Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin went into the hospital both before Christmas and on New Year’s Day, apparently not informing the White House and Congress on either occasion. Other than the president as commander-in-chief, SecDef Austin is the senior civilian in the U.S. military’s chain of command.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin looks on during a joint press conference with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant at Israel’s Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, Israel December 18, 2023. REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura/File Photo
Austin’s medical condition is serious, most recently requiring four days in an intensive care unit. A blindsided president has already declared he won’t fire Austin, nor will Austin resign. No big deal, then?
I’m amazed. One of the first and most valuable lessons I learned in the military was to keep your boss informed. Tell her if the project is behind schedule. Tell him if you’re missing critical spares that would hamper the combat performance of your unit. Don’t let your boss be blindsided. Most obviously, under combat conditions, failing to keep your boss informed of critical information is an almost certain way to get your people killed.
When I was a lieutenant, I served on the “battle staff” for exercises in Cheyenne Mountain. This was in 1986 at the tail end of the Cold War. During one exercise, a friend of mine, another LT, witnessed the commanding four-star general chewing out a colonel on his staff. The colonel had failed to tell the general that AWACS planes were unavailable during the exercise. (Remember, this was an exercise, i.e. “fake.”) My friend told me the general reamed the colonel a new one for failing to inform him of what in wartime would have been a critical piece of information.
Lloyd Austin, it seems, has been MIA for several days without keeping his immediate superior, Joe Biden, in the loop, potentially threatening the national security of our country. Yet Austin has no plans to resign and Biden has no plans to take action.
It’s a bad example to our military that something so critical as a failure to respect the chain of command is being dismissed as a trivial matter. A blindsided Biden should not turn a blind eye here. If Austin has honor, he should resign to avoid further embarrassment to his boss. If he doesn’t, Biden should fire him.
What will historians say decades or centuries from now when the U.S. empire collapses into ruin? How will they explain it?
Consider the United States in the big picture. I see a country with unique strengths. Two wide oceans protecting us. A long secure border with Canada. A securable border with Mexico, the current immigrant “crisis” be damned. Canada and Mexico aren’t our enemies. No invasion is coming from them. As a country, the USA occupies a geographical/global position that is uniquely safe and advantageous.
Why are we so fearful? Why do we spend a trillion dollars (or more) each year on national “defense”?
How incredibly lucky we are! (Credit: Tom Van Sant/Geosphere Project, Santa Monica/Science Photo Library)
Of course, I put “defense” in quotes because the USA is an empire with a military configured for offense. Global reach, global power, was the motto of my service, the U.S. Air Force. The U.S. military strives for full-spectrum dominance, meaning total control of the land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace, justified in the false name of “defense.” The cost of this febrile quest for dominance is, I believe, ultimately unbearable. Why do we persist in such folly?
What country would dare to attack the USA? Other than small terrorist networks like Al Qaeda, no country, no people, no leaders in their right mind would dare attack us, let alone invade us. They know they’d likely be obliterated if they did. Does anyone truly fear an attack on the USA from China? Russia? Iran? North Korea? Given America’s belligerence, evidence of our unbridled vengeance after Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and our vast arsenal of highly destructive weaponry, including thousands of nuclear warheads, anyone attacking the U.S. would be pursuing a death wish.
I am not afraid of Russia, a regional power that is stuck in a quagmire war against Ukraine. I am not afraid of China, a regional military power and economic superpower that is tied to us in global trade and has no intent, near as I can tell, to attack my country. I am not afraid of Iran, or North Korea, or similar “threats” of the moment. So why is my government constantly exaggerating these threats and telling me to be afraid?
Of course, I know all about Ike’s military-industrial-congressional complex. I write against it all the time. It’s not just the MICC and its pursuit of profits and power, however. It’s the corporate interests that say Taiwan must be “protected” for its microchips, the Middle East must be “protected” because of its oil, that Ukraine must be “protected” for its rich agricultural wealth (even as Russia’s gas pipelines to Germany are destroyed) and the riches to be had once the war is over and Ukraine is rebuilt. I know there’s nothing new about this; I’ve read my Smedley Butler.
When I first signed up for the U.S. military in 1981, and then went on active duty in 1985, I thought the U.S. did face a possible existential threat: the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and Communism. By 1991, that threat was largely gone. Even Cold War hawks like Jeanne Kirkpatrick wrote enthusiastically of the U.S. becoming a normal country in normal times. WTF happened? Why didn’t we?
Here we are, more than 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the U.S. government is selling Putin’s Russia as a serious threat again. When we see clear evidence that Putin has more than enough to handle with Ukraine, we’re told to look toward China as the Next Big Threat. Meanwhile, irrational, indefensible, blank checks of support given to Israel in its murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza threaten a wider war in the Middle East, a war some in our government seem to be spoiling to fight, knowing of course that they and theirs won’t be fighting it.
We Americans need to get a collective grip on ourselves and our own government. Stop feeding the Pentagon brass with money: it only encourages the bastards. Stop listening to the fear mongers. Turn off the mainstream media and ignore all the threat inflation. Look within yourself and control the fear and divisiveness they try to instill in you.
As Senator George McGovern, a war hero, said in 1972 when he won the Democratic nomination for the presidency: Come home, America. Close most of the military bases that America has overseas. Make deep cuts to the Pentagon war budget. Let other peoples settle their differences without our meddling, without our depleted uranium shells, without our cluster munitions, without our Hellfire missiles, without our mendacious rhetoric about a “rules-based order.”
Come home, America. We have a vast country with vast potential—and serious problems. Time to tackle them instead of seeking to dominate the world.
