“The golden age of intelligence is before us”

Robert Kaplan says fighting terrorism will require new rules for spying, but he predicts that fighting an "almost comic book evil" will lead to a revival.

By Laura Rozen

Topics:U.S. Military

“In a world in which borders are dissolving and bad guys conceal bombs in their pockets or steal millions by means of computers, the intelligence business is set for a golden age,” wrote Robert Kaplan back in 1998 for the Atlantic Monthly. That golden age may have begun for real last week, when the terror attack on New York and Washington spurred our political leaders to pledge a war against terrorism that will largely be fought by expanded intelligence capabilities and small stealth squads of special forces.

The author of seven books, including “Balkan Ghosts” and “The Coming Anarchy,” Kaplan has scanned the post-Cold War landscape from Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, to Ft. Bragg, N.C., which inspired his thinking about the future importance of intelligence and special forces. Known for his sober judgment and frequent pessimism, Kaplan was uncharacteristically optimistic about the U.S.’s capacity to recover from last week’s terror and its aftermath. Salon interviewed Kaplan Wednesday by telephone at his home in western Massachusetts.

You have written about Islamic fundamentalism as a challenge to regimes in Egypt, in Pakistan. To people who say the U.S. got attacked because of its policies, particularly toward the Middle East, what do you say?

First of all, that’s not why we got attacked. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to have to make certain concessions in order to appease Arab moderates in order to help us in our struggle. We’ll get help from a regime, and they’ll ask us to put pressure on Israel over settlements, for instance.

The real cause of the attacks is that the terrorists have an existential hatred of the modern technological world, even though they use its toys. And that hatred exists because they see our world as the real challenge to Islam in a way that communism never was. Because communism was a failure, it was never seen as a challenge to them.

We really are a challenge. And also because the modern technological world is interpreted through an American prism. We’ve always represented the future. And our popular culture has the ability to suck up their new emerging middle classes — in Egypt and other Islamic and developing countries — because it’s informal, it’s not aristocratic — it’s jeans, computers, music. Because it’s an informal culture, anyone can join it, and it becomes very enticing. And that’s the threat. They hate us, but it’s a type of respect.

You have traveled around the U.S. trying to understand where the country is headed. How do you think the attacks will change us as a country? What strengths and vulnerabilities have you observed?

Because we have had the dumb luck of geographical circumstance, until now we have been able to indulge ourselves in freedoms that other countries have not. We don’t have to carry identity cards with us, like most Europeans. But we also tend to confuse convenience with liberty. And because of these freedoms, we tend to be that much more exposed. Historically, we have tended to denigrate the very parts of the bureaucracy like the intelligence services that have historically prevented these kinds of attacks.

The CIA functions badly because it’s not been respected for decades. And when something’s not respected, the best people are not attracted to join. What I see coming out of this is a kind of reform and resurgence of the CIA, like we saw in the U.S. military in the decade culminating in the Gulf War.

But there were umpteen television shows glorifying the CIA already set to air on the TV networks in the fall, before these attacks.

It’s like pissing in an ocean. First of all, the Vietnam syndrome is over. The ’60s are over. Assassinations will come back. Because there are no military targets. Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic had water and electricity grids to bomb. I mean, once we kept Belgrade out of running water and power for a week, Milosevic surrendered. We are dealing with an enemy now where there is nothing to bomb. You have to kill people.

As I said in the Atlantic, the next war is going to be all about intelligence. The great golden age of intelligence is before us, and the greatest spies are just being born now. Future wars are going to be based on the size and quality of the intelligence services. Because in a world of complex, variegated cultures, understanding intent is more important than satellite photos. We need people who can melt into societies.

But no one who has traveled a lot abroad and has a lot of foreign acquaintances can get a security clearance within American diplomatic and intelligence agencies. They have self-selected people who have very limited foreign experience.

That’s all going to change. I got an e-mail the other day from a friend at the State Department. He said the change has been dramatic. Before, it was “You can’t do this because of this rule and that rule.” Now, he said, you do it and break the rule. And nobody will punish you. It turns out that this kind of bureaucratic web of restrictions — that’s going to be wiped away in a second.

Was there anything that surprised you as you watched the pictures on TV of New York after the attacks?

It turns out that we weren’t weak as a society. For so many decades, we had nothing to struggle for. We became decadent and overly legalistic. But once threatened, that changed.

What’s your prediction for the coming days? Are you optimistic?

I’m very optimistic. If you look historically at America, America was coming apart into partisanship and hatred in the ’30s — Huey Long, Father Coughlin, all that. And then Hitler and Tojo came along, and it saved us. After World War II, the U.S. has experienced 50 years of dynamism. Out of World War II came the GI Bill, civil rights, the erosion of anti-Semitism — all of this came out of World War II.

Without it, America would have rolled into decadence. But we have been a very lucky country. Every few decades, we are faced with almost comic-book evil. You are going to see: A lot will change.

I was not surprised by the tremendous civil spirit in New York for two reasons. The little reason is because New York has happened to have a very good mayor for the last eight years, not just for the last eight days. Rudolph Giuliani has spent the previous eight years restoring a sense of civil spirit in New York.

But there’s a bigger reason. America is a country built of small communities. America’s greatness is not its central government, but its weak central government with hundreds of small communities. And those are the real roots of this country’s vibrancy. The New York story is very much an American story.

Another thing to note is that the Red vs. Blue map of Bush vs. Gore — the east and west coasts of the country versus the middle — has been detonated. If Cheney’s health doesn’t hold up enough to run next term, I could see a Bush-[New York Gov. George Pataki] ticket, and New York going Republican.

You have written on everything from the rise of nationalism and the end of communism in Eastern Europe, to Egypt’s fight with the Islamic brotherhood, to the U.S. intelligence services, to Pakistan as a potential Yugoslavia with nukes. What are your thoughts as you have watched events unfold here after the terrorist attacks?

The first thing no one has realized yet is that these attacks mean the end of Wilsonian idealism. Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda are all off the charts, assigned to the sepia-toned 1990s. We can only afford to do good works abroad when security at home can be taken for granted.

Absent that luxury, foreign policy goes back to what it has traditionally been: cold national security.

Back to Kissinger and realpolitik?

Right. The U.S. can only engage in good works abroad when it doesn’t face threats to national security at home.

America’s historical experience, our sense of security, was based on being surrounded by two oceans. Our national security was created not by a smart security policy, but by the dumb luck of geography.

Now technology has bridged oceanic distance. The result is that we are now more vulnerable than at any time since the British burnt down the White House in 1814.

We’re back to the period of the first three or four U.S. presidents, from George Washington to James Madison to John Adams. All realists. They were reading Greek and Roman history, not the life of Jesus Christ. Realism tends to thrive when people feel insecure.

The 20th century did not end until last week. The Balkans, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo — all of that was a kind of low-level extension of the Cold War — a coda.

How was the Bosnian war still a part of the Cold War?

In the Balkan wars what we were basically witnessing was the cleaning up of the business of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Really, when you think about it — if you could give it one cause — what we saw the last decade in the Balkans was the refuse of communism. When Belgium and everywhere else became middle class in the 1950s, the Balkans lagged behind. I mean, you don’t see French Canadians smuggling AK-47s up New York’s Hudson River.

: Laura Rozen writes about U.S. foreign policy and the Balkans crisis for Salon News. More Laura Rozen

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Our non-withdrawal from Afghanistan

Despite the alleged 2014 end date, the military has ramped up its construction of long-term bases

By Nick Turse

A helicopter lands near U.S. soldiers at the Forward Operating Base Bostic in Kunar, Afghanistan (Credit: Reuters/Erik de Castro)

Topics:U.S. Military, Afghanistan, Pentagon

This originally appeared on TomDispatch.

In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence. The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.

Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity. It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation and dissemination” operations center — and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.

Nor is it an anomaly. Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating. In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan. Today, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs tells TomDispatch, the number tops 450.

The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility at the massive air base in Kandahar is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway in Afghanistan. While some U.S. bases are indeed closing up shop or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing or ending next year, as well as a withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram airfields. The same is true even of some smaller camps, forward operating bases (FOBs) and combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands. “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office recently told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication. “We’re transitioning… into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”

Whether the U.S. military will still be in Afghanistan in five or 10 years remains to be seen, but steps are currently being taken to make that possible. U.S. military publications, plans and schematics, contracting documents and other official data examined by TomDispatch catalog hundreds of construction projects worth billions of dollars slated to begin, continue or conclude in 2012.

While many of these efforts are geared toward structures for Afghan forces or civilian institutions, a considerable number involve U.S. facilities, some of the most significant being dedicated to the ascendant forms of American warfare: drone operations and missions by elite special operations units. The available plans for most of these projects suggest durability. “The structures that are going in are concrete and mortar, rather than plywood and tent skins,” says Gerdes. As of last December, his office was involved in 30 Afghan construction projects for U.S. or international coalition partners worth almost $427 million.

The Big Base Build-Up

Recently, the New York Times reported that President Obama is likely to approve a plan to shift much of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan to special operations forces. These elite troops would then conduct kill/capture missions and train local troops well beyond 2014. Recent building efforts in the country bear this out.

A major project at Bagram Air Base, for instance, involves the construction of a special operations forces complex, a clandestine base within a base that will afford America’s black ops troops secrecy and near-absolute autonomy from other U.S. and coalition forces. Begun in 2010, the $29 million project is slated to be completed this May and join roughly 90 locations around the country where troops from Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan have been stationed.

Elsewhere on Bagram, tens of millions of dollars are being spent on projects that are less sexy but no less integral to the war effort, like paving dirt roads and upgrading drainage systems on the mega-base. In January, the U.S. military awarded a $7 million contract to a Turkish construction company to build a 24,000-square-foot command-and-control facility. Plans are also in the works for a new operations center to support tactical fighter jet missions, a new flight-line fire station, as well as more lighting and other improvements to support the American air war.

Last month, Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered that the U.S.-run prison at Bagram be transferred to Afghan control. By the end of January, the U.S. had issued a $36 million contract for the construction, within a year, of a new prison on the base. While details are sparse, plans for the detention center indicate a thoroughly modern, high-security facility complete with guard towers, advanced surveillance systems, administrative facilities and the capacity to house about 2,000 prisoners.

At Kandahar Air Field, that new intelligence facility for the drone war will be joined by a similarly-sized structure devoted to administrative operations and maintenance tasks associated with robotic aerial missions. It will be able to accommodate as many as 180 personnel at a time. With an estimated combined price tag of up to $5 million, both buildings will be integral to Air Force and possibly CIA operations involving both the MQ-1 Predator drone and its more advanced and more heavily-armed progeny, the MQ-9 Reaper.

The military is keeping information about these drone facilities under extraordinarily tight wraps. They refused to answer questions about whether, for instance, the construction of these new centers for robotic warfare are in any way related to the loss of Shamsi Air Base in neighboring Pakistan as a drone operations center, or if they signal efforts to increase the tempo of drone missions in the years ahead. The International Joint Command’s chief of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations, aware that such questions were to be posed, backed out of a planned interview with TomDispatch.

“Unfortunately our ISR chief here in the International Joint Command is going to be unable to address your questions,” Lieutenant Ryan Welsh of ISAF Joint Command Media Outreach explained by email just days before the scheduled interview. He also made it clear that any question involving drone operations in Pakistan was off limits. “The issues that you raise are outside the scope under which the IJC operates, therefore we are unable to facilitate this interview request.”

Whether the construction at Kandahar is designed to free up facilities elsewhere for CIA drone operations across the border in Pakistan or is related only to missions within Afghanistan, it strongly suggests a ramping up of unmanned operations. It is, however, just one facet of the ongoing construction at the air field. This month, a $26 million project to build 11 new structures devoted to tactical vehicle maintenance at Kandahar is scheduled for completion. With two large buildings for upkeep and repairs, one devoted strictly to fixing tires, another to painting vehicles, as well as an industrial-sized car wash, and administrative and storage facilities, the big base’s building boom shows no sign of flickering out.

Construction and Reconstruction

This year, at Herat Air Base in the province of the same name bordering Turkmenistan and Iran, the U.S. is slated to begin a multimillion-dollar project to enhance its special forces’ air operations. Plans are in the works to expand apron space — where aircraft can be parked, serviced and loaded or unloaded — for helicopters and airplanes, as well as to build new taxiways and aircraft shelters.

That project is just one of nearly 130, cumulatively valued at about $1.5 billion, slated to be carried out in Herat, Helmand and Kandahar provinces this year, according to Army Corps of Engineers documents examined by TomDispatch. These also include efforts at Camp Tombstone and Camp Dwyer, both in Helmand Province as well as Kandahar’s FOB Hadrian and FOB Wilson. The U.S. military also recently awarded a contract for more air field apron space at a base in Kunduz, a new secure entrance and new roads for FOB Delaram II, and new utilities and roads at FOB Shank, while the Marines recently built a new chapel at Camp Bastion.

Seven years ago, Forward Operating Base Sweeney, located a mile up in a mountain range in Zabul Province, was a well-outfitted, if remote, American base. After U.S. troops abandoned it, however, the base fell into disrepair. Last month, American troops returned in force and began rebuilding the outpost, constructing everything from new troop housing to a new storage facility. “We built a lot of buildings, we put up a lot of tents, we filled a lot of sandbags, and we increased our force protection significantly,” Captain Joe Mickley, commanding officer of the soldiers taking up residence at the base, told a military reporter.

Decommission and Deconstruction

Hesco barriers are, in essence, big bags of dirt. Up to seven feet tall, made of canvas and heavy gauge wire mesh, they form protective walls around U.S. outposts all over Afghanistan. They’ll take the worst of sniper rounds, rifle-propelled grenades, even mortar shells, but one thing can absolutely wreck them — the Marines’ 9th Engineer Support Battalion.

At the beginning of December, the 9th Engineers were building bases and filling up Hescos in Helmand Province. By the end of the month, they were tearing others down.

Wielding pickaxes, shovels, bolt-cutters, powerful rescue saws and front-end loaders, they have begun “demilitarizing” bases, cutting countless Hescos — which cost $700 or more a pop — into heaps of jagged scrap metal and bulldozing berms in advance of the announced American withdrawal from Afghanistan. At Firebase Saenz, for example, Marines were bathed in a sea of crimson sparks as they sawed their way through the metal mesh and let the dirt spill out, leaving a country already haunted by the ghosts of British and Russian bases with yet another defunct foreign outpost. After Saenz, it was on to another patrol base slated for destruction.

Not all rural outposts are being torn down, however. Some are being handed over to the Afghan Army or police. And new facilities are now being built for the indigenous forces at an increasing rate. “If current projections remain accurate, we will award 18 contracts in February,” Bonnie Perry, the head of contracting for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Afghanistan Engineering District-South, told military reporter Karla Marshall. “Next quarter we expect that awards will remain high, with the largest number of contract awards occurring in May.” One of the projects underway is a large base near Herat, which will include barracks, dining facilities, office space and other amenities for Afghan commandos.

Tell Me How This Ends

No one should be surprised that the U.S. military is building up and tearing down bases at the same time, nor that much of the new construction is going on at mega-bases, while small outposts in the countryside are being abandoned. This is exactly what you would expect of an occupation force looking to scale back its “footprint” and end major combat operations while maintaining an on-going presence in Afghanistan. Given the U.S. military’s projected retreat to its giant bases and an increased reliance on kill/capture black-ops as well as unmanned air missions, it’s also no surprise that its signature projects for 2012 include a new special operations forces compound, clandestine drone facilities and a brand new military prison.

There’s little doubt Bagram Air Base will exist in five or 10 years. Just who will be occupying it is, however, less clear. After all, in Iraq, the Obama administration negotiated for some way to station a significant military force — 10,000 or more troops — there beyond a withdrawal date that had been set in stone for years. While a token number of U.S. troops and a highly militarized State Department contingent remain there, the Iraqi government largely thwarted the American efforts — and now, even the State Department presence is being halved.

It’s less likely this will be the case in Afghanistan, but it remains possible. Still, it’s clear that the military is building in that country as if an enduring American presence were a given. Whatever the outcome, vestiges of the current base-building boom will endure and become part of America’s Afghan legacy.

On Bagram’s grounds stands a distinctive structurecalled the “Crow’s Nest.” It’s an old control tower built by the Soviets to coordinate their military operations in Afghanistan. That foreign force left the country in 1989. The Soviet Union itself departed from the planet less than three years later. The tower remains.

America’s new prison in Bagram will undoubtedly remain, too. Just who the jailers will be and who will be locked inside five years or 10 years from now is, of course, unknown. But given the history — marked by torture and deaths — of the appalling treatment of inmates at Bagram and, more generally, of the brutality toward prisoners by all parties to the conflict over the years, in no scenario are the results likely to be pretty.

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

: Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. This story is a joint investigative project of Salon, AlterNet, and Brave New Foundation. More Nick Turse

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America, arms-dealer to the world

Munitions is the one U.S. industry that's booming -- with devastating global consequences

By William Astore

Assembly line workers work on a F-35 fighter aircraft at a production plant in Fort Worth, Texas (Credit: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi)

Topics:U.S. Economy, U.S. Military

This originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college. It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds. But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.” Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.

If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.

Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death,” the title of a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade published to acclaim in the U.S. in 1934. Back then, most Americans saw themselves as war-avoiders rather than as war-profiteers. The evil war-profiteers were mainly European arms makers like Germany’s Krupp, France’s Schneider or Britain’s Vickers.

Not that America didn’t have its own arms merchants. As the authors of “Merchants of Death” noted, early on our country demonstrated a “Yankee propensity for extracting novel death-dealing knickknacks from [our] peddler’s pack.” Amazingly, the Nye Committee in the U.S. Senate devoted 93 hearings from 1934 to 1936 to exposing America’s own “greedy munitions interests.” Even in those desperate depression days, a desire for profit and jobs was balanced by a strong sense of unease at this deadly trade, an unease reinforced by the horrors of and hecatombs of dead from the First World War.

We are uneasy no more. Today we take great pride (or at least have no shame) in being by far the world’s number one arms-exporting nation. A few statistics bear this out. From 2006 to 2010, the U.S. accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s arms exports, easily surpassing a resurgent Russia in the “Lords of War” race. Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary pressures, the U.S. increased its market share, accounting for a whopping 53 percent of the trade that year. Last year saw the U.S. on pace to deliver more than $46 billion in foreign arms sales. Who says America isn’t number one anymore?

For a shopping list of our arms trades, try searching the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database for arms exports and imports. It reveals that, in 2010, the U.S. exported “major conventional weapons” to 62 countries, from Afghanistan to Yemen, and weapons platforms ranging from F-15, F-16 and F-18 combat jets to M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Cobra attack helicopters (sent to our Pakistani comrades) to guided missiles in all flavors, colors, and sizes: AAMs, PGMs, SAMs, TOWs — a veritable alphabet soup of missile acronyms. Never mind their specific meaning: They’re all designed to blow things up; they’re all designed to kill.

Rarely debated in Congress or in U.S. media outlets is the wisdom or morality of these arms deals. During the quiet last days of December 2011, in separate announcements whose timing could not have been accidental, the Obama Administration expressed its intent to sell nearly $11 billion in arms to Iraq, including Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter-bombers, and nearly $30 billion in F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, part of a larger, $60 billion arms package for the Saudis. Few in Congress oppose such arms deals since defense contractors provide jobs in their districts — and ready donations to Congressional campaigns.

Let’s pause to consider what such a weapons deal implies for Iraq. Firstly, Iraq only “needs” advanced tanks and fighter jets because we destroyed their previous generation of the same, whether in 1991 during Desert Shield/Storm or in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Secondly, Iraq “needs” such powerful conventional weaponry ostensibly to deter an invasion by Iran, yet the current government in Baghdad is closely aligned with Iran, courtesy of our invasion in 2003 and the botched occupation that followed. Thirdly, despite its “needs,” the Iraqi military is nowhere near ready to field and maintain such advanced weaponry, at least without sustained training and logistical support provided by the U.S. military.

As one U.S. Air Force officer who served as an advisor to the fledging Iraqi Air Force, or IqAF, recently worried:

“Will the IqAF be able to refuel its own aircraft? Can the Iraqi military offer adequate force protection and security for its bases? Can the IqAF provide airfield management services at its bases as they return to Iraqi control after eight years under US direction? Can the IqAF ensure simple power generation to keep facilities operating? Will the IqAF be able to develop and retain its airmen?… Only time will tell if we left [Iraq] too early; nevertheless, even without a renewed security agreement, the USAF can continue to stand alongside the IqAF.”

Put bluntly: We doubt the Iraqis are ready to field and fly American-built F-16s, but we’re going to sell them to them anyway. And if past history is a guide, if the Iraqis ever turn these planes against us, we’ll blow them up or shoot them down — and then (hopefully) sell them some more.

Our Best Arms Customer

Let’s face it: the weapons we sell to others pale in comparison to the weapons we sell to ourselves In the market for deadly weapons, we are our own best customer. Americans have a love affair with them, the more high-tech and expensive, the better. I should know. After all, I’m a recovering weapons addict.

Well into my teen years, I was fascinated by military hardware. I built models of what were then the latest U.S. warplanes: the A-10, the F-4, the F-14, -15 and -16, the B-1, and many others. I read Aviation Week and Space Technology at my local library to keep track of the newest developments in military technology. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I went on to major in mechanical engineering in college and entered the Air Force as a developmental engineer.

Enamored as I was by roaring afterburners and sleek weaponry, I also began to read books like James Fallows’s ”National Defense” (1981) among other early critiques of the Carter and Reagan defense buildup, as well as the slyly subversive and always insightful “Augustine’s Laws” (1986) by Norman Augustine, later the CEO of Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. That and my own experience in the Air Force alerted me to the billions of dollars we were devoting to high-tech weaponry with ever-ballooning price tags but questionable utility.

Perhaps the best example of the persistence of this phenomenon is the F-35 Lightning II. Produced by Lockheed Martin, the F-35 was intended to be an “affordable” fighter-bomber (at roughly $50 million per copy), a perfect complement to the much more expensive F-22 “air superiority” Raptor. But the usual delays, cost overruns, technical glitches and changes in requirements have driven the price tag of the F-35 up to $160 million per plane, assuming the U.S. military persists in its plans to buy 2,400 of them. (If the Pentagon decides to buy fewer, the cost-per-plane will soar into the F-22 range.) By recent estimates the F-35 will now cost U.S. taxpayers (you and me, that is) at least $382 billion for its development and production run. Such a sum for a single weapons system is vast enough to be hard to fathom. It would, for instance, easily fund all federal government spending on education for the next five years.

The escalating cost of the F-35 recalls the most famous of Norman Augustine’s irreverent laws: “In the year 2054,” he wrote back in the early 1980s, “the entire defense budget will [suffice to] purchase just one aircraft.” But the deeper question is whether our military even needs the F-35, a question that’s rarely asked and never seriously entertained, at least by Congress, whose philosophy on weaponry is much like King Lear’s: “O, reason not the need.”

But let’s reason the need in purely military terms. These days, the Air Force is turning increasingly to unmanned drones. Meanwhile, plenty of perfectly good and serviceable “platforms” remain for attack and close air support missions, from F-16s and F-18s in the Air Force and Navy to Apache helicopters in the Army. And while many of our existing combat jets may be nearing the limits of airframe integrity, there’s nothing stopping the U.S. military from producing updated versions of the same. Heck, this is precisely what we’re hawking to the Saudis — updated versions of the F-15, developed in the 1970s.

Because of sheer cost, it’s likely we’ll buy fewer F-35s than our military wants but many more than we actually need. We’ll do so because Weapons ‘R’ Us. Because building ultra-expensive combat jets is one of the few high-tech industries we haven’t exported (due to national security and secrecy concerns), and thus one of the few industries in the U.S. that still supports high-paying manufacturing jobs with decent employee benefits. And who can argue with that?

The Ultimate Cost of Our Merchandise of Death

Clearly, the U.S. has grabbed the brass ring of the global arms trade. When it comes to investing in militaries and weaponry, no country can match us. We are supreme. And despite talk of modest cuts to the Pentagon budget over the next decade, it will, according to President Obama, continue to grow, which means that in weapons terms the future remains bright. After all, Pentagon spending on research and development stands at $81.4 billion, accounting for an astonishing 55 percent of all federal spending on R&D and leaving plenty of opportunity to develop our next generation of wonder weapons.

But at what cost to ourselves and the rest of the world? We’ve become the suppliers of weaponry to the planet’s hotspots. And those weapons deliveries (and the training and support missions that go with them) tend to make those spots hotter still — as in hot lead.

As a country, we seem to have a teenager’s fascination with military hardware, an addiction that’s driving us to bust our own national budgetary allowance. At the same time, we sell weapons the way teenage punks sell fireworks to younger kids: for profit and with little regard for how they might be used.

Sixty years ago, it was said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America. In 1955, as Bob Seger sang, we were young and strong and makin’ Thunderbirds. But today we’re playing a new tune with new lyrics: What’s good for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or [insert major-defense-contractor-of-your-choice here] is good for America.

How far we’ve come since the 1950s!

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: William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel. He has taught cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is the author of "Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism," among other books. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu. More William Astore

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Space: The next war zone?

By rejecting an international agreement to demilitarize space, the White House doubles down on American imperialism

By David Sirota

(Credit: iStockphoto/scibak)

Topics:U.S. Military, Barack Obama

For most of the last century, dystopian science fiction has allowed us to momentarily behold an alternate reality, without having to remain there permanently. Tapping into our affinity for vicarious experience, the genre’s best films and books prompted us to consider all sorts of scientifically possible scenarios — nuclear catastrophe, environmental cataclysm, alien invasions, artificial intelligence gone crazy, etc. — and then breathe a sigh of relief in our still-not-too-dystopian present.

But lately, old sci-fi themes are starting to feel a bit too real, what with events dabbling in dystopia and the “fi” now seeming to vanish from our most enduring sci-fi tropes. In the last few years, we’ve seen sci-fi’s Nuclear Dystopia genre in the Fukushima disaster; its Environmental Cataclysm genre in climate-change-intensified weather events; its End-of-the-World genre in fears of an asteroid collision; its Outbreak Catastrophe genre in various epidemics; its Alien Invasion genre in revelations of possible alien life; its Artificial Intelligence Disaster in the rise of robotic warfare (and even automated robotic warfare); and its Authoritarian Dystopia genre in successive presidents’ indefinite detentions, assassinations and “kill lists.” Now, this month, we are even seeing the rise of sci-fi’s Space War genre in real-life geopolitics.

It started on January 12th, when the Obama administration negged an international agreement aimed at both reducing dangerous space debris and keeping space as demilitarized as possible. As Canada’s National Post noted, the White House rejected the covenant specifically “because it impinged on the (U.S.) military’s use of space.”

A few days after the rejection, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a formal statement declaring that the United States “will not enter into a code of conduct that in any way constrains our national security-related activities in space.” With neoconservatives promoting superheated claims that space demilitarization will harm America’s national security, the administration’s declaration looks politically timed, especially considering that, according to the New York Times in 2010, the White House previously promised to “renounce the unilateral stance of the Bush administration and instead emphasize international cooperation (in space), including the possibility of an arms control treaty that would limit the development of space weapons.”

In one sense, this is nothing new. After all, the United States government has long been trying to militarize space. As far back as 1958, for example, Time magazine reported that Lt. General Donald L. Putt told the House Armed Services Committee of the Air Force’s “plans to become the U.S. Space Force and eventually occupy the moon.” A year later, NASA scientists were hard at work on a “Project Horizon” plan that the agency says was aiming to place “a military colony on the moon.” Then, of course, came Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), which ultimately translated into an ever-growing Pentagon budget for space operations.

But in another sense, the very public nature of the Obama administration’s space decrees this month represents something monumental: a proud reiteration that despite the budgetary, diplomatic and human consequences of U.S. military aggression in the last decade, America still has both no plans to change its imperial posture, and many plans to carry that posture into the few frontiers still left unconquered. In practice, that means a stealth effort to dominate the Arctic, a brazen attempt to control the Internet, and yes, the ongoing attempt to dominate space for military purposes.

All of that may seem like fodder for the fantastical plots of bad sci-fi films, but unfortunately, it’s all too real and all too consequential. Indeed, as military powers like China already start to follow our saber-rattling example, the U.S. government’s posture is today setting the stage for major hegemonic fights for these frontiers, with space the biggest potential battleground of all. No doubt, if and how those conflicts develop will determine whether or not our tomorrow is as dark as sci-fi so often imagines.

: David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota

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The scandal that isn’t on the video

Is it worse to desecrate a few corpses than to mass produce a lot of them?

By Saree Makdisi

Topics:Afghanistan, U.S. Military

The United States and its allies were quick to go into damage control mode to try to contain the political and diplomatic fallout from a video posted on YouTube apparently showing US Marines urinating on the mangled corpses of dead Afghans,

A Pentagon spokesman, Captain John Kirby, told CNN: “Regardless of the circumstances or who is in the video, this is egregious, disgusting behavior. It’s hideous. It turned my stomach.” Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed. “This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms.”.

It ought to go without saying that urinating on corpses, whether of Taliban fighters or Afghan civilians (or any one else for that matter), is disrespectful and degrading and ought to be condemned. What is interesting, and somewhat unsettling, about the outpouring of sentiment following this new scandal, however, is that it raises more questions than it answers.

Isn’t it odd, for example, that there seems to be more concern about urinating on these bodies than there is about the actual killing that transformed them from living human beings to splayed-out corpses in the first place? Is it really possible that peeing on dead bodies is seen as horrific, but killing people is perfectly acceptable? Isn’t something missing from this picture?

This seems an especially pressing question given that much of the US military (and related CIA) effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan so often seems to involve simply killing—or, to use the rather more circumspect military term, “degrading”—as many militants as possible, not necessarily in actual combat operations, but by twos and threes and tens and dozens, in bombings and air raids and drone attacks, as they sleep or drive or eat or pray or brush their teeth. Day after day we read reports of 8 militants being killed here, 5 being killed there , and 6 somewhere else. It is as though the earth keeps vomiting forth “militants,” who then simply need to be mown down like so much vermin in a “war” reduced to its lowest common denominator—killing for the sake of killing, without any kind of strategic aim or vision or logic, much less a sense of when it might end.

Sure, every now and then someone (very rightly) raises a question about how many civilians are being killed in air raids or drone attacks in Afghanistan or Pakistan; not that it makes any difference. There is even the occasional report about the “vast drone/killing operation” being conducted by the Obama Administration, and a few people, including Glenn Greenwald, have been warning of the menace that an unchecked, unregulated, program of extrajudicial executions means, or ought to mean, to Americans and others alike.

But, these exceptions aside, the routine, hum-drum slaughter of “militants” slips by far too readily without sufficient questioning, without enough people pausing to ask who these people are, what they want, what threat they really pose to the US with their AK-47s and RPGs, what plan, if any, there is to do something to stop their seemingly autochthonous emergence (by addressing its causes, for example) rather than merely mowing them down by the dozen after they emerge–or whether the plan really is simply to go on killing as long as there is a supply of living bodies to soak up our ordnance. After all, President Obama has deliberately chosen to kill rather than capture people because he knows that pictures like those that emerged from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are bad news—but that there will be few pictures and fewer questions about the endless slaughter of anonymous militants in the dusty backwaters of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For all the furor, the current scandal proves that point all too grimly, precisely because the scandal consists in the urination rather than the killing itself.

Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos called the act of urinating on the corpses “wholly inconsistent with the high standards of conduct and warrior ethos that we have demonstrated throughout our history.” A NATO spokesman added, “This disrespectful act is inexplicable and not in keeping with the high moral standards we expect of coalition forces.”

But what does it mean to speak of a “warrior ethos” and “high moral standards” in a war when most of the killing is being done by remote control—and not in the heat, intensity and sweaty, adrenaline-driven fear of battle (which the very concept of a “warrior ethos” is supposed to describe), but rather clinically, in air-conditioned comfort, from the safe distance of 20,000 feet—or, rather, 10,000 miles?

It is all too easy to look at the young Marines urinating on the corpses in that video and condemn them (rightly) for their callous brutality. It is far more difficult, however, to put their adolescent action back in its fuller and more meaningful context and ask ourselves what it means that we hardly seem to attach more value to a human life than they do, and that we have come to accept the “reaping” of human lives—for it is not without reason that one of the biggest drones is called Reaper—as a matter to be dismissed with a careless flick of the morning newspaper or click of the mouse.

: Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and the author of, among other books, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation." Follow him @sareemakdisi on Twitter. More Saree Makdisi

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Obama’s “mission accomplished” moment?

At the Pentagon, the president whitewashes the Afghan war and looks to continue a disastrous military-first policy

By Tom Engelhardt

resident Barack Obama delivers speaks on the Defense Strategic Review, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012, at the Pentagon (Credit: AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

Topics:U.S. Military, Barack Obama, Pentagon

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Here’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will pay. Pls respond qkly. PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC.

Here’s the way it actually went down in Washington last week: a triumphant performance by a commander-in-chief who wants you to know that he’s at the top of his game.

When it came to rolling out a new 10-year plan for the future of the U.S. military, the leaks to the media began early and the message was clear. One man is in charge of your future safety and security. His name is Barack Obama. And — not to worry — he has things in hand.

Unlike the typical president, so the reports went, he held six (count ‘em: six!) meetings with top Pentagon officials, the Joint Chiefs, the service heads and his military commanders to plan out the next decade of American war making. And he was no civilian bystander at those meetings either. On a planet where no other power has more than two aircraft carriers in service, he personally nixed a Pentagon suggestion that the country’s aircraft carrier battle groups be reduced from 11 to 10, lest China think our power-projection capabilities were weakening in Asia.

His secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, spared no words when it came to the president’s role, praising his “vision and guidance and leadership” (as would Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin E. Dempsey). Panetta described Obama’s involvement thusly: “[T]his has been an unprecedented process, to have the president of the United States participate in discussions involving the development of a defense strategy, and to spend time with our service chiefs and spend time with our combatant commanders to get their views.”

In other words, Obama taking ownership of the rollout of “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” a 16-page document summarizing a review of America’s strategic interests, defense priorities and military spending. Its public unveiling was to reflect the steady hand of a commander-in-chief destined to be in charge of American security for years to come.

The president even made a “rare visit” to the Pentagon. There, he was hailed as the first occupant of the Oval Office ever to make comments, no less present a new “more realistic” strategic guidance document, from its press office. All of this, in turn, was billed as introducing “major change” into the country’s military stance, leading to (shades of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) a “leaner, meaner” force, slimmed down and recalibrated for economic tough times and a global “moment of transition.”

As political theater, it couldn’t have been smarter. For a president, vulnerable like all Democrats to charges of national security weakness in an election year, it was a chance for great photo ops and headlines. And it left his Republican opponents (Ron Paul, of course, excepted) in the dust, sputtering, fuming and complaining that he was “leading from behind” and “imperiling” the nation.

Even better, in an election season which has mesmerized the media, not a single reporter or pundit seemed to notice that, whatever the new Pentagon plan might mean for the U.S. military globally, it was great domestic politics for a president whose second term was in peril.

Another “Mission Accomplished” Moment?

The actual Pentagon planning document, released the day of the president’s Pentagon appearance, might as well have been written in cuneiform script or hieroglyphics. Just about any military future might have been read into or out of its purposely foggy, not to say impenetrable, pages. That, too, seemed politically canny, offering the president a militarized version of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too-ism.

While the document only referred to the Pentagon budget-cutting process that had been making headlines for weeks in the most oblique manner, the briefings offered by the president, the secretary of defense and other top officials highlighted those “cuts”: $487 billion over the next decade. It was the sort of thing that should have made any deficit hawk’s heart flutter. Yet somehow — a bow to defense hawks? — the same budget, already humongous from an unprecedented 12 straight years of expansion, was, Obama assured his audience, actually slated to keep on growing.

Like a magician pulling the proverbial rabbit from the hat, the president described the situation this way: “Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow, but the fact of the matter is this: It will still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership. In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.”

This magic trick was only possible because those headlined cuts were to come largely from the Pentagon’s “projected defense spending.” You’ll get the idea if you imagine an obese foodie announcing that he’s going to “diet” by cutting back on his dreams of future feasts, even as he modestly increases his actual caloric intake.

Surrounded by Panetta, Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs and the service secretaries, the president had so much more to offer. Those nasty, unwinnable, nation-building-style counterinsurgency wars “with large military footprints” were now a thing of the past. On them, the tide was, as he so poetically put it, receding. Yes, there would be losers — Army and Marine Corps troop strength was slated to drop by perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 in the coming decade — but weren’t they already the losers of wars no one wanted?

Listening to his presentation and those to follow, you could have been pardoned for imagining that we were already practically out of Afghanistan and looking to a time when everything military would be just cool as hell. In that future, there would be nothing but neat, high-tech military operations (and war toys) to the horizon.

These would include our latest perfect weapon, the pilotless drone; nifty cyberwar-style online combat; plenty of new spy and advanced surveillance gear; and sexy shadow wars, just the thing for “environments where adversaries try to deny us access.” Elite special operations forces — the secret military, cocooned inside the regular military, that took down Osama bin Laden — would be further expanded; and finally, there would be a “pivot to Asia” to confront the planet’s rising superpower, China, by sea and air, leaving all those nasty Arabs and Pashtuns and their messy, ugly guerrilla insurgencies, IEDs and suicide bombers behind.

It couldn’t have sounded cheerier once the media speculation began and it offered something for just about anyone who mattered in imperial Washington. In fact, as sober as Obama looked and as business-like as his surroundings were, if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine a flight suit and an aircraft carrier deck, for this felt eerily like his “mission accomplished” moment.

Hostilities of the old nasty sort were practically at an end and a new era of high-tech, super-secret, elite warfare was upon us. The future would be so death-of-bin-Laden-ish all the way. It would be safe, secure and glorious in the hands of our reconfigured military and its efficiently reconfigured budget.

Military-First Imperial Realism

This particular reconfiguration also allowed the globe’s last great imperial power to put a smiley face on a decade of military disasters in the Greater Middle East and — for all the clever politics of the moment — to cry uncle in its own fashion. More miraculous yet, it was doing so without giving up its global military dreams.

It was a way of saying that, if the U.S. ever gets itself out of Afghanistan, when it comes to invading and occupying another Muslim land, building hundreds of bases and an embassy the size of the Ritz, and running riot in the name of “nation-building” and democracy: never again — or not for a few decades anyway.

Consider this a form of begrudging imperial realism that managed never to leave behind that essential American stance of garrisoning the planet. In fact, in order to fly all those drones and land all those special operations units, Washington may need more, not less bases globally. And of course, those 11 carrier battle groups are themselves floating bases, massively armed American small towns at sea.

As it happens, though, we already know how this story ends and it’s nothing to write home about. Yes, they’re going with what’s hot, especially those drones. But keep in mind that, only a few years ago, the hottest thing in town was counterinsurgency warfare and its main proponent, General David Petraeus, was being hailed as a new Alexander the Great, Napoleon, or U.S. Grant. And you know what happened there.

Now, counterinsurgency is history. The new hot ticket of the moment, that “revolutionary weapon” of our time — the drone or robotic airplane — is to fit the bill instead. Drones are, without a doubt, technologically remarkable and growing more sophisticated by the year. But air power has historically proved a poor choice if you want to accomplish anything political on the ground. It hardly matters whether those planes in the distant heavens have pilots or not, or whether they can see ants crawl from 20,000 feet and blast them away with precision.

Despite hosannas about the air war in Libya, count on one thing: air power will prove predictably inept when it comes to an American version of “revolutionary” counterterror warfare in the twenty-first century. So much for the limits of realism.

Washington-style realism assumes that we made a few mistakes, which can be rectified with the help of advanced technology and without endangering the military-industrial-crony-capitalist way of life. That’s about as radical as Obama’s Washington is likely to get.

When compared to the Republicans (Ron Paul aside again) storming the rhetorical barricades daily, threatening war with Iran nightly, promising to reinvade Iraq, or swearing that a military budget larger than those of the next 10 countries combined is wussiness itself, the Obama administration’s approach does look like shining realism. Up against this planet as it actually is today, its military-first policies look like wishful thinking.

What Drones Can’t Do

Climate-change advocates sometimes say that we’re on a new planet. (Bill McKibben calls it “Eaarth,” with that ungainly extra “a” to signify an ungainly place that used to be comfy enough for humanity.) It is, they say, a planet under pressure and destabilizing in all sorts of barely imagined ways.

Here’s the strange thing, though. Set aside climate change, and to the passing, modestly apocalyptic eye, this planet still looks as if it were destabilizing. Your three economic powerhouses — the European Union, China and the United States — are all teetering at the edge of interrelated financial crises. The EU seems to be literally destabilizing. It’s now perfectly reasonable to suggest that the present Eurozone may, within years, be Eurozones (or worse). Who knows when European banks, up to their elbows in bad debt, will start to tumble or whole countries like Greece go down (whatever that may mean)?

At the same time, the Chinese, with the hottest economy on the planet, have a housing bubble, which may already be bursting. (Americans should have at least a few passing memories of just what kinds of troubles a popped housing bubble can bring.) And for all we know, the U.S. economy, despite recent headlines about growing consumer confidence and an unemployment rate dropping to 8.5 percent, may be on life support.

As for the rest of the world, it looks questionable as well. The powerhouse Indian economy, like the Brazilian one, is slowing down. Whatever the glories of the Arab Spring, the Middle East is now in tumult and shows no signs of righting itself economically or politically any time soon. And don’t forget the Obama administration’s attempt to ratchet up sanctions on Iranian oil. If things go wrong, that might end up sending energy prices right through the roof and blowing back on the global economy in painful ways. With the major economies of the globe balancing on a pin, the possibility of a spike in those prices thanks to any future U.S./Iran/Israeli crisis should be terrifying.

The globalization types of the 1990s used to sing hymns to the way this planet was morphing into a single economic creature. It’s worth keeping in mind that it remains so in bad times. This year could, of course, be another bumble-through year of protest and tumult, or it could be something much worse. And don’t think that I — a non-economist of the first order — am alone in such fears. The new head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, has been traveling the planet recently making Jeremiah sound like an optimist, suggesting that we could, in fact, be at the edge of another global Great Depression.

But know this: You can buy drones till they’re coming out your ears and they won’t help keep Greece afloat for an extra second. Expand special operations forces to your heart’s content and you still can’t send them into those failing European banks. Take over cyberspace or outer space and you won’t prevent a Chinese housing bubble from bursting. None of the crucial problems on this planet are, in fact, amenable to military solutions, not even by a country willing to pour its treasure into previously unheard of military and national security expenditures.

Over the years, “the perfect storm” came to be a perfectly overused cliché, which is why you don’t see it much any more. But it might be worth dusting off and keeping in reserve this year and next — just in case. After all, when any situation destabilizes, all bets are off, including for a president having his mission accomplished moment. (Just ask John McCain what happened to his 2008 presidential bid when the economy suddenly began to melt down.)

In such a situation, the sort of military-first policy the president has made his own couldn’t be more useless. Maybe it’s time to take out a little insurance. Just not with AIG.

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: Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, "The United States of Fear" (Haymarket Books), has just been published. More Tom Engelhardt