(Editor’s Note: I wrote this piece to describe the military intellectual complex’s endless search for a new Cold War. But Donald Trump seems to be looking for a hot one.)
The Washington Post’s recent release of the “Afghanistan Papers”, which reported at least a significant portion of the near-infinite number of lies told to justify that long-running disaster, can be considered an act both admirable and risible, because until very recently the Post itself was aggressively selling the “NO RETREAT!” message that has kept us lost in the Himalayas for almost two decades, as exampled by this most gross bellow dated August 19, 2019, “Trump risks turning a chance for success in Afghanistan into a shameful failure”. As Kelley Beaucar Vlahos writes in the American Conservative, “The Afghanistan War’s #MeToo Moment”, we now have a chance to escape from the war because its authors are themselves getting tired of it. We’re beginning to reach the “I never understood why we were there in the first place” stage of withdrawal, and, frankly, people like myself and Kelley, who point out the hypocrisy of it all, aren’t helping. If we aren’t careful, the newly minted peacemakers will repent of their new-found wisdom and insist that Trump “stay the course”, leaving it to the next president make the graceful dismount. So there!
In fairness, it must be pointed out that President Obama was ready to make the withdrawal back in 2014, pushing himself as the “Peace President”—“he got us out of Iraq and he’s gonna get us out of Afghanistan too!”—when ISIS suddenly emerged out of nowhere and, by beheading two Americans, make anything smacking of “retreat” a political impossibility. “Peace” once more became a synonym for “weakness”.
The appetite of the American people for a “tough” foreign policy, as long as it doesn’t lead to too many body bags with Americans in them (other nationalities don’t count), is a major reason—though, most unfortunately, only one of many—why, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. spends almost as much on defense as it did when we actually had an enemy, a powerful nation armed with thousands of thermonuclear-armed missiles, along with a “revolutionary” message that resonated to tens of millions of people all around the globe regardless of nationality. Today no nation is interested in matching our military spending, and there is no “message”, no doctrine capable of linking two nations together, other than the “message” of self-interest. Yet the great American war machine continues to clank along, wasting literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a solution in search of a problem, though in fact its only real function is to provide comfortable careers for tens of thousands of professionals, who would otherwise have to seek useful rather than parasitic employment.
ISIS destroyed the first, delicate shoots of a possible rebirth of the Democratic Party as the “Peace Party”, leaving the “New Wilsonians” in charge, led, of course, by Ms. Woodrow herself, Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s defeat leaves the field open for new developments, the problem being that most liberals simply wish the rest of the world would go away. When pressed, they generally cling to the Democratic Party’s reflex reaction—“never let the Republicans get to the right of you”, and the simplest way to do that is to never raise the topic on your own accord. “Let’s talk about the environment, about reproductive rights, about health care, about racism. Let’s talk about things that matter!” For Republicans, of course, toughness is an end in itself—and certainly we have to be tougher than the goddamn Democrats!—and even Trump, with his occasional, crazy “Why are we there?” talk, makes sure—makes goddamn sure—to spend more—a lot more!—on defense than those goddamn sissy Democrats. And so we get a vicious cycle, the Republicans always striving to stay ahead of the Democrats and the Democrats determined not to get left behind.
Democrats—particularly Democratic elected officials—are further hobbled by the fact that while most of the rank and file cares little about foreign affairs, there is one group that cares a great deal, and they are, for the most part, the ones who write the checks. In what can only be described as a shockingly honest article in the New York Times by Nathan Thrall on the topic of—wait for it—“Money and Jews”, Thrall wrote that “Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors.” Not all of these checkwriters follow the AIPAC line of unstinting and unthinking support for Israel, but a lot of them do, and despite all the stress that has occurred between liberalism and Israel since 9/11, Democratic elected officials remain very leery of getting on the wrong side of AIPAC. Why look for trouble?
The Republicans, of course, have their own Jewish mega-donors, far more right wing than those in the Democratic camp, multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson being the most spectacular example. Adelson’s enormous wealth (currently around $35 billion, according to “Wealthy Gorilla”) has given him effective veto power over the Republican nominee for president. Further complicating matters, the other heavy hitting foreign lobby in DC is the supposed polar opposite of Israel, Saudi Arabia, although the two countries do have at least some of the same enemies. The Saudis function under the radar as much as possible, but use their enormous wealth to great effect. In his memoirs, former secretary of defense Robert Gates recalled his amazement when a Saudi prince told him that the U.S. ought to declare war on Iran, effectively as a favor to the Saudis. Gates seems to have forgotten that the U.S. had effectively done the same thing twice in the case of Iraq.