Or, as the Good Book says, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3 NIV) Yes, indeed. Let’s remove the planks from our own eyes, which should keep us very busy for decades, rather than globetrotting to remove the sawdust from the eyes of other peoples who’d prefer us to stay home and leave them alone.
Hellfire Missiles and Cluster Munitions under the White House Christmas Tree
As Christmas approaches, it doesn’t seem to be the season to be jolly, unless you’re a U.S. weapons manufacturer. It seems instead yet another season for war, as the president and Congress fight over how much deadly weaponry to send to Ukraine and Israel (and to Taiwan as well). Look under the White House Christmas tree and you’ll find Hellfire missiles for Israel, cluster munitions for Ukraine, and similar gifts offering joy to the world.
Last week, Ukraine’s president paid a visit to Washington where he posed with his most fervent supporters and gift-givers: U.S. arms manufacturers. Talk about a photo op!
Zelensky meets with high-ranking executives of the “merchants of death,” or Santa’s DC Beltway elves
Zelensky is no dummy. He knows that Congress and the President ultimately answer to the military-industrial complex. Look for a compromise bill in January that gives Ukraine most of the weapons that it’s requesting.
Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to send Israel the bombs, missiles, and shells it’s using to level Gaza. Last night, I was reading a book and came across this quote about war. Can you guess the person speaking?
“The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not [about the war]. When starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. [The] people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right. The greatest harshness.”
“The greatest harshness” might give the game away. It’s Adolf Hitler before the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. It’s from Ian Kershaw’s definitive two-volume biography of Hitler, v.2, p. 209.
A brutal, pitiless, war of the greatest harshness: that description doesn’t seem alien to our world today.
I’m a member of the Eisenhower Media Network, or EMN. We’re a small network of retired military types and former U.S. government officials who are openly critical of the military-industrial-congressional complex, America’s open-ended forever wars (the global war on terror; the cold war against Russia and China), and rising militarism within and across our society.
Recently, EMN issued a new letter in opposition to the Washington bipartisan consensus for war and more war. I’m proud to say I had a hand in writing it, as did Matthew Hoh and other members of EMN. Here’s what we had to say:
Military and Foreign Policy Experts Open Letter on U.S. Diplomatic Malpractice
Does America inspire the world by the power of its example or the example of its power? Far too often, and despite President Joe Biden’s words during his inaugural address, America’s overmilitarized power and diplomatic malpractice are its examples to the world.
We must change that. To make America truly essential and indispensable, we must not remain the world’s leading arms maker and weapons exporter. We must instead become the world’s greatest and most committed peacemaker and diplomat.
The problem is that America continues to make war, continues being “essential” only as the world’s leading merchant of death, and continues seeking dominance through military supremacy that ends, in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and earlier in Vietnam, in mass death and colossal folly.
In our first open letter last spring in The New York Times, we, the undersigned, argued that a thoroughly militarized U.S. foreign policy would generate ruinous and worsening consequences and increasingly limited options for the U.S. and the world. Recent events bear this out.
The results of U.S. diplomatic malpractice are cruelly displayed in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. Risks of further escalation and a world war are rising. Predictably, a militarized foreign policy characterized by rejecting or ignoring international laws and treaties and by disingenuous negotiations and talks has offered no solutions to volatile wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East while making war more likely in the Indo-Pacific.
Militarized solutions breed and feed more war. Earnest and deliberate diplomacy is the best hope to bring peace, stability and reconciliation to the world.
We chose Ike as our inspiration because he warned Americans of the dangers of the military-industrial complex and because he rejected a world dedicated to manufacturing weapons to commit mass murder.
War in Ukraine
The failure to pursue diplomacy in Eastern Europe, both before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has resulted in a costly and destructive stalemate for which there are two likely futures:
The collapse of the Ukrainian state due to a deteriorating economic and military situation hastened by corruption.Here, Ukraine’s fragility resembles that of previous houses of cards built by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam.
A harrowing and bloody stalemate in Ukraine where firepower, made more lethal by technological advances, rules a battlefield where neither side can achieve decisive tactical or operational gains. The pursuit of ways out of this stalemate likely entails horizontal and vertical escalation, neither of which offers solace to those seeking an end to death and destruction in Ukraine and the establishment of peace and stability.
Horizontal escalation sees the war extending further to civilian population centers and infrastructure and includes the possibility of other nations joining the conflict. Vertical escalation sees the expansion of arsenals to weapons of greater range, lethality, and consequence, including nuclear weapons. These two forms of escalation may be intertwined and reinforcing. So, as the war may expand horizontally to resemble The War of Cities between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, it may expand vertically as well with more powerful weapons being introduced by both sides. The use of nuclear weapons is increasingly conceivable under these conditions.
These two likely futures may intersect. For example, a Ukrainian collapse could see NATO forces, likely Polish and Romanian, marching into western and central Ukraine to counter a Russian push to fill a collapsing Ukrainian state. Such an event could lead to a war between NATO and Russia, a war that conceivably could go nuclear.
Hamas, Israel and the Middle East
The Russia-Ukraine War now rages concurrently with the war between Hamas and Israel. This war, too, is born of a U.S. refusal to foster diplomacy. Unlike the conventional war between Russia and Ukraine, we are witnessing an asymmetrical conflict more akin to the wars of insurgency many of us experienced in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Worse, the Hamas/Israel bloodletting in Gaza is characterized by an ethnic cleansing campaign that would be impossible without U.S. diplomatic, economic, media, military and political support. We are disgusted by and find repugnant the brazen and bipartisan support by the U.S. government for rampant violations of international law by Israel. Ethnic cleansing in Gaza, long planned by senior members of the Israeli government and powerful elements of Israel’s reactionary right wing, follows in the ghastly wake of Hamas atrocities against civilians on October 7.
