Tomgram: William Hartung, The Doctrine of Armed Exceptionalism
By William Hartung
Posted on October 25, 2016, Printed on October 28, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176202/ ;
War, what is it good for? In America, the answer is that, much of the time,
you'll probably never know what it's good for -- or, in some cases, even
notice that we're at war. Right now, the U.S. is ever more deeply involved
in significant conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and increasingly
Yemen -- at least five ongoing wars in the Greater Middle East. Yet, in the
midst of Election 2016, with the single exception of the long-proclaimed,
long-awaited Iraqi-Kurdish offensive against Islamic State militants in the
city of Mosul (with U.S. advisers on the frontlines and U.S. Apache
helicopter crews in the air), the rest of our spreading military actions
might as well be taking place on Mars.
The Taliban has recently attacked two Afghan cities and is gaining ground
nationwide; Afghan military casualties have been soaring; and American
planes and advisers have been let loose there in a fashion unseen since
2014. Neither presidential candidate has offered a peep on the subject, nor
has there been a question about that now-15-year-old war in any of the
"debates." (They must be rigged!) In Syria, the U.S. air campaign
continues, largely unnoticed, while Washington tries to broker a deal
between the Turks and the Kurds (think Hatfields and McCoys) for an
offensive to take ISIS's "capital" Raqqa. (Good luck on that twosome working
together!)
The New York Times recently described the expanding but under-the-radar
American war against the al-Shabab terror movement in Somalia this way:
"Hundreds of American troops now rotate through makeshift bases in Somalia,
the largest military presence since the United States pulled out of the
country after the 'Black Hawk Down' battle in 1993... It carries enormous
risks -- including more American casualties, botched airstrikes that kill
civilians and the potential for the United States to be drawn even more
deeply into a troubled country that so far has stymied all efforts to fix
it."
As for Libya -- oh, yes, Washington is in action there, too, even if you
never hear about it -- the U.S. Air Force (drones, jets, and helicopters)
has doubled its air strikes against ISIS militants in the last month: 163 of
them. And, of course, there's Yemen where the U.S. seems to be stumbling
directly into a new war without the slightest notice to Congress or the
American people. American destroyers have been responding to "missile
attacks" that -- shades of the Tonkin Gulf incident of the Vietnam War era
-- may or may not have happened by firing Tomahawk cruise missiles at
targets in territory occupied by the Houthi rebels. This in a country
already under siege from a brutal American-backed Saudi air campaign,
significantly aimed at its impoverished civilian population, and wracked by
an expanding al-Qaeda operation. Even what those destroyers are doing so
close to the Yemeni coast is never discussed.
Add it all up and one classic TomDispatch question comes to mind: What could
possibly go wrong? Especially since, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung
points out today, it's all sunshine when it comes to one great war-fighting
fact: the Pentagon's budget is already coming up roses and no matter who
enters the Oval Office, it's only going to get bigger. So buckle up that
seat belt, it's war, American-style, and taxpayer dollars to the horizon.
Tom
The Urge to Splurge
Why Is It So Hard to Reduce the Pentagon Budget?
By William D. Hartung
Through good times and bad, regardless of what's actually happening in the
world, one thing is certain: in the long run, the Pentagon budget won't go
down.
It's not that that budget has never been reduced. At pivotal moments, like
the end of World War II as well as war's end in Korea and Vietnam, there
were indeed temporary downturns, as there was after the Cold War ended. More
recently, the Budget Control Act of 2011 threw a monkey wrench into the
Pentagon's plans for funding that would go ever onward and upward by putting
a cap on the money Congress could pony up for it. The remarkable thing,
though, is not that such moments have occurred, but how modest and
short-lived they've proved to be.
Take the current budget. It's down slightly from its peak in 2011, when it
reached the highest level since World War II, but this year's budget for the
Pentagon and related agencies is nothing to sneeze at. It comes in at
roughly $600 billion -- more than the peak year of the massive arms build-up
initiated by President Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. To put this figure
in perspective: despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping
sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still
managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did
during its two terms in office.
