General McCaffrey's Boondoggle
It has long been my contention that that President Eisenhower’s warning that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex”, was perhaps the most prescient Presidential statement of the 20th Century. Over the weekend, The New York Times published a major investigative piece on Exhibit A of unwarranted influence:General Barry McCaffrey.
The consulting company he started after leaving the government in 2001, BR McCaffrey Associates, promises to “build linkages” between government officials and contractors like Defense Solutions for up to $10,000 a month. He has also earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he is the chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that often competes for national security contracts.
Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.
On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC’s viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television.
McCaffrey defends himself by saying that he was a critic of the War in Iraq, but the Times points out, his criticism came late in the game after the occupation had already soured.
In early 2003 Forrest Sawyer asked General McCaffrey on CNBC what could go wrong after an invasion. Anticipating this very question, the Pentagon had invited General McCaffrey and other analysts to a special briefing. Years later General McCaffrey would say he knew that the post-invasion planning was a disaster. “They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war,” he said.
Given a chance by Mr. Sawyer to raise an alarm, the general reiterated Pentagon talking points about the “astonishing amount” of postwar planning.
And when Tom Brokaw asked him, days before the invasion, “What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?” he replied, “Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones.”
Some day historians will look back at the years 2000-2008 and chronicle the massive strategic errors that led to our current Imperial Overstretch. They will wonder whether the American public was seized with some sort of mass delusion that allowed Bush and Cheney free rein through two elections to lead a democracy to such disaster. In the end they will conclude that a subservient media system, using supposed experts like General McCaffrey, was the key to manufacturing consent.
Jon,
While the eight years of Bush II have certainly seen the most egregious abuses to date, there was little to nothing done in the Clinton years to reign in the M-I complex Eisenhower warned us about despite the ample opportunity to do so.
Jon,
While the eight years of Bush II have certainly seen the most egregious abuses to date, there was little to nothing done in the Clinton years to reign in the M-I complex Eisenhower warned us about despite the ample opportunity to do so.
Why is the starting assumption that what we’ve seen is the result of “massive strategic errors?”
Any more than the economic hole we are in is the product of “bad planning?”
Who was that guy, Grover Norquist, and folks like Newt Gingrich and such? Who were pretty straightforward about extending the Reagan Doctrine, of spending the Soviets into bankruptcy so they couldn’t continue THEIR programs, to the grotesque wealth transfer we are still seeing go on right before our very jaded eyes, that was done as I see it intentionally to undo the Dam’ New Deal and Dam’ Great Society and make Dam’ sure that those Dam’ lib’rals could never rise again. All while making an enormous amount of present and future public wealth disappear into private coffers.
From what I read about the sums that have simply “vanished” in Iraq and Afghanistan (actual entire pallet-loads of neat plastic-wrapped blocks of $100 bills), lost in the bazaar and the baksheesh and the bottomless corruption that is the reality that hides behind the public smokescreen of a “grand crusade to build Baghdad up, up, up until it’s just like Kansas City,” the play that’s on now is intentional and cynical and maybe inevitable.
Generals, who are supposed to be “above” or at least “outside of” politics, have been lying and misleading for generations. Remember the phony Bomber Gap and the Missile Gap and the Window of Vulnerability, and the supposed invulnerability of Warsaw-Pact troops (who it turns out could not be trusted with maps for fear they would defect, and were drunk, drugged and abused to the constant point of mutiny)? All lies told with long straight faces to Congressional committees with the power of the purse and a willingness to let it ride because this or that weapon system was built in their state or district, and the Ganerals and the Mili-Indy guys throw one heck of a party, don’t they?
There are too many indicia to write in a blog that point to intentional “incompetence” in defining doctrine, strategy and tactics, that there’s a clique of folks who have discerned that the average American can be led around by his or her “patriotic” nose to the stalls where the wallets are extracted and emptied to fund fruitless Wars on Terror and Drugs and (tee-heee) Poverty and Illiteracy and HIV and all that.
Mass delusion, aided by the consumptive whirligig that led most of us to think we were living in the Golden Age. But there’s something in the human brain that lets us conflate real personal interests with that hatred and fear of “the enemy” and adhesion to our tribal self-definitions, the stuff that Nazi-to-Neocon levers of power are made of.