Both Israel and Saudi Arabia are able to further cement their relations with Congress by functioning as “mini-Pentagons”, buying billions of dollars in American weaponry annually, maintaining close contact with all the major defense contractors, who, of course, have facilities in hundreds of congressional districts across the country. In Washington, you always know who your friends are, because they will never let you forget it. It must be said that the Saudis, very sportingly, use their own money, while Israel largely recycles the $4 billion or so in foreign aid that it receives from the U.S. every year, such “foreign aid” functioning in large part as “more pork”, one reason why Congress is so willing to vote for it.
Considering all the pressure on both Republicans and Democrats to support increased defense spending no matter what, it's pleasantly surprising to see that there has been some kickback to the latest grotesque1 increase, from two senatorial outliers, Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders, though I wonder why Rand didn’t write his piece 10 years ago and why Bernie didn’t write his 20. I have been particularly ticked at Bernie because, despite his refreshingly non-interventionist approach to foreign affairs, until recently he continued to vote happily for intervention-enabling defense budgets, as long as little Vermont got its share of the take, his “argument” being, in effect, “Sure I’ll be a whore! As long as you pay me!” But if the new Trump budgets—up $120 billion this year over Obama’s final pork-fest—makes them gag, well, at least it’s something, something more than we get from 90% of the Beltway pack, who bark with Pavlovian approval whenever they hear the words “repairing our neglected defenses”, even though our defenses have never, ever been neglected, the Reagan and Bush increases as unjustified as Trump’s2 (I write about this a lot.).
Refreshingly, both senators point out that such massive overspending only makes it more likely that our “endless wars” overseas will remain endless, and Paul very shrewdly identifies provisions in the bill pushing “firm” policies (with regard to Syria and the “controversial” Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline being built by Russia) intended by their authors to irritate those nations, hopefully leading to more tension and thus more spending. Paul also points out (Sanders naturally does not) that Democrats hold wasteful defense spending hostage, in order to force Republicans to agree to wasteful domestic spending (though Republicans rarely complain too hard; if they didn’t increase such spending when they controlled both houses and the presidency, they never cut it).
Republicans have hypnotized themselves into believing that “more” defense spending is always “essential”, which is why they never fail to let themselves be blackmailed into accepting Democratic proposals for increased defense spending, while Democrats have hypnotized themselves into believing that poverty is always increasing (it isn’t) and that our infrastructure is always crumbling, though it wouldn’t be if it didn’t cost, for example, $3.4 billion to build one mile of subway track in New York City.3
In fact, of course, both parties really view their pet programs has pork barrels, as welfare, but welfare for the middle and upper classes rather than the poor. Two years ago the National Review ran a story by Mike Fredenburg, “How the Navy’s Zumwalt-Class Destroyers Ran Aground”, explaining how the Navy planned to buy 32 super destroyers for $46 billion and ended up buying 3 for $22 billion—$22 billion and counting, because the ships are not “ready” for combat, and even Mike, scathing though he is, doesn’t quite have the nerve to admit that these ships are, in fact, absolutely useless, except as devices for spending money, which they will do throughout their otherwise useless lives, much of which will surely be spent in dry dock, undergoing repairs, so that, at least, no one will be in danger of drowning.
Fredenburg remarks that, despite the vast shriveling in the program, both in the number of ships and their supposed capabilities, “absolutely no one has been held accountable for this budget-busting debacle. In fact, every one of the Navy’s four original project managers were almost immediately promoted from captain to admiral upon completing their stint in charge. And the lead contractors for the Zumwalt program — Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — have received additional hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of defense contracts — even as costs soared, schedules slipped, and capabilities declined.”
The promotions weren’t surprising; rather, they were well-earned. It was the project managers’ job both to make unrealistic promises of fantastic performance at bargain-basement prices to get the contracts made and then modify them endlessly, all in the same direction—that is to say, down—to keep the cash flowing. So it wasn’t a “debacle” at all! The system worked! Best of all, since the ships weren’t even needed—their supposed raison d'être of providing long-range (100 miles!) artillery support for land troops already filled far more competently by missiles and smart bombs launched from aircraft—the complete military failure of the program is entirely beside the point! So instead of saying that no one was held accountable, it is more accurate to say that everyone was held accountable—and justly rewarded for a job well done!
