Tomgram: Engelhardt, Roads to Nowhere, Ghost Soldiers, and a $43 Million Gas
Station in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on November 12, 2015, Printed on November 12, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176068/
It's a $cam!
The American Way of War in the Twenty-First Century
By Tom Engelhardt
Let's begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil
money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad
on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003.
Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at
least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a
mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that's just what happened as the starting
gun went off.
It's never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated
Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31
billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in
the American "reconstruction" of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for
instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed "as
crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's
security." It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health
hazard. In 2006, "feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student
barracks" and that was only the beginning of its problems.
When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that
built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already
paid. A year later, a New York Times reporter visited and found that "the
ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are
crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets
are filthy and nonfunctioning." This seems to have been par for the course.
Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million
prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.
And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq.
Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be
crucial to "standing up" a new security force in that country. Despite the
money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never
completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out.
And the police were hardly alone. Take the $3.4 million unfinished
teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company
was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which
it walked away, money in hand.
And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere
paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful
to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million
bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and
Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region's booming drug trade in opium
and heroin). In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the
southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the "highway to nowhere," was
so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter.
And don't think that this was an aberration. The U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International
Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program
meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it
could point to "less than 100 miles of gravel road completed." Each mile of
road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected
$290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went
directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the
road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation
projects.
In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing. In 2011,
McClatchy News reported that "U.S. government funding for at least 15
large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly
$3 billion despite the government's questions about their effectiveness or
cost."
The Gas Station to Nowhere
So much construction and reconstruction -- and so many failures. There was
the chicken-processing plant built in Iraq for $2.58 million that, except in
a few Potemkin-Village-like moments, never plucked a chicken and sent it to
market. There was the sparkling new, 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art,
$25 million headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province,
Afghanistan, that doubled in cost as it was being built and that three
generals tried to stop. They were overruled because Congress had already
allotted the money for it, so why not spend it, even though it would never
be used? And don't forget the $20 million that went into constructing roads
and utilities for the base that was to hold it, or the $8.4 billion that
went into Afghan opium-poppy-suppression and anti-drug programs and resulted
in... bumper poppy crops and record opium yields, or the aid funds that
somehow made their way directly into the hands of the Taliban (reputedly its
second-largest funding source after those poppies).
There were the billions of dollars in aid that no one could account for, and
a significant percentage of the 465,000 small arms (rifles, machine guns,
grenade launchers, and the like) that the U.S. shipped to Afghanistan and
simply lost track of. Most recently, there was the Task Force for Business
Stability Operations, an $800-million Pentagon project to help jump-start
the Afghan economy. It was shut down only six months ago and yet, in
response to requests from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction, the Pentagon swears that there are "no Defense Department
personnel who can answer questions about" what the task force did with its
money. As ProPublica's Megan McCloskey writes, "The Pentagon's claims are
particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of
the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by
the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating
Terrorism."
Still, from that pile of unaccountable taxpayer dollars, one nearly $43
million chunk did prove traceable to a single project: the building of a
compressed natural gas station. (The cost of constructing a similar gas
station in neighboring Pakistan: $300,000.) Located in an area that seems
to have had no infrastructure for delivering natural gas and no cars
converted for the use of such fuel, it represented the only example on
record in those years of a gas station to nowhere.
All of this just scratches the surface when it comes to the piles of money
that were poured into an increasingly privatized version of the American way
of war and, in the form of overcharges and abuses of every sort, often
simply disappeared into the pockets of the warrior corporations that entered
America's war zones. In a sense, a surprising amount of the money that the
Pentagon and U.S. civilian agencies "invested" in Iraq and Afghanistan never
left the United States, since it went directly into the coffers of those
companies.
Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the
domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the
American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's
dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated
Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country
was a shambles. In Iraq, a mere $60 billion was squandered on the failed
rebuilding of the country. Keep in mind that none of this takes into
account the staggering billions spent by the Pentagon in both countries to
build strings of bases, ranging in size from American towns (with all the
amenities of home) to tiny outposts. There would be 505 of them in Iraq and
at least 550 in Afghanistan. Most were, in the end, abandoned, dismantled,
or sometimes simply looted. And don't forget the vast quantities of fuel
imported into Afghanistan to run the U.S. military machine in those years,
some of which was siphoned off by American soldiers, to the tune of at least
$15 million, and sold to local Afghans on the sly.
In other words, in the post-9/11 years, "reconstruction" and "war" have
really been euphemisms for what, in other countries, we would recognize as a
massive system of corruption.
And let's not forget another kind of "reconstruction" then underway. In both
countries, the U.S. was creating enormous militaries and police forces
essentially from scratch to the tune of at least $25 billion in Iraq and $65
billion in Afghanistan. What's striking about both of these security
forces, once constructed, is how similar they turned out to be to those
police academies, the unfinished schools, and that natural gas station. It
can't be purely coincidental that both of the forces Americans proudly
"stood up" have turned out to be the definition of corrupt: that is, they
were filled not just with genuine recruits but with serried ranks of "ghost
personnel."
In June 2014, after whole divisions of the Iraqi army collapsed and fled
before modest numbers of Islamic State militants, abandoning much of their
weaponry and equipment, it became clear that they had been significantly
smaller in reality than on paper. And no wonder, as that army had enlisted
50,000 "ghost soldiers" (who existed only on paper and whose salaries were
lining the pockets of commanders and others). In Afghanistan, the U.S. is
still evidently helping to pay for similarly stunning numbers of phantom
personnel, though no specific figures are available. (In 2009, an estimated
more than 25% of the police force consisted of such ghosts.) As John Sopko,
the U.S. inspector general for Afghanistan, warned last June: "We are paying
a lot of money for ghosts in Afghanistan... whether they are ghost teachers,
ghost doctors or ghost policeman or ghost soldiers."
And lest you imagine that the U.S. military has learned its lesson, rest
assured that it's still quite capable of producing nonexistent proxy forces.
Take the Pentagon-CIA program to train thousands of carefully vetted
"moderate" Syrian rebels, equip them, arm them, and put them in the field to
fight the Islamic State. Congress ponied up $500 million for it, $384
million of which was spent before that project was shut down as an abject
failure. By then, less than 200 American-backed rebels had been trained and
even less put into the field in Syria -- and they were almost instantly
kidnapped or killed, or they simply handed over their equipment to the
al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front. At one point, according to the
congressional testimony of the top American commander in the Middle East,
only four or five American-produced rebels were left "in the field." The
cost-per-rebel sent into Syria, by the way, is now estimated at
approximately $2 million.
A final footnote: the general who oversaw this program is, according to the
New York Times, still a "rising star" in the Pentagon and in line for a
promotion.
Profli-gate
You've just revisited the privatized, twenty-first-century version of the
American way of war, which proved to be a smorgasbord of scandal,
mismanagement, and corruption as far as the eye could see. In the tradition
of Watergate, perhaps the whole system could be dubbed Profli-gate, since
American war making across the Greater Middle East has represented perhaps
the most profligate and least effective use of funds in the history of
modern warfare. In fact, here's a word not usually associated with the U.S.
military: the war system of this era seems to function remarkably like a
monumental scam, a swindle, a fraud.
The evidence is in: the U.S. military can win battles, but not a war, not
even against minimally armed minority insurgencies; it can "stand up"
foreign militaries, but only if they are filled with phantom feet and if the
forces themselves are as hollow as tombs; it can pour funds into the
reconstruction of countries, a process guaranteed to leave them more
prostrate than before; it can bomb, missile, and drone-kill significant
numbers of terrorists and other enemies, even as their terror outfits and
insurgent movements continue to grow stronger under the shadow of American
air power. Fourteen years and five failed states later in the Greater
Middle East, all of that seems irrefutable.
