{"id":132762,"date":"2019-05-06T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T11:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=132762"},"modified":"2019-05-13T12:08:18","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T11:08:18","slug":"the-pentagons-long-con","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/05\/the-pentagons-long-con\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pentagon\u2019s Long Con"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Guess what?\u00a0 \u201cThe Good Ol Days\u201d never left us!\u00a0 Just think of the new \u201ccold war\u201d with Russia and China and the U.S. military\u2019s call for a $1.7 trillion \u201cinvestment\u201d in new nukes!<\/p><\/div>\n

30 Apr 2019 – <\/em>\u201cWar is a racket<\/a>,\u201d wrote General Smedley Butler<\/a> in the 1930s.\u00a0 Dwight D. Eisenhower\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0at the end of his presidency about the military-industrial complex and its misplaced, anti-democratic power.\u00a0 Martin Luther King Jr\u00a0spoke<\/a>\u00a0against militarism and the \u201cspiritual death\u201d he believed Americans were suffering from in the 1960s.\u00a0 As MLK put it<\/a>, we\u2019ve become a country of guided missiles and misguided men, a generation maimed and mutilated by militarism, a country seemingly in a state of permanent war.\u00a0 And let\u2019s not forget James Madison\u2019s warning<\/a> about long wars as being pernicious to liberty and freedom.<\/p>\n

I often find myself writing variations<\/a> of what Butler, Ike, MLK, and Madison warned us about generations (or centuries) ago.\u00a0 All I can say in my defense is that the message bears repeating.\u00a0 We\u2019ve become a country that celebrates<\/a> \u201cour\u201d military and militarism, a country that leads every other country in the world in weapons sales, a country that spends enormous sums ($750 billion<\/a> in 2020, if Trump gets his way) on \u201cdefense\u201d that impoverishes health care, education, infrastructure repairs, and other areas of societal wellness.<\/p>\n

Americans are warned about socialism by the mainstream media, but they\u2019re never warned about militarism.\u00a0 I wonder why?<\/p>\n

America is the victim of a long con orchestrated by the Pentagon and the National Security State, as I explain today in my latest article for TomDispatch<\/a>.\u00a0 You can read the entire article here<\/a>; what follows is an extract.\u00a0 As MLK said, America needs a revolution in values; we must overcome our arrogance of power and set our own house in order.\u00a0 But we can\u2019t do that until we end our mindless militarism.<\/p>\n

How the Pentagon Took Ownership of Donald Trump<\/strong><\/p>\n

Donald Trump is a con man. Think of\u00a0Trump University<\/a>\u00a0or a juicy\u00a0Trump steak<\/a>\u00a0or can\u2019t-lose casinos (that\u00a0never won<\/a>). But as president, one crew he hasn\u2019t conned is the Pentagon. Quite the opposite, they\u2019ve conned him because they\u2019ve been at the game a lot longer and lie (in Trump-speak) in far\u00a0biglier<\/a>\u00a0ways.<\/p>\n

People condemn President Trump for his\u00a0incessant lying<\/a>\u00a0and his con games \u2014 and rightly so. But few Americans condemn the Pentagon and the rest of the\u00a0national security state<\/a>, even though we\u2019ve been the victims of their long con for decades now. As it happens, from the beginning of the Cold War to late last night, they\u2019ve remained remarkably skilled at\u00a0exaggerating<\/a>\u00a0the threats the U.S. faces and, believe me, that represents the longest con of all. It\u2019s kept the military-industrial complex humming along, thanks to countless\u00a0trillions<\/a>\u00a0of taxpayer dollars, while attempts to focus a spotlight on that scam have been largely discredited or ignored.<\/p>\n

One thing should have, but hasn\u2019t, cut through all the lies: the grimly downbeat results of America\u2019s actual wars. War by its nature tells harsh truths \u2014 in this case, that the U.S. military is anything but \u201cthe\u00a0finest fighting force<\/a> that the world has ever known.\u201d Why? Because of its almost unblemished record of losing, or at least never winning, the wars it engages in. Consider the disasters that make up its record from Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s to, in the twenty-first century, the Iraq War that began with the invasion of 2003 and the nearly 18-year\u00a0debacle<\/a>\u00a0in Afghanistan \u2014 and that\u2019s just to start down a list. You could easily add Korea (a 70-year stalemate\/truce that remains troublesome to this day), a disastrous eight-year-old intervention in Libya, a quarter century in (and out and in)\u00a0Somalia<\/a>, and the devastating U.S.-backed Saudi war in\u00a0Yemen<\/a>, among so many other\u00a0failed<\/a>\u00a0interventions.<\/p>\n