Here, the U.S. government isn’t just passively witnessing war crimes; it is enabling them. With the frightening possibility of escalation to a regional or even a world war, the violence in Gaza has fed and feasted upon decades of deliberate diplomatic malpractice in America. Decades of putting Israel first, second, and last while ignoring the plight and pleas of Palestinians have made political settlements to the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank nearly impossible.
Whereas a month ago, we lived with the risk of nuclear war as an outcome of escalating conflict in Ukraine, we now face the elevated risk of a rightfully feared world war as a consequence of entangling alliances between nuclear-armed Moscow and Washington in the Middle East.
China and the Path Ahead
To this, we must add the dangers of war with China, something hyped by leading U.S. politicians; the still unpaid costs of the $8 trillion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; a militarized federal budget for which 60% of discretionary spending goes to war and all its wounds; and a hollowed American economy.
Decades of reckless U.S. war-making, both direct and via proxies, while coddling corrupt, ruthless, and unjust foreign governments has, not surprisingly, made the world more dangerous and less stable. Failure to invest in and maintain our country has weakened and corroded America’s infrastructure, institutions, and industries. A hypocritical flaunting of international law and an espousal of an ethereal rules-based order, coupled with an arrogant disregard for past U.S. crimes and blunders, have caused dozens of nations to flock to competitors – a movement away from America that will undoubtedly accelerate if we remain on our current militaristic path.
Moreover, decades of colossal military spending have witnessed few strategic gains for the U.S. Our military, often saluted as the world’s greatest by politicians, hasn’t won a major war since World War II. That same military annually faces significant recruiting shortfalls that cast considerable doubt on the integrity and staying power of the All-Volunteer Force. America’s legacy of failed wars is not redeemed by ongoing displays of vacuous military boosterism. Feel-good patriotism can’t suppress the bitterness many of us military veterans feel toward the past, nor does it calm the worries we have about our nation’s future.
Pope Francis has spoken of a “famine of peace” that exists in the world today. In this spirit, we call for immediate ceasefires, without conditions, in Gaza and Ukraine.
The surest way to prevent wars from exploding into uncontainable wildfires is to starve them of fuel. To think or speak that these conflagrations can be managed, adjusted as if by damper or thermostat, is a fool’s conceit or a liar’s word. We have been burned too many times in our professional lives to believe hot wars can be “won” by throwing more gasoline on them, whether rhetorically or in the form of cluster munitions, depleted uranium shells, and similar forms of “aid.”
A better path ahead is clear. Peace, not war, must be fostered. In embracing peace through diplomacy conducted in good faith, America would indeed exhibit the power of its example, becoming essential to a world that cries out for liberty and justice for all.
America Must Reignite Its Distrust of Large Standing Militaries
A recent article by Major General (ret.) Dennis Laich and Colonel (ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson notes a crisis in military recruitment in America. Here’s how their article begins:
The U.S. military’s all-volunteer force (AVF) model is an abject failure. Last year, the active Army fell 15,000 recruits short of its goal. This year, it was 10,000, and the Army Reserve fell 40% short of its goal. This year, the active Navy fell 7,000 short, and the Navy Reserve was 33% short. Finally, the active Air Force fell 3,000 recruits short, and the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard each fell 30% short of their goals.
There is no reason to believe these trends won’t continue, and even less reason to believe they will not get worse. In the past 10 years, the propensity to serve has fallen from 15% to 9%, and the portion of the recruiting-age population qualified to serve has dropped from 30 % to 23%. The number of children 5 and under in the United States is 12% smaller than the 15- to 25-year-old cohort, presenting a grim demographic reality.
Our national security crisis is part of a broader civic rot that plagues our democracy. Ultimately, the AVF’s failure could lead to war if the U.S. appears weak to a potential adversary.
Laich and Wilkerson would like to see a return of a lottery-based military draft for young men and women in America. I respect these men; we are part of the same organization, the Eisenhower Media Network. Yet I see this issue in a different light.
In essence, young Americans are voting with their feet by not joining the military in the numbers the AVF desires. This is not a bad thing. The U.S. military, if it was focused truly on national defense, would and should be considerably smaller. What enlarges our military (and its recruitment quotas) is imperial sprawl. Does the U.S. truly need to garrison roughly 800 military bases overseas? Does the U.S. Army truly need big brigades and battalions to fight conventional wars in Asia? Why does the Air Force need so many people? Why must the Navy have so many ships? Why do we need a growing Space Force?
A recruiting crisis even with Tom Cruise making two-hour commercials for the U.S. Navy? (Cruise attends the London premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick.” Karwai Tang | Wireimage | Getty Image)
I don’t see America appearing “weak” to potential adversaries. If anything, potential adversaries look at the U.S. as an overly strong and often unpredictable bully. Every country in the world knows the U.S. puts its military first, that the U.S. is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in war, that the U.S. never met a war it didn’t like, even though it hasn’t won a major war since World War II. Military weakness is not a problem America is ever likely to have. Even when the empire eventually collapses, the military will still be the last American institution that will be fully funded. (Indeed, huge sums of money spent on the military is contributing to that collapse.)
We don’t need a revival of the draft. We need a revival of sanity. We need a foreign policy in which we mind our own business. In which we don’t dispatch military forces to every hotspot in the world. In which we don’t pummel other countries into submission, as we attempted to do with countries like Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. (The death of Henry Kissinger the Pummeler at age 100 shows that only the good die young.)
