I’m going to show you three charts that are part of a much larger presentation prepared by the Defense Business Board, an advisory council to the Secretary of Defense that was created in 2001. It is not classified and was sent to me by one of our readers who is as concerned as I am that Eisenhower’s warning of the “undue influence of the Military Industrial Complex” threaten the very security of our nation.
The first is the comparative budgets of the Pentagon since the Carter Presidency.
What is so immediately striking is that the military budget has grown 289% in real dollars since 1980 and yet the actual fighting force has shrunk radically: Army divisions down by 47%, commissioned ships down by 45%, Air Force fighter attack jets down by 54%. Continue reading ‘Rightsizing the Pentagon’
“It is important that we not repeat the mistakes of the past, where tough economic times or the winding down of a military campaign leads to steep and unwise reductions in defense.”
Gates is worried that for the first time in a generation there is a strange coalition of progressive Democrats and libertarian Republican who are willing to seriously cut back the Pentagon budget. Senator Lindsay Graham has called this “an unholy alliance”, and is worried that the Military budget that has poured so much money into South Carolina may be in danger.
The most comprehensive manifesto of the unholy alliance is titled Debt, Deficits and Defense and should be read by every American. Of course even Gates’ modest cuts were immediately met by condemnation from Pols of both parties who still subscribe to Military Keynesianism as a way to keep unemployment under control. What is needed now is a massive conversion effort of our war economy to a peace economy like the one Seymour Melman proposed in the late 1950′s.
A recent report from the Congressional Research Service finds that the war on terror, including Afghanistan and Iraq, has been, by far, the costliest war in American history aside from World War II. It adjusted costs of all previous wars for inflation.
Those historical comparisons should be a wake-up call to President Obama, underscoring how our military strategy is not only a mess — as the recent leaked documents from Afghanistan suggested — but also more broadly reflects a gross misallocation of resources. One legacy of the 9/11 attacks was a distortion of American policy: By the standards of history and cost-effectiveness, we are hugely overinvested in military tools and underinvested in education and diplomacy.
Kristof goes on to point out “For the cost of just one soldier in Afghanistan for one year, we could start about 20 schools there.” And as Greg Mortenson (pictured above), author of Three Cups of Tea, has shown, those schools have a far more beneficial effect that the combat troops.
I may be wearing rose-colored glasses, but it seems to me that the issue I have been haranguing you with for two years, The Cost of Empire, is finally penetrating into the national discussion.
But I think the next month and a half is going to bring a change of mood in the country that will help the Democrats. First off, it appears that Mother Nature, with help from BP and the Feds is going to lift the pall of the Gulf Oil Spill.
The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
But the second and more important move will be the return of a large number of troops from Iraq over Labor Day. Obama said he would end the war in Iraq and he’s going to keep his word. The new Centcom commander, General James Mattis made clear in his confirmation hearing that a withdrawal next summer from Afghanistan is his plan.
Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, pointedly asked General Mattis whether he agreed that a July 2011 deadline for the start of American withdrawals from Afghanistan would mean shifting from the current troop-intensive counterinsurgency strategy to an “increasingly important emphasis” on counterterrorism. In other words, should not the United States use the date to begin moving toward a more limited strategy of hunting down insurgents without trying to rebuild Afghanistan? General Mattis quickly agreed.
“I think that is the approach, Senator,” he said.
Finally, the Dems are going to play hardball in merging the Tea Party and Republican Party into one simple image.
The Wiki-Leaks document dump over the weekend is not the Pentagon Papers Redux, but it does highlight three facts about the War in Afghanistan that will not change no matter what General Petraeus does in Kabul.
1.The very idea of counter-insurgency warfare is deeply flawed.
The reports portray a resilient, canny insurgency that has bled American forces through a war of small cuts. The insurgents set the war’s pace, usually fighting on ground of their own choosing and then slipping away.
Sabotage and trickery have been weapons every bit as potent as small arms, mortars or suicide bombers. So has Taliban intimidation of Afghan officials and civilians — applied with pinpoint pressure through threats, charm, violence, money, religious fervor and populist appeals.
The Washington Post’s new series Top Secret America is a frightening look into the post 9/11 cancerous growth of the spy bureaucracy in our country.
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work…
Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.
When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.
Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington’s bureaucracy. “Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn’t gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?” he said. “Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn’t produce the same thing?”
As the Post explains much of this sprawl of bureaucracy has been contracted out to companies like General Dynamics. So here we have our corporate welfare system on steroids. Will Obama have the guts to take a knife to this monstrosity? Like the Military Industrial Complex, Top Secret America must undergo a radical downsizing for the coming age of austerity.
