The American Military Uncontained
Chaos Spread, Casualties Inflicted, Missions Unaccomplished
By William J. AstoreMay 15, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Tom
Dispatch" - It’s 1990. I’m a young captain in the U.S.
Air Force. I’ve just witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, something I never
thought I’d see, short of a third world war. Right now I’m witnessing the slow
death of the Soviet Union, without the accompanying nuclear Armageddon so many
feared. Still, I’m slightly nervous as my military gears up for an unexpected
new campaign, Operation Desert Shield/Storm, to expel Iraqi autocrat Saddam
Hussein’s military from Kuwait. It’s a confusing moment. After all, the Soviet
Union was forever (until it wasn’t) and Saddam had been a stalwart U.S. friend,
his country a bulwark against the Iran of the Ayatollahs. (For anyone who
doubts that history, just check out the now-infamous 1983
photo of Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy for President Reagan, all
smiles and shaking hands with Saddam in Baghdad.) Still, whatever my anxieties,
the Soviet Union collapsed without a whimper and the campaign against Saddam’s
battle-tested forces proved to be a “cakewalk,” with ground combat over in a
mere 100 hours.
Think of it as the trifecta moment: Vietnam
syndrome vanquished forever, Saddam’s army destroyed, and the U.S. left
standing as the planet’s “sole superpower.”
Post-Desert Storm, the military of which I was a part stood
triumphant on a planet that was visibly ours and ours alone. Washington had won
the Cold War. It had won everything, in fact. End of story. Saddam admittedly
was still in power in Baghdad, but he had been soundly spanked. Not a single
peer enemy loomed on the horizon. It seemed as if, in the words of former U.N.
ambassador and uber-conservative Jeane
Kirkpatrick, the U.S. could return to being a normal country in normal
times.
What Kirkpatrick meant was that, with the triumph of freedom
movements in Central and Eastern Europe and the rollback of communism, the U.S.
military could return to its historical roots, demobilizing after its victory in
the Cold War even as a “new world order” was emerging. But it didn’t happen.
Not by a long shot. Despite all the happy talk back then about a “new
world order,” the U.S. military never gave a serious thought to becoming a
“normal” military for normal times. Instead, for our leaders, both military and
civilian, the thought process took quite a different turn. You might sum up
their thinking this way, retrospectively: Why should we demobilize or even
downsize significantly or rein in our global ambitions at a moment when we can
finally give them full expression? Why would we want a “peace dividend” when we
could leverage our military assets and become a global power the likes of which
the world has never seen, one that would put the Romans and the British in the
historical shade? Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer caught the spirit
of the moment in February 2001 when he
wrote, "America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power
in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a
position to reshape norms, alter expectations, and create new realities. How? By
unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will."
What I didn’t realize back then was: America’s famed
“containment policy” vis-à-vis the Soviet Union didn’t just contain that
superpower -- it contained us, too. With the Soviet Union gone, the U.S.
military was freed from containment. There was nowhere it couldn’t go and
nothing it couldn’t do -- or so the top officials of the Bush administration
came into power thinking, even before 9/11. Consider our
legacy military bases from the Cold War era that already spanned the globe
in an historically unprecedented way. Built largely to contain the Soviets,
they could be repurposed as launching pads for interventions of every sort.
Consider all those weapon systems meant to deter Soviet aggression. They could
be used to project power on a planet seemingly without rivals.
Now was the time to go for broke. Now was the time to go “all
in,” to borrow the title of Paula Broadwell’s fawning biography of her mentor
and lover, General David Petraeus. Under the circumstances, peace dividends
were for wimps. In 1993, Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under Bill
Clinton, caught the coming post-Cold War mood of twenty-first-century America
perfectly when she
challenged Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell angrily over what she
considered a too-cautious U.S. approach to the former Yugoslavia. "What's the
point of having this superb military that you're always talking about,” she
asked, “if we can't use it?"