What accounts for the Department of Defense's ability to keep a stranglehold
on your tax dollars year after endless year?
Pillar one supporting that edifice: ideology. As long as most Americans
accept the notion that it is the God-given mission and right of the United
States to go anywhere on the planet and do more or less anything it cares to
do with its military, you won't see Pentagon spending brought under real
control. Think of this as the military corollary to American exceptionalism
-- or just call it the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, if you will.
The second pillar supporting lavish military budgets (and this will hardly
surprise you): the entrenched power of the arms lobby and its allies in the
Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The strategic placement of arms production
facilities and military bases in key states and Congressional districts has
created an economic dependency that has saved many a flawed weapons system
from being unceremoniously dumped in the trash bin of history.
Lockheed Martin, for instance, has put together a handy map of how its
troubled F-35 fighter jet has created 125,000 jobs in 46 states. The actual
figures are, in fact, considerably lower, but the principle holds: having
subcontractors in dozens of states makes it harder for members of Congress
to consider cutting or slowing down even a failed or failing program. Take
as an example the M-1 tank, which the Army actually wanted to stop buying.
Its plans were thwarted by the Ohio congressional delegation, which led a
fight to add more M-1s to the budget in order to keep the General Dynamics
production line in Lima, Ohio, up and running. In a similar fashion, prodded
by the Missouri delegation, Congress added two different versions of
Boeing's F-18 aircraft to the budget to keep funds flowing to that company's
St. Louis area plant.
The one-two punch of an environment in which the military can do no wrong,
while being outfitted for every global task imaginable, and what former
Pentagon analyst Franklin "Chuck" Spinney has called "political
engineering," has been a tough combination to beat.
"Scare the Hell Out of the American People"
The overwhelming consensus in favor of a "cover the globe" military strategy
has been broken from time to time by popular resistance to the idea of using
war as a central tool of foreign policy. In such periods, getting Americans
behind a program of feeding the military machine massive sums of money has
generally required a heavy dose of fear.
For example, the last thing most Americans wanted after the devastation and
hardship unleashed by World War II was to immediately put the country back
on a war footing. The demobilization of millions of soldiers and a sharp
cutback in weapons spending in the immediate postwar years rocked what
President Dwight Eisenhower would later dub the "military-industrial
complex."
As Wayne Biddle has noted in his seminal book Barons of the Sky, the U.S.
aerospace industry produced an astonishing 300,000-plus military aircraft
during World War II. Not surprisingly, major weapons producers struggled to
survive in a peacetime environment in which government demand for their
products threatened to be a tiny fraction of wartime levels.
Lockheed President Robert Gross was terrified by the potential impact of
war's end on his company's business, as were many of his industry cohorts.
"As long as I live," he said, "I will never forget those short, appalling
weeks" of the immediate postwar period. To be clear, Gross was appalled not
by the war itself, but by the drop off in orders occasioned by its end. He
elaborated in a 1947 letter to a friend: "We had one underlying element of
comfort and reassurance during the war. We knew we'd get paid for anything
we built. Now we are almost entirely on our own."
The postwar doldrums in military spending that worried him so were reversed
only after the American public had been fed a steady, fear-filled diet of
anti-communism. NSC-68, a secret memorandum the National Security Council
prepared for President Harry Truman in April 1950, created the template for
a policy based on the global "containment" of communism and grounded in a
plan to encircle the Soviet Union with U.S. military forces, bases, and
alliances. This would, of course, prove to be a strikingly expensive
proposition. The concluding paragraphs of that memorandum underscored
exactly that point, calling for a "sustained buildup of U.S. political,
economic, and military strength... [to] frustrate the Kremlin design of a
world dominated by its will."
