Author: Jeff Huber

According to the CIA World Factbook, the U.S. spent an estimated $518 billion on its military in 2005.  Second was scary old China, which spent a paltry $81.5 billion.  Following behind the big two were Japan, England, Germany, Italy and South Korea, ranging between $21 billion and $45 billion.  (CIA figures for England, Germany and Italy are from 2003, but you get an idea of the proportions.)

Below the fold: fighting the entire world?

A perennial defense of America’s defense spending has been that it’s only a small percentage of the Gross Domestic Product.  In 2005, for example, it was 4.06 percent of the total $12.41 trillion economy.  Taken out of context, that sounds like a small number, until you note that China’s military budget is around 1 percent of its GDP of $8.182 trillion.  Besides which, nobody ever won or deterred a war based on the percentage of its GDP it spent on its military.  Nations that spend a greater percent of their GDP on arms than the U.S. include such traditional war fighting powerhouses as Djibouti (4.3 percent), Brunei (5.1 percent) and Eritrea (17.7 percent).  Even 100 percent of very little is still very little.

But 50 percent of everything is a hell of a lot, which is where America’s military spending stands.  As Jane’s Defense Weekly notes, America now spends as much on its military as the rest of the world combined.  

Is the Bush administration planning on fighting a war with the rest of the entire world?  I’m thinking that even those yahoos know better than to try something like that.  Then again, you never know with that crowd.

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It’s pretty clear that America’s military industrial political complex has us spending way, way, way more than we need to on military arms.  But it’s also intuitively obvious that the United States can’t afford to do without a robust armed force in the Next World Order.  But how much force do we need, and what do we need it for?

In terms of symmetric force versus force war, the two most obvious–though unlikely–scenarios are defending Taiwan from an invasion by China and defending South Korea from an invasion from the North.  The former is largely a maritime interdiction problem.  We’d want to stop the Chinese invasion force as it crossed the Strait of Formosa.  The latter would be a land war.  

We’ll no doubt want to maintain a security sponsorship of Israel, which is still surrounded by nations unfriendly to it.  But Israel has proven itself rather adept at repelling invasions with little if any direct help from us.  

There’s an outside possibility that Russia, in a desperate attempt to regain its former prestige and glory, might try to invade Western Europe.  But seriously, folks.  Russia’s done.  Its economy is roughly the size of Brazil’s ($1.5 trillion) and its once mighty Cold War arsenal is rusting on the flight line, molding in the silo, sinking at the pier, or burning in Chechnya.  

There are unpredictable unknowns, of course.  Panama could go up for grabs.  Syria might invade Lebanon.  Somebody might try to take over a weakened Iraq by force, but after having observed our fiasco in that country, who’d be crazy enough to want to repeat it?  

Speaking of Iraq, if there’s one lesson we needed to learn from that woebegone war it’s that we don’t want to do preemptive invasions and occupations any more.  

What about the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction?  

We have these things called deterrence and retaliation.  We also have enough city buster nukes left over from the Cold War to barbecue our entire planet, and Mars and Venus and Mercury besides.  Anybody who pops a ballistic missile nuke off in our direction knows that we’ll know where it came from right away.  And anybody who wants to give a nuke to a terrorist knows we’ll know where the terrorist got it.  

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What do we need defense-wise?  A lot less than we have now.  How much less?  Well, if we leave the decision on that to the Pentagon and the military industrial political complex, we’ll wind up with more, not less.

So here’s my proposal.  Start by cutting the Department of Defense Budget in half.  Don’t cut corners by chipping away at military veterans’ benefits.  Get rid of stuff, and quit making more of it.  Dump at least two aircraft carriers and only produce one per decade, at most.  Cut off funding for further procurement of Cold War dinosaurs like the F-22 fighter and the B-2 bomber.  Bring along the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and make that the last of the manned combat aircraft.  No new classes of submarines.  The ones we have now are swift and silent enough.  No new classes of naval surface combatants.  If we didn’t get it right with the Arleigh Burke missile destroyers, we never will.  The tanks we have now are fine.  If you want them to burn less gas, give them new engines.  If you want them more invulnerable, give them new armor.  

Whatever you do, don’t let generals and politicians and arms industry CEOs convince you that you need to spend more and more tax dollars on fantastical weaponry to “keep America safe.”