And here's something else irrefutable: amid the defeats, corruption, and
disappointments, there lurks a kind of success. After all, every disaster
in which the U.S. military takes part only brings more bounty to the
Pentagon. Domestically, every failure results in calls for yet more
military interventions around the world. As a result, the military is so
much bigger and better funded than it was on September 10, 2001. The
commanders who led our forces into such failures have repeatedly been
rewarded and much of the top brass, civilian and military, though they
should have retired in shame, have taken ever more golden parachutes into
the lucrative worlds of defense contractors, lobbyists, and consultancies.
All of this couldn't be more obvious, though it's seldom said. In short,
there turns out to be much good fortune in the disaster business, a fact
which gives the whole process the look of a classic swindle in which the
patsies lose their shirts but the scam artists make out like bandits.
Add in one more thing: these days, the only part of the state held in great
esteem by conservatives and the present batch of Republican presidential
candidates is the U.S. military. All of them, with the exception of Rand
Paul, swear that on entering the Oval Office they will let that military
loose, sending in more troops, or special ops forces, or air power, and
funding the various services even more lavishly; all of this despite
overwhelming evidence that the U.S. military is incapable of spending a
dollar responsibly or effectively monitoring what it's done with the
taxpayer funds in its possession. (If you don't believe me, forget
everything in this piece and just check out the finances of the most
expensive weapons system in history, the F-35 Lightning II, which should
really be redubbed the F-35 Overrun for its madly spiraling costs.)
But no matter. If a system works (particularly for those in it), why change
it? And by the way, in case you're looking for a genuine steal, I have a
fabulous gas station in Afghanistan to sell you...
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Engelhardt
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176068
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Roads to Nowhere, Ghost Soldiers, and a $43 Million Gas
Station in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on November 12, 2015, Printed on November 12, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176068/
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: A small reminder, for those of you in a
generous mood, that signed, personalized copies of Greg Grandin's superb
book, Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial
Statesman, are still available for a donation of $100 (or more), much
appreciated funds that truly do help keep TomDispatch rolling along. My
idiosyncratic and personal history of the Cold War, The End of Victory
Culture, and my recent book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World, are similarly
available, as are books by Nick Turse and other TD authors. Check out our
donation page for the details. And truly -- thanks in advance! Tom]
It's a $cam!
The American Way of War in the Twenty-First Century
By Tom Engelhardt
Let's begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil
money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad
on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003.
Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at
least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a
mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that's just what happened as the starting
gun went off.
It's never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated
Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31
billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in
the American "reconstruction" of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for
instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed "as
crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's
security." It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health
hazard. In 2006, "feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student
barracks" and that was only the beginning of its problems.
When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that
built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already
paid. A year later, a New York Times reporter visited and found that "the
ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are
crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets
are filthy and nonfunctioning." This seems to have been par for the course.
Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million
prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.
And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq. Consider,
for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to
"standing up" a new security force in that country. Despite the money poured
into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or
never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out. And the police
were hardly alone. Take the $3.4 million unfinished teacher-training center
in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build
(using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in
hand.
And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere
paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful
to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million
bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and
Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region's booming drug trade in opium
and heroin). In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the
southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the "highway to nowhere," was
so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter.
And don't think that this was an aberration. The U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International
Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program
meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it
could point to "less than 100 miles of gravel road completed." Each mile of
road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected
$290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went
directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the
road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation
projects.
In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing. In 2011,
McClatchy News reported that "U.S. government funding for at least 15
large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly
$3 billion despite the government's questions about their effectiveness or
cost."