Senator Arthur Vandenberg put the thrust of this new Cold War policy in far
simpler terms when he bluntly advised President Truman to "scare the hell
out of the American people" to win support for a $400 million aid plan for
Greece and Turkey. His suggestion would be put into effect not just for
those two countries but to generate support for what President Eisenhower
would later describe as "a permanent arms establishment of vast
proportions."
Industry leaders like Lockheed's Gross were poised to take advantage of such
planning. In a draft of a 1950 speech, he noted, giddily enough, that "for
the first time in recorded history, one country has assumed global
responsibility." Meeting that responsibility would naturally mean using air
transport to deliver "huge quantities of men, food, ammunition, tanks,
gasoline, oil and thousands of other articles of war to a number of widely
separated places on the face of the earth." Lockheed, of course, stood
ready to heed the call.
The next major challenge to armed exceptionalism and to the further
militarization of foreign policy came after the disastrous Vietnam War,
which drove many Americans to question the wisdom of a policy of permanent
global interventionism. That phenomenon would be dubbed the "Vietnam
syndrome" by interventionists, as if opposition to such a military policy
were a disease, not a position. Still, that "syndrome" carried
considerable, if ever-decreasing, weight for a decade and a half, despite
the Pentagon's Reagan-inspired arms build-up of the 1980s.
With the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Washington decisively renewed its practice
of responding to perceived foreign threats with large-scale military
interventions. That quick victory over Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein's
forces in Kuwait was celebrated by many hawks as the end of the
Vietnam-induced malaise. Amid victory parades and celebrations, President
George H.W. Bush would enthusiastically exclaim: "And, by God, we've kicked
the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
However, perhaps the biggest threat since World War II to an "arms
establishment of vast proportions" came with the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War, also in 1991. How to mainline fear into
the American public and justify Cold War levels of spending when that other
superpower, the Soviet Union, the primary threat of the previous nearly
half-a-century, had just evaporated and there was next to nothing
threatening on the horizon? General Colin Powell, then chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, summed up the fears of that moment within the
military and the arms complex when he said, "I'm running out of demons. I'm
running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il-sung."
In reality, he underestimated the Pentagon's ability to conjure up new
threats. Military spending did indeed drop at the end of the Cold War, but
the Pentagon helped staunch the bleeding relatively quickly before a "peace
dividend" could be delivered to the American people. Instead, it put a firm
floor under the fall by announcing what came to be known as the "rogue
state" doctrine. Resources formerly aimed at the Soviet Union would now be
focused on "regional hegemons" like Iraq and North Korea.
Fear, Greed, and Hubris Win the Day
After the 9/11 attacks, the rogue state doctrine morphed into the Global War
on Terror (GWOT), which neoconservative pundits soon labeled "World War IV."
The heightened fear campaign that went with it, in turn, helped sow the
seeds for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was promoted by visions of
mushroom clouds rising over American cities and a drumbeat of Bush
administration claims (all false) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction and ties to al-Qaeda. Some administration officials including
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even suggested that Saddam was like
Hitler, as if a modest-sized Middle Eastern state could somehow muster the
resources to conquer the globe.
The administration's propaganda campaign would be supplemented by the work
of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and
the American Enterprise Institute. And no one should be surprised to learn
that the military-industrial complex and its money, its lobbyists, and its
interests were in the middle of it all. Take Lockheed Martin Vice President
Bruce Jackson, for example. In 1997, he became a director of the Project
for the New American Century (PNAC) and so part of a gaggle of hawks
including future Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, future
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and future Vice President Dick Cheney.
In those years, PNAC would advocate the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as part
of its project to turn the planet into an American military protectorate.
Many of its members would, of course, enter the Bush administration in
crucial roles and become architects of the GWOT and the invasion of Iraq.