Because you don’t.  

The Next World Order Series:

Part I: America’s 21st Century Military

Part II: Network-centric Warfare

Part III: America’s Military Industrial Complex

Part IV: The Revolt of the Retired Generals

Part V: What Good is War?

Part VI: Body Count

Part VII: Order in the Next World Order

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

If you want to know what the Next World Order will look like, just take a look around.  It’s already here.  The last world order–the one in which the United States served the function of “global hegemon”–was over in less time than it took the American neoconservatives to cook up the idea, due in large part to our disastrous experiment in Iraq.

Our foreign policy aims should now be to land in a position as the first among nations in a fluid, multi-tiered global power structure.  

At present, the world’s state and non-state political entities are roughly divided into five levels of power.  For the sake of creating a common vocabulary, we’ll tentatively define those tiers as major powers, balance powers, regional powers, wild cards, and others.

Below the fold: a model for sane foreign policy in the Next World Order…

Top Guns

In light of the U.S. military’s proven decreased capacity for decisively achieving strategic aims, economy has more than ever become the premier instrument of political power.  Hence, at the top of the power tier we have the globe’s three largest Gross Domestic Products.  According to the CIA World Factbook, these are the United States ($12.4 trillion), the European Union ($12.2 trillion) and China ($8.2 trillion).  Combined, these three entities account for 55 percent of the entire worlds gross product ($59.6 trillion).  

Following at numbers four and five and six are Japan ($3.9 trillion) and India ($3.7 trillion) and Germany ($2.45 trillion).  England, France, Italy, Brazil, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Spain are all under $2 trillion, and everybody else is under $1 trillion.  So it’s a good bet that the major powers will remain so for at least a decade, and perhaps throughout the 21st century.  

In the second tier, the balance powers, I include England, Russia, and Japan.  I base balance power status less on economy than on geographical and historical factors.  England, Russia, and Japan have all had extensive empires of their own at some point in the previous two centuries, and have a long history of both friendly and belligerent relationships with today’s major powers.

Given its economy and potential for growth, India may well become a balance or even a major power by the end of this century, but for now, I classify it as a significant regional power.  To date, it doesn’t have anywhere near the same experience in influencing global politics as do the entities in the first two tiers.  Other regional powers include Brazil, which not only has South America’s largest economy but which is developing its own nuclear program.  

Wild Cards and Tame Ones

Wild card number one is the Middle East.  America’s attempts at getting the region under control have had the unfortunate effect of letting the cat herd out of the corral, and there’s no telling where they’ll decide to settle down.  The best tea leaf reading I’ve heard is that Osama bin Laden’s real goal is to establish a political coalition of Sunni Islamic states, one that would look similar to the pre-World War I Ottoman Empire, and one that would have a working if sometimes uneasy relationship with the Shiite Persians in Iran.  

If we can get him to openly admit that that’s what he’s aiming for, I say let him have a go at it.  Pull off to the periphery, as Jack Murtha suggests, and see if the region can pull itself into a cooperative.  If it can’t, and that part of the world falls into Hobbesian conflict, oh well.  We stay on the periphery and contain it, and find other solutions to our energy needs.  

If that conflict spreads into hapless sub-Saharan Africa (another wild card), well, it’s not like that part of the world isn’t already in a Hobbesian quagmire already.  And we’re not doing a whole lot about that now, are we?  And what can we do?  Attempts to fix things in Somalia turned into a disaster, what’s to think trying to fix things anywhere else in that part of the world–militarily at least–will turn out any better?  

Speaking of Wild Cards: we’ve done what we can in the Balkans, and it didn’t do all that much good.  And it’s really not America’s problem.  It’s the European Union’s and Russia’s problem.

The geographically immediate Wild Card America needs to concern itself most with is Latin America.  And just how wild is that?  The worst bad guy in our hemisphere is Cuba’s Fidel Castro.  How big and bad is he?  Not big and bad enough to threaten with invasion, or you can bet the Bush administration would have threatened him with that by now.  

Venezuela?  For all his bluster, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says he’d be content with $50 a barrel oil prices, which is considerably lower than the $70 plus prices we’re paying today.

Who are “the others?” Canada.  New Zealand.  Australia.  Switzerland.  Netherlands.  Singapore.  Countries that will always be friendly to the U.S. and its allies of the moment, but that will never rise above the level of regional powers, even though they could become vital geo-strategic allies in the unlikely event of another global war.  

