The %#% Military Budget

and how do you - a Texas voter - know this?

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I can tell you that two national parties and a couple of provincial ones have had significant shake-ups. The shake-ups came from the inside of the parties, pushing old big-wigs / big money out.

It can be done if the voters care.

I was active when it made sense. In Texas the Democratic Party has devolved into a very small contingent that has pretty much no direction and few candidates. They often don't even field candidates anymore. I have the state and local candidates information to let them know my personal opinion. What's that got to do with smothering all but top down input, as in closed primaries?

Not if you keep the only people trying to accomplish this out of the voting booth

WASHINGTON — In a rare act of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill on Monday that sets forth a muscular vision of America as a global power, with a Pentagon budget that far exceeds what President Trump has asked for.

Senators voted 89-9 to approve the measure, known as the National Defense Authorization Act; the House has already adopted a similar version.

The vote marked the 56th consecutive year that Congress has passed the defense policy bill — a point of personal pride for Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, and who has spent the past week shepherding the bill on the Senate floor as he battles brain cancer.

In arguing for the increased funding, Mr. McCain cited a string of recent deadly accidents involving the military, including a collision last month between an oil tanker and the destroyer John S. McCain, named for the senator’s father and grandfather. Ten sailors were killed and five others injured.

“We are gambling with the lives of the best among us and we’re now seeing the cost — the tragic but foreseeable costs of an overworked, strained force with aging equipment and not enough of it,” Mr. McCain said.

The 1,215-page bill sets policy on a range of military matters as diverse as whether the Air Force can buy new fighter jets and pay raises for service members. It provides $640 billion for basic Pentagon operations — $37 billion more than President Trump sought — and another $60 billion for war operations overseas in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The measure also includes a string of provisions to streamline the management of the Defense Department; along with boosting military spending, overhauling the Pentagon has been a high priority for Mr. McCain.

“He’s someone who has lived with underfunding of the military, seen the impact on readiness, seen the strains that impact the force,” said Anthony N. Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The bill also reflects Mr. McCain’s expansive vision of the role of the United States in world affairs. It authorizes $500 million to provide security assistance, including weapons, to Ukraine; $100 million to help Baltic nations “deter Russian aggression” and another $705 million for Israeli cooperative missile defense programs — $558.5 million more than the administration’s request.

But while the proposal outlines a hefty defense budget, whether the Pentagon gets the money will be determined by congressional appropriators, and Democrats have pledged to block major increases in military spending without a similar boost for domestic programs.

“It’s a grandiose spending plan,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said in a recent interview.

Before the bill can be sent to the president for his signature, it must be reconciled with the House version. They are different in a critical respect; the House-passed bill authorizes the creation of a new Space Corps, to manage satellite and other space-related programs, while the Senate bill does not.

The proposed corps has drawn opposition from the Air Force, which manages most of the military’s space-related programs, as well as the White House.

The defense bill, approved by the Armed Services Committee by a unanimous vote of 27-0 in June, is one of the few must-pass measures to go through Congress, which makes it a prime target for lawmakers trying to attach amendments to it. Senators had proposed more than 500 amendments, but the vast majority were not attached to the bill.

Among the amendments kept out of the measure was a controversial proposal by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Democrat, to block Mr. Trump’s directive barring transgender troops from serving in the military. On Friday, Mr. McCain and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services panel, joined Ms. Gillibrand in introducing a separate bill that would allow transgender troops to serve.

Correction: September 21, 2017
An earlier version of this article misidentified a group of nations authorized to receive funding to “deter Russian aggression” under a defense policy bill. The bill authorizes $100 million for Baltic nations, not Balkan.

Sad, but true.

How the US Paved the Way for ‘Generational’ War
By removing most Americans from the combat arena, we gained the ability to wage war forever, and damn the consequences.
http://billmoyers.com/story/us-paved-way-generational-war/

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/lies-we-tell-ourselves/


Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
— A. E. Housman, 1859-1936

Seven of my soldiers are dead. Two committed suicide. Bombs got the others in Iraq and Afghanistan. One young man lost three limbs. Another is paralyzed. I entered West Point a couple of months before 9/11. Eight of my classmates died “over there.”

Military service, war, sacrifice—when I was 17, I felt sure this would bring me meaning, adulation, even glory. It went another way. Sixteen years later, my generation of soldiers is still ensnared in an indecisive, unfulfilling series of losing wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Niger—who even keeps count anymore? Sometimes, I allow myself to wonder what it’s all been for.

I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who sees it. Nonetheless, you hear few dissenting voices among the veterans of the “global war on terror.” See, soldiers are all “professionals” now, at least since Richard Nixon ditched the draft in 1973. Mostly the troops—especially the officers—uphold an unwritten code, speak in esoteric vernacular and hide behind a veil of reticence. It’s a camouflage wall as thick as the “blue line” of police silence. Maybe it’s necessary to keep the machine running. I used to believe that. Sometimes, though, we tell you lies. Don’t take it personally: We tell them to each other and ourselves as well.

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Consider just three:

1. Soldiers don’t fight (or die) for king, country or apple pie. They do it for each other, for teammates and friends. Think Henry V’s “band of brothers.” In that sense, the troops can never be said to die for nothing.

No disrespect to the fallen, but this framework is problematic and a slippery-slope formula for forever war. Imagine the dangerous inverse of this logic: If no soldiers’ lives can be wasted, no matter how unmerited or ill-advised the war, then the mere presence of U.S. “warriors” and deaths of American troopers justifies any war, all war. That’s intellectually lazy. Two things can, in fact, be true at once: American servicemen can die for no good reason and may well have fought hard and honorably with/for their mates. The one does not preclude the other.

Unfortunately, it seems Americans are in for (at least) three more years of this increasingly bellicose—and perilous—rhetoric. We saw it when Sean Spicer, President Trump’s former press secretary, had the gall to declare that questioning the success of a botched January raid in Yemen “does a disservice” to the Navy SEAL killed in the firefight. It got worse from there. Trump tweeted that a certain senator—Vietnam veteran John McCain, of all people—who talked about “the success or failure of the mission” to the media had “emboldened the enemy.” According to this fabled logic, Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens died for his brothers-in-arms, and thus to even ponder the “what-for” is tantamount to abetting the enemy.

2. We have to fight “them”—terrorists, Arabs, Muslims, whomever—“over there” so we don’t end up fighting them “over here.”

In fact, the opposite is likely true. Detailed State Department statistics demonstrate that international terrorist attacks numbered just 346 in 2001 (down from 426 in 2000), versus 11,072 worldwide in 2016. That’s a cool 3,100 percent increase. Sure, the vast majority of those attacks occurred overseas—mostly suffered by civilians across the Greater Middle East. Then again, even domestic attacks have risen since the U.S. launched its “war on terror.” In 2001, 219 “terror” attacks worldwide were considered by the Department of State to be “anti-US,” and only four of those occurred in North America (the homeland). In 2016, by way of contrast, 72 terrorist incidents took place in North America, and 61 of those were in the United States alone.

Consider the data another way: From 1996 to 2000 (pre-9/11), an average of 5.6 people were killed annually in terror attacks within the United States. Now fast-forward 15 years. From 2012 to 2016, an average of 32.2 people died at the hands of terrorists here in the U.S. Since 2001, lethal attacks on the homeland and/or U.S. interests haven’t decreased. Quite the reverse: Such incidents have only proliferated. Something isn’t working.