The Gas Station to Nowhere
So much construction and reconstruction -- and so many failures. There was
the chicken-processing plant built in Iraq for $2.58 million that, except in
a few Potemkin-Village-like moments, never plucked a chicken and sent it to
market. There was the sparkling new, 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art,
$25 million headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province,
Afghanistan, that doubled in cost as it was being built and that three
generals tried to stop. They were overruled because Congress had already
allotted the money for it, so why not spend it, even though it would never
be used? And don't forget the $20 million that went into constructing roads
and utilities for the base that was to hold it, or the $8.4 billion that
went into Afghan opium-poppy-suppression and anti-drug programs and resulted
in... bumper poppy crops and record opium yields, or the aid funds that
somehow made their way directly into the hands of the Taliban (reputedly its
second-largest funding source after those poppies).
There were the billions of dollars in aid that no one could account for, and
a significant percentage of the 465,000 small arms (rifles, machine guns,
grenade launchers, and the like) that the U.S. shipped to Afghanistan and
simply lost track of. Most recently, there was the Task Force for Business
Stability Operations, an $800-million Pentagon project to help jump-start
the Afghan economy. It was shut down only six months ago and yet, in
response to requests from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction, the Pentagon swears that there are "no Defense Department
personnel who can answer questions about" what the task force did with its
money. As ProPublica's Megan McCloskey writes, "The Pentagon's claims are
particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of
the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by
the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating
Terrorism."
Still, from that pile of unaccountable taxpayer dollars, one nearly $43
million chunk did prove traceable to a single project: the building of a
compressed natural gas station. (The cost of constructing a similar gas
station in neighboring Pakistan: $300,000.) Located in an area that seems to
have had no infrastructure for delivering natural gas and no cars converted
for the use of such fuel, it represented the only example on record in those
years of a gas station to nowhere.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20All of this
just scratches the surface when it comes to the piles of money that were
poured into an increasingly privatized version of the American way of war
and, in the form of overcharges and abuses of every sort, often simply
disappeared into the pockets of the warrior corporations that entered
America's war zones. In a sense, a surprising amount of the money that the
Pentagon and U.S. civilian agencies "invested" in Iraq and Afghanistan never
left the United States, since it went directly into the coffers of those
companies.
Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the
domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the American
reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars,
larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western
Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a
shambles. In Iraq, a mere $60 billion was squandered on the failed
rebuilding of the country. Keep in mind that none of this takes into account
the staggering billions spent by the Pentagon in both countries to build
strings of bases, ranging in size from American towns (with all the
amenities of home) to tiny outposts. There would be 505 of them in Iraq and
at least 550 in Afghanistan. Most were, in the end, abandoned, dismantled,
or sometimes simply looted. And don't forget the vast quantities of fuel
imported into Afghanistan to run the U.S. military machine in those years,
some of which was siphoned off by American soldiers, to the tune of at least
$15 million, and sold to local Afghans on the sly.
In other words, in the post-9/11 years, "reconstruction" and "war" have
really been euphemisms for what, in other countries, we would recognize as a
massive system of corruption.
And let's not forget another kind of "reconstruction" then underway. In both
countries, the U.S. was creating enormous militaries and police forces
essentially from scratch to the tune of at least $25 billion in Iraq and $65
billion in Afghanistan. What's striking about both of these security forces,
once constructed, is how similar they turned out to be to those police
academies, the unfinished schools, and that natural gas station. It can't be
purely coincidental that both of the forces Americans proudly "stood up"
have turned out to be the definition of corrupt: that is, they were filled
not just with genuine recruits but with serried ranks of "ghost personnel."
In June 2014, after whole divisions of the Iraqi army collapsed and fled
before modest numbers of Islamic State militants, abandoning much of their
weaponry and equipment, it became clear that they had been significantly
smaller in reality than on paper. And no wonder, as that army had enlisted
50,000 "ghost soldiers" (who existed only on paper and whose salaries were
lining the pockets of commanders and others). In Afghanistan, the U.S. is
still evidently helping to pay for similarly stunning numbers of phantom
personnel, though no specific figures are available. (In 2009, an estimated
more than 25% of the police force consisted of such ghosts.) As John Sopko,
the U.S. inspector general for Afghanistan, warned last June: "We are paying
a lot of money for ghosts in Afghanistan... whether they are ghost teachers,
ghost doctors or ghost policeman or ghost soldiers."
