Thursday, June 16, 2016
The
Pentagon’s Real $trategy: Keeping the Money Flowing
Global Zero demonstrates against
nuclear weapons during President Obama's nuclear summit in April 2016.
(Photo: Victoria Pickering/flickr/cc)
These days, lamenting the apparently aimless
character of Washington’s military operations in the Greater Middle East has
become conventional wisdom among administration critics of every sort. Senator
John McCain thundersthat “this president has no strategy
to successfully reverse the tide of slaughter and mayhem” in that region.
Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies bemoans the “lack of a viable and public
strategy.” Andrew Bacevich suggests that
“there is no strategy. None. Zilch.”
After 15 years of grinding war with no
obvious end in sight, U.S. military operations certainly deserve such obloquy.
But the pundit outrage may be misplaced. Focusing on Washington rather than on
distant war zones, it becomes clear that the military establishment does indeed
have a strategy, a highly successful one, which is to protect and enhance its
own prosperity.
Given this focus, creating and maintaining an
effective fighting force becomes a secondary consideration, reflecting a
relative disinterest -- remarkable to outsiders -- in the actual business of
war, as opposed to the business of raking in dollars for the Pentagon and its
industrial and political partners. A key element of the strategy involves
seeding the military budget with “development” projects that require little
initial outlay but which, down the line, grow irreversibly into massive,
immensely profitable production contracts for our weapons-making cartels.
If this seems like a startling proposition,
consider, for instance, the Air Force’s determined and unyielding efforts to
jettison the A-10 Thunderbolt, widely viewed as the
most effective means for supporting troops on the ground, while ardently
championing the sluggish, vastly overpriced F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that, among
myriad other deficiencies, cannot fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm. No
less telling is the Navy’s ongoing affection for budget-busting programs such
as aircraft carriers, while maintaining its traditional disdain for the
unglamorous and money-poor mission of minesweeping, though the mere threat of
enemy mines in the 1991 Gulf War (as in the Korean Wardecades earlier) stymied plans for
major amphibious operations. Examples abound across all the services.
Meanwhile, ongoing and dramatic programs to
invest vast sumsin meaningless, useless, or superfluous weapons systems are the
norm. There is no more striking example of this than current plans to rebuild
the entire American arsenal of nuclear weapons in the coming decades, Obama's
staggering bequest to the budgets of his successors.
Taking Nuclear Weapons to the
Bank
These nuclear initiatives have received far
less attention than they deserve, perhaps because observers are generally loath
to acknowledge that the Cold War and its attendant nuclear terrors, supposedly
consigned to the ashcan of history a quarter-century ago, are being
revived on a significant scale. The U.S. is
currently in the process of planning for the construction of a new fleet
of nuclear submarines loaded with new intercontinental nuclear missiles, while
simultaneously creating a new land-based intercontinental missile, a new
strategic nuclear bomber, a new land-and-sea-based tactical nuclear fighter
plane, a new long-range nuclear cruise missile (which, as recently as 2010, the
Obama administration explicitly promised not to develop), at least
three nuclear warheads that are essentially new designs, and new fuses for
existing warheads. In addition, new nuclear command-and-control systems are
under development for a fleet of satellites (costing up to $1
billion each) designed to make the business of fighting a nuclear
war more practical and manageable.
This massive nuclear buildup, routinely
promoted under the comforting rubric of “modernization,” stands in contrast to
the president’s lofty public ruminations on the topic of nuclear weapons. The
most recent of these was delivered during his visit -- the first by an American
president -- to Hiroshima last month. There, he urged “nations like my own that hold
nuclear stockpiles” to “have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and
pursue a world without them.”
In reality, that “logic of fear” suggests
that there is no way to “fight” a nuclear war, given the unforeseeable but
horrific effects of these immensely destructive weapons. They serve no
useful purpose beyond deterring putative opponents from using them, for which
an extremely limited number would suffice. During the Berlin crisis of 1961,
for example, when the Soviets possessed precisely four intercontinental nuclear
missiles, White House planners seriously contemplated launching an overwhelming
nuclear strike on the USSR. It was, they claimed, guaranteed to achieve
“victory.” As Fred Kaplan recounts in his book Wizards of
Armageddon, the plan’s advocates conceded that the Soviets
might, in fact, be capable of managing a limited form of retaliation with their
few missiles and bombers in which as many as three million Americans could be
killed, whereupon the plan was summarily rejected.
In other words, in the Cold War as today, the
idea of “nuclear war-fighting” could not survive scrutiny in a real-world
context. Despite this self-evident truth, the U.S. military has long been the
pioneer in devising rationales for fighting such a war via ever more
“modernized” weapons systems. Thus, when first introduced in the early 1960s,
the Navy’s invulnerable Polaris-submarine-launched intercontinental missiles --
entirely sufficient in themselves as a deterrent force against any potential
nuclear enemy -- were seen within the military as an attack on Air Force
operations and budgets. The Air Force responded by conceiving and successfully
selling the need for a full-scale, land-based missile force as well, one that
could more precisely target enemy missiles in what was termed a “counterforce”
strategy.
The drive to develop and build such systems
on the irrational pretense that nuclear war fighting is a practical proposition
persists today. One component of the current “modernization” plan is the
proposed development of a new “dial-a-yield” version of the venerable
B-61 nuclear bomb. Supposedly capable of delivering explosions of varying
strength according to demand, this device will, at least theoretically, be
guidable to its target with high degrees of accuracy and will also be able
to burrow deep into the earth to destroy
buried bunkers. The estimated bill -- $11 billion -- is a welcome boost for the
fortunes of the Sandia and Los Alamos weapons laboratories that are developing
it.