As members of opposing political parties, we disagree on a number of important issues. But we must not allow honest disagreement over some issues to interfere with our ability to work together when we do agree.
By far the single most important of these is our current initiative to include substantial reductions in the projected level of American military spending as part of future deficit reduction efforts. For decades, the subject of military expenditures has been glaringly absent from public debate. Yet the Pentagon budget for 2010 is $693 billion – more than all other discretionary spending programs combined. Even subtracting the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military spending still amounts to over 42% of total spending.
It is irrefutably clear to us that if we do not make substantial cuts in the projected levels of Pentagon spending, we will do substantial damage to our economy and dramatically reduce our quality of life.
This is a movement that needs wide support from both left and right. Until most Americans realize that there is a better Life After Empire, we will be trapped in a pinched view of the American future. Write Frank and Paul and tell them of your support.
The United States has three DEFCON 5 level crises happening at once. The first is an ecological disaster in the American Gulf region. The second is a foreign policy disaster in the Arabian Gulf region. And the third is an economic disaster being caused by the Bond Vigilantes in the Canyons of Wall Street. They are all related and they all flow from a conservative ideology that is inimical to the liberal project that is the story of America since 1776.
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence declaring “All men are created equal” and supporting the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, takes it’s soul from John Locke’s statement of Liberalism’s belief in Liberty and Equality. Not equality of outcomes, but equality of opportunity, the end to aristocracy and power by birth. American was a liberal country at it’s founding and through most of its history.
But since Ronald Reagan, a conservative mentality has gripped our country that rejected Nixon’s embrace of environmentalism and ignored the laws liberal Republicans had helped pass to protect the planet. Since Reagan a Neo-conservative foreign policy elite has rejected the warnings of Dwight Eisenhower and built a war machine unprecedented in world history and projected American power throughout the Arabian Gulf region at a cost of $1 trillion per year. And finally a conservative group of economists (The Chicago School) has empowered a group of Bond Traders (the Vigilantes) into threatening our government (and others around the world) to slash spending at the very moment our economy is poised to plunge into a depression. Continue reading ‘Deflation, Kleptocracy & Reform’
Although the investigation is not complete, the officials suspect that at least some of these security companies — many of which have ties to top Afghan officials — are using American money to bribe the Taliban. The officials suspect that the security companies may also engage in fake fighting to increase the sense of risk on the roads, and that they may sometimes stage attacks against competitors.
Now Presdient Karzai’s brother is trying to consolidate all the private security companies under a single force, controlled by him.
American and Afghan officials said that Ahmed Wali Karzai was moving rapidly to bring the 23 unregistered security companies in Kandahar under his own control. With the government’s support, Ahmed Wali Karzai, together with Mr. Ruhullah, plan to form an umbrella company, called the Kandahar Security Force, that will broker business for the various individual companies, a senior NATO official said.
“He wants a cut of every contract,” the NATO official in Kabul said.
It’s very clear, the Karzai’s have only one objective–Keep U.S. money flowing into their country for as long as possible. With luck, they can retire to the South of France in seven years, their Swiss bank accounts overflowing with U.S. munificence.
It is somewhat ironic that President Obama finished off the best week of his Presidency by flying to Afghanistan in the middle of the night. Of course pictures like this of young soldiers of all races eager to grab the President’s hand, help back home and may even introduce a note of cognitive dissonance in some of the Tea Party Patriots. But the real problem is that President Karzai has delusions of grandeur that he can play the global power game to offset U.S. insistence that he clean up the corruption around his administration.
“He’s slipping away from the West,” said a senior European diplomat in Kabul.
Mr. Karzai warmly received one of America’s most vocal adversaries, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, on an official visit to Kabul in early March. Mr. Karzai met with him again this past weekend in Tehran, when the two celebrated the Afghan and Iranian New Year together.
Mr. Karzai returned to Kabul only hours before Mr. Obama landed.
Last week, Mr. Karzai made a three-day trip to China, a country that is making economic investments in Afghanistan, notably in its copper reserves, taking advantage of the hard-won and expensive security efforts of the United States and other Western nations. Continue reading ‘Graveyard of Empires’
, has shown, those schools have a far more beneficial effect that the combat troops.
absurdity. We are spending millions per month of your taxpayer dollars to fund local afghan security companies to protect the supply trucks that keep our war going. But it turns out much of the money is used in a kind of Kabuki play 