How the Pentagon Became Walmart

“FOREIGN POLICY”  By Rosa Brooks

“Asking warriors to do everything poses great dangers for our country — and the military.

Our armed services have become the one-stop shop for America’s policymakers.

Here’s the vicious circle in which we’ve trapped ourselves: As we face novel security threats from novel quarters — emanating from nonstate terrorist networks, from cyberspace, and from the impact of poverty, genocide, or political repression, for instance — we’ve gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of “war,” thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks. But viewing more and more threats as “war” brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion — and its reduced protections for basic rights.

Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere, so we freeze or cut spending on civilian diplomacy and development programs. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.

“If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war, and “war rules” appear to apply everywhere, displacing peacetime laws and norms. When everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission, displacing civilian institutions and undermining their credibility while overloading the military.

More is at stake than most of us realize. Recall Shakespeare’s Henry V:

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage… 

In war, we expect warriors to act in ways that would be immoral and illegal in peacetime. But when the boundaries around war and the military expand and blur, we lose our ability to determine which actions should be praised and which should be condemned.

For precisely this reason, humans have sought throughout history to draw sharp lines between war and peace — and between the role of the warrior and the role of the civilian. Until less than a century ago, for instance, most Western societies maintained that wars should be formally declared, take place upon clearly delineated battlefields, and be fought by uniformed soldiers operating within specialized, hierarchical military organizations. In different societies and earlier times, humans developed other rituals to delineate war’s boundaries, from war drums and war sorcery to war paint and complex initiation rites for warriors.

Like a thousand other human tribes before us, we modern Americans also engage in elaborate rituals to distinguish between warriors and civilians: Our soldiers shear off their hair, display special symbols on their chests, engage in carefully choreographed drill ceremonies, and name their weapons for fearsome spirits and totem animals (the Hornet, the Black Hawk, the Reaper). And despite the changes ushered in by the 9/11 attacks, most of us view war as a distinct and separate sphere, one that shouldn’t intrude into our everyday world of offices, shopping malls, schools, and soccer games. Likewise, we relegate war to the military, a distinct social institution that we simultaneously lionize and ignore. War, we like to think, is an easily recognizable exception to the normal state of affairs and the military an institution that can be easily, if tautologically, defined by its specialized, war-related functions.

But in a world rife with transnational terrorist networks, cyberwarriors, and disruptive nonstate actors, this is no longer true. Our traditional categories — war and peace, military and civilian — are becoming almost useless.

In a cyberwar or a war on terrorism, there can be no boundaries in time or space: We can’t point to the battlefield on a map or articulate circumstances in which such a war might end. We’re no longer sure what counts as a weapon, either: A hijacked passenger plane? A line of computer code? We can’t even define the enemy: Though the United States has been dropping bombs in Syria for almost two years, for instance, no one seems sure if our enemy is a terrorist organization, an insurgent group, a loose-knit collection of individuals, a Russian or Iranian proxy army, or perhaps just chaos itself.

We’ve also lost any coherent basis for distinguishing between combatants and civilians: Is a Chinese hacker a combatant? What about a financier for Somalia’s al-Shabab, or a Pakistani teen who shares extremist propaganda on Facebook, or a Russian engineer paid by the Islamic State to maintain captured Syrian oil fields?

When there’s a war, the law of war applies, and states and their agents have great latitude in using lethal force and other forms of coercion. Peacetime law is the opposite, emphasizing individual rights, due process, and accountability.

When we lose the ability to draw clear, consistent distinctions between war and not-war, we lose any principled basis for making the most vital decisions a democracy can make: Which matters, if any, should be beyond the scope of judicial review? When can a government have “secret laws”? When can the state monitor its citizens’ phone calls and email? Who can be imprisoned and with what degree, if any, of due process? Where, when, and against whom can lethal force be used? Should we consider U.S. drone strikes in Yemen or Libya the lawful wartime targeting of enemy combatants or nothing more than simple murder?

When we heedlessly expand what we label “war,” we also lose our ability to make sound decisions about which tasks we should assign to the military and which should be left to civilians.