Why is the starting assumption that what we’ve seen is the result of “massive strategic errors?”
Any more than the economic hole we are in is the product of “bad planning?”
Who was that guy, Grover Norquist, and folks like Newt Gingrich and such? Who were pretty straightforward about extending the Reagan Doctrine, of spending the Soviets into bankruptcy so they couldn’t continue THEIR programs, to the grotesque wealth transfer we are still seeing go on right before our very jaded eyes, that was done as I see it intentionally to undo the Dam’ New Deal and Dam’ Great Society and make Dam’ sure that those Dam’ lib’rals could never rise again. All while making an enormous amount of present and future public wealth disappear into private coffers.
From what I read about the sums that have simply “vanished” in Iraq and Afghanistan (actual entire pallet-loads of neat plastic-wrapped blocks of $100 bills), lost in the bazaar and the baksheesh and the bottomless corruption that is the reality that hides behind the public smokescreen of a “grand crusade to build Baghdad up, up, up until it’s just like Kansas City,” the play that’s on now is intentional and cynical and maybe inevitable.
Generals, who are supposed to be “above” or at least “outside of” politics, have been lying and misleading for generations. Remember the phony Bomber Gap and the Missile Gap and the Window of Vulnerability, and the supposed invulnerability of Warsaw-Pact troops (who it turns out could not be trusted with maps for fear they would defect, and were drunk, drugged and abused to the constant point of mutiny)? All lies told with long straight faces to Congressional committees with the power of the purse and a willingness to let it ride because this or that weapon system was built in their state or district, and the Ganerals and the Mili-Indy guys throw one heck of a party, don’t they?
There are too many indicia to write in a blog that point to intentional “incompetence” in defining doctrine, strategy and tactics, that there’s a clique of folks who have discerned that the average American can be led around by his or her “patriotic” nose to the stalls where the wallets are extracted and emptied to fund fruitless Wars on Terror and Drugs and (tee-heee) Poverty and Illiteracy and HIV and all that.
Mass delusion, aided by the consumptive whirligig that led most of us to think we were living in the Golden Age. But there’s something in the human brain that lets us conflate real personal interests with that hatred and fear of “the enemy” and adhesion to our tribal self-definitions, the stuff that Nazi-to-Neocon levers of power are made of.
I for one recognize that such has been your contention of longstanding, Jon, that President Eisenhower was onto something big with his de facto farewell caveat concerning the famed military-industrial complex. Let’s make a date, then, to unpack the full context, and to try to understand what he might have been referencing. It’s been a mystery to me for too long, not least because (a) I’m a Freudian product of that Complex and (b) he, Ike, was its parent.
Seriously. Let’s do. It’s a perpetual headscratcher, that one.
I for one recognize that such has been your contention of longstanding, Jon, that President Eisenhower was onto something big with his de facto farewell caveat concerning the famed military-industrial complex. Let’s make a date, then, to unpack the full context, and to try to understand what he might have been referencing. It’s been a mystery to me for too long, not least because (a) I’m a Freudian product of that Complex and (b) he, Ike, was its parent.
Seriously. Let’s do. It’s a perpetual headscratcher, that one.
By the way, I’m really DIGGING this new President-Elect! He delights, almost daily.
Thank you, Jon and All, for turning me onto him.
Thank you sincerely.
By the way, I’m really DIGGING this new President-Elect! He delights, almost daily.
Thank you, Jon and All, for turning me onto him.
Thank you sincerely.
You know the drill, Hugo. Frighten and tell them they are deserving, deprive them of attention and tell them to stand at attention, show them a death and tell them it’s a cause. Passion and purpose without detail can break their will while making their backs strong. Tell them weeping is the most righteous sound a human can make, and have them weep every Sunday after Mass for a home they’ve not yet lost.
Two old lyrics in counterpoint sum it up for me, as if the conflict is one yearning:
“Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.”
“The water is wide I cannot cross over
Neither have I light wings to fly
Build me a boat that can carry two
And both shall row my love and I”
There is a romance to violence and death.
You know the drill, Hugo. Frighten and tell them they are deserving, deprive them of attention and tell them to stand at attention, show them a death and tell them it’s a cause. Passion and purpose without detail can break their will while making their backs strong. Tell them weeping is the most righteous sound a human can make, and have them weep every Sunday after Mass for a home they’ve not yet lost.