A smaller military might mean fewer foreign entanglements for America as well as far less global destruction (think of Southeast Asia as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and so on). That wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Of course, the U.S. military’s answer to its alleged recruiting crisis is to hire an expensive advertising agency, giving it more than $450 million in taxpayer money to craft new ways of enticing young Americans to join the AVF. It just goes to show how much money the Pentagon has to throw (or throw away) at perceived problems.
If America faced a true and immediate threat (a clear and present danger, as the saying goes) to its national security, I don’t doubt young Americans would step up. But I see no foreign enemy seeking the military conquest of Topeka or Tampa or Tucson, nor do I see a pressing need for a super-sized military that still retains a Cold War mentality of full-spectrum dominance against the Reds (China and Russia remain the bogeymen for most in the U.S. military and Congress as well.)
As one major general once told me, less money for the U.S. military, along with fewer troops, might have the salutary effect of forcing the brass to think for once before invading another country or threatening yet another war. Wouldn’t that be something.
Throughout most of our history, America had a profound distrust of large standing militaries and the mayhem and mischief they so often cause. It’s time to reignite that distrust.
It’s depressingly true that no nations or peoples are immune from committing atrocities. History is filled with them. Atrocities, that is.
Did Hamas commit atrocities, most notably on 10/7? Yes. Has Israel committed atrocities in Gaza since those terror attacks? Yes.
Any sane human is outraged by atrocious behavior. What is particularly galling about Israel’s atrocities is that the U.S. government is enabling them while claiming Israel and the U.S. are the good guys—and that, however many innocents die due to U.S. and Israeli bombs, bullets, and missiles, it’s all the fault of Hamas.
Even serial killers sometimes know they are monsters. We fancy ourselves as innocents.
Why? Because America is a “good” country. Good thing we never promoted slavery and participated in massacres of Native Americans. Or the mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II. Or widespread misogyny. (Remember that women weren’t even allowed to vote in presidential elections until 1920.). Good thing we’ve always embraced Jews, never discriminating against them or turning desperate Jews away during the Holocaust.
Americans should know from our own history that “good” people can do horrific things because as a country we’ve done them ourselves.
Most Americans see Israel as an ally, a modern democracy akin to the U.S. That doesn’t mean Israel is immune from atrocious behavior; again, our own history shows that America is well capable of slaughtering millions in the name of “manifest destiny.” Back in the day, most Americans agreed we had our own “human animals,” our own savages, and that “the only good Indian is a dead one.” So, in the name of destiny, even of God, we killed the brave.
My dog-eared copy
The other day, as a distraction from current events, I started reading again from Schopenhauer’s essays and aphorisms. As a European living when slavery was very much alive in antebellum America, Schopenhauer had this to say about the “pitilessness” and “cruelty” in “slave-owning states of the North American Union”:
No one can read [accounts of slavery in antebellum America] without horror, and few will not be reduced to tears: for whatever the reader of it may have heard or imagined or dreamed of the unhappy condition of the slaves, indeed of human harshness and cruelty in general, will fade into insignificance when he reads how these devils in human form, these bigoted, church-going, Sabbath-keeping scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons among them, treat their innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into their devilish clutches. This book [on slavery in the USA] rouses one’s human feelings to such a degree of indignation that one could preach a crusade for the subjugation and punishment of the slave-owning states of North America. They are a blot on mankind.
Schopenhauer was pulling no punches, and rightly so. Yet there are still those in America who make the argument that slavery wasn’t all bad, that some slaves learned useful skills. Though I don’t hear such apologists volunteering to be slaves themselves.
If a curriculum in Florida can still put a happy face on the deep iniquity of slavery, which the U.S. eliminated (at least by law) in 1865, are we at all surprised that many can put a happy face on whatever Israel is doing in Gaza?
Ethnic cleansing? Genocide? Been there, done that. But that’s OK: “they” were savages. “We” the chosen ones had no choice. Or did we?
The intent of this “tribunal” is to draw attention to America’s overwhelming dominance of the world’s trade in deadly weaponry and the cost we all pay when “weapons ‘r’ us.” How did the U.S. come to embrace this deadly trade, to the point of boasting of our market dominance as a sign of America’s health and fitness? How did we come to equate arsenals with democracy? And isn’t it high time we denounced this trade in death, as the U.S. Senate did back in the 1930s with the Nye Commission?
Back in 2012, I wrote an article for TomDispatch, “Confessions of a Recovering Weapons Addict,” in which I admitted my own childish enthusiasm for weaponry and all things that go “bang”—and kill. It’s reposted today at TomDispatch and also here below.
Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college. It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds. But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.” Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.
If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.
Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death,” the title of a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade published to acclaim in the U.S. in 1934. Back then, most Americans saw themselves as war-avoiders rather than as war-profiteers. The evil war-profiteers were mainly European arms makers like Germany’s Krupp, France’s Schneider, or Britain’s Vickers.
Not that America didn’t have its own arms merchants. As the authors of Merchants of Death noted, early on our country demonstrated a “Yankee propensity for extracting novel death-dealing knickknacks from [our] peddler’s pack.” Amazingly, the Nye Committee in the U.S. Senate devoted 93 hearings from 1934 to 1936 to exposing America’s own “greedy munitions interests.” Even in those desperate depression days, a desire for profit and jobs was balanced by a strong sense of unease at this deadly trade, an unease reinforced by the horrors of and hecatombs of dead from the First World War.
We are uneasy no more. Today we take great pride (or at least have no shame) in being by far the world’s number one arms-exporting nation. A few statistics bear this out. From 2006 to 2010, the U.S. accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s arms exports, easily surpassing a resurgent Russia in the “Lords of War” race. Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary pressures, the U.S. increased its market share, accounting for a whopping 53% of the trade that year. Last year saw the U.S. on pace to deliver more than $46 billion in foreign arms sales. Who says America isn’t number one anymore?