The Afghan and Iraq wars would prove an absolute bonanza for contractors as
the Pentagon budget soared. Traditional weapons suppliers like Lockheed
Martin and Boeing prospered, as did private contractors like Dick Cheney's
former employer, Halliburton, which made billions providing logistical
support to U.S. troops in the field. Other major beneficiaries included
firms like Blackwater and DynCorp, whose employees guarded U.S. facilities
and oil pipelines while training Afghan and Iraqi security forces. As much
as $60 billion of the funds funneled to such contractors in Iraq and
Afghanistan would be "wasted," but not from the point of view of companies
for which waste could generate as much profit as a job well done. So
Halliburton and its cohorts weren't complaining.
On entering the Oval Office, President Obama would ditch the term GWOT in
favor of "countering violent extremism" -- and then essentially settle for a
no-name global war. He would shift gears from a strategy focused on large
numbers of "boots on the ground" to an emphasis on drone strikes, the use of
Special Operations forces, and massive transfers of arms to U.S. allies like
Saudi Arabia. In the context of an increasingly militarized foreign policy,
one might call Obama's approach "politically sustainable warfare," since it
involved fewer (American) casualties and lower costs than Bush-style
warfare, which peaked in Iraq at more than 160,000 troops and a comparable
number of private contractors.
Recent terror attacks against Western targets from Brussels, Paris, and Nice
to San Bernardino and Orlando have offered the national security state and
the Obama administration the necessary fear factor that makes the case for
higher Pentagon spending so palatable. This has been true despite the fact
that more tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons will be
useless in preventing such attacks.
The majority of what the Pentagon spends, of course, has nothing to do with
fighting terrorism. But whatever it has or hasn't been called, the war
against terror has proven to be a cash cow for the Pentagon and contractors
like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.
The "war budget" -- money meant for the Pentagon but not included in its
regular budget -- has been used to add on tens of billions of dollars more.
It has proven to be an effective "slush fund" for weapons and activities
that have nothing to do with immediate war fighting and has been the
Pentagon's preferred method for evading the caps on its budget imposed by
the Budget Control Act. A Pentagon spokesman admitted as much recently by
acknowledging that more than half of the $58.8 billion war budget is being
used to pay for non-war costs.
The abuse of the war budget leaves ample room in the Pentagon's main budget
for items like the overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft, a plane
which, at a price tag of $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, is on track to be
the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken. That slush fund is also
enabling the Pentagon to spend billions of dollars in seed money as a down
payment on the department's proposed $1 trillion plan to buy a new
generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines. Shutting it
down could force the Pentagon to do what it likes least: live within an
actual budget rather continuing to push its top line ever upward.
Although rarely discussed due to the focus on Donald Trump's abominable
behavior and racist rhetoric, both candidates for president are in favor of
increasing Pentagon spending. Trump's "plan" (if one can call it that) hews
closely to a blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation that, if
implemented, could increase Pentagon spending by a cumulative $900 billion
over the next decade. The size of a Clinton buildup is less clear, but she
has also pledged to work toward lifting the caps on the Pentagon's regular
budget. If that were done and the war fund continued to be stuffed with
non-war-related items, one thing is certain: the Pentagon and its
contractors will be sitting pretty.
As long as fear, greed, and hubris are the dominant factors driving Pentagon
spending, no matter who is in the White House, substantial and enduring
budget reductions are essentially inconceivable. A wasteful practice may be
eliminated here or an unnecessary weapons system cut there, but more
fundamental change would require taking on the fear factor, the doctrine of
armed exceptionalism, and the way the military-industrial complex is
embedded in Washington.
Only such a culture shift would allow for a clear-eyed assessment of what
constitutes "defense" and how much money would be needed to provide it.
Unfortunately, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned
Americans about more than 50 years ago is alive and well, and gobbling up
your tax dollars at an alarming rate.
