{"id":198687,"date":"2021-11-01T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2021-11-01T12:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=198687"},"modified":"2025-01-10T15:08:25","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:08:25","slug":"the-spoils-of-war-how-profits-rather-than-empire-define-success-for-the-pentagon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/11\/the-spoils-of-war-how-profits-rather-than-empire-define-success-for-the-pentagon\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Spoils of War\u201d: How Profits Rather Than Empire Define Success for the Pentagon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Cockburn\u2019s new book is an incredible compendium of avarice and folly.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Wikipedia<\/p><\/div>\n

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View of the Pentagon, Headquarters of the US Department of Defense in Virginia. It is the world’s largest office building with over 603 869m\u00b2 of total floor – three times the size of the floor space of the Empire State Building in New York. Photo: Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase\/Department of Defense<\/p><\/div>\n

27 Oct 2021 – <\/em>In the introduction to \u201cThe Spoils of War,\u201d an extraordinary new book by Andrew Cockburn, he makes a straightforward assertion about the U.S. military. \u201cWar-fighting efficiency has a low priority,\u201d he writes, \u201cby comparison with considerations of personal and internal bureaucracies. \u2026 The military are generally not interested in war, save as a means to budget enhancement.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This is not a popular perspective in Washington, D.C., to say the least. It\u2019s of course legal for the New York Times and the Washington Post, or network television, to make this case. But just to be on the safe side, they never do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Intriguingly, it\u2019s also not a left-wing critique, exactly. Leftist analysis of the American war machine generally credits it with a coherent plan to rule the world and an implacable lust for the violence needed to make it happen. \u201cIf you\u2019re a dove, you think the whole thing\u2019s really rotten,\u201d Cockburn said in a recent appearance on Intercepted. However, \u201ca lot of my good sources, and indeed friends, whose political views in other areas might make your hair stand on end\u201d despise the military\u2019s profligate behavior for their own reasons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Courtesy of Verso Books<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Cockburn suggests that the Pentagon and the corporations that feed off it have generated the largest and most byzantine bureaucracy in human history, filled with innumerable fiefdoms far more focused on besting their internal rivals than outside enemies. Today\u2019s generals and admirals don\u2019t engage in unnecessary activities like trying to win wars, but instead while their days away plotting how to join the board of General Dynamics six hours after their retirement party. Mid-level whistleblowers who suggest the military should procure helmets that protect soldiers from roadside bombs \u2014 rather than actually\u00a0amplifying<\/a><\/i> the damage \u2014 are\u00a0energetically ostracized. Then, as with Chuck Spinney, a Pentagon analyst who testified in the 1980s before Congress on the soaring costs of complex weapons, they are punished. (Spinney managed to keep his job but his higher-ups stopped giving him anything of significance to do, leaving him lots of time to ponder his misdeeds before his retirement 20 years later.)<\/div>\n
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Cockburn aptly quotes one Pentagon weapons designer in the 1960s telling new\u00a0hires that they would be making \u201cweapons that don\u2019t work to meet threats that don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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The array of panjandrums\u00a0in Cockburn\u2019s compendium of avarice and folly\u00a0at the top of the military world\u00a0therefore appear like an expanded, hyperviolent version of the Roy family on the HBO show \u201cSuccession\u201d \u2014 that is, they spend 98 percent of their time jockeying for wealth and power within the organization, and at most a residual 2 percent attempting to do what the organization purportedly exists to accomplish.<\/p>\n

Even the most wised-up cynic might rebel at this worldview. Can it possibly be true that the U.S. military \u2014 which converts wedding parties in Pakistan into scraps of wet red flesh with drones piloted from 8,000 miles away and possesses the ability to end human civilization in 30 minutes \u2014 is simultaneously this venal and preposterous?\u00a0<\/b>But\u00a0<\/b>Cockburn relentlessly piles fact upon fact until readers have no option but to admit that the answer is yes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here are a few of the many, many examples that Cockburn provides:<\/p>\n