That’s still a remarkably small number, mind you, about the same chance as death by lightning strike. Furthermore, from 2005 to 2015, 66 percent of terrorism fatalities in the U.S. were not perpetrated by Islamist groups. Besides, domestic mass shootings (in this case defined as four or more victims killed or wounded in a single event) are far more dangerous, with 1,072 incidents from 2013 to 2015. No doubt we’d hear more about these attacks if the culprits were a bit browner and named Ali or Abdullah.

It appears that U.S. military action may even be making matters worse. Take Africa, for instance. Prior to 9/11, few American troops patrolled the continent, and there were few recognized anti-U.S. threat groups in the region. Nonetheless, President George W. Bush (and later Barack Obama) soon sent more and more U.S. special operators to “advise and assist” across Africa. By 2017, al-Qaida and Islamic State-linked factions had multiplied and were now killing American troops.

It all appears rather counterproductive. For one final example, let us look at Yemen, just across the Red Sea from turbulent Africa. The U.S.-backed Saudi terror bombings on Yemeni civilians is doing more than just killing tens of thousands, spreading cholera and causing famine. That’s bad enough. It turns out that by helping Saudi Arabia pummel Yemen into the Stone Age, the U.S.-backed coalition is diminishing state control over broad swaths of the country and empowering al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula—which now holds sway in much of eastern Yemen.

Let’s review: The threat from terrorism is miniscule, is not even majority “Islamic,” pales in comparison with domestic mass shooting deaths and has not measurably decreased since 9/11. Remind me again how fighting “them there” saves soldiers from having to fight “them here?”

3. Americans are obliged to honor the troops. They fight for your freedom. Actively opposing the war(s) dishonors their sacrifice.

This is simply illogical and another surefire way to justify perpetual war. Like the recent NFL national anthem debate, such rhetoric serves mostly as a distraction. First off, it’s abstract and absurd to argue that U.S. troops engaged in the sprawling “war on terror” are dying to secure American freedom. After all, these are wars of choice, “away-games” conducted offensively in distant lands, with dubious allies and motives. Furthermore, all this fighting, killing and dying receives scant public debate and is legally “sanctioned” by a 16-year-old congressional authorization.

All this “don’t dishonor the troops” nonsense is as old as war itself. These sorts of “stab-in-the-back” myths were heard in Weimar Germany after World War I and in post-Vietnam America. You know the shtick: The soldiers could’ve won, should’ve won, if only they hadn’t been stabbed in the back by politicians, and so on. Let’s not forget, however, that the First Amendment—for those who bother to read it—sanctifies the citizenry’s right to dissent. Furthermore, the Constitution purposefully divides responsibility for war-making among the separate branches of government. Those who claim peaceful protest dishonors or undermines “the soldiers” don’t want an engaged populace. These folks prefer obedient automatons, replete with “thanks for your service” platitudes and yellow ribbons plastered on car bumpers. As far for me, I’ll take an engaged, thoughtful electorate over free Veterans Day meals at the local Texas Roadhouse any day.

The half-truths, comfortable fictions and outright lies are more than a little dangerous. They are affecting the next generation of young Americans. For instance, a full decade and two wars after I graduated, I taught history at West Point. Best job I ever had. My first crop of freshman cadets will graduate in May. They’re impressive young men and women. They’re mostly believers (for that, I envy them), ready to kick ass and wipe the floor with Islamic State—or Islamic State 2.0—or whomever. No one really tells them of the quagmires and disappointments that lie ahead. A few of us try, but we’re the outliers. Most cadets are unreachable. It has always been this way.

Truthfully, I surmise, it wouldn’t matter anyway. A surprising number of the cadets want to end up like me and so many others: disenchanted, lost and broken. There’s a romance to it. I felt the tug once, too. Some of my students will excel, and 10 years from now, they’ll come back to West Point and mentor cadets en route to the same ugly places, the same never-ending wars. Those kids, mind you, will have been born a decade after 9/11. Thinking on this near certainty, I want to throw up. But make no mistake: It will be so.

A system of this sort—one that produces and exalts generations of hopeless soldiers—requires millions of individual lies and necessitates discarding inconvenient truths. Only maybe, just maybe, it’s all rather simple. Perhaps we’re just pawns, duped in a very old game. Maybe soldiers’ sacrifices offer nothing of any real value. Nothing, that is, besides a painful warning: Trust not your own policymakers, your leaders or even the public. They’ll let you down every time.

The Rise of America's Secret Wars



“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of Niger. Graham and other senators expressed shock about the deployment, but the global sweep of America’s most elite forces is, at best, an open secret.
Earlier this year before that same Senate committee—though Graham was not in attendance—General Raymond Thomas, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), offered some clues about the planetwide reach of America’s most elite troops. “We operate and fight in every corner of the world,” he boasted. “Rather than a mere ‘break-glass-in-case-of-war’ force, we are now proactively engaged across the ‘battle space’ of the Geographic Combatant Commands… providing key integrating and enabling capabilities to support their campaigns and operations.”
In 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces, including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, deployed to 149 countries around the world, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command. That’s about 75 percent of the nations on the planet and represents a jump from the 138 countries that saw such deployments in 2016 under the Obama administration. It’s also a jump of nearly 150 percent from the last days of George W. Bush’s White House. This record-setting number of deployments comes as American commandos are battling a plethora of terror groups in quasi-wars that stretch from Africa and the Middle East to Asia.
“Most Americans would be amazed to learn that U.S. Special Operations Forces have been deployed to three quarters of the nations on the planet,” observes William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “There is little or no transparency as to what they are doing in these countries and whether their efforts are promoting security or provoking further tension and conflict.”
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“Since 9/11, we expanded the size of our force by almost 75 percent in order to take on mission-sets that are likely to endure,” SOCOM’s Thomas told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. Since 2001, from the pace of operations to their geographic sweep, the activities of U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) have, in fact, grown in every conceivable way. On any given day, about 8,000 special operators—from a command numbering roughly 70,000—are deployed in approximately 80 countries.
“The increase in the use of Special Forces since 9/11 was part of what was then referred to as the Global War on Terror as a way to keep the United States active militarily in areas beyond its two main wars, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hartung told TomDispatch. “The even heavier reliance on Special Forces during the Obama years was part of a strategy of what I think of as ‘politically sustainable warfare,’ in which the deployment of tens of thousands of troops to a few key theaters of war was replaced by a ‘lighter footprint’ in more places, using drones, arms sales and training, and Special Forces.”

No matter who won the last election, our leaders want war with Iran. It's beginning to look like the Bush decision to invade Iraq.

