{"id":199594,"date":"2021-11-22T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2021-11-22T12:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=199594"},"modified":"2021-11-17T04:37:23","modified_gmt":"2021-11-17T04:37:23","slug":"the-pentagon-as-pentagod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/11\/the-pentagon-as-pentagod\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pentagon as Pentagod"},"content":{"rendered":"

America\u2019s Abyss of Weapons and Warmaking<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pentagod – Wikipedia<\/p><\/div>\n

16 Nov 2021 – <\/em>Who is America\u2019s god? The Christian god of the beatitudes, the one who healed the sick, helped the poor, and preached love of neighbor? Not in these (dis)United States. In the Pledge of Allegiance, we speak proudly of One Nation under God, but in the aggregate, this country doesn\u2019t serve or worship Jesus Christ, or Allah, or any other god of justice and mercy. In truth, the deity America believes in is the five-sided one headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.<\/p>\n

In God We Trust<\/a> is on all our coins. But, again, which god? The one of \u201cturn the other cheek\u201d? The one who found his disciples among society\u2019s outcasts? The one who wanted nothing to do with moneychangers or swords? As Joe Biden might say<\/a>, give me a break.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s true god is a deity of wrath, whose keenest followers profit mightily from war and see such gains as virtuous, while its most militant disciples, a crew of losing generals and failed Washington officials, routinely employ murderous violence across the globe. It contains multitudes, its name is legion, but if this deity must have one name, citing a need for some restraint<\/a>, let it be known as the Pentagod.<\/p>\n

Yes, the Pentagon is America\u2019s true god. Consider that the Biden administration requested a whopping $753 billion<\/a> for military spending in fiscal year 2022 even as the Afghan War was cratering. Consider that the House Armed Services Committee then boosted that blockbuster budget to $778 billion in September. Twenty-five billion dollars extra<\/a> for \u201cdefense,\u201d hardly debated, easily passed, with strong bipartisan support in Congress. How else, if not religious belief, to explain this, despite the Pentagod\u2019s prodigal $8 trillion<\/a> wars over the last two decades that ended so disastrously? How else to account for future budget projections showing that all-American deity getting another $8 trillion or so<\/a> over the next decade, even as the political parties fight like rabid dogs over roughly 15%<\/a> of that figure for much-needed domestic improvements?<\/p>\n

Paraphrasing Joe Biden<\/a>, show me your budget and I\u2019ll tell you what you worship. In that context, there can\u2019t be the slightest doubt: America worships its Pentagod<\/a> and the weapons and wars that feed it.<\/p>\n

Prefabricated War, Made in the U.S.A.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I confess that I\u2019m floored by this simple fact: for two decades in which \u201cforever war\u201d has served as an apt descriptor of America\u2019s true state of the union, the Pentagod has failed<\/a> to deliver on any of its promises. Iraq<\/a> and Afghanistan<\/a>? Just the most obvious of a series of war-on-terror quagmires and failures galore.<\/p>\n

That ultimate deity can\u2019t even pass<\/a> a simple financial audit to account for what it does with those endless funds shoved its way, yet our representatives in Washington keep doing so by the trillions. Spectacular failure after spectacular failure and yet that all-American god just rolls on, seemingly unstoppable, unquenchable, rarely questioned, never penalized, always on top.<\/p>\n

Talk about blind faith!<\/p>\n

The Pentagod advances a peculiar form of war, one that would puzzle most classic military strategists. In fact, its version of war is beyond strategy of the Clausewitzian<\/a> sort. I think of it as prefabricated war<\/em>, borrowing a term from the inestimable Ann Jones\u2019s recent piece<\/a> for TomDispatch<\/em> on our Afghan disaster. It\u2019s a term pregnant with meaning.<\/p>\n

Prefabricated war is how the Pentagod has ruled for so endlessly long. There is, as a start, the fabrication of false causes<\/a> for war. In Vietnam, it was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident<\/a>, the \u201cattacks\u201d on U.S. Navy ships that never happened. In Afghanistan, it was vengeance for the 9\/11 attacks against a people who neither planned nor committed them. In Iraq, it was the weapons of mass destruction<\/a> that Saddam Hussein didn\u2019t have. Real causes don\u2019t matter much to America\u2019s war god since false ones can always be fabricated, after which enough true believers \u2014 especially in Congress \u2014 will embrace them fervently and faithfully.<\/p>\n