So Where Does That Leave Us?

It leaves us in a bad position for as long as the hegemons of Team Bush are in power.  Swapping out chiefs of staff and press secretaries won’t make a change in the fundamental policies and philosophies that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, Krauthammer, Kristol and the rest of the neoconservative junta has finagled on America and the rest of the world.  

Global sanity can only be restored when the philosophical descendants of Alexander, Caesar, Stalin, Hitler, et al are jack booted out of office.

The Next World Order Series:

Part I: America’s 21st Century Military

Part II: Network-centric Warfare

Part III: America’s Military Industrial Complex

Part IV: The Revolt of the Retired Generals

Part V: What Good is War?

Part VI: Body Count

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Much has been made of the American casualty count in our war in Iraq.  U.S. forces have suffered more than 2,300 deaths and over 17,000 wounded.  Some refer to these figures as the “horrible human price” of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Others sneer at these numbers, and consider them a trifling compared to the casualty counts of earlier U.S. wars.

To a large extent, the debate over war casualties is moot.  Body count is seldom an accurate measure of success in war, nor is a low own force casualty rate a reason to support one.  You can have no casualties and still lose a war; you can have millions of casualties and still win.  Likewise, some wars justify millions of casualties and some wars don’t justify a single one.  

There’s a tendency for many military thinkers to compare World War II to all the wars that followed it.  In most cases, such analogies are flawed.  

Below the fold: the Next World Order body count…

America did not join the allied side to “liberate the freedom loving peoples” of Germany and Japan from their oppressive political leadership.  Either actively or through passive acquiescence, the German and Japanese populations supported their totalitarian governments.  We were not merely fighting Hitler and Tojo.  We were at war with their entire nations, nations that were better prepared for war than we were at the outset of hostilities.  While in retrospect we view attacks on civilian populations like the air raids on Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima with mixed moral judgments, we need to modulate those judgments by considering the context in which we took those actions.  Never before had an alliance of nations engaged another one in a truly global war with a stated objective of unconditional surrender of the enemy.  Such a war has not occurred since, and hopefully never will again.

Some estimates peg the number of deaths incurred during that war at over 62 million.  The total property loss is likely incalculable, as is any attempt to determine whether the results of World War II justified its cost.  It did, after all, lead to a half-century of Cold War between the victors with the U.S. led western coalition on one side and the Soviet bloc on the other.

But at least we can say of World War II that it began with formal declarations of war and ended when formal documents of surrender were signed by recognized authorities of the vanquished belligerents.  

The “third world” proxy wars that the Cold War spawned were undeclared and produced indecisive results at best.  Hostilities in the Korean Conflict ended in a tie with the signing of a cease-fire agreement.  North Korea still gives us security fits.  Our Vietnam terminated in a scramble to catch the last plane out of Saigon and a bitterly divided United States.

Examine later U.S. military incursions in Grenada, Lebanon, Somalia, the Arabian Gulf, and elsewhere, and you won’t find a single decisive “victory” or achievement of long-term American political goals in the bunch.    

Many might argue that America’s persistent pursuit of arms superiority and willingness to apply it in key hot spots was the “constant pressure” that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

But what good did that really do?  From all indications, the Soviet’s demise only served to let the cats out of the corral, and America has shifted from a generational war against the Evil Empire to another one against the Axis of Evil, the evil doers, the evil ones, the forces of evil, those who would perpetrate evil, evil geniuses and all the other minions of Doctor Evil.  

How many casualties does America need to sustain to counter all that evil?

The answer is very, very few.  Despite what the Rovewellian mind control machine would have us believe, terrorism is not a military problem, it’s a law enforcement and diplomatic issue.

Al Qaeda doesn’t have an army, or a navy, or an air force, or even a state department.  Nobody’s facing an April 15th deadline to file tax returns with the Islamo-fascist Revenue Service.  Nobody elected Osama bin Laden to power, and his strategies weren’t crafted by a think tank called the “Project for the New Jihadist Century.”  Radical militant groups are sustaining far greater casualties than U.S. forces and whatever remains of our “coalition” are, and yet who has a recruiting problem and who doesn’t?