And lest you imagine that the U.S. military has learned its lesson, rest
assured that it's still quite capable of producing nonexistent proxy forces.
Take the Pentagon-CIA program to train thousands of carefully vetted
"moderate" Syrian rebels, equip them, arm them, and put them in the field to
fight the Islamic State. Congress ponied up $500 million for it, $384
million of which was spent before that project was shut down as an abject
failure. By then, less than 200 American-backed rebels had been trained and
even less put into the field in Syria -- and they were almost instantly
kidnapped or killed, or they simply handed over their equipment to the
al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front. At one point, according to the congressional
testimony of the top American commander in the Middle East, only four or
five American-produced rebels were left "in the field." The cost-per-rebel
sent into Syria, by the way, is now estimated at approximately $2 million.
A final footnote: the general who oversaw this program is, according to the
New York Times, still a "rising star" in the Pentagon and in line for a
promotion.
Profli-gate
You've just revisited the privatized, twenty-first-century version of the
American way of war, which proved to be a smorgasbord of scandal,
mismanagement, and corruption as far as the eye could see. In the tradition
of Watergate, perhaps the whole system could be dubbed Profli-gate, since
American war making across the Greater Middle East has represented perhaps
the most profligate and least effective use of funds in the history of
modern warfare. In fact, here's a word not usually associated with the U.S.
military: the war system of this era seems to function remarkably like a
monumental scam, a swindle, a fraud.
The evidence is in: the U.S. military can win battles, but not a war, not
even against minimally armed minority insurgencies; it can "stand up"
foreign militaries, but only if they are filled with phantom feet and if the
forces themselves are as hollow as tombs; it can pour funds into the
reconstruction of countries, a process guaranteed to leave them more
prostrate than before; it can bomb, missile, and drone-kill significant
numbers of terrorists and other enemies, even as their terror outfits and
insurgent movements continue to grow stronger under the shadow of American
air power. Fourteen years and five failed states later in the Greater Middle
East, all of that seems irrefutable.
And here's something else irrefutable: amid the defeats, corruption, and
disappointments, there lurks a kind of success. After all, every disaster in
which the U.S. military takes part only brings more bounty to the Pentagon.
Domestically, every failure results in calls for yet more military
interventions around the world. As a result, the military is so much bigger
and better funded than it was on September 10, 2001. The commanders who led
our forces into such failures have repeatedly been rewarded and much of the
top brass, civilian and military, though they should have retired in shame,
have taken ever more golden parachutes into the lucrative worlds of defense
contractors, lobbyists, and consultancies.
All of this couldn't be more obvious, though it's seldom said. In short,
there turns out to be much good fortune in the disaster business, a fact
which gives the whole process the look of a classic swindle in which the
patsies lose their shirts but the scam artists make out like bandits.
Add in one more thing: these days, the only part of the state held in great
esteem by conservatives and the present batch of Republican presidential
candidates is the U.S. military. All of them, with the exception of Rand
Paul, swear that on entering the Oval Office they will let that military
loose, sending in more troops, or special ops forces, or air power, and
funding the various services even more lavishly; all of this despite
overwhelming evidence that the U.S. military is incapable of spending a
dollar responsibly or effectively monitoring what it's done with the
taxpayer funds in its possession. (If you don't believe me, forget
everything in this piece and just check out the finances of the most
expensive weapons system in history, the F-35 Lightning II, which should
really be redubbed the F-35 Overrun for its madly spiraling costs.)
But no matter. If a system works (particularly for those in it), why change
it? And by the way, in case you're looking for a genuine steal, I have a
fabulous gas station in Afghanistan to sell you...
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Engelhardt
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176068