But prefabricated war doesn\u2019t just start with or consist of manufactured causes. It\u2019s fabricated far ahead of time in a colossal cathedral of violence \u2014 President Eisenhower\u2019s<\/a> military-industrial-congressional complex \u2014 that sends its missionaries and minions around the planet on a mission of global reach, global power<\/a>, and full-spectrum dominance. War is prefabricated on 750 military bases<\/a> scattered across the globe on every continent except Antarctica, in America\u2019s giant arms corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and by Special Operations forces that act much like the Jesuits<\/a> of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, spreading the one true faith to 150 countries<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since America\u2019s war god is also a jealous deity, it insists on dominating all domains \u2014 not just land, sea, and air but space as well. Even more ethereal realms like cyberspace and virtual\/augmented realities must be captured and controlled. It seeks omnipotence and omniscience in the name of your safety and, if you let it, will also know everything about you, while having the power to smite you, should you stop blindly worshipping it and feeding it more money<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet, as strong as it may be, its urge to fabricate threats and exaggerate vulnerabilities never ends. China and Russia are allegedly the biggest threats of the moment, two \u201cnear-peer\u201d rivals supposedly driving a new cold war<\/a>. China, for example, now reportedly has a navy of 355 ships<\/a>, an ostensibly alarming development (even if those vessels are nowhere near as powerful as their American equivalents). That naturally requires yet more shipbuilding by the U.S. Navy.<\/p>\n

Russia may have an economy that\u2019s smaller than California\u2019s, but it\u2019s allegedly leading in hypersonic missile<\/a> development (and China, too, has now entered the fray<\/a> with, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs put it recently, something \u201cvery close\u201d to a \u201cSputnik moment\u201d). As a result, the Pentagod demands yet more money to bridge this alleged missile gap. Like earlier bomber<\/a> and missile<\/a> gaps from the previous Cold War, such vulnerabilities exist mostly in the minds of its proselytizers.<\/p>\n

And in that context, here\u2019s an article of faith rarely questioned by true believers: while America prides itself on having the world\u2019s best<\/a> and most powerful military, it perennially declares itself in danger of being overmatched. As a result, from aircraft carriers to stealth bombers to nuclear missiles, ever more weaponry must be fabricated. Who cares that it takes the next 11 nations<\/a> combined to come close to matching the American \u201cdefense\u201d budget. Beware the cry, \u201cO ye of little faith!\u201d should you dare to question any of the Pentagod\u2019s fabricated \u201cneeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The notion of prefab war goes deeper still, notes Ann Jones. As she wrote me recently:<\/p>\n

\u201cI would also carry the implications of prefabricated war to its source in the industrial world that does the material fabrication that dictates the strategy and style of war and pockets the profits.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIn Afghanistan prefabrication meant forcing Afghan soldiers to drop their trusty Kalashnikovs and retrain endlessly on new U.S. rifles (I forget the model) so heavy and temperamental as to be close to useless; they were particularly sensitive to dust, which in Afghanistan is the principal constituent of the air. The U.S. also trained Afghan soldiers how to enter houses, to search inside and kill every occupant; it erected on the training ground some prefabricated wooden houses for the practice of home invasions. (I witnessed this stuff myself.)\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To her point, I\u2019d add the notion of a prefab \u201cgovernment in a box<\/a>,\u201d a bizarre aspect of the Afghan surge early in President Barack Obama\u2019s first term in office. The idea was to drop ready-made mini-democracies into less-than-stable regions of Afghanistan that had been conditionally secured by U.S. troops. Those prefab governments would then supposedly provide a democratic toehold, freeing American troops to do what they did best: apply \u201ckinetic\u201d force elsewhere through massive firepower.<\/p>\n

But the Pentagod didn\u2019t deliver democracy in a box to Afghanistan. Instead, it brought prefab war, made in the U.S.A., exported globally. Or, as Ann Jones put it to me, \u201cThe Afghan war was pulled from a box to be used to pave the way for the Big Box war already planned for Iraq by the Bush\/Cheney administration.\u201d That such a \u201cBig Box\u201d war then failed so dismally led, of course, to no diminution in the Pentagod\u2019s power or authority, blind devotion being what it is.<\/p>\n

Judging by the Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq wars, a shoddy yet destructive form of prefab war has been the ultimate American export of these years.<\/p>\n

Losing My Religion<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was once an acolyte of the Pentagod. I served for 20 years in the U.S. Air Force, working in Cheyenne Mountain<\/a> near the end of the original Cold War. I hunkered down there waiting for the nuclear Armageddon that fortunately never came (though the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was certainly a near miss). A cathedral of power, Cheyenne Mountain could have served as the ultimate temple of doom, but America ultimately \u201cwon\u201d the Cold War when the Soviet Union imploded after a disastrous conflict in Afghanistan. That proved a setback indeed for a deity that feared the very thought of a \u201cpeace dividend\u201d in the wind. Fortunately, that singular moment of victory proved only temporary, as America\u2019s incessant conflicts since Desert Storm in 1991 have shown.<\/p>\n