Today, American military personnel operate in nearly every country on Earth — and do nearly every job on the planet. They launch raids and agricultural reform projects, plan airstrikes and small-business development initiatives, train parliamentarians and produce TV soap operas. They patrol for pirates, vaccinate cows, monitor global email communications, and design programs to prevent human trafficking.

Many years ago, when I was in law school, I applied for a management consulting job at McKinsey & Co. During one of the interviews, I was given a hypothetical business scenario: “Imagine you run a small family-owned general store. Business is good, but one day you learn that Walmart is about to open a store a block away. What do you do?”

“Roll over and die,” I said immediately.

The interviewer’s pursed lips suggested that this was the wrong answer, and no doubt a plucky mom-and-pop operation wouldn’t go down without a fight: They’d look for a niche, appeal to neighborhood sentiment, or maybe get artisanal and start serving hand-roasted chicory soy lattes. But we all know the odds would be against them: When Walmart shows up, the writing is on the wall.

Like Walmart, today’s military can marshal vast resources and exploit economies of scale in ways impossible for small mom-and-pop operations. And like Walmart, the tempting one-stop-shopping convenience it offers has a devastating effect on smaller, more traditional enterprises — in this case, the State Department and other U.S. civilian foreign-policy agencies, which are steadily shrinking into irrelevance in our ever-more militarized world. The Pentagon isn’t as good at promoting agricultural or economic reform as the State Department or the U.S. Agency for International Development — but unlike our civilian government agencies, the Pentagon has millions of employees willing to work insane hours in terrible conditions, and it’s open 24/7.

It’s fashionable to despise Walmart — for its cheap, tawdry goods, for its sheer vastness and mindless ubiquity, and for the human pain we suspect lies at the heart of the enterprise. Most of the time, we prefer not to see it and use zoning laws to exile its big-box stores to the commercial hinterlands away from the center of town. But as much as we resent Walmart, most of us would be hard-pressed to live without it.

As the U.S. military struggles to define its role and mission, it evokes similarly contradictory emotions in the civilian population. Civilian government officials want a military that costs less but provides more, a military that stays deferentially out of strategy discussions but remains eternally available to ride to the rescue. We want a military that will prosecute our ever-expanding wars but never ask us to face the difficult moral and legal questions created by the eroding boundaries between war and peace.

We want a military that can solve every global problem but is content to remain safely quarantined on isolated bases, separated from the rest of us by barbed wire fences, anachronistic rituals, and acres of cultural misunderstanding. Indeed, even as the boundaries around war have blurred and the military’s activities have expanded, the U.S. military itself — as a human institution — has grown more and more sharply delineated from the broader society it is charged with protecting, leaving fewer and fewer civilians with the knowledge or confidence to raise questions about how we define war or how the military operates.

It’s not too late to change all this.

No divine power proclaimed that calling something “war” should free us from the constraints of morality or common sense or that only certain tasks should be the proper province of those wearing uniforms. We came up with the concepts, definitions, laws, and institutions that now trap and confound us — and they’re no more eternal than the rituals and categories used by any of the human tribes that have gone before us.

We don’t have to accept a world full of boundary-less wars that can never end, in which the military has lost any coherent sense of purpose or limits. If the moral and legal ambiguity of U.S.-targeted killings bothers us, or we worry about government secrecy or indefinite detention, we can mandate new checks and balances that transcend the traditional distinctions between war and peace. If we don’t like the simultaneous isolation and Walmartization of our military, we can change the way we recruit, train, deploy, and treat those who serve, change the way we define the military’s role, and reinvigorate our civilian foreign-policy institutions.

After all, few generals actually want to preside over the military’s remorseless Walmartization: They too fear that, in the end, the nation’s over-reliance on an expanding military risks destroying not only the civilian competition but the military itself. They worry that the armed services, under constant pressure to be all things to all people, could eventually find themselves able to offer little of enduring value to anyone.

Ultimately, they fear that the U.S. military could come to resemble a Walmart on the day after a Black Friday sale: stripped almost bare by a society both greedy for what it can provide and resentful of its dominance, with nothing left behind but demoralized employees and some shoddy mass-produced items strewn haphazardly around the aisles.”

