US aircraft carrier with carrier battle group behind. (photo: US Navy)
Cow
Most Sacred: Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable
By Andrew J. Bacevich,
TomDispatch
20 August 16
[Note
to TomDispatch Readers: Today, TD pays a visit to
a classic piece published at this site on January 27, 2011. In a way, it
couldn’t be a sadder story, since so little has changed in the five-and-a-half
years since Andrew Bacevich wrote it and so it remains, as he suggests in his
new introduction, painfully relevant. Tom]
A
writer who dares to revisit a snarky article dashed off five-plus years earlier
will necessarily approach the task with some trepidation. Pieces such as the
one republished below are not drafted with the expectation that they will enjoy
a protracted shelf life. Yet in this instance, I'm with Edith Piaf: Non,
je ne regrette rien. The original text stands without revision or
amendment. Why bother to update, when the core argument remains true (at least
in my estimation).
This past
weekend, I attended the annual meeting of Veterans for Peace (VFP), held on
this occasion in funky, funky Berkeley, California. The experience was both
enlightening and humbling. VFP members are exemplars of democratic citizenship:
informed, engaged, simultaneously realistic -- not expecting peace to bust out
anytime soon -- and yet utterly determined to carry on with their cause. To
revive a phrase from another day, they insist that there is light at the end of
the tunnel.
What
particularly impressed me was the ability of rank-and-file VFP members to
articulate the structural roots of American militarism and imperialism.
They understand that the problem isn't George W. Bush and Barack Obama (and
therefore won't be solved by Hillary or The Donald). It's not that we
have a war party that keeps a peace party under its boot. No, the problem is
bigger and deeper: a fraudulent idea of freedom defined in quantitative
material terms; a neoliberal political economy that privileges growth over all
other values; a political system in which Big Money’s corruption has become
pervasive; and, of course, the behemoth of the national security apparatus, its
tentacles reaching into the far quarters of American society -- even into the
funky precincts of the San Francisco Bay Area. There is no peace party in this
country, even if a remnant of Americans is still committed to the possibility
of peace.
If any
of my weekend confreres have occasion to read this piece on the second
go-round, I hope that it will pass muster with them. If not, I know they will
let me know in no uncertain terms.
-
Andrew
Bacevich, TomDispatch
Cow
Most Sacred
Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable
Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable
In
defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of
conversation. Americans should not confuse that talk with reality. Any
cuts exacted will at most reduce the rate of growth. The essential facts
remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the
planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history.
The
Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time
during the Cold War -- this despite the absence of anything remotely
approximating what national security experts like to call a “peer
competitor.” Evil Empire? It exists only in the fevered
imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a rust-bucket
Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously the ravings of radical
Islamists promising from deep inside their caves to unite the Umma in
a new caliphate.
What
are Americans getting for their money? Sadly, not much. Despite
extraordinary expenditures (not to mention exertions and sacrifices by U.S.
forces), the return on investment is, to be generous, unimpressive. The
chief lesson to emerge from the battlefields of the post-9/11 era is this: the
Pentagon possesses next to no ability to translate “military supremacy” into
meaningful victory.
Washington
knows how to start wars and how to prolong them, but is clueless when it comes
to ending them. Iraq, the latest addition to the roster of America’s
forgotten wars, stands as exhibit A. Each bomb that blows up in Baghdad
or some other Iraqi city, splattering blood all over the streets, testifies to
the manifest absurdity of judging “the surge” as the epic feat of arms
celebrated by the Petraeus lobby.
The
problems are strategic as well as operational. Old Cold War-era
expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and
standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world. There,
American military activities are instead fostering instability and inciting
anti-Americanism. For Exhibit B, see the deepening morass that Washington
refers to as AfPak or the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.
Add to
that the mountain of evidence showing that Pentagon, Inc. is a miserably
managed enterprise: hide-bound, bloated, slow-moving, and prone to wasting
resources on a prodigious scale -- nowhere more so than in weapons procurement
and the outsourcing of previously military functions to “contractors.”
When it comes to national security, effectiveness (what works)
should rightly take precedence over efficiency (at what cost?)
as the overriding measure of merit. Yet beyond a certain level,
inefficiency undermines effectiveness, with the Pentagon stubbornly and
habitually exceeding that level. By comparison, Detroit’s much-maligned
Big Three offer models of well-run enterprises.
Impregnable
Defenses
All of
this takes place against the backdrop of mounting problems at home: stubbornly
high unemployment, trillion-dollar federal deficits, massive and mounting debt,
and domestic needs like education, infrastructure, and employment crying out
for attention.
Yet
the defense budget -- a misnomer since for Pentagon, Inc. defense per se
figures as an afterthought -- remains a sacred cow. Why is that?