The waste associated with the entirely unnecessary Zumwalt program is “outrageous”—at least it should be—but it’s small potatoes—barely, in fact, a spud—compared with the true monsters of defense waste, like the $1.5 trillion jet fighter program, which Mr. Fredenburg crisply dismembers in the crisply titled “Mr. President, Cancel the F-35”, written back in 2017, which unfortunately though unsurprisingly failed to enlighten the newly installed Mr. Trump.
As Mr. Fredenberg points out, in 2017 the F-35 program had been in operation for close to 20 years without producing an operational plane. In June 2019, Andrew Cockburn provided an update in the Atlantic, “The Military-Industrial Virus”, his article making many of the same points as this one:
The F-35 first saw combat last year [2018], seventeen years after the program began. The Marines sent just six of them on their first deployment to the Middle East, and over several months only managed to fly, on average, one combat sortie per plane every three days. According to the Pentagon’s former chief testing official, had there been opposition, these “fighters” could not have survived without protection from other planes. The most expensive weapons program in history at a projected cost of $406 billion, the F-35 initially carried a radar whose frequent freezing required the pilot to regularly switch it on and off. While the radar problem was eventually corrected, the Air Force version of the plane still features an unacceptably inaccurate gun that remains to be fixed, though the Air Force claims to be working on it.
The F-35’s woes mimic those of its “big brothers”, the even more useless B-1 and B-2 bombers, and follow the same pattern: “advanced” design and technology that adds weight and decreases reliability, and also doesn’t work. The B-1, built by Ronald Reagan to teach sissy boy Jimmy Carter how a real man spends money, was not really a combat aircraft, since its offensive and defensive weapons systems could not operate at the same time. Like the F-35, the B-1 needs other aircraft to protect it, a strange “warrior” indeed. As I have frequently discussed at this site, in some detail—America’s “bomber follies” are always good for a laugh—the B-1 and B-2 have proven successively less airworthy than the 1950s-era B-52—and the incipient B-3 will surely prove to be the most finicky of all—so that when the U.S. actually needs a heavy bomber to, you know, bomb something, it relies for the most part on the B-52, built when we actually needed a heavy bomber. In fact, the Air Force is planning to retire both the B-1 and B-2 before the B-52, despite its antique design, in part to free up new money to waste on the B-3.
Fredenberg says that the central concept of the F-35, that it would rely on advanced technology to identify and destroy enemy fighters before coming into visual range, so that the enemy fighters would be destroyed by an enemy they couldn’t even see, has proved unworkable, meaning that the F-35 has to fight the old-fashioned way, via the human eye, and the F-35’s greater weight makes it slower and less maneuverable than aircraft 20 years its senior. In addition, the F-35’s “advanced” target detection technology allows other fighters to detect it, advertising its position rather than concealing it. And, in fact, Sebastien Sprenger, writing in “C4RISNET”, a seriously intense modern warfare information service, gives us the following piece, dated September 29, 2019: “Stealthy no more? A German radar vendor says it tracked the F-35 jet in 2018 — from a pony farm”:
German radar-maker Hensoldt claims to have tracked two F-35s for 150 kilometers following the 2018 Berlin Air Show in Germany in late April of that year. The company’s passive radar system, named TwInvis, is but one of an emerging generation of sensors and processors so sensitive and powerful that it promises to find previously undetectable activities in a given airspace.
After devastating the F-35, Fredenberg followed his assault with a flight into the wild blue yonder, “‘Simplicate and Add Lightness!’ — Designing the F-45 Mustang II”, earnestly explaining how the U.S. Air Force could create a fighter fleet that could successfully engage a “peer” enemy, i.e., China or Russia. As Fredenberg explains, our “glorious” victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, which strangely have “won” us nothing, were dependent on the fact that our military totally outclassed the opposition. But how would we defeat a “real” enemy, one with capabilities approximately equal to ours?
Here’s the thing, Mike. If we actually starting exchanging punches with either nation, the conflict wouldn’t be fought with airplanes and ships. It would be fought with intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Back in 2015, for some obscure reason, I took it upon myself to read Thinking About National Security, a book by Harold Brown, secretary of defense for most of Jimmy Carter’s single term in office, published in 1983. I came to learn (I guess), but stayed to scoff, particularly “amused” by Brown’s defense of America’s chemical weapons program. Sure, all our war games showed that any significant engagement with Soviet forces—and use of the Soviets of nerve gas on our boys would most certainly count as such—would quickly lead to an all-out nuclear exchange—but, but, but, well, goddamn it, they have them so we have to have them and that’s all she wrote! Don’t ask so many goddamn smartass questions!
