from jobs and money flowing to their districts."

So what do they do?

"It just takes one phone call from the program manager in the Pentagon tot he president of the company to unleash a torrent.Now in this case it's Lockheed-Martin. So the president of Lockheed makes a few calls, turns on his lobbyists. Makes a couple more calls to his subcontractors, who in turn call their subs. Now they're all going to turn on their lobbyists. And that's when the fax attacks start. They start lobbying Congress, and Congress gets inundated with studies showing why the F-22 is absolutely vital to the survival of Western society. The studies will say, 'Yes, the F-22 might have had some problems in the past, but we've overcome them." And meanwhile in the newspapers there'll be op-eds singing the F-22's praises written by people in think tanks funded by the defense industry."

7. Shock and Awe at Home The Patriot Act, the torture memos, (pp. 232-233):

Like Lincoln and Roosevelt before him, George W. Bush determined that, at a time of "invasion or rebellion," the Constitution gave the president the right to deny detained "unlawful combatants" constitutional legal protections. While he is thus not the first American president to do this, and although he was empowered by the precedents of Lincoln and Roosevelt, no administration has ever asserted more unilateral discretion over when and to what extent the country will abide by the constitutional requirement to uphold the writ of habeas corpus.

(p. 267):

Yoo acknowledges that "historical precedents provide some support" for the argument that "the government consistently overreacts to crises by oppressing dissenters and infringing on individual rights." As he sees it, though, the historical tension between security and liberty moves on a pendulum, which during wartime swings toward security and then toward a restoration of liberties when peace returns.

"History does not show," he writes in War by Other Means, "that wars have reduced American civil liberties, either before or after the war. The Union reduced civil liberties during the Civil War, but it also liberated the slaves and expanded individual rights against the states afterward. FDR interned Japanese-Americans during World War II, but civil liberties surged in the decades after."

Conclusion: If I Ran the Zoo (pp. 272-273):

Though any number of voices have contributed to my thinking about America's future, two issues, raised by Chuck Spinney and Colonel Wilkerson respectively, have impressed me as most urgent and very much at the root of all the others. The first is Spinney's concern that something must be done to address the fact that Madison's solution to the dangers of a majority faction, namely, the formation of a representative republic, has backfired, producing in Congress a class of professional politicians who can be corrupted by strategies like frontloading and political engineering. The second is Wilkerson's concern that the National Security Act of 1947 has outlived its usefulness and needs to be replaced, both because it ill-equips America to meet today's security challenges and because it upset the balance of power between the branches so dangerously toward the executive.

posted 2009-10-16