I posted this on another thread, but it is being buried under irrelevant blather. I want to keep up with this series of conversations.

http://therealnews.com/t2/story:20753:Undoing-the-New-Deal%3A--Eisenhower-Builds-an-Arsenal-of-Nuclear-Weapons-and-a-%0D%0ACabinet-of-Millionair
So, we're picking up the tale, sort of after Truman comes Eisenhower. There's been an ongoing debate in the United States, and it's still not over, about the relationship of military spending and social programs and where is the money gonna come from to pay for the social safety net to pay for the New Deal. The right-wing conservatives, they have always, and this has been going on for a long time but of course, we're seeing a renewed bout of it now. In fact, as we talk, the Republicans are passing new tax legislation and essentially it's lower taxes, lots of military spending, and taken out of social programs. This debate ain't new, so talk a bit how this reflects itself toward the end of Truman and the Eisenhower years.
PETER KUZNICK: One of the things we need to mention to start off with is NSC-68. NSC-68 was proposed in 1950. It was drafted largely by Paul Nitze, who was very, very hawkish. NSC-68 was a new approach to defense spending. It called basically for quadrupling America's defense spending. The idea was that now American policy has to be based on not what the Soviet Union was likely to do, but what the Soviet Union was capable of doing in a worst-case scenario. It looked like it was dead on arrival when it was first introduced in 1950.
However, the Korean War intervened. Once the Korean War started on a large scale, then they were able to push NSC-68 through. So, we see as after World War II, the demobilization, the decrease in defense spending, Truman tries to ramp it up again in 1946/1947 and then we've got a slow but steady increase in defense spending up to 1950. Then we see a quadrupling in defense spending. So, the military budget has gotten tremendously bloated between 1950, when NSC-68 was introduced and 1953, when the Korean War finally comes to a halt.
PAUL JAY: We've talked about to a large extent was the response to the deep crisis of unemployment, deep crisis of global capitalism, but by the end, coming out after the Second World War, most of the American elites don't think there needs to be such an appeasement with the American workers. A lot of the elites want to undo some of those reforms. You have this big increase in military spendings. You have the Cold War, which helps justify all this. You have McCarthyism and, as we talked about earlier, even before McCarthy starts holding his hearings, there's congressional hearings of Un-American Activities Committee purging the unions, purging schools, purging government, purging Hollywood of progressives and left-wingers. So, it's all in this environment that the 1950s evolves. So, what happens to the New Deal-type reforms as Eisenhower comes to power in all of this?
PETER KUZNICK: Well, Eisenhower is a particularly interesting figure. He's a military man but he's a military man in a new era, in the nuclear era. I think it was three days before Eisenhower was elected in November of 1952, the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb. It was over the island of Elugelab. There was a mushroom cloud something like 60 miles long and the island of Elugelab disappeared into the sea. It was gone. That was our first hydrogen bomb test.
Eisenhower's vision was that the greatest threat to the United States economically and security-wise was an unbalanced budget. He thought we could sink ourselves by too much spending. So, Eisenhower's strategy was to actually cut defense spending. Eisenhower wanted to effectively minimize the army and go with the Air Force and our nuclear programs. The reason why Eisenhower was so hawkish when it came to nuclear weapons was because they were so much less expensive, they believed, than conventional defense spending.
So, what we see with Eisenhower is when Eisenhower takes office, United States has a little bit more than 1,000 nuclear weapons. When Eisenhower leaves office, United States has more than 22,000 nuclear weapons. When Eisenhower's budget cycle is finished, United States has almost 30,000 nuclear weapons. So, that was the bargain that Eisenhower made with the devil, that the United States would be able to cut defense spending, cut budgets overall in the 1950s, but do so by this massive increase in nuclear weapons. So, the vision that a lot of the scientists had and Henry Wallace had in 1945, this fear of this apocalypse that we were creating potentially, now came to fruition under Eisenhower. We've got the capability, this overkill capacity, by the end of the Eisenhower administration to not only eliminate ourselves, let's eliminate everybody on the planet several times over.
PAUL JAY: Eisenhower often gets quoted, there’'s this famous quote of Eisenhower about "Beware of the military-industrial complex." But when you read that, it's not that he doesn't think there needs to be a military-industrial complex, he does, he just thinks beware of how the political effect of having such a massive part of the economy devoted to arms manufacturing. But he's not really for minimizing it, he's just for being beware of it.
PETER KUZNICK: He's afraid that it was growing out of control and he had good reason to fear that because he had created the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower, almost as much as anybody, perhaps more than anybody else, can be considered the father of the military-industrial complex, in the worse sense of the military-industrial complex, in the sense that we're creating the seeds of our own annihilation through this process.
So, it wasn't only the extent to which they subverted normal democracy in America, and we've seen the effects of the arms lobby. In fact, in the original draft of the speech that Malcolm Moos from Johns Hopkins had written of the military-industrial complex speech, along with Williams, they talked about the merchants of death. They go back to the 1930s term that was so popular to talk about the arms merchants from World War I, and they bring that up at the first draft. Eisenhower said he wanted to go with that kind of vision about a military establishment that was out of control, in bed with industry, threatening us all, but his final version was not actually as strong as the initial versions that were drafted for that speech.
PAUL JAY: Now, what happens in terms of the New Deal legislation during Eisenhower?
PETER KUZNICK: Well, I think that Adlai Stevenson probably got it correct. Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic candidate who ran against Eisenhower in 1952. Eisenhower said "The New Dealers have all left Washington and been replaced by the car dealers," and that was the Eisenhower administration. It was a cabinet of millionaires. Now, that's not so shocking. Now, we've got a cabinet of billionaires. But the idea in the 1950s that you would have a cabinet of millionaires seemed obscene to many people, and so Eisenhower told them be careful. Let's not say anything that's gonna offend public sensitivities when it comes to how wealthy this cabinet is.
Unfortunately, they didn't all get the message. There were two Charles E. Wilsons at the time. There was “Engine Charlie,” the head of GM and then there was “Electric Charlie,” the head of GE. Well, “Engine Charlie” became the Defense Secretary in the 1950s. He made some comments talking about the unemployed as kennel-fed dogs, which is the opposite message that Eisenhower's trying to set. The word started to spread at time that Wilson, when he was head of GM, developed the automatic transmission so he'd always have one foot free to put in his mouth.
But this was the kind of cabinet that they had, it was a very wealthy cabinet and the administration policies, Eisenhower was fortunate, in a sense, that the 1950s were a time of relative prosperity in the United States in which everybody seemed to be, standards of living seemed to be improving across the board. Of course, they went up faster for some people than they did for others but there was still a time despite the fact that there was a major recession in '57, that there were periodic declines in the 1950s but it was a time of relative stability. You have to remember, the '50s was the time when we have suburbanization, we have a rapidly growing middle class and you've got people buying cars, buying automobiles, buying their own homes. The GI Bill made a lot of this possible.
Now, the people who benefited the most from the GI Bill were mostly whites, of course, but they moved out to the suburbs and so you've got these Levittown kind of communities developing. Many of them had covenants that said they weren't even allowed to let blacks move in, other minorities move in. This was a time when the Donald Trump Seniors, the Fred Trumps, are having their restrictive covenants in their housing, in the apartments that they're building, or they're refusing to rent to African Americans. So, you've got this white suburbanization process developing in the 1950s at a time, again, of relative prosperity. And so...
PAUL JAY: Can I add when you, I think it's important to say “relative prosperity” because-
PETER KUZNICK: Relative...
PAUL JAY: ... it was these sort of upper sections of the working class, the unionized sections in places like auto that were doing very well. The poverty rate was actually was very high.
PETER KUZNICK: And that's why there's gonna be a war on poverty in the 1960s, because poverty had not been eliminated, certainly. But we see the rise of the gun belt in the 1950s, rise of places like Los Angeles, the Southwest, Atlanta, areas that are gonna be profiting from the vast defense spending and the aerospace industry. We gotta remember the aerospace is really gonna get a huge boost in the 1950s, especially in the aftermath of Sputnik. We're gonna see a shift in the economy once the Soviets launch Sputnik, which was launched on October 4th, 1957.