Several years ago, CIA/Department of Defense mouthpiece David Ignatius, nominally employed by the Washington Post, offered a pulse-pounding piece, “America is no longer guaranteed military victory. These weapons could change that.”
In the world envisioned by Pentagon planners, the United States could field an array of drones in the sky, unmanned submarines beneath the seas and advanced systems on the ground that could overwhelm an adversary’s battle-management networks. Like the two previous “offsets,” battlefield nuclear weapons in the 1950s and precise conventional weapons in the 1970s, this one would seek to restore lost U.S. military dominance.
Yes, I’m sure either China or Russia would be “happy” to be defeated in an all-out conventional war and would never think of resorting to nuclear weapons, choosing instead a war relying on all those high tech weapons that, as both Mr. Fredenberg and I have pointed out, never work the way they are supposed to. But that doesn’t matter to the people who tell Mr. Ignatius what to write, because, of course, none of these high-tech machines are really designed to do anything except spend money and garner promotions!
During much of the nineteenth century, after each development of new and more fearsome weapons, the inventors would often express the hope that “now” war would be too terrible for rational men to even consider, much less initiate—pious hopes indeed, and always doomed to disappointment, until the invention of first the atomic and then the hydrogen bomb. As Henry Kissinger (somewhere) complained, the trouble with nuclear weapons is that they’re so damned powerful everyone’s afraid to use them. Can’t you make one that will kill, you know, 1,000 people—what you might call manageable carnage—instead of 100,000?
Well, you can’t. As a result, there was simply no reason for the U.S. to possess all the cutting-edge—cutting-edge yet totally dysfunctional—weaponry that the Pentagon, or even the “practical” Mr. Fredenberg, can dream up. Nothing more is needed than the “token” nuclear deterrent similar to that maintained by China (about 250), rather than the 3800 currently in our “stockpile”. As I am now repeating for the fourth or the fifth time,4 President Eisenhower, back in the day, used to say “There won’t be a war. Khrushchev knows that, no matter what, I can take out Moscow. And there’s nothing he wants so much he’ll give up Moscow to get it.” The Cuban Missile Crisis almost proved a disastrous exception to this rule, thanks to gross miscalculations on both sides, but fortunately it proved a “learning experience” for both as well.
Four-star Marine general Anthony Zinni, who was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1965, experiencing really the “second half” of the Cold War, summed up the endless prepping for the “Big One” this way.
Problem was, we could never figure just how this particular war would actually start. After playing a bazillion war games at the Naval War College and other places, I still could not come up with a logical or convincing way such a war would kick off. It was just too hard to show why the Soviets would want to conquer a burning, devastated Europe, or how that could possibly benefit the communists in any way. So we would just gloss over the way the miserable war got started, jump into the middle of things, and play on. The Cold War was ever-present, and it was great for justifying programs, systems, and force structure—but, deep down inside, no one seriously believed that it would actually happen.5
Now, 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the battle continues—the battle to continue to justify “programs, systems, and force structure”, even though there is no great adversary laboring to achieve “revolution” around the world. Which is why, perversely, our Great American War Machine needs its Afghanistans. To loop back to Ms. Vlahos’ article once more, “The Afghanistan War’s #MeToo Moment”, it’s true that, as she says, the Washington Post,
in releasing the Afghanistan Papers they have not only unshackled themselves from further servitude to the lies, but the newspaper has seemingly liberated hundreds if not thousands of military personnel, soldiers, contractors, diplomats and other Deep State blobbies who, sensing safety in numbers, are now, after nearly 18 years, ready to call out the emperor’s naked adiposity.
But, one has to add, unlike the original #MeToo movement, here the witnesses and the accused are the same: the “naked adiposity” being exposed belongs to the Post itself, along with “military personnel, soldiers, contractors, diplomats and other Deep State blobbies”, who, except for the actual grunts in the field, all did well in the war, just like the captains who made admiral for shepherding the useless Zumwalt-class destroyers into existence. No one is going to be punished for the useless and bloody Afghan War, not George Bush, who let it linger for no good reason, not Barack Obama, who expanded it for no good reason, and not Donald Trump, who has left troop levels remain at the level they were when he took office (40,000), while civilian casualties reached an all-time high in the third quarter of 2019 (1,174 civilians killed and 3,139 wounded).