Who’s doing something right in the Global War on Terror, and who isn’t?

Can more Americans killed or injured in a misdirected military effort turn the tide?

I seriously doubt it.  

I also seriously doubt whether more terrorists killed or injured or captured can make much of a difference either.

But guess what?  I’ve spoken with more than one influential retired senior military officer who thinks war serves the purpose of keeping the world’s population in check.  Seriously.  

I’ve asked these characters if they think maybe proliferating modern birth control methods throughout the third world might not serve the purpose of keeping the global population in check as well, but they shake their heads no.

That would be encouraging immoral behavior among primitive peoples, they say.

And besides, if we controlled population through modern birth control rather than war, what would happen their high dollar retirement jobs in the military industrial complex?  What, they’re going to make the same kind of money they’re making now lobbying for the condom industry?  

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The Next World Order Series:

Part I: America’s 21st Century Military

Part II: Network-centric Warfare

Part III: America’s Military Industrial Complex

Part IV: The Revolt of the Retired Generals

Part V: What Good is War?

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Part V of the “Next World Order” series asks the blasphemous question “why do we need a military?”  Links to parts I through IV are included at the bottom of this article.  

In its 1997 “Statement of Principles,” the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) urged a return to a “Reaganite policy of military strength” and a need to increase defense spending significantly “if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future[.]”

Below the fold: what the neocons forgot to remember…

For all their collective brainpower, the PNACers overlooked the elephant hiding behind the couch in their clubhouse.  During the Reagan era, America had a peer military competitor.  Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it hasn’t.  Even so, at the urging of the neoconservatives, America will spend upwards of a half trillion dollars for our Department of Defense in 2006, an expenditure that matches the military spending of the rest of the world combined.  And that half trillion doesn’t cover the cost of Homeland Security and other federal domestic security programs.

For all our politicians’ and generals’ talk about “transforming” the military to meet the needs of the new century, our force doesn’t look significantly different from the one we had in the middle of the last one.  

In World War II, our Navy had aircraft carriers, surface combatants, submarines, amphibious assault craft and Marines.  Our Air Force–then a branch of our Army–had bombers, fighters and cargo planes.  The Army had armor, infantry, artillery and special forces.

What we have now is a higher tech version of what we had then.  We’ve traded our old fashioned P.F. Flyers for new fangled Nike Air Jordans that run faster, jump higher and stop on a smaller dime.  But our old shoes did something that our news ones never have: win an actual war in which the enemies actually surrendered and signed actual documents to that effect, and effectively told their populations to shut the hell up and deal with it.  

When the Soviet Union fell apart and what was left of its military did the same, the U.S. armed services fell all over themselves to justify their continued existence and their slices of the federal budget pie.

With no maritime power to challenge its dominance of the open oceans, the Navy adopted a strategy of patrolling littoral waters from which it could project air power (carrier aircraft, cruise missiles, and naval gunfire) and land power (Marines) ashore.

The Air Force suffered from both its proven successes and failures.  The two Gulf Wars illustrated that air supremacy is a given in any U.S. conflict, and that the “shock and awe” value of strategic bombing isn’t worth the cost of the point papers air power advocates wrote about it.  The Air Force’s main function has become to take the Army wherever it needs to go to do whatever it needs to do when it gets there.  And yeah, support whatever the Army’s doing with direct air support.  Except the Air Force doesn’t really like doing direct support of Army ground operations, and the Navy’s better at doing that anyway.  

The poor Army folks–God bless them–don’t know which way to point their gun barrels.  Are they a heavy force?  Are they a light force?  Are they Patton’s tank warriors or Sergeant Fury’s Howling Commandos?  Do they pull triggers or punch buttons on computer keyboards?  Do they pitch their own tents or does a subsidiary of Halliburton do that for them?  

In short, the best-trained, best-equipped, best-financed force in history is something of a Chinese fire department.  It’s a navy that’s a coast guard with an air force and an army, an air force that’s an airline, and an army that’s neck deep in its outsourced latrine.  

And you wonder why a bunch of sand herders have the mighty U.S. military stymied in the Middle East?

I don’t.