Sputnik, Eisenhower downplays the effects of that. He says "Oh, I'm not impressed. They've launched one small ball into space." He says, "Not a big deal." In fact, he went out and played, I think it was five rounds of golf that week to show that he wasn't impressed with Sputnik. However, the next month, November 1st, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2. Now, this is serious. Not only did they send the dog into space but Sputnik 2 weighs six tons. That creates a tremendous crisis in American society because the Soviets had already tested an intercontinental ballistic missile prior to launching Sputnik 1, and the Americans started to panic. We set up a committee, the Gaither Committee, which issues a very, very frightening report. The Washington Post has a big front-page article saying that the United States is now facing the gravest crisis in its history. This is an existential crisis for the United States.
The view in the United States was that the, not only in the United States, actually around the world, was that the Soviets were ahead of the United States in scientific, technological and defense capabilities. Of course, it wasn't true. Allen Dulles later commented, he said, the head of the CIA, or I think it was Allen Dulles, might have been John Foster Dulles, who said "I wasn't concerned. I could see every blade of grass in the Soviet Union. I knew exactly what they had and I knew how far ahead we were." Eisenhower had that same sense of certainty and security because we were having our U-2 flights and we were actually getting very, very good intelligence and we knew the Soviets were not ahead. The Soviets were actually far behind the United States but we still increased defense spending.
Eisenhower actually tried to tamp down the fears and tamp down the increase in defense spending, again, fearing we would bankrupt ourselves. But there is a lot of pressure then to reform America's education system. The question was, while we're so concerned with how plush the carpet is gonna be and with the fins on our cars, while the Soviets are spending money on education, on science and technology and they've outflanked the United States and they're far ahead of us. That becomes a crucial issue in American society. The Democrats realize they've got an issue that can put them back in the White House. They can use this to run against the Republicans in 1960. Lyndon Johnson's aides give him a memo that Johnson later trumpets, that says this is gonna put the Democrats not only in control of both houses but also in control of the White House again.
And Kennedy, John Kennedy is one of the ones who runs based upon what was called then the “Missile Gap,” the idea that the Soviets have got a vast abundance, a vast superiority in missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles over the United States. And so, Kennedy and others do a lot of fear mongering about that, attack the Eisenhower administration for being weak on defense, for allowing the Soviets to get ahead of us and then in 1959, allowing the Cuban Revolution, a Communist revolution, 90 miles off the coast of Florida. This all comes together and becomes crucial in the 1960 election when Kennedy defeats Nixon very, very narrowly despite all that Kennedy had going for him.
PAUL JAY: Now, I think it's important to kind of elaborate that sections of the American working class really benefited from all of this militarization. They benefited from the Post-War Expansion. Europe had been laid waste and so had the Soviet Union. American capital and goods were expanding all over the world. American hegemony was being asserted. A section of the American working class was going very well in riding this gravy train but a large section was not, and it wasn't just all black. Unorganized white workers were not doing anywhere near as unionized white workers were. A real division was developing and this starts to build up as we head into the '60s. But when we get to Kennedy, we actually see another leap in militarization.
PETER KUZNICK: One of the things that we saw in the '50s, as we discussed, the Labor Movement takes a big hit when the Communists are forced out of the unions. But in the mid 50s, you have a pretty conservative leadership under...but you've got the merger of the AFL and CIO in mid-decade, which is gonna give the Labor Movement a little more strength. You've got the Reuther wing of the Labor Movement, the industrial unions that really had been making progress in the '40s and '50s.
I think, and don't quote me on this for sure, but I think the percentage of American workers who were in unions peaks around 1948 but it's still strong in the 1950s. It's not until the 1950s that we begin to see a relative decline in the industrial sector compared to service and white-collar kinds of jobs. But American industry is still thriving and going strong in the 1950s. Based upon that, you've got more and more workers being brought into the middle class, or at least into having what we defined then as middle class standards of living, suburban lifestyles, owning their own homes, and so you've got a big, expanding middle class in the 1950s. But as you were saying, many, many, many workers are gonna be left behind and we're gonna see the relative decline in the percentage of workers who are unionized beginning in the 1950s really.
PAUL JAY: And with Kennedy, as I said and you said, I think it's actually the largest increase in military spending, was it, in US history, outside of a war? Am I right in the ...
PETER KUZNICK: I'm not sure if you're right in terms of the largest increase but we do so a sharp increase in military spending. I like to divide the Kennedy presidency into two periods: from Kennedy's election until the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of '62, Kennedy is a real defense hawk. Kennedy is a Cold War liberal from '60 to '62, but then Kennedy sees the light in '62. And the last year of Kennedy's presidency, he's trying to roll back the hawkish Cold War policies that defines his earliest presidency. He begins, I guess off on a very bad foot with the Bay of Pigs. It was a fiasco. It was Trump-esque in its absurdity. Kennedy-
PAUL JAY: For people that, get it really fast for people that don't know what the Bay of Pigs was.
PETER KUZNICK: In April of '62, the United States-
PAUL JAY: You're gonna have to, well, let's wait till that's over or take it off or something.
PETER KUZNICK: It'll just stop in a second. Okay, ready?
PAUL JAY: Let me think about ... We're at 20 minutes now. Alright. Well, let's really quick, we'll do what Bay of Pigs is and then we'll probably, is there anything specific about Kennedy and the New Deal legislation? Does he do any of that kinda reform stuff?
PETER KUZNICK: Not really. Kennedy didn't achieve very much in terms of domestic policy.
PAUL JAY: Well, we should say that. Okay. Well, let's start with Bay of Pigs and then we'll maybe end with that. Okay, go ahead. The Bay of Pigs.
PETER KUZNICK: Yes. Kennedy inherited a plan from the Eisenhower/Nixon administration to overthrow the Castro government in Cuba. The CIA trained a large force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba in 1961 with the understanding, the promise that they would be greeted as liberators when they arrived and the Cuban people would rise up and overthrow the Castro administration. Kennedy had his doubts from the beginning. He warned people that he was not gonna send in American forces to back up this Cuban exile force if they were in trouble. The assumption in the intelligence community and the Pentagon was that Kennedy would be forced to do so. So, the group goes in there, they invade, there's no public uprising in support. The Cubans were ready for them. They captured or killed the entire invading force. It was a fiasco.
In the midst of it, you had the heads of the CIA and top officials of the Pentagon who had a midnight meeting with Kennedy, saying "You've gotta send in the American forces to bail them out." Kennedy refused to do so. That's when Kennedy begins to develop his doubts about the wisdom of the military and the intelligence people. He refers to the "CIA bastards, those joint chief sons of bitches." He takes the power away from the CIA. He puts the CIA in every country under the ambassadors in those countries.
He says "I'm gonna smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it in the winds." He says to his closest advisors, he says "If somebody comes in to talk to me about unemployment...," he said, "I can challenge him, I can debate with them." He says "But the military and the intelligence people, you always assume they've got some kind of superior understanding intelligence and insight." He says "I've learned my lesson." Another occasion, he said "First thing I'm gonna tell my successor is don't trust the military." He says "Even on military matters, they don't necessarily know what they're talking about." So, Kennedy learned a very important lesson at the Bay of Pigs and he begins to doubt the military.
But then in June, he's got a disastrous meeting with Khrushchev in Geneva and then after that things get very tense, and in July of 1961, we've got the crisis beginning, the Berlin Crisis. Kennedy makes a speech July 25th, which he announces an increase of defense spending of $3.45 billion. That sounds like chump change now compared to the level of defense spending we have, but at the time, that was considered an astronomical increase. Kennedy calls for a 25% increase in the size of the army. He wants to call up National Guards, call up American Troops, reservists as well. He calls for a big fallout shelter-building program in the United States. And then the Soviets respond with building the Berlin Wall.
Kennedy actually says that "In some ways, that's a relief because a wall is a lot better than a war," because it looked like the US and the Soviet Union were about to go to war in the summer of 1961. But then we've got this increase in harsh rhetoric continuing through 1962, continuing through the very, very, very dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.
PAUL JAY: Alright, Peter. Let's pick this up in the next part. We'll talk about the nature of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But as the main focus of our series is on what happens to domestic legislation, but you can't look at domestic legislation without looking at the military expenditure, as I said in the beginning. So, these two questions go together and obviously continue to. Alright. Thanks, Peter. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. Join us for the next segment in our series with Peter Kuznick on Undoing the New Deal on The Real News Network.

PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network, I'm Paul Jay. We're continuing our series of discussions on the Undoing of the New deal, and we're joined again by Professor Peter Kuznick, who joins us from Washington. Peter is a Professor of History, and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. Thanks for joining us again Peter.
PETER KUZNICK: My pleasure, Paul.
PAUL JAY: So, before we move on to Kennedy, and then we're going to get to Johnson, you wanted to make a comment about Eisenhower, who made a couple of great sounding speeches about reducing military expenditure but I'm not sure how much that actually ever got implemented. But talk about this speech in, I guess, it's 1953, is it?
PETER KUZNICK: Yes. The world had a great opportunity in March of 1953 to reverse course rather than this insane military spending that was beginning. On March 5th, 1953, Stalin died. The Soviet leaders reached out to the United States. They offered the Americans an olive branch. They talked about changing the direction of our relations. They talked about, basically, ending the Cold War. We could've ended the Cold War as early as March 5, 1953, taken a different route.
Eisenhower and the others in his administration debate what to do, how to respond. Churchill, who was now re-elected and back in office in England, begged the United States to hold a summit with the Soviet leaders and move toward peace, rather than belligerence and hostility. Eisenhower doesn't say anything publicly in response for six weeks. Then he makes a speech. It's a visionary speech. It's the kind of vision that Eisenhower represented at his best, and he says there:
PRESIDENT EISENHOWER: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
PETER KUZNICK: “This is not a way of life at all. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” What a great speech and the Soviets were thrilled. They republished this. They reprinted it. They broadcast it over and over, and then two days later, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, makes a speech reversing the whole thing. Instead of an olive branch, he gives the Soviets a middle finger and he accuses the Soviet Union of trying to overthrow every Democratic government in the world. The exact wrong message.
And so, it's sort of like Trump, where Tillerson says something sane and then Trump will undermine it two days later when it comes to North Korea. The same thing happened in 1953 with Eisenhower and Dulles. We're really much more on the same page, but if you look at the third world response, you've got the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, and the third world leaders are all saying, "We have to be independent. We have to be neutral." They say, "It is insane to spend all these dollars and all these rubles on the military when we need money for development."
PAUL JAY: So, what went on with Eisenhower, making that kind of speech? He's not known for any big increase in social spending domestically. He helps build, as you said, the military industrial complex, especially the nuclear side of it. So, what was that speech about, and then how does he allow Dulles to contradict him two days later?
PETER KUZNICK: That's one of the mysteries. That's why... writing books on the debate, what was going on in that administration. Did Eisenhower speak for it or did Dulles speak for it? Was Eisenhower the militarist or was Dulles the militarist? In many ways, the '50s was a very, very dangerous time. And there were so many harebrained schemes that were going on.
We talked a little bit about Sputnik but one of the proposals after that was to blast a hydrogen bomb on the surface of the moon to show the world that we really are the strongest. And they talked about putting missile bases on the moon, and then the idea was to have the Soviets respond by putting their own missile bases on the moon. We could put ours on distant planets, so that we could then hit the Soviet bases on the moon. The great independent journalist I.F. Stone mentioned that the word for lunar, for moon, in Latin is Luna. And he said, we should have a new department in the cabinet and call it the Department of Lunacy because of the crazy ideas that were being promulgated at the time.
This comes across, really, with the nuclear policies. So, when McGeorge Bundy asks Dan Ellsberg in 1961 to find out from the Joint Chiefs what would be, how many people would die as a result of America's nuclear launch in the event of a war with the Soviet Union, the Pentagon comes back with the idea that between 600 and 650 million people would die from America's weapons alone in our first PSYOP. And that doesn't even account for nuclear winter, which would have killed us all, or the numbers who would be killed by the Soviet weapons. That includes at least 100 million of our own allies in Western Europe.
We are talking about a period the lunacy and insanity was captured best by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove in 1964. That policy was so close to what was actually occurring at the time. Did Eisenhower speak for this? When Eisenhower wanted to, one of his visions was for planetary excavation using hydrogen bombs. People should study the lunacy of Project Plowshare.
PAUL JAY: They used to have tourism to go look at nuclear tests outside of Las Vegas and people would sit just a few miles away with sunglasses on.
PETER KUZNICK: And we sent American soldiers into the blast area, knowing that they were going to be irradiated. Yeah, the irrationality in these times. People are going to look back at the Trump administration and if we're here later, maybe they'll laugh at us. If we survive this period, they'll laugh. They'll look back and say, "Look at the craziness of this period."
Well, if you look at the history of the '50s and early '60s, you see a lot of that same kind of craziness in terms of the policies that were actually implemented at the time, and the ones, for example, one of the ideas was to melt the polar ice caps using hydrogen bombs. We wanted to increase polar melting. We wanted to increase the temperature on the planet by exploding nuclear bombs.
PAUL JAY: And this was to do, to what end?
PETER KUZNICK: For what end? I'm not sure. I mean, one-
PAUL JAY: Well, they may get their way, the way things are heading right now. They may get that.
PETER KUZNICK: And one of the things from Trump's National Security speech was to not talk about, or to say that global warming is not a National Security concern as Obama and others had believed it was. But they wanted to actually redirect hurricanes by setting off hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere in the path of the hurricane, so they could redirect hurricanes. They wanted to build new harbors by setting off hydrogen bombs. They wanted to have a new canal across the, instead of the Panama canal, with hydrogen bombs and reroute rivers in the United States.
I mean, crazy, crazy ideas that was considered American policy. And actually, it was the Soviets who saved us because Eisenhower wanted to begin to do these programs, but the Soviets would not allow, would not give the United States the right to do that because there was a temporary test ban in the late 1950s. And Eisenhower would have had to abrogate that in order to begin these projects.
PAUL JAY: Okay. Let's catch up. So, we had just, the last part dealt with some of Kennedy. We get into the 1960s. Kennedy is as preoccupied with the Cold War, the beginning of the Vietnam War, Cuba, the Missile Crisis. And we had left off right at the moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Give us a really quick recap because I think on this issue of militarization and former policy, we kind of have to do a whole nother series that focuses more on that. We're trying to get more into this issue of the New Deal and what happened to domestic social reforms in the context of this massive military expenditure. But talk a bit about that moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
PETER KUZNICK: Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis is very important because now we're going through the Korean Missile Crisis, and if Trump has his way, we'll also go through the Iranian Missile Crisis. And the last time we were this close to nuclear war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. What happens there is that Khrushchev, in order to try to accomplish two things, or three things, really.
One is to, he knows the United States is planning an invasion of Cuba. The United States had been carrying out war games, massive war games, 40,000 people participating in these war games. Like now, we're carrying out war games off the Korean coast. And the war game that was planned for October of '62 was called Operation Ortsac. Anybody who doesn't get it? Certainly the Soviets did. Ortsac is Castro spelled backwards.
And so, we were planning, we had the plans in place to overthrow the Cuban government, number one. Number two, Khrushchev wanted a credible deterrent. The Americans learned, Kennedy says, "Let's find out what the reality of the Missile Gap is." And he has McNamara do the study. We find out that there is a Missile Gap. By October of '61, we find out that there is a Missile Gap, and it's in our favor. The United States is ahead between 10 to 1 and 100 to 1 over the Soviet Union in every important category.
Still, the pressure was to increase America's missiles and so, the Strategic Air Command in the Air Force wanted to increase our missiles by 3,000. McNamara figures that the least number he can get away with is to increase our intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1,000 even though we're ahead 10 to 1 already at that point. The Kremlin interpreted that, and said, "Why is the US increasing its missiles when it's so far ahead of us?" They said, "Obviously, the United States is preparing for a first strike against the Soviet Union." That was the Kremlin interpretation. It needed a credible deterrent.
They knew that, initially they thought, "Well, the fact that we can take out Berlin will be a credible enough deterrent. The Americans will never attack." Then they realized that that wouldn't be a sufficient deterrent to some of the hawks in the American military, the Curtis LeMays, who had a lot of influence at the time. Or before that, the Lemnitzers. And so, they decide, "Well, we've got to put missiles in Cuba, which is a more credible deterrent."
And the third is that Khrushchev wanted to appease his hawks. Khrushchev's strategy was to build up Soviet consumer economy. He said, "The Soviet people want washing machines. They want cars. They want houses. That's what we need." And so, he wanted to decrease defense spending and one of the cheap ways to do that was to put the missiles in Cuba. So, they do that foolishly. It's a crazy policy because they don't announce it. It's very much like the movie Strangelove, where Khrushchev was planning to announce that the missiles were in Cuba on the anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. That was coming up in a couple-
PAUL JAY: You mean Dr. Strangelove, meaning what's the point of a doomsday machine if you don't tell people you've got it?
PETER KUZNICK: As Strangelove says, "Well what's the point of the doomsday machine if you don't announce that you have it?" And then, the Americans didn't, the Soviets didn't announce that they had the, if they had announced that the missiles were there, then the United States could not have invaded Cuba the way the military wanted. They could not have bombed Cuba. It would've been an effective deterrent, especially if they announced that also, that the missiles were there, that the warheads were there and that they also had put 100 battlefield nuclear weapons inside Cuba.
That would have meant that there was no possibility of the United States invading and that the deterrent would've actually worked. But they didn't announce it. And so, the United States plans for an invasion and we got very close to doing so. But again, the intelligence was abysmal. We knew where 33 of the 42 missiles were. We didn't find the other missiles. We didn't know that the battlefield nuclear weapons were there. We didn't know that the missiles were ready to be armed.
And so, the United States was operating blind. We thought that there were 10,000 armed Soviets in Cuba. Turns out, there were 42,000 armed Soviets. We thought that there were 100,000 armed Cubans. Turns out, there were 270,000 armed Cubans. Based on the initial intelligence, McNamara said, "If we had invaded, we figured we'd suffer 18,000 casualties, 4,500 dead." When he later finds out how many troops there actually were there, he says, "Well, that would've been 25,000 Americans dead." When he finds out that there were 100 battlefield nuclear weapons as well, he doesn't find that out until 30 years later, and then he turns white, and he says, "Well that would've meant we would've lost 100,000 American Troops." Twice as many, almost, as we lost in Vietnam.
He said, "We would've definitely destroyed Cuba and probably wiped out the Soviet Union as well." So, that's how close we came at this time. Which is again, as Robert Gates, another hawk, warns, "The United States should not invade Syria," he said. "Or should not bomb Syria because haven't we learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, that whenever these things happen, you never know what the consequences are going to be. It's always the unintended consequences that are going to get you."
Which we learned in Cuba. We learned in Iraq and Afghanistan or we should've learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, Trump hasn't learned it and we had better learn before we do something crazy now in Korea.
PAUL JAY: All right, thanks, Peter. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