The ultimate cost of this new nuclear arsenal
in its entirety is essentially un-knowable. The only official estimate we have
so far came from the Congressional Budget Office, which last year projected a
total of $350 billion. That figure, however, takes the
“modernization” program only to 2024 -- before, that is, most of the new
systems move from development to actual production and the real bills for all
of this start thudding onto taxpayers’ doormats. This year, for instance, the
Navy is spending a billion and a half dollars in
research and development funds on its new missile submarine, known only as the
SSBN(X). Between 2025 and 2035, however, annual costs for that program are
projected to run at $10 billion a year. Similar escalations are in store for
the other items on the military’s impressive nuclear shopping list.
Assiduously tabulating these projections,
experts at the Monterey Center for Nonproliferation Studies peg the price of the total program at a
trillion dollars. In reality, though, the true bill that will come due over the
next few decades will almost certainly be multiples of that. For example, the
Air Force has claimed that its new B-21 strategic bombers will each cost more
than $564 million (in 2010 dollars), yet
resolutely refuses to release its secret internal estimates for the ultimate
cost of the program.
To offer a point of comparison, the F-35
Joint Strike Fighter, the tactical nuclear bomber previously mentioned, was originally
touted as costing no more than $35 million per plane. In fact, it will
actually enter service with a sticker price well in excess of $200 million.
Nor does that trillion-dollar figure take
into account the inevitable growth of America’s nuclear “shield.” Nowadays, the
excitement and debate once generated by President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars”
scheme to build a defense system of anti-missile missiles and other devices
against a nuclear attack is long gone. (The idea for such a defense, in fact,
dates back to the 1950s, but Reagan boosted it to prominence.) Nevertheless,
missile defense still routinely soaks up some $10 billion of our money
annually, even though it is known to have no utility whatsoever.
“We have nothing to show for it,” Tom
Christie, the former director of the Pentagon’s testing office, told me
recently. “None of the interceptors we currently have in silos waiting to shoot
down enemy missiles have ever worked in tests.” Even so, the U.S. is busy constructing more anti-missile bases
across Eastern Europe. As our offensive nuclear programs are built up in the
years to come, almost certainly eliciting a response from Russia and China, the
pressure for a costly expansion of our nuclear “defenses” will surely follow.
The Bow-Wave Strategy
It’s easy enough to find hypocrisy in
President Obama’s mellifluous orations on abolishing nuclear weapons given the
trillion-dollar-plus nuclear legacy he will leave in his wake. The record
suggests, however, that faced with the undeviating strategic thinking of the
military establishment and its power to turn desires into policy, he has simply
proven as incapable of altering the Washington system as his predecessors in
the Oval Office were or as his successors are likely to be.
Inside the Pentagon, budget planners and
weapons-buyers talk of the “bow wave,” referring to the process by which
current research and development initiatives, initially relatively modest in
cost, invariably lock in commitments to massive spending down the road.
Traditionally, such waves start to form at times when the military is
threatened with possible spending cutbacks due to the end of a war or some
other budgetary crisis.
Former Pentagon analyst Franklin “Chuck”
Spinney, who spent years observing and chronicling the phenomenon from the
inside, recalls an early 1970s bow wave at a time
when withdrawal from Vietnam appeared to promise a future of reduced defense
spending. The military duly put in place an ambitious “modernization” program
for new planes, ships, tanks, satellites, and missiles. Inevitably, when it
came time to actually buy all those fancy new systems, there was insufficient
money in the defense budget.
Accordingly, the high command cut back on
spending for “readiness”; that is, for maintaining existing weapons in working
order, training troops, and similar mundane activities. This had the desired
effect -- at least from the point of view of Pentagon -- of generating a raft
of media and congressional horror stories about the shocking lack of
preparedness of our fighting forces and the urgent need to boost its budget. In
this way, the hapless Jimmy Carter, elected to the presidency on a promise to
rein in defense spending, found himself, in Spinney’s phrase, "mousetrapped,"
and eventually unable to resist calls for bigger military budgets.
This pattern would recur at the beginning of
the 1990s when the Soviet Union imploded and the Cold War superpower military
confrontation seemed at an end. The result was the germination of
ultimately budget-busting weapons systems like the Air Force’s F-35 and F-22
fighters. It happened again when pullbacks from Iraq and Afghanistan in Obama’s
first term led to mild military spending cuts. As Spinney points out, each
successive bow wave crests at a higher level, while military budget cuts due to
wars ending and the like become progressively more modest.
The latest nuclear buildup is
only the most glaring and egregious example of the present bow wave that is
guaranteed to grow to monumental proportions long after Obama has retired to
full-time speechmaking. The cost of the first of the Navy’s new Ford Class
aircraft carriers, for example, has already grown by 20% to $13 billion with more undoubtedly to
come. The “Third Offset Strategy,” a fantasy-laden shopping list of robot
drones and “centaur” (half-man, half-machine) weapons
systems, assiduously touted by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, is
similarly guaranteed to expand stunningly beyond the $3.6 billion allotted to
its development next year.
Faced with such boundlessly ambitious raids on the public purse, no one should claim
a “lack of strategy” as a failing among our real policymakers, even if all that
planning has little or nothing to do with distant war zones where Washington’s
conflicts smolder relentlessly on.
Copyright 2016 Andrew Cockburn
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of
Harper’s Magazine. An Irishman, he has covered national security topics
in this country for many years. In addition to publishing numerous books,
he co-produced the 1997 feature film The Peacemaker and the
2009 documentary on the financial crisisAmerican Casino. His
latest book is Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (Henry
Holt)
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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