The “war” continues, not because there is any “threat” to the U.S. that might emerge in Afghanistan, but because we have not completely subdued it to our will—this is the true measure of foreign policy “success” that is applied by everyone from John Bolton to Samantha Power. Bolton wants to kill everyone, and Power wants to “save” everyone, but somehow the results are the same.
I started this rambling exercise in sustained kvetching before our new Cold War heated up in both North Korea and the Middle East, both as a result of Donald Trump’s maximal demands/minimal intelligence approach to foreign affairs. Because the Democrats are not in power, it’s “possible”, though far from certain, that Democratic candidates will argue for a significantly less aggressive foreign policy. The fact that Congress has passed several resolutions seeking to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, productive of nothing but corpses, is heartening, though both Trump’s vetoes and the failure of the Democratic leadership to actually halt funding for the war are, one would have to say, typical. As a Democratic congressman said a long time ago, “If you let us vote both ways on an issue here, we will.”
Unsurprisingly, the Democratic leadership traded away the opportunity to actually change U.S. foreign policy for the better in exchange for domestic goodies. Foreigners don’t vote, especially dead ones.6 One can hope that there is sufficient war weariness in the American people—a war weariness to which Trump has fitfully appealed—to discourage the Trump administration from acting on their fantasies of absolute power. One can hope because one can always hope. But our giant war machine has gained so much momentum that it will never slow of its own accord. Unless and until there is a serious clash between domestic and defense spending—specifically over Social Security and Medicare—old man war machine will jes’ keep rollin’ along.
1. Speaking of reflexes, I seem to use “grotesque” almost reflexively. Well, my friends, we live in grotesque times. I wish I didn’t mean that, but I do. “Etymonline”, a genuine blessing in this otherwise awkward, even ungainly, age, tells me that “grotesque” comes from the Middle French crotesque, from the Italian grottesco, “from a grotto”. Says Etymonline: ‘The explanation that the word first was used of paintings found on the walls of Roman ruins revealed by excavation (Italian pittura grottesca) is "intrinsically plausible," according to OED [Oxford English Dictionary].’ I have to wonder how OED would distinguish between an explanation that was "intrinsically plausible" and one that was, in contrast, extrinsically so.
2. All good Republicans, and many Democrats, believe, of course, that Ronald Reagan literally “saved America” by radically boosting defense spending after he assumed office. In fact, I recall the chair of the joint chiefs being asked at a congressional hearing shortly after Reagan’s election which nation’s deterrence he would prefer, that of the U.S. versus that of the U.S.S.R. After an awkward pause, he admitted that he thought our package was superior. The collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the great events of history but sadly convinced many that if we simply spent enough, and were “firm enough”, we could impose our will on the entire world. And such has not been the case.
3. At the state and local level, all government programs have a strong tendency to be captured by the government employees who run them and to serve first of all as full employment programs for government workers. Progressive city mayors like Bill de Blasio can never figure out why, for example, the New York Housing Authority benefits everyone except the poor—because the poor are the least politically potent group involved. Just like the military, progressives make glowing promises about grand new projects, which inevitably come in years behind schedules and millions, if not billions, of dollars over budget, and vastly shrunken in size. Because the purpose was to spend money; the purported project, whatever it was, was simply a lure to set the hook.
4. I have written it so many times I have learned how to spell “Khrushchev”. Lots of aiches.
5. Battle Ready, by Tom Clancy. The book, written by “the” Tom Clancy, is largely about Zinni rather than by him, but also includes a chapter, “The Calling”, written by Zinni himself, including the text here. Tony Koltz is listed as third author. Zinni was forced out of service during the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the second Bush administration. In Battle Ready he says “In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence, and corruption. False rationales presented as a justification; a flawed strategy; lack of planning; the unnecessary alienation of our allies; the underestimation of the task; the unnecessary distraction from real threats; and the unbearable strain dumped on our overstretched military, all of these caused me to speak out.” It is “interesting” that all of this is omitted on the Wikipedia page devoted to the general. Zinni was scarcely a dove, but objected, strenuously, to the failure of other military leaders to insist that the force the Bush administration planned on sending, and did send, to Iraq was far too small to accomplish the task set before it. The administration, of course, “planned” for a small war because it feared, with good reason, that planning for a “real war”—300,000 troops, a total expenditure mounting towards $400-$500 billion—would prove self-defeating.
6. The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison has kept watch over the Yemen War in all its horrible detail. It was one of many of Barack Obama’s foreign policy failings that he gave the Saudis virtually unconditional U.S. support for this useless war. Trump, one can say, has discarded the “virtually”.
