U.S. jet takes off from an aircraft carrier. (photo: Getty)
Trump's
Vision of a Militarized America
By William Hartung,
TomDispatch
03 February 17
Note
for TomDispatch Readers: As you may have noticed, in the
era of Donald Trump and “alternative facts,” a wave of old dystopian novels
headed by George Orwell’s 1984 has hit the bestseller list.
It’s a striking phenomenon. At Dispatch Books, our own publishing line, we
sensed that this might be coming and recently put out TomDispatch regular John
Feffer’s stunning dystopian novel, Splinterlands. Unlike
the older ones, from Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here to
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it reads as if you had stumbled
upon the work of a journalist on a shattered planet in the very near
future. If you’re in a dystopian mood, get yourself a copy as soon
as possible (and lend us a little helping hand at the same time). Alternatively,
if you go to the TomDispatch donation page and
contribute $100 ($125 if you live outside the USA), Feffer will send you a
signed, personalized copy of the book. Either way, it’s the perfect reading for
our dystopian moment. Tom
Last
Friday, Donald Trump made his first visit to the Pentagon where he spoke of signing an
order to begin “a great rebuilding of the armed services of the United States,”
something he’s been advocating for quite a while. As TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung indicates today,
this will mean a massive surge in federal dollars pouring into the abyss of the
Pentagon, which has shown itself quite capable of absorbing such moneys in the
past and seems to lack the slightest ability to account for what’s done with
them. (The Pentagon has never even managed to pass an audit.) We already
know that this will mean more troops, more ships, more planes, and as a draft executive order for
the new president put it, “a desire to invest in a host of military
capabilities, including Special Operations forces and nuclear weapons.”
These
are two areas in which “build up” is already the operative phrase. At
approximately 70,000 personnel, the
elite Special Operations forces are now an enormous, secretive military --
larger than the armies of some sizable countries -- cocooned inside the regular
armed forces. Special ops types are now dispatched annually to about 70% of the nations on
the planet. As for those nuclear forces, under President Obama who
won a Nobel Peace Prize in part for his abolitionist sentiments, they were
already launched on a trillion dollar,
three-decade “modernization” program, involving the creation of new delivery systems and
“smart nukes” as well. If
each of these forces is now to be expanded even more rapidly and expensively,
that’s a genuine upping of the military ante on the planet.
As
former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who, with President Ronald Reagan, came
remarkably close to negotiating nuclear weapons out of existence, pointed out recently in Time magazine,
“it looks as if the world is preparing for war... Today,... the nuclear threat
once again seems real. Relations between the great powers have been going from
bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the
military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands.”
Indeed,
at the dawn of the Trump era, it’s worth remembering that, despite the obvious
power of the United States, this is no longer a one-way planet. Take the new
“nationalism” of the president (and his close adviser Steve Bannon). As the
guiding principle of American foreign policy, nationalism will prove a
distinctly two-way street, as is already the case in Mexico
where Trump’s wall, his immigration policies, and his tax threats against
Mexican products may only stoke Mexican nationalism, uniting an otherwise riven
country in a fierce spirit of anti-Americanism.
And
don’t expect a staggering American military build-up to be a one-way phenomenon
either, especially on the nuclear front. Before he’s done, Donald Trump, who
has a yearning for the
1950s, could well put the planet on the kind of military footing that hasn’t
been seen since at least the height of the Cold
War. He could well spark a potentially out of control three-way arms race
that would include China and Russia, while heightening increasingly pugnacious
nationalist feelings across the planet. Worse yet, as Hartung points out today,
if your money is going to head massively into the military (while civilian
spending is slashed), when problems or crises arrive, as they will on such a
planet, it’s obvious where you’re most likely to turn. At this point, only two
weeks into his presidency, the Earth looks like a distinctly more dangerous
place. No wonder the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just moved its
Doomsday Clock 30 seconds "closer to catastrophe” at 2½ minutes to
midnight.
-Tom
Engelhardt, TomDispatch
What
Happens When All We Have Left Is The Pentagon?
Trump’s Vision of a Militarized America
Trump’s Vision of a Militarized America
Just over $600 billion a
year and counting, the Pentagon already receives significantly more than its
fair share of federal funds. If President Donald Trump has his way,
though, that will prove a sum for pikers and misers. He and his team are
now promising that spending on defense and homeland security will increase
dramatically in the years to come, even as domestic programs are slashed and
entire civilian agencies shuttered.
The
new administration is reportedly considering a plan --
modeled on proposals from the military-industrial-complex-backed Heritage
Foundation -- that would cut a staggering $10.5 trillion in federal spending
over the next decade. The Departments of Energy, Commerce, Transportation, and
State might see their budgets slashed to the bone; the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting would be privatized; and (though the money involved would amount
to chicken feed) the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities
would be eliminated altogether. In the meantime, the ranks of the Army
and Marines would be expanded, a huge naval buildup would be launched, and a
new Star Wars-style missile defense system would be developed -- all at a
combined cost of up to $1
trillion beyond the already munificent current Pentagon plans for that same
decade.