#^&%#*&+*^*#

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-american-military-system-dissected/

The purpose of all wars, is peace. So observed St. Augustine early in the first millennium A.D. Far be it from me to disagree with the esteemed Bishop of Hippo, but his crisply formulated aphorism just might require a bit of updating.

I’m not a saint or even a bishop, merely an interested observer of this nation’s ongoing military misadventures early in the third millennium A.D. From my vantage point, I might suggest the following amendment to Augustine’s dictum: Any war failing to yield peace is purposeless and, if purposeless, both wrong and stupid.

War is evil. Large-scale, state-sanctioned violence is justified only when all other means of achieving genuinely essential objectives have been exhausted or are otherwise unavailable. A nation should go to war only when it has to — and even then, ending the conflict as expeditiously as possible should be an imperative.

Some might take issue with these propositions, President Trump’s latest national security adviser doubtless among them. Yet most observers — even, I’m guessing, most high-ranking U.S. military officers — would endorse them. How is it then that peace has essentially vanished as a U.S. policy objective? Why has war joined death and taxes in that select category of things that Americans have come to accept as unavoidable?

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The United States has taken Thucydides’s famed Melian Dialogue and turned it inside out. Centuries before Augustine, the great Athenian historian wrote, “The strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must.”Strength confers choice; weakness restricts it. That’s the way the world works, so at least Thucydides believed. Yet the inverted Melian Dialogue that prevails in present-day Washington seemingly goes like this: strength imposes obligations and limits choice. In other words, we gotta keep doing what we’ve been doing, no matter what.

Making such a situation all the more puzzling is the might and majesty of America’s armed forces. By common consent, the United States today has the world’s best military. By some estimates, it may be the best in recorded history. It’s certainly the most expensive and hardest working on the planet.

Yet in the post-Cold War era when the relative strength of U.S. forces reached its zenith, our well-endowed, well-trained, well-equipped, and highly disciplined troops have proven unable to accomplish any of the core tasks to which they’ve been assigned. This has been especially true since 9/11.

We send the troops off to war, but they don’t achieve peace. Instead, America’s wars and skirmishes simply drag on, seemingly without end. We just keep doing what we’ve been doing, a circumstance that both Augustine and Thucydides would undoubtedly have found baffling.

Prosecuting War, Averting Peace

How to explain this paradox of a superb military that never gets the job done? Let me suggest that the problem lies with the present-day American military system, the principles to which the nation adheres in raising, organizing, supporting, and employing its armed forces. By its very existence, a military system expresses an implicit contract between the state, the people, and the military itself.

Here, as I see it, are the principles — seven in all — that define the prevailing military system of the United States.

First, we define military service as entirely voluntary. In the U.S., there is no link between citizenship and military service. It’s up to you as an individual to decide if you want to take up arms in the service of your country.

If you choose to do so, that’s okay. If you choose otherwise, that’s okay, too. Either way, your decision is of no more significance than whether you root for the Yankees or the Mets.

Second, while non-serving citizens are encouraged to “support the troops,” we avoid stipulating how this civic function is to be performed.

In practice, there are many ways of doing so, some substantive, others merely symbolic. Most citizens opt for the latter. This means that they cheer when invited to do so. Cheering is easy and painless. It can even make you feel good about yourself.