William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and
Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He is the author of
Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial
Complex.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 William D. Hartung
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176202
Tomgram: William Hartung, The Doctrine of Armed Exceptionalism
By William Hartung
Posted on October 25, 2016, Printed on October 28, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176202/ ;
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We're proud to note that Nick Turse's
remarkable work for this website (and elsewhere) on the shadowy use of
American Special Operations forces globally has been named Project
Censored's number one story of 2015-2016. Click here for Turse's latest TD
piece on the subject and expect more revelations in the months to come.
Congratulations, Nick! Tom]
War, what is it good for? In America, the answer is that, much of the time,
you'll probably never know what it's good for -- or, in some cases, even
notice that we're at war. Right now, the U.S. is ever more deeply involved
in significant conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and increasingly
Yemen -- at least five ongoing wars in the Greater Middle East. Yet, in the
midst of Election 2016, with the single exception of the long-proclaimed,
long-awaited Iraqi-Kurdish offensive against Islamic State militants in the
city of Mosul (with U.S. advisers on the frontlines and U.S. Apache
helicopter crews in the air), the rest of our spreading military actions
might as well be taking place on Mars.
The Taliban has recently attacked two Afghan cities and is gaining ground
nationwide; Afghan military casualties have been soaring; and American
planes and advisers have been let loose there in a fashion unseen since
2014. Neither presidential candidate has offered a peep on the subject, nor
has there been a question about that now-15-year-old war in any of the
"debates." (They must be rigged!) In Syria, the U.S. air campaign continues,
largely unnoticed, while Washington tries to broker a deal between the Turks
and the Kurds (think Hatfields and McCoys) for an offensive to take ISIS's
"capital" Raqqa. (Good luck on that twosome working together!)
The New York Times recently described the expanding but under-the-radar
American war against the al-Shabab terror movement in Somalia this way:
"Hundreds of American troops now rotate through makeshift bases in Somalia,
the largest military presence since the United States pulled out of the
country after the 'Black Hawk Down' battle in 1993... It carries enormous
risks -- including more American casualties, botched airstrikes that kill
civilians and the potential for the United States to be drawn even more
deeply into a troubled country that so far has stymied all efforts to fix
it."
As for Libya -- oh, yes, Washington is in action there, too, even if you
never hear about it -- the U.S. Air Force (drones, jets, and helicopters)
has doubled its air strikes against ISIS militants in the last month: 163 of
them. And, of course, there's Yemen where the U.S. seems to be stumbling
directly into a new war without the slightest notice to Congress or the
American people. American destroyers have been responding to "missile
attacks" that -- shades of the Tonkin Gulf incident of the Vietnam War era
-- may or may not have happened by firing Tomahawk cruise missiles at
targets in territory occupied by the Houthi rebels. This in a country
already under siege from a brutal American-backed Saudi air campaign,
significantly aimed at its impoverished civilian population, and wracked by
an expanding al-Qaeda operation. Even what those destroyers are doing so
close to the Yemeni coast is never discussed.
Add it all up and one classic TomDispatch question comes to mind: What could
possibly go wrong? Especially since, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung
points out today, it's all sunshine when it comes to one great war-fighting
fact: the Pentagon's budget is already coming up roses and no matter who
enters the Oval Office, it's only going to get bigger. So buckle up that
seat belt, it's war, American-style, and taxpayer dollars to the horizon.
Tom
The Urge to Splurge
Why Is It So Hard to Reduce the Pentagon Budget?
By William D. Hartung
Through good times and bad, regardless of what's actually happening in the
world, one thing is certain: in the long run, the Pentagon budget won't go
down.
It's not that that budget has never been reduced. At pivotal moments, like
the end of World War II as well as war's end in Korea and Vietnam, there
were indeed temporary downturns, as there was after the Cold War ended. More
recently, the Budget Control Act of 2011 threw a monkey wrench into the
Pentagon's plans for funding that would go ever onward and upward by putting
a cap on the money Congress could pony up for it. The remarkable thing,
though, is not that such moments have occurred, but how modest and
short-lived they've proved to be.