The
answer lies first in understanding the defenses arrayed around that cow to
ensure that it remains untouched and untouchable. Exemplifying what the
military likes to call a “defense in depth,” that protective shield consists of
four distinct but mutually supporting layers.
Institutional
Self-Interest: Victory in World War II produced not peace, but an
atmosphere of permanent national security crisis. As never before in U.S.
history, threats to the nation’s existence seemed omnipresent, an attitude
first born in the late 1940s that still persists today. In Washington,
fear -- partly genuine, partly contrived -- triggered a powerful
response.
One
result was the emergence of the national security state, an array of
institutions that depended on (and therefore strove to perpetuate) this
atmosphere of crisis to justify their existence, status, prerogatives, and
budgetary claims. In addition, a permanent arms industry arose, which
soon became a major source of jobs and corporate profits. Politicians of
both parties were quick to identify the advantages of aligning with this “military-industrial complex,” as
President Eisenhower described it.
Allied
with (and feeding off of) this vast apparatus that transformed tax dollars into
appropriations, corporate profits, campaign contributions, and votes was an
intellectual axis of sorts -- government-supported laboratories,
university research institutes, publications, think tanks, and lobbying firms
(many staffed by former or would-be senior officials) -- devoted to identifying
(or conjuring up) ostensible national security challenges and alarms, always
assumed to be serious and getting worse, and then devising responses to
them.
The
upshot: within Washington, the voices carrying weight in any national security
“debate” all share a predisposition for sustaining very high levels of military
spending for reasons having increasingly little to do with the well-being of
the country.
Strategic
Inertia: In a 1948 State Department document, diplomat George F. Kennan
offered this observation: “We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but
only 6.3 percent of its population.” The challenge facing American
policymakers, he continued, was “to devise a pattern of relationships that will
permit us to maintain this disparity.” Here we have a description of
American purposes that is far more candid than all of the rhetoric about
promoting freedom and democracy, seeking world peace, or exercising global
leadership.
The
end of World War II found the United States in a spectacularly privileged
position. Not for nothing do Americans remember the immediate postwar era
as a Golden Age of middle-class prosperity. Policymakers since Kennan’s
time have sought to preserve that globally privileged position. The
effort has been a largely futile one.
By
1950 at the latest, those policymakers (with Kennan by then a notable
dissenter) had concluded that the possession and deployment of military power
held the key to preserving America’s exalted status. The presence of U.S.
forces abroad and a demonstrated willingness to intervene, whether overtly or
covertly, just about anywhere on the planet would promote stability, ensure
U.S. access to markets and resources, and generally serve to enhance the
country’s influence in the eyes of friend and foe alike -- this was the idea,
at least.
In
postwar Europe and postwar Japan, this formula achieved considerable
success. Elsewhere -- notably in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and
(especially after 1980) in the so-called Greater Middle East -- it either produced
mixed results or failed catastrophically. Certainly, the events of the
post-9/11 era provide little reason to believe that this
presence/power-projection paradigm will provide an antidote to the threat posed
by violent anti-Westernjihadism. If anything, adherence to it is
exacerbating the problem by creating ever greater anti-American animus.
One
might think that the manifest shortcomings of the presence/power-projection
approach -- trillions expended in Iraq for what? -- might stimulate present-day
Washington to pose some first-order questions about basic U.S. national
security strategy. A certain amount of introspection would seem to be
called for. Could, for example, the effort to sustain what remains of
America’s privileged status benefit from another approach?
Yet
there are few indications that our political leaders, the senior-most echelons
of the officer corps, or those who shape opinion outside of government are
capable of seriously entertaining any such debate. Whether through
ignorance, arrogance, or a lack of imagination, the pre-existing strategic
paradigm stubbornly persists; so, too, as if by default do the high levels of
military spending that the strategy entails.
Cultural
Dissonance: The rise of the Tea Party movement should disabuse any
American of the thought that the cleavages produced by the “culture wars” have
healed. The cultural upheaval touched off by the 1960s and centered on
Vietnam remains unfinished business in this country.
Among
other things, the sixties destroyed an American consensus, forged during World
War II, about the meaning of patriotism. During the so-called Good War,
love of country implied, even required, deference to the state, shown most
clearly in the willingness of individuals to accept the government’s authority
to mandate military service. GI’s, the vast majority of them draftees,
were the embodiment of American patriotism, risking life and limb to defend the
country.
The GI
of World War II had been an American Everyman. Those soldiers both represented
and reflected the values of the nation from which they came (a perception
affirmed by the ironic fact that the military adhered to prevailing standards
of racial segregation). It was “our army” because that army was
“us.”