In short, the U.S. spends staggering sums annually, essentially stolen from a domestic economy and\u00a0infrastructure<\/a>\u00a0that\u2019s fraying at the seams, on what still passes for \u201cdefense.\u201d The result: botched wars in distant lands that have little, if anything, to do with true defense, but which the Pentagon uses to justify yet more funding, often in the name of \u201crebuilding<\/a>\u201d a \u201cdepleted<\/a>\u201d military. Instead of a three-pointed pyramid scheme, you might think of this as a five-pointed Pentagon scheme, where losing only wins you ever more, abetted by lies that just grow and grow. When it comes to raising money based on false claims, this president has nothing on the Pentagon. And worse yet, like America\u2019s wars, the Pentagon\u2019s long con shows no sign of ending. Eat your heart out, Donald Trump!<\/p>\n

Eternal MADness<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSo many lies, so little time\u201d is a phrase that comes to mind when I think of the 40 years I\u2019ve spent up close and personal with the U.S. military, half on active duty as an Air Force officer. Where to begin? How about with those\u00a0bomber<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0missile<\/a>\u00a0\u201cgaps,\u201d those alleged shortfalls vis-\u00e0-vis the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s? They amounted to Chicken Little-style sky-is-falling hoaxes, but they brought in countless billions of dollars in military funding. In fact, the \u201cgaps\u201d then were all in our favor, as this country held a decisive edge in both strategic bombers and nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs.<\/p>\n

Or consider the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin\u00a0Resolution<\/a>\u00a0that served to authorize horrific attacks on Vietnam in retaliation for a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. Navy destroyers that\u00a0never happened<\/a>. Or think about the consistent exaggeration of Soviet weapons capabilities in the 1970s (the hype surrounding its\u00a0MiG-25<\/a>\u00a0Foxbat fighter jet, for example) that was used to justify a new generation of ultra-expensive American weaponry. Or the justifications for the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s \u2014 remember the\u00a0Strategic Defense Initiative<\/a>\u00a0(aka \u201cStar Wars\u201d) or the\u00a0MX ICBM<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Pershing II<\/a>\u00a0missiles, not to speak of the neutron bomb and alarming military exercises that nearly brought us to nuclear war with the \u201cEvil Empire\u201d\u00a0in 1983<\/a>. Or think of another military miracle: the \u201cpeace dividend<\/a>\u201d that never arrived after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 and the last superpower (you know which one) was left alone on a planet of minor \u201crogue states.\u201d And don\u2019t forget that calamitous \u201cshock and awe\u201d invasion of Iraq in 2003 in the name of neutralizing weapons of mass destruction that\u00a0didn\u2019t exist<\/a>\u00a0or the endless global war on terror that still ignores the fact that 15 of the 19 September 11th terrorist hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

And this endless long con of the Pentagon\u2019s was all the more effective because so many of its lies were sold by self-serving politicians. Exhibit one was, of course, John F. Kennedy\u2019s embrace of that false missile gap in winning the 1960 presidential election. Still, the Pentagon was never shy in its claims. Take the demand of the Air Force then for 10,000 — yes, you read that right! — new ICBMs to counter a Soviet threat that then numbered no more than a few dozen such missiles (as Daniel Ellsberg reminds us in his recent book, The Doomsday Machine<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

To keep the Air Force happy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara settled on a mere 1,000 land-based Minuteman missiles to augment the 54 older Titan II<\/a> ICBMs in that service\u2019s arsenal, a figure I committed to memory as a teenager in the 1970s. And don\u2019t forget that some of those missiles were MIRVed, meaning they had multiple nuclear warheads that could hit many targets. It all added up to the threat of what, in those years, came to be called \u201cmutually assured destruction,\u201d better known by its all-too-apt acronym, MAD.<\/p>\n

