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An Exceptional Military for the Exceptional Nation

In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds “who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”

As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?

Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before. The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon, declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.

In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: we need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes? After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting force” ever.

Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.

And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for — the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?

The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all, America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically, as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)

Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin, Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”? Let me count the ways.

The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole

In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal “defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill, you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly $50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend, American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget continued to soar.

Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just three years in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia — so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.

Colossal budgets for weapons and war enjoy broad bipartisan support in Washington. It’s almost as if there were a military-industrial-congressional complex at work here! Where, in fact, did I ever hear a president warning us about that? Oh, perhaps I’m thinking of a certain farewell address by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.

In all seriousness, there’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually. Even when Congress and the Pentagon allegedly try to enforce fiscal discipline, if not austerity elsewhere, the crushing gravitational pull of that hole just continues to suck in more money. Bet on that continuing as the Pentagon issues ever more warnings about a new cold war with China and Russia.

Given its money-sucking nature, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is remarkably exceptional when it comes to failing fiscal audits — five of them in a row (the fifth failure being a “teachable moment,” according to its chief financial officer) — as its budget only continued to soar. Whether you’re talking about lost wars or failed audits, the Pentagon is eternally rewarded for its failures. Try running a “Mom and Pop” store on that basis and see how long you last.

Speaking of all those failed wars, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t come cheaply. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, roughly 937,000 people have died since 9/11/2001 thanks to direct violence in this country’s “Global War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. (And the deaths of another 3.6 to 3.7 million people may be indirectly attributable to those same post-9/11 conflicts.) The financial cost to the American taxpayer has been roughly $8 trillion and rising even as the U.S. military continues its counterterror preparations and activities in 85 countries.

No other nation in the world sees its military as (to borrow from a short-lived Navy slogan) “a global force for good.” No other nation divides the whole world into military commands like AFRICOM for Africa and CENTCOM for the Middle East and parts of Central and South Asia, headed up by four-star generals and admirals. No other nation has a network of 750 foreign bases scattered across the globe. No other nation strives for full-spectrum dominance through “all-domain operations,” meaning not only the control of traditional “domains” of combat — the land, sea, and air — but also of space and cyberspace. While other countries are focused mainly on national defense (or regional aggressions of one sort or another), the U.S. military strives for total global and spatial dominance. Truly exceptional!

Strangely, in this never-ending, unbounded pursuit of dominance, results simply don’t matter. The Afghan War? Bungled, botched, and lost. The Iraq War? Built on lies and lost. Libya? We came, we saw, Libya’s leader (and so many innocents) died. Yet no one at the Pentagon was punished for any of those failures. In fact, to this day, it remains an accountability-free zone, exempt from meaningful oversight. If you’re a “modern major general,” why not pursue wars when you know you’ll never be punished for losing them?

Indeed, the few “exceptions” within the military-industrial-congressional complex who stood up for accountability, people of principle like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, were imprisoned or exiled. In fact, the U.S. government has even conspired to imprison a foreign publisher and transparency activist, Julian Assange, who published the truth about the American war on terror, by using a World War I-era espionage clause that only applies to American citizens.

And the record is even grimmer than that. In our post-9/11 years at war, as President Barack Obama admitted, “We tortured some folks” — and the only person punished for that was another whistleblower, John Kiriakou, who did his best to bring those war crimes to our attention.

And speaking of war crimes, isn’t it “exceptional” that the U.S. military plans to spend upwards of $2 trillion in the coming decades on a new generation of genocidal nuclear weapons? Those include new stealth bombers and new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for the Air Force, as well as new nuclear-missile-firing submarines for the Navy. Worse yet, the U.S. continues to reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first, presumably in the name of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And of course, despite the countries — nine! — that now possess nukes, the U.S. remains the only one to have used them in wartime, in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Finally, it turns out that the military is even immune from Supreme Court decisions! When SCOTUS recently overturned affirmative action for college admission, it carved out an exception for the military academies. Schools like West Point and Annapolis can still consider the race of their applicants, presumably to promote unit cohesion through proportional representation of minorities within the officer ranks, but our society at large apparently does not require racial equity for its cohesion.

A Most Exceptional Military Makes Its Wars and Their Ugliness Disappear

Here’s one of my favorite lines from the movie The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” The greatest trick the U.S. military ever pulled was essentially convincing us that its wars never existed. As Norman Solomon notes in his revealing book, War Made Invisible, the military-industrial-congressional complex has excelled at camouflaging the atrocious realities of war, rendering them almost entirely invisible to the American people. Call it the new American isolationism, only this time we’re isolated from the harrowing and horrific costs of war itself.

America is a nation perpetually at war, yet most of us live our lives with little or no perception of this. There is no longer a military draft. There are no war bond drives. You aren’t asked to make direct and personal sacrifices. You aren’t even asked to pay attention, let alone pay (except for those nearly trillion-dollar-a-year budgets and interest payments on a ballooning national debt, of course). You certainly aren’t asked for your permission for this country to fight its wars, as the Constitution demands. As President George W. Bush suggested after the 9/11 attacks, go visit Disneyworld! Enjoy life! Let America’s “best and brightest” handle the brutality, the degradation, and the ugliness of war, bright minds like former Vice President Dick (“So?”) Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald (“I don’t do quagmires”) Rumsfeld.

Did you hear something about the U.S. military being in Syria? In Somalia? Did you hear about the U.S. military supporting the Saudis in a brutal war of repression in Yemen? Did you notice how this country’s military interventions around the world kill, wound, and displace so many people of color, so much so that observers speak of the systemic racism of America’s wars? Is it truly progress that a more diverse military in terms of “color, creed, and background,” to use Secretary of Defense Austin’s words, has killed and is killing so many non-white peoples around the globe?

Praising the all-female-crewed flyover at the last Super Bowl or painting rainbow flags of inclusivity (or even blue and yellow flags for Ukraine) on cluster munitions won’t soften the blows or quiet the screams. As one reader of my blog Bracing Views so aptly put it: “The diversity the war parties [Democrats and Republicans] will not tolerate is diversity of thought.”

Of course, the U.S. military isn’t solely to blame here. Senior officers will claim their duty is not to make policy at all but to salute smartly as the president and Congress order them about. The reality, however, is different. The military is, in fact, at the core of America’s shadow government with enormous influence over policymaking. It’s not merely an instrument of power; it is power — and exceptionally powerful at that. And that form of power simply isn’t conducive to liberty and freedom, whether inside America’s borders or beyond them.

Wait! What am I saying? Stop thinking about all that! America is, after all, the exceptional nation and its military, a band of freedom fighters. In Iraq, where war and sanctions killed untold numbers of Iraqi children in the 1990s, the sacrifice was “worth it,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once reassured Americans on 60 Minutes.

Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you. You don’t like Disney? Then, hark back to that old marching song of World War I and “pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.” Remember, America’s troops are freedom-delivering heroes and your job is to smile and support them without question.

Have I made my point? I hope so. And yes, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional and being so, being #1 (or claiming you are anyway) means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how many innocents you kill or maim, how many lives you disrupt and destroy, how many lies you tell.

I must admit, though, that, despite the endless celebration of our military’s exceptionalism and “greatness,” a fragment of scripture from my Catholic upbringing haunts me still: Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/unveiling-nuclear-threats-reality-past-present/5828519

Unveiling the Nuclear Threats: A Reality of Past and Present

On June 16, 92-year-old Daniel Ellsberg passed away. At RAND, he contributed to a top-secret 47-volume study of classified documents on the Vietnam War. Even though the war had been acknowledged to be “unwinnable” since the 1950s, successive presidents from Eisenhower to Nixon had lied about the conflict.

As Ellsberg released copies of the classified documents, the 7,000 pages became known as the “Pentagon Papers.” However, from 1958 to 1971, his primary job had been as a nuclear war planner for Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

In his view, nearly every U.S. president from Truman to Trump has “considered or directed serious preparations for possible imminent U.S. initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare.” Most plans focused on the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, North Korea, as well as Iraq, Iran, India, and Libya.

In the case of China, Beijing’s role in the Korean War (1950) and the Taiwan Strait crises (1954-55, 1958) triggered U.S. nuclear plans.

Until recently, it was not known that Ellsberg also copied files on the Pentagon’s nuclear plans to decapitate Russia, China and our planet.

China’s Auto-pilot Nuclear Decapitation                     

In May 2021, the New York Times released Ellsberg’s classified documents on the proposed nuclear attack on China amid tensions over the Taiwan Strait in 1958. Pentagon’s leaders were pushing for a first-strike option, despite their belief that the Soviet Union, China’s then-ally, could retaliate and millions of people would perish.

Urging President Biden and the Congress to take notice, Ellsberg was also weary of media apathy after his book The Doomsday Machine (2017). 

Since the Ukraine conflict, the U.S. and NATO have associated Russia with China, which had no role in the invasion. By October 2022, the Biden administration unveiled a Cold War strategy for “nuclear threats from China and Russia.” In the process, historical realities were turned upside down.

According to The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg first learned about those realities reading a top-secret document based on President Kennedy’s question to the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

“If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”

The total varied around 275 million to 325 million deaths. In fact, the U.S. nuclear war plan sought the “destruction of China and the Soviet Union as ‘viable’ societies.”