Two old lyrics in counterpoint sum it up for me, as if the conflict is one yearning:
“Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,
For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part of the patriot game.”
“The water is wide I cannot cross over
Neither have I light wings to fly
Build me a boat that can carry two
And both shall row my love and I”
There is a romance to violence and death.
“These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives.”
Does anyone besides poor old undereducated redneck me see this as the definition of ‘conflict of interest’?
“These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives.”
Does anyone besides poor old undereducated redneck me see this as the definition of ‘conflict of interest’?
It’s good to see someone call McCaffrey out. The sad thing is I suspect he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong.
It’s good to see someone call McCaffrey out. The sad thing is I suspect he doesn’t believe he did anything wrong.
Len-Your citation of the “water is wide” was sublime.
Hugo-I’m ready to unpack what we can about the MIC.
JTMcPhee-Take a look at my Cost of Empire piece. I think you will find that I am in pretty strong agreement that this was a strategic wealth transfer of grand proportions.
Len-Your citation of the “water is wide” was sublime.
Hugo-I’m ready to unpack what we can about the MIC.
JTMcPhee-Take a look at my Cost of Empire piece. I think you will find that I am in pretty strong agreement that this was a strategic wealth transfer of grand proportions.
All you got to do is Follow the Money, Jon. It will be interesting to see where the money goes in the next 4-8 years. Gasohol, anyone? Algae in your tank?
All you got to do is Follow the Money, Jon. It will be interesting to see where the money goes in the next 4-8 years. Gasohol, anyone? Algae in your tank?
And for some other views of the romance of violence:
Wilfred Owen, WW I –
http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html
Matthew Arnold, timeless –
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/dover.html
And for some other views of the romance of violence:
Wilfred Owen, WW I –
http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html
Matthew Arnold, timeless –
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/dover.html
JTM- This comes back to our earlier discussion about whether capitalism depends on bubbles to exist? If it does, the Green Energy will be the next bubble.
JTM- This comes back to our earlier discussion about whether capitalism depends on bubbles to exist? If it does, the Green Energy will be the next bubble.
It reeks of George Schultz and Bectel. Business as usual for those guys.
It reeks of George Schultz and Bectel. Business as usual for those guys.
Jon — I wonder if there is any “business model” for a large population to work from, that has any chance of attaining the kind of meta-stability many of us believe could exist in smaller self-sufficient communities.
Maybe not? Maybe since we don’t have ESP and our altruism stops at tribal boundaries, the kind of mutual Golden Rule life of barter and exchange just ain’t in the cards.
Some suppose Eden was between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, that some also call the “cradle of civilization,” which is really where the warlord and priestly class system came to be when some ancient George Washington Carver or Borglund discovered you could plant the seeds of certain wild grasses and get back a hundredfold or more.
Leading to the surplus crop, leading to granaries in fixed locations, leading to population growth, leading to predatory humans too lazy to plant or hunt any more, leading to standing armies needing swords and spears and such, leading to mud and brick and stone fortifications, leading to palaces and temples, leading to the Code of Hammurabi which aside from the lopping off of hands for theft was mostly an early version of our own Uniform Commercial Code “governing” banking and transport and storage of goods and sales rules and such.
And wars over territory and pride and arrogance, and better weapons, and more complex hierarchies, and experiments with different forms of social control.
You know, “civilization.”
Which means “to live in cities.” And like “sophistication,” if you look at the roots and usages, used to be a negative thing, including “aduleration” and “shallowness” and such.
In the meantime, I’m shorting coal and buying Vestas … “I’m forever blowing bubbles…”
http://www.247wallst.com/2008/04/cramer-breaking.html
Jon — I wonder if there is any “business model” for a large population to work from, that has any chance of attaining the kind of meta-stability many of us believe could exist in smaller self-sufficient communities.
Maybe not? Maybe since we don’t have ESP and our altruism stops at tribal boundaries, the kind of mutual Golden Rule life of barter and exchange just ain’t in the cards.
Some suppose Eden was between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, that some also call the “cradle of civilization,” which is really where the warlord and priestly class system came to be when some ancient George Washington Carver or Borglund discovered you could plant the seeds of certain wild grasses and get back a hundredfold or more.