And the Pentagon\u2019s version of madness never ends. Think, for instance, of the planned three-decade $1.7 trillion \u201cmodernization<\/a>\u201d of the U.S. nuclear triad now underway, justified in the name of \u201covermatching<\/a>\u201d China and Russia, \u201cnear-peer<\/a>\u201d rivals in Pentagon-speak. No matter that America\u2019s current triad of land-based, submarine-based, and air-deployed nukes already leave the arsenals of those two countries in the shade.<\/p>\n

Reason doesn\u2019t matter when the idea of a new cold war with those two former enemies couldn\u2019t be more useful in justifying the through-the-ceiling $750 billion<\/a> defense budget requested by President Trump for 2020. The Democrats have pushed back with a still-soaring budget of $733 billion<\/a> that accepts without question the \u201cbaseline\u201d minimum demanded<\/a> by Pentagon officials, a level of spending Trump once called \u201ccrazy<\/a>.\u201d Talk about resistance being futile!<\/p>\n

In other words, when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars, the Washington establishment of both parties has essentially been assimilated into the Pentagon collective. The national security state, that (unacknowledged) fourth branch of government, has in many ways become the most powerful of all, siphoning off more than 60%<\/a> of federal discretionary spending, while failing<\/a> to pass a single audit of how it uses<\/a> such colossal sums.<\/p>\n

All of this is in service to what\u2019s known as a National Defense Strategy (NDS) whose main purpose is to justify yet more prodigious Pentagon spending. As Vietnam War veteran and professor at National Defense University Gregory Foster wrote<\/a> of the latest version of that document:<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em>In the final analysis, the NDS is an unadulterated call for a new Cold War, with all its attendant appurtenances: more gluttonous defense spending to support escalatory arms races in all those \u2018contested domains\u2019 of warfare; reliance on bean-counting input measures (weapons, forces, spending) for determining comparative \u2018competitiveness\u2019; reinforcement and reaffirmation of the sacrosanct American way of war; and the reassuring comfort of superimposing an artificially simplistic Manichean worldview on the world\u2019s inherent complexity and thereby continuing to ignore and marginalize actors, places, and circumstances that don\u2019t coincide with our established preconceptions.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Such a critique is largely lost on Donald Trump, a man who models himself on perceived tough guys like Andrew Jackson<\/a> and Winston Churchill<\/a>. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he did, at least, rail against the folly and cost of America\u2019s wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. He said he wanted better relations with Russia. He talked about reinvesting in the United States rather than engaging in new wars. He even attacked<\/a> costly weapons systems like the sky\u2019s-the-limit $1.4 trillion Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Suffice it to say that, after two-plus years of posing as commander-in-chief, strong man Trump is now essentially owned by the Pentagon. America\u2019s wars continue unabated. U.S. troops remain in Syria and Afghanistan (despite the president\u2019s stated desire to remove them). Relations with Russia are tense as his administration tears up<\/a> the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty negotiated by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.<\/p>\n

What to make of the president\u2019s visible capitulation to the Pentagon? Sure, he\u2019s playing to his conservative base, which is generally up for more spending on weaponry and war, but like so many presidents before him, he\u2019s been conned as well. The con-man-in-chief has finally met his match: a national security state that, when you consider its record, has had far greater success at lying its way to power than Donald J. Trump.<\/p>\n

The Biggest Lie of All<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, let\u2019s take a hard look at ourselves when it comes to weaponry and those wars of \u201cours.\u201d Because the most significant lies aren\u2019t the ones the president tells us, but those we tell ourselves. The biggest of all: that we can continue to send young men and women off to war without those wars ever coming home.<\/p>\n

Think again. America\u2019s shock-and-awe conflicts have indeed come home, big time — with shocking and awful results. On some level, many Americans recognize this. PTSD<\/a> (post-traumatic stress disorder) is now a well-known acronym. A smaller percentage of Americans know something about TBI, the traumatic brain injuries that already afflict an estimated 314,000<\/a> troops, often caused by IEDs (improvised explosive devices), another acronym it would have been better never to have to learn. Wounded Warrior<\/a> projects remind us that veterans continue to suffer long after they\u2019ve come home, with roughly 20 of them a day taking their own lives in a tragic epidemic<\/a> of suicides. Meanwhile, surplus military equipment — from automatic weapons to tank-like MRAPs — made for the mean streets of Iraq are now deployed on Main Street, USA, by increasingly militarized<\/a> police forces. Even the campus cops at Ohio State University have<\/a> an MRAP!<\/p>\n