1,100 US Nuclear Targets in 1956. In 2016, The National Security Archives published a declassified list of US nuclear targets from 1956, which spanned 1,100 locations across Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and North Korea. (Source: Screen capture close-up of “Nukemap” by Future of Life Institute)

Worse, the nuclear strategy linked a “general war,” which would legitimize a first-strike against the Soviet Union (and today Russia), and China, even if Beijing would have nothing to do with such conflict. So, Ellsberg asked the Chiefs, over the president’s signature, for a total breakdown of global deaths from U.S. attacks.

Another 100 million deaths, roughly, were predicted in Eastern Europe, from direct attacks on Warsaw Pact bases and air defenses and from fallout. Perhaps 100 million more from fallout in Western Europe and still another 100 million in the mainly neutral countries adjacent to the Soviet bloc and China, including Finland, Sweden, Austria, Afghanistan, India, and Japan.

The total death toll would be roughly 600 million dead. That’s a hundred Holocausts.

A Truly “Final Solution”

As Ellsberg discovered, deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack or responding to such an attack has never been the only or primary purpose of U.S. nuclear plans and preparations. The real purpose is to limit the damage to the U.S. from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia.

The devastating impact of “nuclear winter” and “nuclear famine,” both of which have been known since the early ’80s, are systematically ignored by nuclear planners.

If U.S. plans for thermonuclear war will be carried out, that means “smoke and soot lofted by fierce firestorms in hundreds of burning cities into the stratosphere, where it would not rain out and would remain for a decade or more.” It would envelope the globe and block most sunlight. It would lower annual global temperatures to the level of the last Ice Age and kill all harvests worldwide, thereby “causing near-universal starvation within a year or two.”

In his memoir Doomsday Delayed (2008), John H. Rubel, who later served as McNamara’s assistant Secretary of Defense, recalls the first high-level presentation of such a scenario in spring 1960. It showed how over half the Soviet population would perish from radioactive fallout alone, and half of all 600 million Chinese. It horrified Rubel, who was of German-Jewish descent. He thought of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when mainly SS bureaucrats, including Adolf Eichmann, agreed on a program to exterminate every last Jew they could find in Europe, deploying technologically-efficient methods of mass extermination:

I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface.

In turn, public discussion of American plans for the decapitation of the Soviet command and control led to a “Dead Hand” system of delegation that would assure retaliation to U.S. attack destroying Moscow and other command centers. And the rest of the nuclear states have followed in the footprints.

The Doomsday Profiteers           

Nuclear preparedness doesn’t come cheap. The projected costs of the U.S. nuclear forces from 2021 to 2030 are expected to total $634 billion. Two-thirds of those costs will be incurred by the Department of Defense (DoD), with the largest expenditure for ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Department of Energy’s (DOE) costs will be for nuclear weapons laboratories and supporting activities.

The key beneficiaries of these expenditures are the major contractors for new nuclear delivery vehicles and the operators of the national nuclear weapons complex. A small oligopoly of global contractors and operators – the Big Defense – will reap the profits. Northrop Grumman has identified major suppliers for its new ICBM in 32 states. Its 12 largest subcontractors include some of the nation’s most prominent defense companies, including Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, L3Harris, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Honeywell, Bechtel, and the aerospace division of Raytheon.

From 2012 to 2020, these Big Defense conglomerates spent over $119 million in campaign contributions employing 380 lobbyists among them in 2020 alone. Over two-thirds of the monies passed through the “revolving door” from top positions in Congress, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy to work for nuclear weapons contractors as executives or board members, and vice versa. Typically, secretaries of defense – including James Mattis (General Dynamics); Mark Esper (Raytheon); and Lloyd Austin (Raytheon) – have served as lobbyists or board members of major nuclear weapons contractors before the Pentagon.

Additionally, the Big Defense spends millions of dollars in supporting think-tanks for “independent analysis” on nuclear weapons. Licking the hand that feeds them, the think-tanks, in return, push for increasing nuclear investment in Russia’s near-abroad and Asia via the trilateral U.S.-UK-Australia security pact AUKUS.

Dismantling the Machine

So, where are we today? The Doomsday Machine plan, officially known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), was updated annually until 2003, when it was replaced until revised in 2012 with OPLAN 8010-12, Strategic Deterrence and Force Employment. Its base plan is thought still to be directed against “Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and WMD attacks by non-state actors.”

Even against Russia and increasingly China, which now dominates U.S. nuclear planning, the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community think that “a disarming first strike [against the U.S.] will most likely not occur.” Yet, as over six decades ago, such assessments are subject to perceptions, which have resulted in several false alarms since the 1960s; some of them potentially fatal.

As evidenced by the Doomsday Clock, the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe is today the highest since World War II. Dismantling the Doomsday Machine in the U.S. and other nuclear states is the only viable way to ensure sustained peace – and the survival of our planet.