Yet even as civilian leaders hankered to flex America’s
military muscle in unpromising places like Bosnia and Somalia in the 1990s, and
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen in this century, the military
itself has remained remarkably mired in Cold War thinking. If I could transport
the 1990 version of me to 2015, here’s one thing that would stun him a
quarter-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union: the force structure of
the U.S. military has changed remarkably little. Its
nuclear triad of land-based ICBMs, submarine-launched SLBMs, and
nuclear-capable bombers remains thoroughly intact. Indeed, it’s being updated
and enhanced at
mind-boggling expense (perhaps as high as a trillion dollars over the next
three decades). The U.S. Navy? Still built around large, super-expensive, and
vulnerable aircraft carrier task forces. The U.S. Air Force? Still
pursuing new, ultra-high-tech
strategic bombers and new, wildly expensive fighters and attack aircraft --
first
the F-22, now
the F-35, both
supremely disappointing. The U.S. Army? Still configured to fight
large-scale, conventional battles,
a surplus of M-1 Abrams tanks sitting in mothballs just in case they’re
needed to plug the Fulda Gap in Germany against a raging Red Army. Except it’s
2015, not 1990, and no mass of Soviet T-72 tanks remains poised to surge through
that gap.
Much
of our military today remains structured to meet and defeat a Soviet threat that
long ago ceased to exist. (Occasional sparring matches with Vladimir Putin’s
Russia in and around Ukraine do not add up to the heated “rumbles in the jungle”
we fought with the Soviet leaders of yesteryear.) And it’s not just a matter of
weaponry. Our military hierarchy remains wildly and
unsustainably top-heavy, with a Cold War-style cupboard of generals and
admirals, as if we were still stockpiling brass in case of another world war and
a further expansion of what is already
uncontestably the largest military on the planet. If you had asked me in
1990 what the U.S. military would look like in 2015, the one thing I wouldn’t
have guessed was that, in its force structure, it would look basically the
same.
This persistence of such Cold War structures and the thinking
that goes with them is a vivid illustration of military inertia, the plodding
last-war conservatism that is a common enough phenomenon in military history.
It’s also a reminder that the military-industrial-congressional-complex that
President Dwight Eisenhower first warned us about in 1961 remains in expansion
mode more than half a century later, with its taste for business as usual
(meaning, among other things, wildly expensive weapons systems). Above all,
though, it’s an illustration of something far more disturbing: the failure of
democratic America to seize the possibility of a less militarized world.
Today, it’s hard to recapture the heady optimism of 1990, the
idea that this country, as after any war, might at least begin to take steps to
demobilize, however modestly, to become a more peaceable land. That’s why 1990
should be considered the high-water mark of the U.S. military. At that moment,
we were poised on the brink of a new normalcy -- and then it all began to go
wrong. To understand how, it’s important to see not just what remained the
same, but also what began to change and just how we ended up with today’s mutant
military.
Paramilitaries Without, Militaries Within, Civilian
Torturers, and Assassins Withal
Put me back again in my slimmer, uniformed 1990 body and
catapult me for a second time to 2015. What do I see in this military moment
that surprises me? Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, for sure. Networked
computers everywhere and the reality of a military
preparing for “cyberwar.” Incessant talk of terrorism as America’s chief
threat. A revival, however haltingly, of counterinsurgency operations, or COIN,
a phenomenon abandoned in Vietnam with a stake through its heart (or so I
thought then). Uncontrolled and largely unaccountable mass surveillance of
civilian society that in the Cold War era would have been a hallmark of the
“Evil Empire.”
More than anything, however, what would truly have shocked the
1990 version of me is the almost unimaginable way the military has “privatized”
in the twenty-first century. The presence of paramilitary forces (mercenary
companies like DynCorp, the former
Blackwater, and Triple Canopy) and private corporations
like KBR doing typical military tasks like cooking and cleaning (what
happened to privates doing KP?), delivering the mail, and mounting guard duty on
military bases abroad; an American intelligence system that’s
filled to the brim with tens of thousands of private contractors; a new
Department of Defense called the Department of Homeland Security (“homeland”
being a word I would once have associated, to be blunt, with Nazi Germany) that
has also embraced paramilitaries and privatizers of every sort; the
rapid rise of a special operations community, by the tens of thousands, that
has come to constitute a vast, privileged,
highly secretive military caste within the larger armed forces; and, most
shocking of all, the public embrace of
torture and
assassination by America’s civilian leaders -- the very kinds of tactics and
techniques I associated in 1990 with the evils of communism.