Here, Americans would do well to ponder the words of Megan Stack, a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times<\/em><\/a> who drew on her own \u201ceducation in war<\/a>\u201d when she wrote: \u201cYou can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done.\u201d She was undoubtedly thinking about subjects like the horrors of Abu Ghraib<\/a> prison in Iraq, torture at the CIA\u2019s \u201cblack sites<\/a>,\u201d cities rubblized<\/a> in the Greater Middle East, and refugees produced by the tens of millions<\/a>. Somehow, sooner or later, it all comes home, whether we as Americans admit it, or even realize it, or not.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere is the truth,\u201d Stack notes:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don\u2019t die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do… All of that poison seeps back into our soil.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so indeed it has. How else to explain the way Americans have come to tolerate, even celebrate, convenient lies: that, for instance, Tomahawk missile strikes in Syria could make a feckless figure like Donald Trump presidential<\/a> or even that such missiles are beautiful<\/a>, as former NBC Nightly News<\/em> anchor Brian Williams once claimed.\u00a0 Imagine if leading media and political figures boasted instead of taking on the Pentagon, reining in its ambitions, and saving taxpayers trillions of dollars, as well as countless lives here and overseas.<\/p>\n

Ending the Pentagon\u2019s Long Con<\/strong><\/p>\n

War is the ultimate audit and, as any American should know, the Pentagon is incapable of passing an audit. Sadly, even when Congress acts to end<\/a> U.S. support for a near-genocidal war that has nothing to do with any imaginable definition of national defense, in this case in Yemen, President Trump vetoes it. Remember when Candidate Trump was against dumb and wasteful wars? Not anymore. Not, at least, if it involves the Saudis.<\/p>\n

The best course for this country, unimaginable as it might seem today, is to fight wars only as a last resort and when genuinely threatened (a sentiment that 86% of Americans<\/a> agree with). In other words, the U.S. should end every conflict it\u2019s currently engaged in, while bringing most of its troops home and downsizing its imperial deployments globally.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s stopping us? Mainly our own fears, our own pride, our own readiness to believe lies. So let me list six things Americans could do that would curb our military mania:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Our nuclear forces remain the best in the world, which is hardly something to brag about. They need to be downsized, not modernized, with the goal of eliminating them — before they eliminate us.<\/strong><\/li>\n
  2. The notion that this country is suddenly engaged in a new cold war with China and Russia needs to be tossed in the trash can of history — and fast.<\/strong><\/li>\n
  3. From its first days, the war on terror has been the definition of a forever war. Isn\u2019t it finally time to end that series of conflicts? International terrorism is a threat best met by the determined efforts of international police and intelligence agencies.<\/strong><\/li>\n
  4. It’s finally time to stop believing that the U.S. military is all about deterrence and democracy, when all too often it\u2019s all about exploitation and dominance.<\/strong><\/li>\n
  5. It’s finally time to stop funding the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state at levels that outpace most of the other major military powers on this planet put together<\/a> and instead invest such funds where they might actually count for Americans. With an appropriate change in strategy, notes defense analyst Nicolas Davies<\/a>, the U.S. could reduce its annual Pentagon budget by 50%.<\/strong><\/li>\n
  6. Finally, it’s time to stop boasting endlessly of our military strength as the<\/em> measure of our national strength. What are we, Sparta?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The Pentagon will never be forced to make significant reforms until Americans stop believing in (and consenting to) its comforting lies.<\/p>\n

    ________________________________________________<\/p>\n

    William Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and historian.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Go to Original \u2013 bracingviews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    30 Apr 2019 – \u201cWar is a racket,\u201d wrote General Smedley Butler in the 1930s. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned at the end of his presidency about the military-industrial complex and its misplaced, anti-democratic power. Martin Luther King Jr spoke against militarism and the \u201cspiritual death\u201d he believed Americans were suffering from in the 1960s\u2026 The Pentagon will never be forced to make significant reforms until Americans stop believing in (and consenting to) its comforting lies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":132763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,65],"tags":[232,120,267,291,126,118,172,75],"class_list":["post-132762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism","category-anglo-america","tag-capitalism","tag-conflict","tag-geopolitics","tag-military","tag-violence","tag-war","tag-west","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}