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“Scant public interest yields ceaseless wars to nowhere”
“Straus Military Reform Project – Center for Defense Information at POGO”
“It turns out that my spending four years on an
amusement-park midway trying to separate marks from their money was
basic training for the nearly 40 years I spent reporting on the U.S.
military.
Both involve suckers and suckees. One just costs a lot more
money, and could risk the future of United States instead of a teddy
bear.
But after 15 years of covering U.S. defense for daily
newspapers in Washington, and 23 more for Time magazine until last
December, it’s time to share what I’ve learned. I’m gratified that the
good folks at the nonpartisan Project On Government Oversight, through
their Straus Military Reform Project, are providing me this weekly
soapbox to comment on what I’ve come to see as the military-industrial
circus.
As ringmaster, I can only say: Boy, are we being taken to
the cleaners. And it’s not so much about money as it is about value. Too
much of today’s U.S. fighting forces look like it came from Tiffany’s,
with Walmart accounting for much of the rest. There’s too little Costco,
or Amazon Prime.
There was a chance, however slight, that President Trump
would blaze a new trail on U.S. national security. Instead, he has
simply doubled down.
We have let the Pentagon become the engine of its own status quo.
For too long, the two political parties have had Pavlovian
responses when it comes to funding the U.S. military (and make no
mistake about it: military funding has trumped military strategy for
decades). Democrats have long favored shrinking military spending as a
share of the federal budget, while Republicans yearn for the days when
it accounted for a huge chunk of U.S. government spending. Neither is
the right approach. Instead of seeing the Pentagon as the way to defend
against all threats, there needs to be a fresh, long-overdue accounting
of what the real threats are, and which of those are best addressed by
military means.
The Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, which
is supposed to do just that every four years, has become an engine of
the status quo. The Pentagon today is little more than a self-licking
ice cream cone, dedicated in large measure to its growth and
preservation.
Congress is a willing accomplice, refusing to shutter
unneeded military bases due to the job losses they’d mean back home. The
nuclear triad remains a persistent Cold War relic (even former defense secretary Bill Perry wants to scrap it),
with backers of subs, bombers and ICBMs embracing one another against
their real threat: a hard-nosed calculus on the continuing wisdom of
maintaining thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.
Unfortunately, it’s getting worse as partisan enmity grows.
It’s quaint to recall the early congressional hearings I covered (Where
have you gone, Barry Goldwater?), when lawmakers would solemnly declare
that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” The political opposition’s
reactions to Jimmy Carter’s failed raid to rescue U.S. hostages held in
Iran in 1980 that killed eight U.S. troops, and to the loss of 241 U.S.
troops on Ronald Reagan’s peacekeeping mission in Beirut in 1983, was
tempered.
But such grim events have been replaced Hillary Clinton’s
Benghazi and Donald Trump’s Jan. 29 special-ops raid in Yemen. Rancid
rancor by both sides cheapens the sacrifice of the five Americans who
died. It only adds a confusing welter of new rules designed to ensure
they aren’t repeated.
Yet mistakes are a part of every military
operation, and an unwillingness to acknowledge that fact, and act
accordingly, leads to pol-mil paralysis. It’s amazing that the deaths of
Glen Doherty, William “Ryan” Owens, Sean Smith, Chris Stevens and
Tyrone Woods seem to have generated more acrimony and second-guessing
than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which 6,908 U.S. troops have died.
There is today a fundamental disconnect between the nation
and its wars. We saw it in President Obama’s persistent leeriness when
it came to the use of military force, and his successor’s preoccupation
with spending and symbolism instead of strategy. In his speech to
Congress Feb. 28, Trump mentioned the heroism of Navy SEAL Owens, but
didn’t say where he died (Yemen). Nor did he mention Afghanistan, Iraq
or Syria, where nearly 15,000 U.S. troops are fighting what Trump boldly
declared is “radical Islamic terrorism.”
But he did declare he is seeking “one of the largest
increases in national defense spending in American history.” His $54
billion boost would represent a 10% hike, and push the Pentagon
spending, already well beyond the Cold War average used to keep the
now-defunct Soviet Union at bay—even higher.
“We are going to have very soon the finest equipment in the
world,” Trump said from the deck of the yet-to-be-commissioned carrier
Gerald R. Ford on Thursday in Hampton, Va. “We’re going to start winning
again.” What’s surprising is Trump’s apparent ignorance that the U.S.
military has had, pound-for-pound, the world’s finest weapons since
World War II. What’s stunning is his apparent belief that better weapons
lead inevitably to victory. There is a long list of foes that knows
better.
It’s long past time for a tough look at what U.S. taxpayers
are getting for the $2 billion they spend on their military and
veterans every day. It would have been great if Trump had been willing
to scrub the Pentagon budget and reshape it for the 21st Century. But
the U.S. has been unwilling to do that ever since the Cold War ended
more than 25 years ago. Instead, it simply shrunk its existing military,
then turned on a cash gusher following 9/11.
I know many veterans who are angered that their sacrifice,
and that of buddies no longer around, have been squandered in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
I recall flying secretly into Baghdad in December 2003 with
then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The bantam SecDef declared on
that trip that the U.S. military had taken the “right approach” in
training Iraqi troops, and that they were fighting “well and
professionally.”
Last month, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the fifth man
to hold that job since Rumsfeld, declared in Baghdad that the U.S.
training of the Iraqi military is “developing very well.” His visit,
like Rumsfeld’s 14 years earlier, wasn’t announced in advance.
Even as Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Trump’s
national security adviser, tries to chart a path forward in Iraq, it’s
worth remembering that he earned his spurs 26 years ago as a captain in a
tank battle with Iraqi forces.
If we’re going to spend—few would call it an investment—$5
trillion fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Syria, and Yemen), don’t
we, as Americans, deserve a better return?
The problem is that the disconnect between the nation and its wars (and war-fighters) also includes us:
- Our representatives in Congress prefer not to get their hands bloodied in combat, so they avoid declaring war. They prefer to subcontract it out to the White House, and we let them get away with it.
- Through the Pentagon, we have subcontracted combat out to an all-volunteer force. Only about 1% of the nation has fought in its wars since 9/11. We praise their courage even as we thank God we have no real skin in the game.
- In turn, the uniformed military services have hired half their fighting forces from the ranks of private, for-profit contractors, who handle the critical support missions that used to be done by soldiers. The ruse conveniently lets the White House keep an artificially-low ceiling on the number of troops in harm’s way. We like those lower numbers.
- Finally, we have contracted out paying for much of the wars’ costs to our children, and grandchildren. We are using their money to fight our wars. They’ll be thanking us in 2050, for sure.
What Mark Thompson Has Learned
2By: Mark Thompson, National Security Analyst
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