For a shopping list of our arms trades, try searching the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database for arms exports and imports. It reveals that, in 2010, the U.S. exported “major conventional weapons” to 62 countries, from Afghanistan to Yemen, and weapons platforms ranging from F-15, F-16, and F-18 combat jets to M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Cobra attack helicopters (sent to our Pakistani comrades) to guided missiles in all flavors, colors, and sizes: AAMs, PGMs, SAMs, TOWs — a veritable alphabet soup of missile acronyms. Never mind their specific meaning: they’re all designed to blow things up; they’re all designed to kill.
Rarely debated in Congress or in U.S. media outlets is the wisdom or morality of these arms deals. During the quiet last days of December 2011, in separate announcements whose timing could not have been accidental, the Obama Administration expressed its intent to sell nearly $11 billion in arms to Iraq, including Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter-bombers, and nearly $30 billion in F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, part of a larger, $60 billion arms package for the Saudis. Few in Congress oppose such arms deals since defense contractors provide jobs in their districts — and ready donationsto Congressional campaigns.
Let’s pause to consider what such a weapons deal implies for Iraq. Firstly, Iraq only “needs” advanced tanks and fighter jets because we destroyed their previous generation of the same, whether in 1991 during Desert Shield/Storm or in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Secondly, Iraq “needs” such powerful conventional weaponry ostensibly to deter an invasion by Iran, yet the current government in Baghdad is closely aligned with Iran, courtesy of our invasion in 2003 and the botched occupation that followed. Thirdly, despite its “needs,” the Iraqi military is nowhere near ready to field and maintain such advanced weaponry, at least without sustained training and logistical support provided by the U.S. military.
As one U.S. Air Force officer who served as an advisor to the fledging Iraqi Air Force, or IqAF, recently worried:
“Will the IqAF be able to refuel its own aircraft? Can the Iraqi military offer adequate force protection and security for its bases? Can the IqAF provide airfield management services at its bases as they return to Iraqi control after eight years under US direction? Can the IqAF ensure simple power generation to keep facilities operating? Will the IqAF be able to develop and retain its airmen?… Only time will tell if we left [Iraq] too early; nevertheless, even without a renewed security agreement, the USAF can continue to stand alongside the IqAF.”
Put bluntly: We doubt the Iraqis are ready to field and fly American-built F-16s, but we’re going to sell them to them anyway. And if past history is a guide, if the Iraqis ever turn these planes against us, we’ll blow them up or shoot them down — and then (hopefully) sell them some more.
Our Best Arms Customer
Let’s face it: the weapons we sell to others pale in comparison to the weapons we sell to ourselves. In the market for deadly weapons, we are our own best customer. Americans have a love affair with them, the more high-tech and expensive, the better. I should know. After all, I’m a recovering weapons addict.
Well into my teen years, I was fascinated by military hardware. I built models of what were then the latest U.S. warplanes: the A-10, the F-4, the F-14, -15, and -16, the B-1, and many others. I read Aviation Week and Space Technology at my local library to keep track of the newest developments in military technology. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I went on to major in mechanical engineering in college and entered the Air Force as a developmental engineer.
Enamored as I was by roaring afterburners and sleek weaponry, I also began to read books like James Fallows’sNational Defense (1981) among other early critiques of the Carter and Reagan defense buildup, as well as the slyly subversive and always insightful Augustine’s Laws (1986) by Norman Augustine, later the CEO of Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. That and my own experience in the Air Force alerted me to the billions of dollars we were devoting to high-tech weaponry with ever-ballooning price tags but questionable utility.
Perhaps the best example of the persistence of this phenomenon is the F-35 Lightning II. Produced by Lockheed Martin, the F-35 was intended to be an “affordable” fighter-bomber (at roughly $50 million per copy), a perfect complement to the much more expensive F-22 “air superiority” Raptor. But the usual delays, cost overruns, technical glitches, and changes in requirements have driven the price tag of the F-35 up to $160 million per plane, assuming the U.S. military persists in its plans to buy 2,400 of them. (If the Pentagon decides to buy fewer, the cost-per-plane will soar into the F-22 range.) By recent estimates the F-35 will now cost U.S. taxpayers (you and me, that is) at least $382 billion for its development and production run. Such a sum for a single weapons system is vast enough to be hard to fathom. It would, for instance, easily fund all federal government spending on education for the next five years.
The escalating cost of the F-35 recalls the most famous of Norman Augustine’s irreverent laws: “In the year 2054,” he wrote back in the early 1980s, “the entire defense budget will [suffice to] purchase just one aircraft.” But the deeper question is whether our military even needs the F-35, a question that’s rarely asked and never seriously entertained, at least by Congress, whose philosophy on weaponry is much like King Lear’s: “O, reason not the need.”
But let’s reason the need in purely military terms. These days, the Air Force is turning increasingly to unmanned drones. Meanwhile, plenty of perfectly good and serviceable “platforms” remain for attack and close air support missions, from F-16s and F-18s in the Air Force and Navy to Apache helicopters in the Army. And while many of our existing combat jets may be nearing the limits of airframe integrity, there’s nothing stopping the U.S. military from producing updated versions of the same. Heck, this is precisely what we’re hawking to the Saudis — updated versions of the F-15, developed in the 1970s.
Because of sheer cost, it’s likely we’ll buy fewer F-35s than our military wants but many more than we actually need. We’ll do so because Weapons ‘R’ Us. Because building ultra-expensive combat jets is one of the few high-tech industries we haven’t exported (due to national security and secrecy concerns), and thus one of the few industries in the U.S. that still supports high-paying manufacturing jobs with decent employee benefits. And who can argue with that?