The
specifics won’t be known until Trump’s first budget becomes public in perhaps
April or May, but as we wait for it, Republican Senate Armed Services Committee
Chairman John McCain has just taken the unusual step of releasing his own spending blueprint for
the military. It suggests that a key senator and the president and his
team are on the same page when it comes to military funding. At an extra $430
billion over the next five years, the numbers in McCain’s plan are similar to
the potential Trump buildup.
One
thing is already clear: this drastic tilt toward yet more Pentagon spending and
away from investment in diplomacy abroad and civilian needs at home will only
further militarize American society, accelerate inequality, and distort the
country’s already highly questionable foreign policy. After all, if your
military is the only well-funded, well-stocked arm of the government, it’s obvious
whom you’re going to turn to in any crisis.
This
process was already visibly underway even before Donald Trump took the oath of
office. His gut decision to entrust national security policymaking only
to military figures was particularly troubling. From National Security
Adviser Michael Flynn to Secretary of Defense James Mattis to head of the
Department of Homeland Security John Kelly, retired generals and other
ex-military types now abound in his administration. Defense analyst and former White
House budget official Gordon Adams summed up the risks of
this approach recently in this way:
“Putting military officers in charge of the entire architecture of
national security reinforces the trend toward militarizing policy and risks
cementing in place ‘the military-industrial complex’ that President Dwight D.
Eisenhower warned of. To borrow the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow’s words, if
all the men around President Trump are hammers, the temptation will be ‘to
treat everything as if it were a nail.’”
How
the Military Came to Dominate Foreign Policy
President
Trump won’t, of course, be starting from scratch in his urge to further elevate
the military in foreign and domestic affairs. He’s building on a process
that’s already well under way. In the Obama years, for instance, there
were a record number of drone strikes, especially outside official U.S. war
zones -- 10 times the number
launched by the Bush administration. Similarly, the Obama administration
paved the way for various Trumpian urges by waging wars on multiple fronts and
instituting a historic crackdown on
whistleblowers in the military and the intelligence communities. It also
approved record levels of U.S. arms sales abroad, $278 billion worth of
them, or more than double those of the Bush years. (In Trumpian terms:
jobs!)
In
addition, as part of his pledge to avoid large, “boots-on-the-ground” conflicts
like the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, President Obama oversaw
a sharp increase in the
size of the U.S. Special Operations forces, sending them abroad to arm, train,
and fight alongside militaries in 138 countries in
2016. Think of this approach -- having a “lighter footprint” while
expanding the number of conflicts the United States is involved in -- as a case
of what I’ve called “politically sustainable warfare.”
It seems cheaper, is far less visible, and involves fewer U.S. casualties than
full-scale invasions and occupations.
In
these years, the Pentagon has also continued to encroach on turf previously
occupied by the State Department and the Agency for International Development,
including funding its own arms and training programs and engaging in economic development projects.
Under the euphemistic term “building partner capacity,” the Pentagon now has
the authority to arm and train foreign
military forces through no less than 70 separate programs.
To be
fair, the drift toward military dominance of foreign policy began well before
Barack Obama took office. In her 2003 book The Mission, Dana
Priest of the Washington Post described the increasing role of
regional combatant commanders in shaping policymaking in Washington. They
could leverage their greater resources and close connections to foreign leaders
to outstrip U.S. ambassadors in power and influence. And their growing
role was just a symptom of a larger problem that Priest described at the time
and that has only become more obvious in the years since: the urge of American
leaders to turn to the military for solutions to problems “that are often, at
their root, political and economic.” As retired General Anthony Zinni,
former head of the U.S. Central Command, noted for instance,
“There is no military solution to terrorism.” That’s a conclusion shared
by other American military leaders, but one that has had little effect on U.S.
efforts to use force as the primary tool for combatting terrorism in countries
like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen, a process that has only led to more failed and
failing states and the further spread of terror groups.
Donald
Trump may indeed gut the diplomatic corps, but don’t forget that State
Department funding was long ago overwhelmed by the largesse available to what
the new president regularly refers to as our “depleted” military. The
Pentagon’s budget is today more than 12 times as large as the State
Department’s, a disparity sure to grow in the years to come. As former
Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted some years ago, there are more military personnel stationed
on one aircraft carrier task force than trained diplomats in the U.S. Foreign
Service. And keep in mind that the United States currently has 10 active aircraft carriers, which themselves
will be just a small part of the Trump administration’s proposed 350-ship Navy.
Even
the intelligence community is likely to be further militarized in the Trump
years. While he was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National
Security Advisor Michael Flynn tried to increase its
influence at the expense of the CIA. Expect him to attempt to seize
control of the nation’s intelligence apparatus and put it in service to his own
distorted view of the world. From failing to predict the collapse of the Soviet
Union to allowing itself to be used to put forward misleading information about
Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S.
Intelligence Community has hardly covered itself in glory. Still, it does
contain a cadre of professional analysts who can provide sitting presidents
with actual information contradicting prevailing prejudices. This was
even true in the case of Iraq, where a number of analysts dissented from the claim that Iraq had
nuclear weapons, while others only acquiesced after being browbeaten by Vice
President Dick Cheney and the band of neoconservatives in his office.