In 1992, the year after the Soviet collapse, I found myself walking around the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the first atomic blast rumbled and roared in July 1945. You might say that, before using two atomic bombs on the Japanese, this country used the first one on ourselves, or at least on all the creatures living near ground zero at that desert site.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have become death, the destroyer of worlds,\u201d mused J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, after his \u201cgadget\u201d exploded, irradiating the surrounding desert in a historically unprecedented way. Oppenheimer himself emerged a changed man. He tried unsuccessfully to block the development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, an act of clarity and conscience for which, he would be accused<\/a> of communist sympathies in 1953 and stripped of his security clearance. He and others who followed learned how unwise it is to resist America\u2019s god of war and its drive for yet more power.<\/p>\n

During that same trip in 1992, I visited Los Alamos National Laboratory, the site where those atomic \u201cgadgets\u201d were first assembled. Fifty years earlier, during World War II, America began to bring together its best and brightest to create a device more destructive than any ever built. They succeeded, in a sense, in tapping into the power of the gods, even if in a remarkably one-sided fashion, gaining an astonishing ability to destroy, but none whatsoever to create. Armageddon, not genesis, became and remains the Pentagod\u2019s ultimate power.<\/p>\n

Back in 1992, the mood at Los Alamos was glum. A national laboratory to create ever newer, more powerful nuclear warheads and weapons didn\u2019t seem to have a promising future with the demise of the Soviet Union. Where, then, did the future lie? Perhaps the best and brightest could turn their thoughts from bombs to consumer goods, or computers, or even what we today call green-energy technologies?<\/p>\n

But no such luck. So here I sit, 30 years later, a bit heavier, my hair and beard greying, having lost whatever faith I had. Why? Because the god I served always wanted more. Even now, it wants to spend up to $2 trillion<\/a> in the coming decades to build \u201cmodernized\u201d versions of the nuclear weaponry that I knew, even then, could only create a darker future.<\/p>\n

Consider the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, or GBSD. It\u2019s an innocuous acronym for what someday will be hundreds of land-based nuclear missiles, one leg of this country\u2019s nuclear \u201ctriad\u201d (the others being the Navy\u2019s Trident submarine force and the Air Force\u2019s strategic bombers). Deploying the GBSD, the Air Force plans to replace its \u201caging\u201d ICBMs with \u201cyouthful\u201d ones, even though such missiles, old or new, were rendered redundant decades ago by equally accurate ones that could be launched from stealthy submarines.<\/p>\n

No matter. Northrop Grumman won the contract<\/a> at a potential lifecycle cost of $264 billion<\/a>. Think of those future missiles and the silos where the present ones sit in flyover states like Wyoming and North Dakota as so many subterranean chapels of utter destructive power, serviced by dedicated Air Force crews who believe that deterrence is best achieved by a policy that once was all-too-accurately known as MAD<\/a>, or mutual assured destruction.<\/p>\n

Yet, before I bled Air Force blue, before I was stationed in a cathedral of military power under who knows how many tons of solid granite, I was raised a Roman Catholic. Recently, I caught the words of Pope Francis<\/a>, God\u2019s representative on earth for Catholic believers. Among other entreaties, he asked \u201cin the name of God\u201d for \u201carms manufacturers and dealers to completely stop their activity, because it foments violence and war, it contributes to those awful geopolitical games which cost millions of lives displaced and millions dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which country has the most arms manufacturers? Which routinely and proudly leads<\/a> the world in weapons exports? And which spends more on wars and weaponry than any other, with hardly a challenge from Congress or a demurral from the mainstream media?<\/p>\n

And as I stared into the abyss created by those questions, who stared back at me but, of course, the Pentagod.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a senior fellow at the <\/em>Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is\u00a0<\/em>Bracing Views<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Copyright 2021 William J. Astore<\/em><\/p>\n

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

16 Nov 2021 – America\u2019s Abyss of Weapons and Warmaking – In the Pledge of Allegiance, we speak proudly of One Nation under God, but this country doesn\u2019t serve or worship Jesus Christ, or Allah, or any other god of justice and mercy. The deity America believes in is the five-sided one headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":153255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[867,1161,1188,120,267,1126,260,487,1050,504,950,1105,780,769,91,86,112,109,287,2648,2649,1709,95,70,126,118,492,172,75],"class_list":["post-199594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism","tag-anglo-america","tag-arms-industry","tag-arms-race","tag-conflict","tag-geopolitics","tag-hegemony","tag-history","tag-human-rights","tag-imperialism","tag-international-relations","tag-invasion","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-military-intervention","tag-military-supremacy","tag-nato","tag-occupation","tag-pentagon","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-space-command","tag-space-digital-military-branch","tag-space-weapons","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-war","tag-war-on-terror","tag-west","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199594","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=199594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}