The Ultimate Cost of Our Merchandise of Death
Clearly, the U.S. has grabbed the brass ring of the global arms trade. When it comes to investing in militaries and weaponry, no country can match us. We are supreme. And despite talk of modest cuts to the Pentagon budget over the next decade, it will, according to President Obama, continue to grow, which means that in weapons terms the future remains bright. After all, Pentagon spending on research and development stands at $81.4 billion, accounting for an astonishing 55% of all federal spending on R&D and leaving plenty of opportunity to develop our next generation of wonder weapons.
But at what cost to ourselves and the rest of the world? We’ve become the suppliers of weaponry to the planet’s hotspots. And those weapons deliveries (and the training and support missions that go with them) tend to make those spots hotter still — as in hot lead.
As a country, we seem to have a teenager’s fascination with military hardware, an addiction that’s driving us to bust our own national budgetary allowance. At the same time, we sell weapons the way teenage punks sell fireworks to younger kids: for profit and with little regard for how they might be used.
Sixty years ago, it was said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. In 1955, as Bob Seger sang, we were young and strong and makin’ Thunderbirds. But today we’re playing a new tune with new lyrics: what’s good for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or [insert major-defense-contractor-of-your-choice here] is good for America.
Using Terror Attacks as an Excuse to Kill Indiscriminately
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America in 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew exactly what to do: “go massive.” Al Qaeda’s “shock and awe” attacks were an opportunity for the Bush/Cheney administration not only to strike against “terror” but against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, possibly even Iran, even though those countries had no role in 9/11. Here’s how Rumsfeld put it:
“Hard to get good case [against Iraq]. Need to move swiftly. Near term target needs – go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.”
Going “massive” had another benefit: it distracted Americans from the colossal failure of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld to keep America safe, to anticipate and prevent the Al Qaeda attacks. Americans rallied around the flag and asked few questions as Congress gave the president a blank check to wage a “global war on terror.”
Something similar is happening in Israel today. The Hamas terror attacks are giving Bibi Netanyahu and the hard right in Israel an opportunity to “go massive,” to “sweep it all up, things related and not.” This has the added virtue of distracting Israelis from the colossal failure of Netanyahu in anticipating and preventing the Hamas attacks. Like their American counterparts, Israelis are tending to rally around the flag as their government is given a blank check (supported by the USA) to wage a war on terror in Gaza.
Of course, a war on terror is a war of terror, which is what we’re witnessing in Gaza. Massive Israeli bombing. Deaths that will soon exceed ten thousand. Widespread hunger, thirst, and suffering. Massive displacement of Palestinians from their homes. All justified because Israel was attacked, and not just attacked but embarrassed, as America was embarrassed on 9/11.
Broadly speaking, the USA and Israel share a conceit of being God’s chosen people and also of having the world’s finest and best military forces. These conceits were challenged respectively by the success of the Al Qaeda and Hamas terror attacks. Embarrassment coupled with anger and revenge leads to going “massive,” irrespective of wisdom or legality (or morality). Going “massive” is also a great CYA exercise, as in covering your ass.
Now is the time, these failed leaders decide, to punish “evildoers,” innocent people be damned. What matters is violence, action, vengeance, settling scores, irrespective of human rights and the so-called rules-based international order. It’s time to kill.
If history doesn’t quite repeat itself, it surely does echo as Israel, much like the USA after 9/11, goes “massive” and kills innocents while claiming it’s all in the cause of self-defense and justice.
I remember seeing the first Rambo flick (“First Blood”) in a movie theater in 1982 when I was nineteen and rooting for Sly Stallone’s character against the police and national guardsmen who are sent to kill him. The police think it’ll be easy to subdue one man, but we the viewers know better. As Colonel Trautman, Rambo’s former commanding officer, says in the movie: In war, it’s wise to have “a good supply of body bags” on hand, a telling reminder about the harsh reality of combat.
In “First Blood,” military clothing and the flag offer no protection to John Rambo, who’s treated as a lowlife by the local sheriff
Yet, there’s a deeper meaning to “First Blood” captured near the end of the movie, when John Rambo, having improbably acted as a one-man invincible army (a true “Army of One”), bitterly reflects on his own post-Vietnam experiences. Rambo, breaking down, admits he can’t adapt to regular civilian life. A loner, he feels himself to be a loser, even though he was decorated for heroism in war with the Medal of Honor. Wounded and haunted by war, his soul seared by violence, he surrenders to Colonel Trautman.
The original Rambo movie wasn’t necessarily deep, but it did remind us that soldiers like Rambo carried hidden wounds of war; it also highlighted a societal suspicion, whether just or unjust, of military veterans. The sheriff in “First Blood” has no respect for Rambo as a military “hero”; he sees him as a disreputable and dangerous outsider and just wants to be rid of him, one way or another.
Subsequent Rambo films would portray him as a virtually unstoppable killing machine. In the first sequel, Rambo is sent back to Vietnam to rescue American POWs betrayed and abandoned by the U.S. government. Perhaps the most famous line from that movie is when Rambo asks Colonel Trautman whether, in returning to Vietnam, the government will finally allow U.S. soldiers to win this time. It was a concise statement of the stab-in-the-back myth, the idea the U.S. military would have won the war in Vietnam if only it hadn’t been betrayed by a duplicitous and spineless government.
“Do we get to win this time?” That’s a question that should haunt all Americans, since we haven’t won a war since 1945. But who is to blame for not winning? And have the wars America has fought since World War II really been worth fighting to begin with?