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I’m one of those fuddy-duddies who still doesn’t think terrorism is a military problem.  It’s a law enforcement problem.  You won’t hear this at any war college or university national security program, but military force is good for two basic things: destroying stuff and killing people.  It is best used to destroy the stuff and kill the people of other military forces.  If there’s no other military force to destroy or kill, the whole idea of applying military force to a problem gets fuzzy.  Sure, it’s great to rebuild electrical generators and paint schools, but you don’t really need a military to do that.  You need a Peace Corps.  

And if we ever again decide that our political aims will be served by large scale destruction of population centers and industrial sites, well, we can do that without putting a single boot on the ground.  

There are more than a few highly respected people in the field of military science who think a Nagasaki-style demonstration is just the thing we need to put an end to terrorism.  I happen to think the people who think that are nuts.  There’s every reason to believe that turning, say, Tallil into solar panel would only add to terrorist recruiting.  

Besides, is that really the kind of thing we want to do?  Is that what we want to be?  

The mightiest nation in human history that blows “freedom loving peoples” to smithereens in order to liberate them so it can justify its bloated defense budget?

That’s not my idea of enlightened world leadership.  

Coming in the Next World Order: what we need, what we don’t need…

Earlier in the Next World Order series:

Part I: America’s 21st Century Military

Part II: Network-centric Warfare

Part III: America’s Military Industrial Complex

Part IV: The Revolt of the Retired Generals
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation is becoming something of an alternative national pastime.  Neoconservative icon Bill Kristol, founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) of which Rumsfeld was a key member, was advocating giving Dandy Don the boot clear back in July of 2001, prior to the 9/11 attacks.  Between then and now, almost everyone from the left, right and center whom the press will cover has demanded that Rummy be given the ax.  

Now six retired generals have joined the chorus.  A fat lot of good that’s going to do, even if Rummy actually resigns this time.  Which he won’t.  

Rummy deserves a lot more than getting run out of the Pentagon in a rail and feathers ceremony.  He deserves a special room in the McNamara suite at the LBJ Hilton in hell.  But sending him there tomorrow won’t fix the disaster he’s helped create.

Below the fold: eradicating the neocon cancer…

Rumsfeld deserves the bulk of the blame for mis-micromanaging the war, and he had much to do with the policy of preemptively invading Iraq.  But he didn’t come up with the idea of thumping Hussein from his throne with military power all on his lonesome.  Bill Kristol, one of the first neoconservatives to turn on Rummy, was a ringleader of the PNAC cabal that first publicly proposed an Iraq invasion in 1998.  Other members of this flock of hawks included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Jeb Bush, and a whole cast of unsavory characters that have since infested every department in the administration.

Firing Rumsfeld as SecDef will effect about as much fundamental change in the Land of Bush as replacing Andrew Card as White House Chief of Staff did.  

In its 1997 Statement of Principles, the PNAC castigated the Clinton administration, stating that, “American foreign and defense policy is adrift,” and promised, “We aim to change this.”

They changed it all right: from adrift to bow down in the water.  In retrospect, foreign and defense policy wise, 1997 looks like the good old days.

The “best trained, best equipped” military in all of history has proven itself impotent in the face of an asymmetric opponent.  As John Murtha and others have said, competitor countries like China and ideological enemies like al Qaeda are laughing in their sleeves as we grind national treasure into hourglass fill in Iraq (as if Iraq didn’t have enough sand in it to begin with).  Nobody except England wants to play ball with us.  The only guy left in England who likes us in Tony Blair, and everybody else in England seems to be getting sick and tired of him.  

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Regardless of whether it does any immediate good, I’m glad to see all these retired generals speaking up, if for no other reason than forcing the Rove patrol onto the information pavement to perform its standard song-and-dance counter-attack.  The more the public sees the likes of Senator George Allen (R-Virginia) try to pawn off the same old polly cracker talking points in defense of the administration, the more of the public that isn’t completely Limbaugh lobotomized will realize what a flaming bag of dog plop on America’s front porch the Bush administration and its supporters are.

And the more they realize that, the more they’ll realize the need to stomp that flaming bag out come November by smothering the GOP oxygen that feeds it.  

Otherwise, the flaming bag of dog plop will burn the whole house down.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Part IV of the “Next World Order” series explores how military officers and politicians have virtually changed roles.

Thomas E. Ricks of The Washington Post reports of yet another retired general who has come forward with harsh criticism of Donald Rumsfeld.