In the
years to come, expect the Cheney model of intelligence manufacturing to be
replicated, especially by Flynn, whose extreme views include a belief that
Islam is not a real religion, that Iran is the “linchpin” of a global
anti-American coalition of enemies extending from Cuba and Venezuela to North
Korea, China, and Russia, and that Islamic “Sharia law” is actually being
imposed in parts of our country. Flynn’s
views on Islam would have been beyond the pale for a top adviser in any prior
administration. Now, however, he’s positioned to regularly press his
views on Donald Trump, who doesn’t read and seems inclined to believe the last
person he talks to.
A Military-First
Administration
To
imagine how Flynn might wield his new power, consider his attempt, while still
at the DIA, to get subordinates to prove that Iran was the “hidden hand” behind the
2012 attacks on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the
death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens. As the New York
Times reported, “Like many other
investigations into Benghazi, theirs found no evidence of any links, and the
general’s stubborn insistence reminded some officials at the agency of how the
Bush administration had once relentlessly sought to connect Saddam Hussein and
Iraq to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”
Trump
and his men now seem poised to purge the CIA and other intelligence agencies of
analysts who might have opinions contrary to their own fantasy view of the
world. Expect Flynn, in particular, to try to shape the intelligence
community’s products towards his ends while serving as interpreter of last resort
for the president. Getting Trump to swallow intelligence assessments
skewed toward his particular set of prejudices and inclinations should be an
easy feat, given that he can’t even acknowledge the
size of the crowd at his own inauguration or let go of the demonstrably false claim that
millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the 2016 election.
The
only likely obstacle to Flynn's ambitions to impose his twisted view of the
world on Trump is the other "big league" Islamophobe in the
administration, White House counselor Steve Bannon. As a recent New
York Times account noted, Bannon has already
attempted to outmaneuver Flynn in the battle for access to the president on
foreign policy issues and his elevation to the National Security Council at the
expense of the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national
intelligence is just the latest indication of how influential he's likely to be
in shaping Trump's foreign policy agenda. This is hardly good news, as on
certain issues he may be even more extreme than Flynn, if that's possible.
Trump’s
predictably militarized approach to policymaking could have serious impacts on
the domestic front as well. On his fifth day in office, for example, he
threatened by tweet to “send in the Feds” to
Chicago if the city government didn’t take steps to “end the carnage”
there. It was unclear whether he meant federal law enforcement personnel
or federal troops, a vagueness troubling in its own right. And don’t
forget that his pledge to “build a wall” ensures a significant jump in funding
for the further militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, already being
patrolled by unarmed drones and growing numbers of armed federal agents.
After all, it took him just days after his inauguration to announce a plan to add 5,000
personnel to the Border Patrol and 10,000 agents to the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement Agency.
As in
all matters Trumpian, some will say we shouldn’t take him at his word, or that
we should wait for his first budget proposal and other such documents to see
what he’s really going to do. But the evidence is
already abundant that the Trump administration is on a path toward undermining
our democracy by pouring taxpayer dollars galore into the U.S. military.
This will happen despite the fact that, 15 years after 9/11, that military has
won nothing and settled no conflicts to Washington’s advantage, even as terror
groups have spread across the Greater Middle East and Africa. It’s a
decade-and-a-half-long record that should lead to almost any other set of plans
than the ones the Trump administration clearly has in mind. But don’t tell
them. They could care less.
Frightening
as it may be, it’s important to recognize that Trump’s impulse to further
militarize American society is by no means a done deal. Democrats in the Senate
are in a position to stop him by voting as
a bloc against any proposal to dramatically ratchet up spending on the
Pentagon, which would deprive Republicans of the 60 votes they need to move
forward on a spending proposal. In addition, the new president’s plans to pump
up the Pentagon, dramatically slash taxes, invest in expensive new programs
like the border wall, and create a trillion dollar infrastructure plan could
set the stage for massive deficits that
will undoubtedly unnerve constituencies ranging from fiscal conservatives to
important sectors of the business community.
And
keep in mind that significant numbers of military and intelligence
professionals truly believe in civilian control of the military and don’t want
to take on tasks unrelated to traditional military missions. In addition,
Trump has already pledged to target overpriced weapons systems like
the F-35 and force the Pentagon to get its books in order so it can at
last pass an audit.
Whether or not he follows through on these promises, he will have put them on
the public agenda, reinforcing one reality: the way so much of the money currently
going to the Pentagon has more to do with lining the pockets of contractors
than with defending the United States and its allies.
The
military-first direction in which Trump is going to take his administration
will predictably lead to yet more militarized policies in the world. It’s
that hammer and nail again. He should take a lesson from history by
listening to the speeches of the former Supreme Allied Commander in World War
II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a military man who also rose to the pinnacle
of power in Washington. As president, Eisenhower not only spoke out
against the dangers of the military-industrial complex but
also stressed that America’s power is ultimately rooted in the strength of its
economy and the health of its citizens, not in seeking magical military solutions or
in overspending on the Pentagon. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is no Dwight
D. Eisenhower.
William
D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular,
is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for
International Policy. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and
the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book,
John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well
as Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the
Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance,
Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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