Take the current budget. It's down slightly from its peak in 2011, when it
reached the highest level since World War II, but this year's budget for the
Pentagon and related agencies is nothing to sneeze at. It comes in at
roughly $600 billion -- more than the peak year of the massive arms build-up
initiated by President Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. To put this figure
in perspective: despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping
sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still
managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did
during its two terms in office.
What accounts for the Department of Defense's ability to keep a stranglehold
on your tax dollars year after endless year?
Pillar one supporting that edifice: ideology. As long as most Americans
accept the notion that it is the God-given mission and right of the United
States to go anywhere on the planet and do more or less anything it cares to
do with its military, you won't see Pentagon spending brought under real
control. Think of this as the military corollary to American exceptionalism
-- or just call it the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, if you will.
The second pillar supporting lavish military budgets (and this will hardly
surprise you): the entrenched power of the arms lobby and its allies in the
Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The strategic placement of arms production
facilities and military bases in key states and Congressional districts has
created an economic dependency that has saved many a flawed weapons system
from being unceremoniously dumped in the trash bin of history.
Lockheed Martin, for instance, has put together a handy map of how its
troubled F-35 fighter jet has created 125,000 jobs in 46 states. The actual
figures are, in fact, considerably lower, but the principle holds: having
subcontractors in dozens of states makes it harder for members of Congress
to consider cutting or slowing down even a failed or failing program. Take
as an example the M-1 tank, which the Army actually wanted to stop buying.
Its plans were thwarted by the Ohio congressional delegation, which led a
fight to add more M-1s to the budget in order to keep the General Dynamics
production line in Lima, Ohio, up and running. In a similar fashion, prodded
by the Missouri delegation, Congress added two different versions of
Boeing's F-18 aircraft to the budget to keep funds flowing to that company's
St. Louis area plant.
The one-two punch of an environment in which the military can do no wrong,
while being outfitted for every global task imaginable, and what former
Pentagon analyst Franklin "Chuck" Spinney has called "political
engineering," has been a tough combination to beat.
"Scare the Hell Out of the American People"
The overwhelming consensus in favor of a "cover the globe" military strategy
has been broken from time to time by popular resistance to the idea of using
war as a central tool of foreign policy. In such periods, getting Americans
behind a program of feeding the military machine massive sums of money has
generally required a heavy dose of fear.
For example, the last thing most Americans wanted after the devastation and
hardship unleashed by World War II was to immediately put the country back
on a war footing. The demobilization of millions of soldiers and a sharp
cutback in weapons spending in the immediate postwar years rocked what
President Dwight Eisenhower would later dub the "military-industrial
complex."
As Wayne Biddle has noted in his seminal book Barons of the Sky, the U.S.
aerospace industry produced an astonishing 300,000-plus military aircraft
during World War II. Not surprisingly, major weapons producers struggled to
survive in a peacetime environment in which government demand for their
products threatened to be a tiny fraction of wartime levels.
Lockheed President Robert Gross was terrified by the potential impact of
war's end on his company's business, as were many of his industry cohorts.
"As long as I live," he said, "I will never forget those short, appalling
weeks" of the immediate postwar period. To be clear, Gross was appalled not
by the war itself, but by the drop off in orders occasioned by its end. He
elaborated in a 1947 letter to a friend: "We had one underlying element of
comfort and reassurance during the war. We knew we'd get paid for anything
we built. Now we are almost entirely on our own."
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1568586973/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1568586973/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20The postwar
doldrums in military spending that worried him so were reversed only after
the American public had been fed a steady, fear-filled diet of
anti-communism. NSC-68, a secret memorandum the National Security Council
prepared for President Harry Truman in April 1950, created the template for
a policy based on the global "containment" of communism and grounded in a
plan to encircle the Soviet Union with U.S. military forces, bases, and
alliances. This would, of course, prove to be a strikingly expensive
proposition. The concluding paragraphs of that memorandum underscored
exactly that point, calling for a "sustained buildup of U.S. political,
economic, and military strength... [to] frustrate the Kremlin design of a
world dominated by its will."