Leading to the surplus crop, leading to granaries in fixed locations, leading to population growth, leading to predatory humans too lazy to plant or hunt any more, leading to standing armies needing swords and spears and such, leading to mud and brick and stone fortifications, leading to palaces and temples, leading to the Code of Hammurabi which aside from the lopping off of hands for theft was mostly an early version of our own Uniform Commercial Code “governing” banking and transport and storage of goods and sales rules and such.
And wars over territory and pride and arrogance, and better weapons, and more complex hierarchies, and experiments with different forms of social control.
You know, “civilization.”
Which means “to live in cities.” And like “sophistication,” if you look at the roots and usages, used to be a negative thing, including “aduleration” and “shallowness” and such.
In the meantime, I’m shorting coal and buying Vestas … “I’m forever blowing bubbles…”
http://www.247wallst.com/2008/04/cramer-breaking.html
Ha, great JT, civilization in a nutshell….1ok years of trial and error and still, we’re never very far from the law of the jungle. I’m long natural gas and tech.
Ha, great JT, civilization in a nutshell….1ok years of trial and error and still, we’re never very far from the law of the jungle. I’m long natural gas and tech.
Jon,
To whom was Ike referring? To which men in particular? And what exactly was the social “type” that he thought they’d come to represent? What led him to imply that such types would reproduce and endure?
How does Ike’s caveat jibe with his insistence on splitting weapons development, competitively, between the public and private sectors? Was that move informed by his wartime mastery of inter-service rivalry?
I get the impression that the erstwhile Columbia president’s MIC was represented, in his thinking, by Harvard’s James Bryant Conant, co-inventor of napalm and of the Comprehensive High School — the more destructive of which is anyone’s guess.
Jon,
To whom was Ike referring? To which men in particular? And what exactly was the social “type” that he thought they’d come to represent? What led him to imply that such types would reproduce and endure?
How does Ike’s caveat jibe with his insistence on splitting weapons development, competitively, between the public and private sectors? Was that move informed by his wartime mastery of inter-service rivalry?
I get the impression that the erstwhile Columbia president’s MIC was represented, in his thinking, by Harvard’s James Bryant Conant, co-inventor of napalm and of the Comprehensive High School — the more destructive of which is anyone’s guess.
The McCaffrey /US military-industrial complex post, reminds me of the Chinese Red Army going into various business ventures as markets were liberalized in China. It’s just people taking advantage of the short term or near term market play that presents itself whether in business suits or military uniforms. It’s the little regulated commingling of public funds and public office clout, with opportunistic privet enterprises. Another form of public/common wealth appropriation, by privet groups and individuals.
The McCaffrey /US military-industrial complex post, reminds me of the Chinese Red Army going into various business ventures as markets were liberalized in China. It’s just people taking advantage of the short term or near term market play that presents itself whether in business suits or military uniforms. It’s the little regulated commingling of public funds and public office clout, with opportunistic privet enterprises. Another form of public/common wealth appropriation, by privet groups and individuals.
“…to be when some ancient George Washington Carver or Borglund”
I read somewhere now unfindable that anthropologist(s) propose(d) that the creation of cities based on crop cultivation likely began with women who were gatherers and noticed that wherever they dropped what they gathered, new crops sprang up the next time they passed that way. Hunters tend to believe that the only way to survive is to keep moving.
And that is what we do as hunters: stay on the move without looking back or down.
The history of the last century was punctuated by two world wars in which the mechanization of warfare begun in the American Civil War reached a level of destruction so terrible, whole populations prayed for deliverance. Deliverance came in the form of a weapon too terrible to use. With the trauma followed by the realization of a permanent state of threat of anilhilation, the goal became the ability to do anything short of anilhilation as a means to project power. With this came the goal of increasing within the limit of anihilation the precision of devastation. So our intelligent wars were directed to evolve to hit the chosen target overwhelmingly without breaking the neighbor’s tea cups.
Like any limit approaching an infinity, there is no end to the addressable points on that line. It is that line that feeds the military-industrial complex budget by which we can infinitely limit the power while increasing the number of horrible acts we commit on increasingly fewer people.