Update (9/2923): A lot has changed in forty years, as a couple of my friends pointed out in response to this article. We could imagine at least two scenarios for a revised Rambo made in 2023:
Version 1: In 2023, the sheriff wouldn’t have to call in the National Guard. All his deputies would gear up with assault rifles, sniper rifles, body armor, and MRAPs donated by the Pentagon as excess gear and the local SWAT team would be mobilized and deployed to find and kill Rambo.
Version 2: Perhaps the most likely one: Rambo would be wearing a “blue lives matter” flag, the sheriff’s patrol car would be festooned with “support our troops” stickers, and they’d call a town meeting to give Rambo the keys to the town as a Medal of Honor winner.
A progressive Pentagon? Talk about an oxymoron! The Pentagon continues to grow and surge with ever larger budgets, ever more expansive missions (for example, a Space Force to dominate the heavens and yet more bases in the Pacific to encircle China), and ever greater ambitions to dominate everywhere, including if necessary through global thermonuclear warfare. No wonder it’s so hard, to the point of absurdity, to imagine a Pentagon that would humbly and faithfully serve only the interests of “national defense.”
Yet, as a thought experiment, why not imagine it? What would a progressive Pentagon look like? I’m not talking about a “woke” Pentagon that touts and celebrates its “diversity,” including its belated acceptance of LGBTQ+ members. I’m glad the Pentagon is arguably more diverse and tolerant now than when I served in the Air Force beginning in the early 1980s. Yet, as a popular meme has it, painting “Black Lives Matter” and rainbow flags on B-52 bombers doesn’t make the bombs dropped any less destructive. To be specific: Was it really a progressive milestone that the combat aircraft in last year’s Super Bowl flyover were operated and maintained entirely by female crews? Put differently, are the bullets and bombs of trans Black G.I. Jane somehow more tolerant and less deadly than cis White G.I. Joe’s?
A progressive military shouldn’t stop with “more Black faces in high places,” more female generals “leaning in” around conference tables, and similar so-called triumphs for diversity. Consider Lloyd Austin, the first Black secretary of defense, whose views and actions have been little different from those of former Defense Secretaries James Mattis or Donald Rumsfeld, and whose background as a retired Army four-star general and well-paid former board member of Raytheon makes him the very stereotype of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex.
No, all-female air crews aren’t nearly enough. Indeed, they are, I’d argue, a form of “woke” camouflage for a predatory military leopard that refuses to change its spots — or curb its appetite.
A truly progressive military should start with the fundamentals. All service members swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, the system of laws that defines and enshrines our vital rights and freedoms (speech, a free press, the right to assemble, privacy, and so on); in short, the right to live untrammeled by domineering forces. Yet, almost by definition, that right is threatened, if not violated, by a massive military-industrial-congressional complex that penetrates nearly every domain of American life. That complex, after all, is anti-democratic, shrouded in secrecy, and jealous of its power, as well as fundamentally and profoundly anti-progressive. Indeed, it’s fundamentally and profoundly anti-truth.
Consider these hard facts. All too many Americans didn’t know how badly they’d been lied to about the Vietnam War until the Pentagon Papers emerged near the end of that disastrous conflict. All too many Americans didn’t know how badly they’d been lied to about the Afghan War until the Afghan War Papers emerged near the end of that disastrous conflict. All too many Americans didn’t know how badly they’d been lied to about the Iraq War until the myth of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (which had been part of the bogus rationale for invading that country) crumbled; nor did they know how badly they continued to be lied to until the myth of the American “surge” there collapsed when the Islamic State forces triumphed all too easily over an American-built Iraqi security structure that collapsed like a rotten house of cards. Perhaps some of them didn’t truly know until a loudmouthed Republican candidate for president, Donald J. Trump, dared to say that the Iraq War had been an unmitigated disaster, or, in Trump-speak, “a big fat mistake.” That burst of honesty helped him win the presidency in 2016. (His rival in that election, Hillary Clinton, remained essentially the chief spokesperson for the Pentagon.)
Yet despite the horrendous failures (and war crimes) of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other U.S. military ventures of this century, no one is ever punished! Sure, you could point to Donald Rumsfeld being cashiered as secretary of defense amid the rubble of “the Global War on Terror,” a belated admission by the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that the Iraq War was going poorly indeed. Still, all those cracks were later papered over with the myth of “the surge” and when Rumsfeld died in 2021, he would receive remarkably glowing tributes in obituaries, as well as bipartisan salutes for his “service” to America rather than condemnation for his numerous crimes and blunders.
The Pentagon’s rampant culture of dishonesty, a cancer that above all infects the brass, led one serving Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, to write a now-renowned (or, if you’re part of the Pentagon, infamous) paper for Armed Forces Journal in 2007 on America’s failure of generalship. As he memorably noted, a U.S. Army private suffered far more dearly for losing a rifle than America’s generals did for losing a war. The Army’s response was — no surprise — to change nothing, leading Yingling to retire early.
13 Tasks for a Progressive Pentagon
Venturing into the Pentagon’s innermost corridors of power, one might be excused for recalling Obi-Wan Kenobi’s warning to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars as they approached the spaceport of Mos Eisley: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”
How does one possibly reform such a top-heavy, self-serving, and dishonest institution along progressive lines? A moment in Greek mythology comes to mind: Hercules and the Augean Stables. Let me nevertheless press ahead with this all too herculean task.
Dreaming is free, as Blondie once sang, so why not dream a little dream with me? Here’s a list — a baker’s dozen, in fact — of ways a progressive Pentagon would both exist and act far differently from America’s current regressive (and very, very aggressive) version of the same.