With
Vietnam, things became more complicated. The war’s supporters argued that
the World War II tradition still applied: patriotism required deference to the
commands of the state. Opponents of the war, especially those facing the
prospect of conscription, insisted otherwise. They revived the
distinction, formulated a generation earlier by the radical journalist Randolph
Bourne, that distinguished between the country and the state. Real
patriots, the ones who most truly loved their country, were those who opposed
state policies they regarded as misguided, illegal, or immoral.
In
many respects, the soldiers who fought the Vietnam War found themselves caught
uncomfortably in the center of this dispute. Was the soldier who died in
Vietnam a martyr, a tragic figure, or a sap? Who deserved greater
admiration: the soldier who fought bravely and uncomplainingly or the one
who served and then turned against the war? Or was the war resister --
the one who never served at all -- the real hero?
War’s
end left these matters disconcertingly unresolved. President Richard
Nixon’s 1971 decision to kill the draft in favor of an All-Volunteer Force,
predicated on the notion that the country might be better served with a
military that was no longer “us,” only complicated things further. So,
too, did the trends in American politics where bona fide war
heroes (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain) routinely lost
to opponents whose military credentials were non-existent or exceedingly slight
(Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama), yet who demonstrated once in
office a remarkable propensity for expending American blood (none belonging to
members of their own families) in places like Somalia, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. It was all more than a little unseemly.
Patriotism,
once a simple concept, had become both confusing and contentious. What
obligations, if any, did patriotism impose? And if the answer was none --
the option Americans seemed increasingly to prefer -- then was patriotism
itself still a viable proposition?
Wanting
to answer that question in the affirmative -- to distract attention from the
fact that patriotism had become little more than an excuse for fireworks
displays and taking the occasional day off from work -- people and politicians
alike found a way to do so by exalting those Americans actually choosing to
serve in uniform. The thinking went this way: soldiers offer living proof
that America is a place still worth dying for, that patriotism (at least in
some quarters) remains alive and well; by common consent, therefore, soldiers
are the nation’s “best,” committed to “something bigger than self” in a land
otherwise increasingly absorbed in pursuing a material and narcissistic
definition of self-fulfillment.
In
effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned values still
survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative segment of American
society. Rather than Everyman, today’s warrior has ascended to the status
of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation for which he or she fights, the
repository of virtues that prop up, however precariously, the nation’s
increasingly sketchy claim to singularity.
Politically,
therefore, “supporting the troops” has become a categorical imperative across
the political spectrum. In theory, such support might find expression in
a determination to protect those troops from abuse, and so translate into
wariness about committing soldiers to unnecessary or unnecessarily costly
wars. In practice, however, “supporting the troops” has found expression
in an insistence upon providing the Pentagon with open-ended drawing rights on
the nation’s treasury, thereby creating massive barriers to any proposal to
affect more than symbolic reductions in military spending.
Misremembered
History: The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled
anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They
differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism.
The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The
results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a
never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.
American
politics once nourished a lively anti-interventionist tradition. Leading
proponents included luminaries such as George Washington and John Quincy
Adams.
That tradition found its basis not in principled pacifism, a
position that has never attracted widespread support in this country, but in
pragmatic realism. What happened to that realist tradition? Simply
put, World War II killed it -- or at least discredited it. In the intense
and divisive debate that occurred in 1939-1941, the anti-interventionists lost,
their cause thereafter tarred with the label “isolationism.”
The
passage of time has transformed World War II from a massive tragedy into a
morality tale, one that casts opponents of intervention as blackguards.
Whether explicitly or implicitly, the debate over how the United States should
respond to some ostensible threat -- Iraq in 2003, Iran today -- replays the
debate finally ended by the events of December 7, 1941. To express
skepticism about the necessity and prudence of using military power is to
invite the charge of being an appeaser or an isolationist. Few
politicians or individuals aspiring to power will risk the consequences of
being tagged with that label.
In
this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s -- always discovering
a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric -- even though the
circumstances in which we live today bear scant resemblance to that earlier
time. There was only one Hitler and he’s long dead. As for
Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more mixed than his battalions
of defenders are willing to acknowledge. And if any one figure deserves
particular credit for demolishing Hitler’s Reich and winning World War II, it’s
Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile and murderous as Hitler himself.
Until
Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced view of World
War II that takes fully into account the political and moral implications of
the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. campaign of obliteration
bombing directed against Germany and Japan, the mythic version of “the Good
War” will continue to provide glib justifications for continuing to dodge that
perennial question: How much is enough?
Like
concentric security barriers arrayed around the Pentagon, these four factors --
institutional self-interest, strategic inertia, cultural dissonance, and
misremembered history -- insulate the military budget from serious
scrutiny. For advocates of a militarized approach to policy, they provide
invaluable assets, to be defended at all costs.
Andrew
J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular,
is author of America’s War for the Greater Middle
East: A Military History.
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