“…to be when some ancient George Washington Carver or Borglund”
I read somewhere now unfindable that anthropologist(s) propose(d) that the creation of cities based on crop cultivation likely began with women who were gatherers and noticed that wherever they dropped what they gathered, new crops sprang up the next time they passed that way. Hunters tend to believe that the only way to survive is to keep moving.
And that is what we do as hunters: stay on the move without looking back or down.
The history of the last century was punctuated by two world wars in which the mechanization of warfare begun in the American Civil War reached a level of destruction so terrible, whole populations prayed for deliverance. Deliverance came in the form of a weapon too terrible to use. With the trauma followed by the realization of a permanent state of threat of anilhilation, the goal became the ability to do anything short of anilhilation as a means to project power. With this came the goal of increasing within the limit of anihilation the precision of devastation. So our intelligent wars were directed to evolve to hit the chosen target overwhelmingly without breaking the neighbor’s tea cups.
Like any limit approaching an infinity, there is no end to the addressable points on that line. It is that line that feeds the military-industrial complex budget by which we can infinitely limit the power while increasing the number of horrible acts we commit on increasingly fewer people.
General Lee said “It’s a good thing that war is so utterly horrible. Otherwise we would tend to love it.” As impersonal as it is now, and with a such a disconnect to any personal connection on the battlefield, I think perhaps they’ve learned to love it.
General Lee said “It’s a good thing that war is so utterly horrible. Otherwise we would tend to love it.” As impersonal as it is now, and with a such a disconnect to any personal connection on the battlefield, I think perhaps they’ve learned to love it.
They love the lifestyle, perhaps, but my work with the grunts has always informed me that they are dedicated professionals who believe in what they do even when they don’t believe in what they are told.
My interest is more in finding the right level of sharability of ideas and innovation such that each culture Jon discusses in his New Federalism can take the full advantage of the commons. IOW, as I’ve said before, innovation is bred and the viability of the seeds of the elite cultivar in all environments is of highest concern. Policy should be set accordingly.
If we are to change from hunters who must roam to farmers who must hunt, we have to change the economy to one where what is consumed is nutritious when plowing, sewing, reaping or skinning. It isn’t enough to beat swords into plowshares. We have to plow and hunt bear when bear become too numerous to let us harvest. On the other hand, we can train ourselves away from being a society of bear hunters if we will quit hunting bear in valleys other than our own and never hunt them for sport. I’m frankly tired of being the world’s bear police because we could be making beer instead and sharing it with the grunts.
They love the lifestyle, perhaps, but my work with the grunts has always informed me that they are dedicated professionals who believe in what they do even when they don’t believe in what they are told.
My interest is more in finding the right level of sharability of ideas and innovation such that each culture Jon discusses in his New Federalism can take the full advantage of the commons. IOW, as I’ve said before, innovation is bred and the viability of the seeds of the elite cultivar in all environments is of highest concern. Policy should be set accordingly.
If we are to change from hunters who must roam to farmers who must hunt, we have to change the economy to one where what is consumed is nutritious when plowing, sewing, reaping or skinning. It isn’t enough to beat swords into plowshares. We have to plow and hunt bear when bear become too numerous to let us harvest. On the other hand, we can train ourselves away from being a society of bear hunters if we will quit hunting bear in valleys other than our own and never hunt them for sport. I’m frankly tired of being the world’s bear police because we could be making beer instead and sharing it with the grunts.
That’s great, len, and cheers too.
Something you said, “innovation is bred”, pops at me because it is so close to one of the innermost essentials of John Dewey’s half-century effort to provide Americans with a native philosophy. He would have said that taste, not innovation, is bred, but also he’d have said — did in fact say — that taste and innovation are inseparable, as taste is developed, over time, as a result of open-minded experience of expectations, surprised. Innovations. A lifetime full of answered and unanswered expectations variously satisfied or else shocked by innovation.
Jazz.
That’s great, len, and cheers too.
Something you said, “innovation is bred”, pops at me because it is so close to one of the innermost essentials of John Dewey’s half-century effort to provide Americans with a native philosophy. He would have said that taste, not innovation, is bred, but also he’d have said — did in fact say — that taste and innovation are inseparable, as taste is developed, over time, as a result of open-minded experience of expectations, surprised. Innovations. A lifetime full of answered and unanswered expectations variously satisfied or else shocked by innovation.
Jazz.