A progressive Pentagon would:
* Take the lead in working to eliminate all nuclear weapons everywhere — that is, total nuclear disarmament — rather than investing vast sums in the coming decades in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It would disavow using nuclear weapons first (“no first use”) in any conflict. It would cancel all plans to “modernize” the current nuclear triad of missiles, planes, and submarines at an estimated cost of $2 trillion. It would also immediately eliminate obsolete and vulnerable land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs, and cancel as redundant the Air Force’s new B-21 stealth bomber.
* Oppose sending any more of those devastating cluster munitions or depleted uranium tank shells to Ukraine; indeed, it would take the lead in eliminating such awful weaponry.
* Stop inflating threats and end all talk of a “new Cold War” with China and Russia.
* Celebrate the insights of Generals Smedley Butler and Dwight D. Eisenhower that war is fundamentally a racket (Butler) and that the military-industrial-congressional complex poses the severest of threats to freedom and democracy in America (President Eisenhower).
* Reject the language of militarism, including describing its troops as “warriors” and “warfighters,” as profoundly undemocratic and un-American.
* Recognize the costs of wars already fought to those troops and ensure full funding of the Department of Veterans Affairs, including for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and moral injuries, among the other wounds of war.
* End the war on terror, launched just after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and urge Congress to repeal the open-ended war authorization it passed then with but a single dissenting vote, because war itself is terror.
* Refuse to go to war unless there’s a formal congressional declaration of the same as the Constitution demands. If the United States had followed that rule, the last war we would have fought was World War II.
* Reject its present culture of secrecy as profoundly counterproductive to success not just in war but in general. That doesn’t mean, of course, sharing specific battle plans (of which there should be far fewer) or detailed information about weaponry with potential enemies. It does mean a willingness to speak truth to the American people, whose support would be needed to prosecute any genuinely necessary war, assuming there even is such a thing.
* Embrace honor and integrity including a willingness of the U.S. military to fall on its own sword — that is, take genuine responsibility for both its deeds and its misdeeds.
* Recognize that one cannot serve both a republic and an empire, that a choice must be made, and that a Pentagon of the present kind in a genuine republic would voluntarily downsize itself, while largely dismantling its imperial infrastructure of perhaps 800 overseas bases.
* Lead the way in demilitarizing space, including eliminating America’s fledgling Space Force and its “guardians.”
* Clearly acknowledge that large, standing militaries and constant wars, as well as preparations for more of the same, are corrosive to democracy, liberty, and the Constitution, as America’s founders recognized.
Imagine that! A progressive Pentagon of peace rather than a regressive one of power and unending warfare. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
What was $550 billion down the crapper in 2014 is approaching $900 billion a decade later
Three Maxims for a Progressive Pentagon
Careful readers won’t be surprised to learn that I was an early Star Wars fan. Naturally, I rooted for the underdog rebels against the evil empire and its henchman, Darth Vader. I saw myself as a potential Jedi Knight, wielding an elegant weapon, a protector of freedom and the republic. (In my defense, I was 14 years old in 1977 when I first saw Star Wars.)
Then, in 1980, I watched The Empire Strikes Back, just as I was pursuing an Air Force ROTC scholarship for college. I heard Yoda, the Jedi master, declare to Luke that “wars not make one great.” That pearl of wisdom floored me then and continues to inform my life.
I’ve read my share of “heavy” philosophy and have the academic credentials to pose as a “serious” enough thinker. Yet I come back to the homespun wisdom captured in certain movies and TV shows that still carries weight for me. Let me share bits of such wisdom with you.
The first is from Kung Fu, the 1970s TV series starring David Carradine. As a young Kwai Chang Caine meets Master Po for the first time, he is astonished to discover that his master is blind. He takes pity on Po, suggesting that his life must be one of endless darkness. Master Po instantly corrects him. “Fear,” he says, “is the only darkness.”
The second is from The Outlaw Josey Wales, a classic western starring Clint Eastwood, also from the 1970s. Josey Wales is a renegade, a wanted man who leaves dead bodies in his wake wherever he travels. Yet he’s also tired of killing, a man in search of peace. In a moving scene, he negotiates just such a peace with Ten Bears, a Comanche chief, saying that there must be a way for people to live together without butchering one another, without constant bloodletting, without race-based hatreds.
A progressive Pentagon would recognize the deep truth of those three maxims: that wars not make one great, that fear is the only darkness, and that there’s a better way for people to live together than constantly butchering one another.
As a Catholic youth, I was taught that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. Today, I’d put that differently. The beginning of wisdom is the quest to master one’s fear, the urge to turn away from fear-driven hatreds, to find better, more pacific, more loving ways.
At the core of the original Star Wars trilogy, George Lucas implanted a message that anger, fear, aggression, and violence — the “dark side” of the Force, as he put it — should be resisted. As Darth Vader confesses to Luke, the power of that dark side is nearly irresistible. Fear and related negative emotions, eerily seductive as they are, can consume our minds (and, as it turns out, given the Pentagon budget, our taxpayer dollars as well).
Too many Americans are prey to the dark side, allowing fear to be the mind-killer. It’s not entirely our fault. From the end of World War II until this very moment, we’ve been told time and again to fear — and fear some more. Fear the communists in Korea and Vietnam. Fear Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Fear Russia and its Hitleresque leader, Vladimir Putin. Fear China and its growing authoritarian power. Closer to home, we’re even now regularly told to fear our neighbors, MAGA or “woke,” depending on your “blue” or “red” team allegiance.
In truth, though, fear is the true darkness. You shouldn’t have to be a Jedi master to know that wars not make one great, that the darkness of fear (and arming ourselves against it) is a path to hell, and that people could indeed live together without eternally slaughtering one another. Those, then, would be my three maxims for a newly progressive Pentagon.
To echo the words of Steven Tyler of Aerosmith: Dream until your dreams come true.
Bracing Views 