Third, when it comes to providing the troops with actual support, we expect Congress to do the heavy lifting. Our elected representatives fulfill that role by routinely ponying up vast sums of money for what is misleadingly called a defense budget. In some instances, Congress appropriates even more money than the Pentagon asks for, as was the case this year.

Meanwhile, under the terms of our military system, attention to how this money actually gets spent by our yet-to-be-audited Pentagon tends to be — to put the matter politely — spotty. Only rarely does the Congress insert itself forcefully into matters relating to what U.S. forces scattered around the world are actually doing.

Yes, there are periodic hearings, with questions posed and testimony offered. But unless there is some partisan advantage to be gained, oversight tends to be, at best, pro forma. As a result, those charged with implementing national security policy — another Orwellian phrase — enjoy very considerable latitude.

Fourth, under the terms of our military system, this latitude applies in spades to the chief executive. The commander-in-chief occupies the apex of our military system. The president may bring to office very little expertise pertinent to war or the art of statecraft, yet his authority regarding such matters is essentially unlimited.

Consider, if you will, the sobering fact that our military system empowers the president to order a nuclear attack, should he see the need — or feel the impulse — to do so. He need not obtain congressional consent. He certainly doesn’t need to check with the American people.

Since Harry Truman ordered the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, presidents have not exercised this option, for which we should all be grateful. Yet on more occasions than you can count, they have ordered military actions, large and small, on their own authority or after only the most perfunctory consultation with Congress. When Donald Trump, for instance, threatened North Korea’s Kim Jong-un with “fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen,” he gave no hint that he would even consider asking for prior congressional authorization to do so. Trump’s words were certainly inflammatory. Yet were he to act on those words, he would merely be exercising a prerogative enjoyed by his predecessors going back to Truman himself.

The Constitution invests in Congress the authority to declare war. The relevant language is unambiguous. In practice, as countless commentators have noted, that provision has long been a dead letter. This, too, forms an essential part of our present military system.

Fifth, under the terms of that system, there’s no need to defray the costs of military actions undertaken in our name. Supporting the troops does not require citizens to pay anything extra for what the U.S. military is doing out there wherever it may be. The troops are asked to sacrifice; for the rest of us, sacrifice is anathema.

Indeed, in recent years, presidents who take the nation to war or perpetuate wars they inherit never even consider pressing Congress to increase our taxes accordingly. On the contrary, they advocate tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest among us, which lead directly to massive deficits.

Sixth, pursuant to the terms of our military system, the armed services have been designed not to defend the country but to project military power on a global basis. For the Department of Defense actually defending the United States qualifies as an afterthought, trailing well behind other priorities such as trying to pacify Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province or jousting with militant groups in Somalia. The United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps are all designed to fight elsewhere, relying on a constellation of perhaps 800 bases around the world to facilitate the conduct of military campaigns “out there,” wherever “there” may happen to be. They are, in other words, expeditionary forces.

Reflect for a moment on the way the Pentagon divvies the world up into gigantic swathes of territory and then assigns a military command to exercise jurisdiction over each of them: European Command, Africa Command, Central Command, Southern Command, Northern Command, and Pacific Command. With the polar icecap continuing to melt, a U.S. Arctic Command is almost surely next on the docket. Nor is the Pentagon’s mania for creating new headquarters confined to terra firma. We already have U.S. Cyber Command. Can U.S. Galactic Command be far behind?

No other nation adheres to this practice. Nor would the United States permit any nation to do so. Imagine the outcry in Washington if President Xi Jinping had the temerity to create a “PRC Latin America Command,” headed by a four-star Chinese general charged with maintaining order and stability from Mexico to Argentina.

Seventh (and last), our military system invests great confidence in something called the military profession.

The legal profession exists to implement the rule of law. We hope that the result is some approximation of justice. The medical profession exists to repair our bodily ailments. We hope that health and longevity will result. The military profession exists to master war. With military professionals in charge, it’s our hope that America’s wars will conclude quickly and successfully with peace the result.

To put it another way, we look to the military profession to avert the danger of long, costly, and inconclusive wars. History suggests that these sap the collective strength of a nation and can bring about its premature decline. We count on military professionals to forestall that prospect.

Our military system assigns the immediate direction of war to our most senior professionals, individuals who have ascended step by step to the very top of the military hierarchy. We expect three- and four-star generals and admirals to possess the skills needed to make war politically purposeful. This expectation provides the rationale for the status they enjoy and the many entitlementsthey are accorded.

America, the (Formerly) Indispensable

Now, the nation that has created this military system is not some “shithole country,” to use a phrase made famous by President Trump. We are, or at least claim to be, a democratic republic in which all power ultimately derives from the people. We believe in — indeed, are certain that we exemplify — freedom, even as we continually modify the meaning of that term.

In the aggregate, we are very rich. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century we have taken it for granted that the United States ought to be the richest country on the planet, notwithstanding the fact that large numbers of ordinary Americans are themselves anything but rich. Indeed, as a corollary to our military system, we count on these less affluent Americans to volunteer for military service in disproportionate numbers. Offered sufficient incentives, they do so.

Finally, since 1945 the United States has occupied the preeminent place in the global order, a position affirmed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991. Indeed, we have come to believe that American primacy reflects the will of God or of some cosmic authority.

From the early years of the Cold War, we have come to believe that the freedom, material abundance, and primacy we cherish all depend upon the exercise of “global leadership.” In practice, that seemingly benign term has been a euphemism for unquestioned military superiority and the self-assigned right to put our military to work as we please wherever we please. Back in the 1990s, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said it best: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

Other countries might design their military establishments to protect certain vital interests. As Albright’s remark suggests, American designs have been far more ambitious.

Here, then, is a question: How do the principles and attitudes that undergird our military system actually suit twenty-first-century America? And if they don’t, what are the implications of clinging to such a system? Finally, what alternative principles might form a more reasonable basis for raising, organizing, supporting, and employing our armed forces?

Spoiler alert: Let me acknowledge right now that I consider our present-day military system irredeemably flawed and deeply harmful. For proof we need look no further than the conduct of our post-9/11 wars, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

These myriad undertakings of the last nearly 17 years have subjected our military system to a comprehensive real-world examination. Collectively, they have rendered a judgment on that system. And the judgment is negative. Put to the test, the American military system has failed.

And the cost so far? Trillions of dollars expended (with trillions more to come), thousands of American lives lost, tens of thousands of Americans grievously damaged, and even greater numbers of non-Americans killed, injured, and displaced.

One thing is certain: our wars have not brought about peace by even the loosest definition of the word.

A Military Report Card

There are many possible explanations for why our recent military record has been so dismal. One crucial explanation — perhaps the most important of all — relates to those seven principles that undergird our military system.

Let me review them in reverse order.

Principle 7, the military profession: Tally up the number of three- and four-star generals who have commanded the Afghan War since 2001. It’s roughly a dozen. None of them has succeeded in bringing it to a successful conclusion. Nor does any such happy ending seem likely to be in the offing anytime soon. The senior officers we expect to master war have demonstrated no such mastery.

The generals who followed one another in presiding over that war are undoubtedly estimable, well-intentioned men, but they have not accomplished the job for which they were hired. Imagine if you contracted with a dozen different plumbers — each highly regarded — to fix a leaking sink in your kitchen and you ended up with a flooded basement. You might begin to think that there’s something amiss in the way that plumbers are trained and licensed. Similarly, perhaps it’s time to reexamine our approach to identifying and developing very senior military officers.