Senator Arthur Vandenberg put the thrust of this new Cold War policy in far
simpler terms when he bluntly advised President Truman to "scare the hell
out of the American people" to win support for a $400 million aid plan for
Greece and Turkey. His suggestion would be put into effect not just for
those two countries but to generate support for what President Eisenhower
would later describe as "a permanent arms establishment of vast
proportions."
Industry leaders like Lockheed's Gross were poised to take advantage of such
planning. In a draft of a 1950 speech, he noted, giddily enough, that "for
the first time in recorded history, one country has assumed global
responsibility." Meeting that responsibility would naturally mean using air
transport to deliver "huge quantities of men, food, ammunition, tanks,
gasoline, oil and thousands of other articles of war to a number of widely
separated places on the face of the earth." Lockheed, of course, stood ready
to heed the call.
The next major challenge to armed exceptionalism and to the further
militarization of foreign policy came after the disastrous Vietnam War,
which drove many Americans to question the wisdom of a policy of permanent
global interventionism. That phenomenon would be dubbed the "Vietnam
syndrome" by interventionists, as if opposition to such a military policy
were a disease, not a position. Still, that "syndrome" carried considerable,
if ever-decreasing, weight for a decade and a half, despite the Pentagon's
Reagan-inspired arms build-up of the 1980s.
With the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Washington decisively renewed its practice
of responding to perceived foreign threats with large-scale military
interventions. That quick victory over Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein's
forces in Kuwait was celebrated by many hawks as the end of the
Vietnam-induced malaise. Amid victory parades and celebrations, President
George H.W. Bush would enthusiastically exclaim: "And, by God, we've kicked
the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
However, perhaps the biggest threat since World War II to an "arms
establishment of vast proportions" came with the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War, also in 1991. How to mainline fear into
the American public and justify Cold War levels of spending when that other
superpower, the Soviet Union, the primary threat of the previous nearly
half-a-century, had just evaporated and there was next to nothing
threatening on the horizon? General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, summed up the fears of that moment within the military and
the arms complex when he said, "I'm running out of demons. I'm running out
of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il-sung."
In reality, he underestimated the Pentagon's ability to conjure up new
threats. Military spending did indeed drop at the end of the Cold War, but
the Pentagon helped staunch the bleeding relatively quickly before a "peace
dividend" could be delivered to the American people. Instead, it put a firm
floor under the fall by announcing what came to be known as the "rogue
state" doctrine. Resources formerly aimed at the Soviet Union would now be
focused on "regional hegemons" like Iraq and North Korea.
Fear, Greed, and Hubris Win the Day
After the 9/11 attacks, the rogue state doctrine morphed into the Global War
on Terror (GWOT), which neoconservative pundits soon labeled "World War IV."
The heightened fear campaign that went with it, in turn, helped sow the
seeds for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was promoted by visions of
mushroom clouds rising over American cities and a drumbeat of Bush
administration claims (all false) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction and ties to al-Qaeda. Some administration officials including
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even suggested that Saddam was like
Hitler, as if a modest-sized Middle Eastern state could somehow muster the
resources to conquer the globe.
The administration's propaganda campaign would be supplemented by the work
of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and
the American Enterprise Institute. And no one should be surprised to learn
that the military-industrial complex and its money, its lobbyists, and its
interests were in the middle of it all. Take Lockheed Martin Vice President
Bruce Jackson, for example. In 1997, he became a director of the Project for
the New American Century (PNAC) and so part of a gaggle of hawks including
future Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, future Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and future Vice President Dick Cheney. In those
years, PNAC would advocate the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as part of its
project to turn the planet into an American military protectorate. Many of
its members would, of course, enter the Bush administration in crucial roles
and become architects of the GWOT and the invasion of Iraq.