Walking about in such a world in 2015, the 1990-me would truly
find himself a stranger in a strange land. This time-traveling Bill Astore’s
befuddlement could, I suspect, be summed up in an impolite sentiment expressed
in three letters: WTF?
Think about it. In 2015, so many of America's
"trigger-pullers" overseas are no longer, strictly speaking, professional
military. They’re mercenaries, guns for hire, or CIA drone pilots (some on loan
from the Air Force), or
warrior corporations and intelligence contractors looking to get in on a
piece of the action in a war on terror where progress is defined -- official
denials to the contrary -- by
body count, by the number of "enemy combatants" killed in drone or other
strikes.
Indeed, the very persistence of traditional Cold War
structures and postures within the “big” military has helped hide the full-scale
emergence of a new and dangerous mutant version of our armed forces. A
bewildering mish-mash of
special ops, civilian contractors (both armed and unarmed), and CIA and
other intelligence operatives, all plunged into a penumbra of secrecy, all
largely hidden from view (even as they’re
openly celebrated in various Hollywood action movies), this mutant military
is forever clamoring for a greater piece of the action.
While the old-fashioned, uniformed military guards its Cold
War turf, preserved like some set of monstrous museum exhibits, the mutant
military strives with great success to expand its power across the globe. Since
9/11, it's the mutant military that has gotten the lion’s share of the action
and much of the adulation -- here’s looking at you,
SEAL Team 6 -- along with its ultimate enabler, the civilian
commander-in-chief, now acting in essence as America’s
assassin-in-chief.
Think of it this way: a quarter-century after the end of the
Cold War, the U.S. military is completely uncontained. Washington’s foreign
policies are strikingly military-first ones, and nothing seems to be out of
bounds. Its two major parts, the Cold War-era “big” military, still very much
alive and kicking, and the new-era military of special ops, contractors, and
paramilitaries seek to dominate everything. Nuclear, conventional,
unconventional, land, sea, air, space, cyber, you name it: all realms must be
mastered.
Except it can’t master the one realm that matters most:
itself. And it can’t find the one thing that such an uncontained military was
supposed to guarantee: victory (not in a single place anywhere on Earth).
Loaded with loot and
praised to the rafters, America’s uncontained military has
no discipline
and no direction. It never has to make truly tough choices, like getting rid of
ICBMs or shedding its obscenely bloated top ranks of officers or cancelling
redundant weapon systems like the F-35. It just aims to do it all, just about
everywhere. As Nick Turse reported recently, U.S. special ops touched down in
150 countries between 2011 and 2014. And the results of all this activity
have been remarkably repetitive and should by now be tragically predictable:
lots of chaos spread, lots of casualties inflicted, and in every case, mission
unaccomplished.
The Future Isn't What It Used to Be
Say what you will of the Cold War, at least it had an end.
The overriding danger of the current American military moment is that it may
lack one.
Once upon a time, the U.S. military was more or less tied to
continental defense and limited by strong rivals in its hegemonic designs. No
longer. Today, it has uncontained ambitions across the globe and even as it
continually stumbles in achieving them, whether in
Iraq,
Afghanistan,
Yemen, or elsewhere, its growth is assured, as our leaders trip over one
another in continuing to shower it with staggering sums of money and
unconditional love.
No military should ever be trusted and no military should ever
be left uncontained. Our nation’s
founders knew this lesson. Five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower took
pains in his
farewell
address in 1961 to remind us of it again. How did we as a people come to
forget it? WTF, America?
What I do know is this: Take an uncontained, mutating
military, sprinkle it with unconditional love and plenty of dough, and you have
a recipe for disaster. So excuse me for being more than a little nervous about
what we’ll all find when America flips the calendar by another quarter-century
to the year 2040.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is
a
TomDispatch regular. He edits the blog
The Contrary
Perspective.
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Copyright 2015 William J. Astore