Or alternatively, consider this possibility: Perhaps our theory of war as an enterprise where superior generalship determines the outcome is flawed. Perhaps war cannot be fully mastered, by generals or anyone else.

It might just be that war is inherently unmanageable. Take it from Winston Churchill, America’s favorite confronter of evil. “The statesman who yields to war fever,” Churchill wrote, “must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

If Churchill is right, perhaps our expectations that senior military professionals will tame war — control the uncontrollable — are misplaced. Perhaps our military system should put greater emphasis on avoiding war altogether or at least classifying it as an option to be exercised with great trepidation, rather than as the political equivalent of a handy-dandy, multi-functional Swiss Army knife.

Principle 6, organizing our forces to emphasize global power projection: Reflect for a moment on the emerging security issues of our time. The rise of China is one example. A petulant and over-armed Russia offers a second. Throw in climate change and mushrooming cyber-threats and you have a daunting set of problems. It’s by no means impertinent to wonder about the relevance of the current military establishment to these challenges.

Every year the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars to maintain and enhance the lethality of a force configured for conventional power projection and to sustain the global network of bases that goes with it. For almost two decades, that force has been engaged in a futile war of attrition with radical Islamists that has now spread across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa.

I don’t know about you, but I worry more about the implications of China’s rise and Russian misbehavior than I do about Islamic terrorism. And I worry more about changing weather patterns here in New England or somebody shutting down the electrical grid in my home town than I do about what Beijing and Moscow may be cooking up. Bluntly put, our existing military system finds us focused on the wrong problem set.

We need a military system that accurately prioritizes actual and emerging threats. The existing system does not. This suggests the need for radically reconfigured armed services, with the hallowed traditions of George Patton, John Paul Jones, Billy Mitchell, and Chesty Puller honorably but permanently retired.

Principle 5, paying — or not paying — for America’s wars: If you want it, you should be willing to pay for it. That hoary axiom ought to guide our military system as much as it should our personal lives. Saddling Millennials or members of Generation Z with the cost of paying for wars mostly conceived and mismanaged by my fellow Baby Boomers strikes me as downright unseemly.

One might expect the young to raise quite a ruckus over such an obvious injustice. In recent weeks, we’ve witnessed their righteous anger over the absence of effective gun controls in this country. That they aren’t comparably incensed about the misuse of guns by their own contemporaries deployed to distant lands represents a real puzzle, especially since they’re the ones who will ultimately be stuck with the bill.

Principles 4 and 3, the role of Congress and the authority of the commander-in-chief: Whatever rationale may once have existed for allowing the commander-in-chief to circumvent the Constitution’s plainly specified allocation of war powers to Congress should long since have lapsed. Well before Donald Trump became president, a responsible Congress would have reasserted its authority to declare war. That Trump sits in the Oval Office and now takes advice from the likes of John Bolton invests this matter with great urgency.

Surely President Trump’s bellicose volatility drives home the point that it’s past time for Congress to assert itself in providing responsible oversight regarding all aspects of U.S. military policy. Were it to do so, the chances of fixing the defects permeating our present military system would improve appreciably.

Of course, the likelihood of that happening is nil until the money changers are expelled from the temple. And that won’t occur until Americans who are not beholden to the military-industrial complex and its various subsidiaries rise up, purge the Congress of its own set of complexes, and install in office people willing to do their duty. And that brings us back to…

Principles 2 and 1, the existing relationship between the American people and their military and our reliance on a so-called all-volunteer force: Here we come to the heart of the matter.

I submit that the relationship between the American people and their military is shot through with hypocrisy. It is, in fact, nothing short of fraudulent. Worse still, most of us know it, even if we are loath to fess up. In practice, the informal mandate to “support the troops” has produced an elaborate charade. It’s theater, as phony as Donald Trump’s professed love for DACA recipients.

If Americans were genuinely committed to supporting the troops, they would pay a great deal more attention to what President Trump and his twenty-first-century predecessors have tasked those troops to accomplish — with what results and at what cost. Of course, that would imply doing more than cheering and waving the flag on cue. Ultimately, the existence of the all-volunteer force obviates any need for such an effort. It provides Americans with an ample excuse for ignoring our endless wars and allowing our flawed military system to escape serious scrutiny.

Having outsourced responsibility for defending the country to people few of us actually know, we’ve ended up with a military system that is unfair, undemocratic, hugely expensive, and largely ineffective, not to mention increasingly irrelevant to the threats coming our way. The perpetuation of that system finds us mired in precisely the sort of long, costly, inconclusive wars that sap the collective strength of a nation and may bring about its premature decline.

The root cause of our predicament is the all-volunteer force. Only when we ordinary citizens conclude that we have an obligation to contribute to the country’s defense will it become possible to devise a set of principles for raising, organizing, supporting, and employing U.S. forces that align with our professed values and our actual security requirements.

If Stormy Daniels can figure out when an existing contract has outlived its purpose, so can the rest of us.

https://ghionjournal.com/tuckers-prudence/

Tucker’s Prudence: When Fox News Becomes the Voice of Reason
BY TEODROSE FIKRE ON APRIL 13, 2018
We have truly arrived at a weird time in our political discourse when Fox News is setting the standard for sensibility in mainstream media. Grant it, this is not saying much given the sorry state of corporate journalism. However, I must give credit where credit is due. In a time where pundits, politicians and media personalities are leading a warmonger parade and insanely pushing a confrontation with Russia, one lonely voice rose from the ashes of sociopaths to inject sanity into the public square.

I’m talking about Tucker Carlson and the sober assessment that he proffered on his show a few days ago (watch video below). I’ll let you watch the video for yourself but just know what he said is a radical departure from the bluster of chicken hawks who willing to fight until the last drop of other people’s blood in order to perpetuate an endless policy of war and capital theft around the world. There is a reason I’m so hard on mainstream media; at every corner we are being inundated with the blathering of military-financial complex shills.

But at least on one day, someone in mainstream media chose a different option. This is not to cast my lot with Fox News nor am I changing my mind about corporate media as a whole. I still stand by my position that news is not news as long as journalists are getting paid by the very powers they are supposed to be checking.
Fox News is still in the business of presenting news through partisan filters, which is why the position that Tucker took in speaking against a rush to war with Syria so astounding. CLICK TO TWEET

Tucker criticized Donald Trump and both sides of the political aisle for absurdly pursuing a course that could end with nuclear bombs landing in Moscow, DC and all cities in between. In the industry of corporate media, it truly does take courage to divert from the business model that has made Fox News one of the highest grossing media companies in the world. This is why mainstream journalists and pundits are more than willing to go along with the corporate line instead of questioning the words they are being force fed on teleprompters. There is too much money being made from ad revenues and Wall Street contributions to dare question authority.

It usually does not end well for those who don’t kowtow to the company line. Can we say Dan Rather? Which then begs the question: what exactly inspired this sudden defiance from Tucker and why did he decide to speak against the madness of yellow journalists who are pushing yet another war. Only time will tell. When it comes to mainstream media, I have learned to be very hesitant and observe for a long time before I arrive at a final decision. However, at least on this Friday, I will give credit to a mainstream reporter who finally did his job and questioned the insanity of establishment voices. Hope more journalists decide to find their voice and speak against the coalition of the killing who are cashing their checks as bodies are dropping in this ongoing crimes against humanity. #TuckerPrudence