The Afghan and Iraq wars would prove an absolute bonanza for contractors as
the Pentagon budget soared. Traditional weapons suppliers like Lockheed
Martin and Boeing prospered, as did private contractors like Dick Cheney's
former employer, Halliburton, which made billions providing logistical
support to U.S. troops in the field. Other major beneficiaries included
firms like Blackwater and DynCorp, whose employees guarded U.S. facilities
and oil pipelines while training Afghan and Iraqi security forces. As much
as $60 billion of the funds funneled to such contractors in Iraq and
Afghanistan would be "wasted," but not from the point of view of companies
for which waste could generate as much profit as a job well done. So
Halliburton and its cohorts weren't complaining.
On entering the Oval Office, President Obama would ditch the term GWOT in
favor of "countering violent extremism" -- and then essentially settle for a
no-name global war. He would shift gears from a strategy focused on large
numbers of "boots on the ground" to an emphasis on drone strikes, the use of
Special Operations forces, and massive transfers of arms to U.S. allies like
Saudi Arabia. In the context of an increasingly militarized foreign policy,
one might call Obama's approach "politically sustainable warfare," since it
involved fewer (American) casualties and lower costs than Bush-style
warfare, which peaked in Iraq at more than 160,000 troops and a comparable
number of private contractors.
Recent terror attacks against Western targets from Brussels, Paris, and Nice
to San Bernardino and Orlando have offered the national security state and
the Obama administration the necessary fear factor that makes the case for
higher Pentagon spending so palatable. This has been true despite the fact
that more tanks, bombers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons will be
useless in preventing such attacks.
The majority of what the Pentagon spends, of course, has nothing to do with
fighting terrorism. But whatever it has or hasn't been called, the war
against terror has proven to be a cash cow for the Pentagon and contractors
like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.
The "war budget" -- money meant for the Pentagon but not included in its
regular budget -- has been used to add on tens of billions of dollars more.
It has proven to be an effective "slush fund" for weapons and activities
that have nothing to do with immediate war fighting and has been the
Pentagon's preferred method for evading the caps on its budget imposed by
the Budget Control Act. A Pentagon spokesman admitted as much recently by
acknowledging that more than half of the $58.8 billion war budget is being
used to pay for non-war costs.
The abuse of the war budget leaves ample room in the Pentagon's main budget
for items like the overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft, a plane
which, at a price tag of $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, is on track to be
the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken. That slush fund is also
enabling the Pentagon to spend billions of dollars in seed money as a down
payment on the department's proposed $1 trillion plan to buy a new
generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines. Shutting it
down could force the Pentagon to do what it likes least: live within an
actual budget rather continuing to push its top line ever upward.
Although rarely discussed due to the focus on Donald Trump's abominable
behavior and racist rhetoric, both candidates for president are in favor of
increasing Pentagon spending. Trump's "plan" (if one can call it that) hews
closely to a blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation that, if
implemented, could increase Pentagon spending by a cumulative $900 billion
over the next decade. The size of a Clinton buildup is less clear, but she
has also pledged to work toward lifting the caps on the Pentagon's regular
budget. If that were done and the war fund continued to be stuffed with
non-war-related items, one thing is certain: the Pentagon and its
contractors will be sitting pretty.
As long as fear, greed, and hubris are the dominant factors driving Pentagon
spending, no matter who is in the White House, substantial and enduring
budget reductions are essentially inconceivable. A wasteful practice may be
eliminated here or an unnecessary weapons system cut there, but more
fundamental change would require taking on the fear factor, the doctrine of
armed exceptionalism, and the way the military-industrial complex is
embedded in Washington.
Only such a culture shift would allow for a clear-eyed assessment of what
constitutes "defense" and how much money would be needed to provide it.
Unfortunately, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned
Americans about more than 50 years ago is alive and well, and gobbling up
your tax dollars at an alarming rate.
William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and
Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He is the author of
Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial
Complex.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 William D. Hartung
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176202