How the Pentagon Became Walmart

Arming The World For Warfare – US Foreign Military Sales Set New Record, Up 55.9 Percent in 2023

 

‘AIR AND SPACE FORCES MAGAZINE’ By John A. Tirpak

“The U.S. transferred a record $80.9 billion worth of military equipment and services to other countries in fiscal 2023, a 55.9 percent increase over the fiscal 2022 level of $50.9 billion, according to the U.S. State Department.”

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“This is the highest annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners,” a State Department release said.

The total marks progress in State’s goal of accelerating FMS cases after an internal review last year of how the process could be sped up.

Of the overall figure, $62.25 billion was funded by “U.S. ally and partner nations,” while the rest was financed by the U.S. The roughly $18 billion remainder includes about $4 billion through the foreign military financing program and $14.68 billion for State Department programs such as anti-narcotics trafficking enforcement and de-mining operations, as well as the Pentagon Defense Building Capacity programs such as the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.

From 2021-23, FMS sales averaged $55.9 billion per year, a 21.9 percent increase over the 2020-22 average of $45.8 billion per year.

The State Department provides this three-year rolling average because of the “multiyear implementation timeframe for many arms transfers and defense trade cases,” it noted in its release.

Poland was the single largest FMS customer in fiscal 2023, with over $30 billion in transfers.

Prominent examples of FMS sales in 2023 included:

• Poland: AH-64E Apache attack helicopter, $12 billion

• Poland: High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), $10 billion

• Germany: CH-47F Chinook Helicopters, $8.5 billion

• Australia: C-130J-30 air transports, $6.35 billion

• Canada: P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, $5.9 billion

• Czech Republic: F-35 fighters and munitions, $5.62 billion

• Republic of Korea: F-35 fighters, $5.06 billion

• Poland: Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, $4.0 billion

• Poland: M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, $3.75 billion

• Kuwait: National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) Medium-Range Air Defense System (MRADS), $3.0 billion

• Germany: AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM), $2.90 billion

The State Department also provided figures for Direct Commercial Sales, which are not managed by the FMS program but which require congressional approval. The total of licensed Direct Commercial Sales from U.S. companies to foreign customers was $157.5 billion in fiscal 2023, a 2.5 percent increase from the $153.6 billion recorded in fiscal 2022.

The three-year rolling average for DCS was $124.9 billion, a 16.5 percent change from the previous three-year period.

DCS “includes the value of hardware, services, and technical data authorized from exports, temporary imports, re-export, re-transfers and brokering,” according to a State press release.

State also noted that the number of DCS cases adjudicated rose six percent in fiscal 2023 versus 2022, from 22,138 to 23,474. The “Total Licensed Entities” involved also rose 2.9 percent, reflecting a wider defense industrial base doing defense business.

Prominent examples of DCS sales in 2023 included:

• Italy: F-35 wing assemblies and sub-assemblies, $2.8 billion

• India: GE F414-INS6 engine hardware, $1.8 billion

• Singapore: F100 engines and spare parts, $1.2 billion

• South Korea: F100 engines and spare parts, $1.2 billion

• Norway/Ukraine: NASAMS, Norway and Ukraine Ministries of Defence, $1.2 billion

• Saudi Arabia: Patriot Guided Missiles, $1 billion

• State noted that it follows “a holistic approach when reviewing arms transfer decisions,” as they will have “potential long-run implications for regional and global security.”

The “holistic approach includes consideration” of U.S. conventional arms transfer policies and takes into account “political, social, human rights, civilian protection, economic, military, nonproliferation, technology security, and end use factors to determine the appropriate provision of military equipment and the licensing of direct commercial sales of defense articles to U.S. allies and partners.”

Foreign Military Sales New Record

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

John A. Tirpak is Editorial Director of Air & Space Forces Magazine, with more than 25 years at the publication and more than 34 years in defense journalism. He has written for Aviation Week & Space Technology, Aerospace Daily, and Jane’s, reporting from all 50 U.S. states and 25 countries. He has been recognized with awards for journalistic excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Aviation and Space Writer’s Association, the Association of Business Publications International, and was the recipient of the 2018 Gill Robb Wilson Award in Arts and Letters from the Air & Space Forces Association. He has lectured at the National War College and did postgraduate research at the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum.