Yet when it comes to military policy, the Obama administration’s success in shutting down wars conducted in plain sight tells only half the story, and the lesser half at that. More significant has been this president’s enthusiasm for instigating or expanding secret wars, those conducted out of sight and by commandos.

President Franklin Roosevelt may not have invented the airplane, but during World War II he transformed strategic bombing into one of the principal emblems of the reigning American way of war. General Dwight D. Eisenhower had nothing to do with the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Yet, as president, Ike’s strategy of Massive Retaliation made nukes the centerpiece of U.S. national security policy.

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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta weighed in similarly.  “There were,” he insisted, “no tactical gains here. These are isolated attacks that are done for symbolic purposes, and they have not regained any territory.”  Such sentiments were echoed by many in the media, who emphasized that the attacks “didn’t accomplish much” or were “unsuccessful.”

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The L.A. Times informed the Pentagon of its story and waited 72 hours before publishing. The Army, notably, had not launched a criminal investigation into the troops responsible for the photos until the Times contacted them. The Obama administration and the Pentagon have both condemned the soldiers responsible for the pictures, but also expressed disappointment in the Times for publishing them. Wired's Spencer Ackerman refers to the photos as "yet another unforced error" for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It's a depressing and disturbing story, from a long and miserable war.

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Advocates of Pentagon reform have criticized President Obama for his timid approach to reducing military spending. Despite current Pentagon budgets that have hovered at the highest levels since World War II and 13 years of steady growth, the administration’s latest plans would only reduce spending at the Department of Defense by 1.6 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars over the next five years.

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Since 1986's "Top Gun" rekindled the Pentagon-Hollywood relationship from its post-Vietnam doldrums, the collusion between the military and the entertainment industry has become a blockbuster con, generating huge benefits for both participants -- and swindling the American public in the process.

The scheme is simple: The Pentagon allows studios to use military hardware and bases at a discounted, taxpayer-subsidized rate. In exchange, filmmakers must submit their scripts to the Pentagon for line edits. Not surprisingly, those edits often redact criticism of military policy, revise depictions of historical failures, and generally omit anything else that might make audiences wonder if our current defense policy is repeating past mistakes.

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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.

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On Thursday, the Pentagon released a report allowing a trickle more of estrogen into the front lines, with women now officially assigned, instead of informally attached, to battalions. But despite an explicit recommendation from a panel of neutral experts, still no ground fighting, no combat infantry, no special forces. In a press release, the women veterans’ Service Women’s Action Network “regretted” the failure to lift the “unfair” Combat Exclusion Policy, which precludes women from becoming infantry members.

Will they never learn? A year ago, the lame duck Congress finally voted an end to the despised exclusion of openly gay men and women from the service, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The same arguments – unit cohesion, unfitness for combat – that were used against open gay service now live on as the last barriers to women. For however many women are fit enough and inclined to take those hard-line jobs, as for the many dedicated gay and lesbian service members, the exclusions are an insurmountable barrier to their aspirations and a costly waste of human power for the country.

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Disclosures posted last evening at the California secretary of state's website confirm that a flood of military contractor money has flowed to Patricia McKeon, who is running for an open Assembly seat in a district that overlaps that of her husband, Republican Rep. Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

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A couple hundred thousand dead civilians have a way of making such noble ideals seem like dollar-store tinsel. And so, throughout our decade-long foreign policy debacle in the Greater Middle East, we in the U.S. have generally agreed that no one shall commit the gaucherie of dwelling on (and “dwelling on” = fleetingly mentioned) civilian casualties. Washington elites may squabble over some things, but as for foreigners killed by our numerous wars, our Beltway crew adheres to a sullen code of omertà.

Club rules do, however, permit one loophole: Washington officials may bemoan the nightmare of civilian casualties -- but only if they can be pinned on a 24-year-old Army private first class named Bradley Manning.

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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.

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The relative lack of controversy marks a contrast with the last great transformation of American foreign policy, which took place at the end of the Cold War.  Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was clear that the Soviet-American conflict that had structured U.S. foreign policy since the late 1940s was coming to an end.  For several years there was a vigorous debate in the mainstream media as well as expert circles about what should replace the Cold War strategy of containment of communism as the basis of American grand strategy.

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But close analysis of the Obama plan shows that he is in fact following in the footsteps of Republican foreign policy stalwarts Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and H.W. Bush. These presidents changed our strategy and reduced defense spending in real terms when the United States ended wars and /or was confronting budget problems. Moreover, the cuts in spending and manpower that Obama is proposing to support his new strategy are far less than his Republican predecessors.

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Wired's Spencer Ackerman reports from the Army's "Unified Quest" event, in which the Army "holds a series of wargames and symposia to help it think about its needs for the near future." Its needs generally include funding that matches or exceeds current levels.

We are, of course, currently drawing down from one of the multiple wars we're fighting, making it harder to justify maintaining such a large Army, but the Army is basically convinced that the world is heading for a disastrous post-apocalyptic hellscape scenario:

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Wired's Danger Room reports:

On no fewer than 20 occasions since 2008, Raptor pilots have reported mid-air black-outs, disorientation and other symptoms of oxygen deprivation — a.k.a., “hypoxia” — possibly related to the stealth fighter’s On-Board Oxygen Generation System, built by Honeywell.

Haha, whoops. Well, when you're only able to spend $66.7 billion on a fleet of supermaneuverable stealth fighter aircraft, these things will happen.

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And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America's ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous -- until now.

Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases -- some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment -- are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war. They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad -- in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign "footprint" and little accountability.

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Last month, Patty Murray was awarded a bronze statuette featuring a little boy with a big smile on his face, running while holding a toy airplane aloft. Presented by the Aerospace Industries Association, a coalition of more than 300 defense and aerospace firms, the "Wings of Liberty Award" was given to Murray "in recognition of her longtime support of the aerospace and defense industry," reads the organization's press release. According to Jim Albaugh, the executive vice president of America's second largest defense contractor, Boeing, and the chairman of AIA's Board of Governors, "Senator Murray knows the value of the aerospace and defense industry."

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The Senate minority whip may be the most outspoken member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction when it comes to the military budget, but the Democrats currently considering whether to cut the deficit via reductions in defense spending or programs like Medicare and Medicaid have received far more money from Pentagon contractors than Kyl or any of their Republican colleagues on the panel, according to an investigation by Alternet, with assistance from the Brave New Foundation and Salon.com. 

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Garrisoning the planet is just part of it. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services are also running covert special forces and spy operations, launching drone attacks, building bases and secret prisons, training, arming, and funding local security forces, and engaging in a host of other militarized activities right up to full-scale war. But while you consider this, keep one fact in mind: the odds are that there is no longer a single nation in the arc of instability in which the United States is in no way militarily involved.

Covenant of the Arc

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Painful as it is to remember, the August debt deal -- which got the country past the crisis provoked by the Republicans' refusal to allow an increase in the debt ceiling -- requires the supercommittee to find at least $1.2 trillion in budget cuts over the next 10 years. If the 12 congressional Republicans and Democrats on the committee fail to agree on those cuts, automatic reductions are supposed to take place, including $492 billion in the defense budget and over $400 billion elsewhere, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Politically, the idea was to apply pressure by threatening the unthinkable, i.e., "We'll shoot the hostage." Either the supercommittee will cut a deal, or the defense budget gets whacked.

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