John Batiste, a former Army two-star who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq from 2004-2005 thinks it’s time for a “fresh start” at the top of the Pentagon, and says a lot of his peers feel the same way.

Below the fold: slamming the generals…

As Ricks notes:

Batiste’s comments resonate especially within the Army: it is widely known there that he was offered a promotion to three-star rank to return to Iraq and be the No. 2 U.S. military officer there but he declined because he no longer wished to serve under Rumsfeld.

Ex generals coming out of the woodwork to tell us what we already pretty much knew about Rumsfeld is hardly news these days.  Ricks’ piece also includes disparaging remarks recently made by former Army two-star Paul Eaton and retired Marine generals Gregory Newbold and Anthony Zinni.  

The most interesting parts of the Ricks article cover Rumsfeld supporters’ attempts to “tamp down the revolt of the retired generals.”

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Peter Pace said on Tuesday that no officers were “muzzled” during the planning of the Iraq invasion.  “The articles that are out there about folks not speaking up are just flat wrong.”  

There’s a grain of truth in that statement.  Lots of folks, like then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinsecki, did speak up.  Like Shinseki, they were castigated by Rumsfeld and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz and shown the door.

Defense Department spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said of Rumsfeld’s leadership style, “People are entitled to their opinions. What they are not entitled to is their own facts.  . . .The assertions about inadequate exposure to military judgment are just fundamentally incorrect.”

Di Rita is the Pentagon’s version of the White House’s Scott McClellan, and he’s mastered the Rovewellian art of altering the truth without actually telling a lie.  Rumsfeld probably did have adequate exposure to military judgment.  He just chose to pay attention to the judgments that agreed with his own and ignored the ones who didn’t.  

Most disturbing to me was Ricks’ account of concerns expressed by military “experts” about “the new outspokenness of retired generals.”

“I think it flatly is a bad thing,” said Richard H. Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina who writes frequently on civilian-military relations. He said he worries that it could undermine civilian control of the military, especially by making civilian leaders feel that that they need to be careful about what they say around officers, for fear of being denounced as soon as they retire.

“How can you prosecute a war if the military and civilians don’t trust each other?” Kohn asked.

I’m sure that somewhere in his vast academic experience Professor Kohn heard the adage that trust is a two-way street.  If an administration of war hawks comes into power hell bent on starting an armed conflict the generals don’t think is necessary and fighting it in a way the generals don’t think will work, and ignore everything the dissenting generals say, why should the generals trust the civilians?  

And from whom does America have more to fear: generals who caution against war or presidents who claim unfettered powers to wage them?

But at the heart of Kohn’s arguments is a fundamentally sinister assault on the notion of an open information society: that retired officers do not have a First Amendment right to speak their minds, that somehow their time in service puts them under a lifetime “gag order,” and that retired officers can be held accountable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice or have their retirement pay withdrawn for speaking out against the establishment.  

That bodes ill not only for retired officers but American society as well.  If retired officers can’t tell truth to power on military related issues, who can?

And if nobody can do that, what’s to keep the country from becoming a military dictatorship?  It’s a bizarre turn of affairs when America’s best safeguard against coming under control of the military is the military itself.

But what would you expect in an environment where the politicians run all the wars and all the generals left on active duty are all politicians?      

For more on presidential authority, see Smoke, Mirrors and War Powers.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Parts I and II in the “Next World Order” series deflated the neoconservative notion that American can establish global dominance through network-centric military applications.  Part III examines how the American arms industry’s influence allows this delusion to linger.

Below the fold: pouring defense dollars on a flat rock…

If you think your defense tax dollars are keeping America safe, think again.  

This is a tough thing to say, because few people understand and respect the sacrifices the men and women of our armed forces make more than I do.  But it has to be said.  The United States military does not defend America.  It hasn’t repelled an invasion of American soil since 1812, and it certainly didn’t defend us from the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001.  

“Fighting them over there” was the military’s job throughout the 20th Century: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War and the third world proxy wars like Korea and Vietnam that sprang from it.  When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, the military’s motivational battle cry “defending our country” was gradually replaced with “protecting our interests overseas.”

Today, the “best trained, best equipped” military in history is bogged down in Hobbesian conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that have no apparent resolution, much resolutions that support any coherent expression of American national interest.

Yet, in 2006, U.S. taxpayers will pony up somewhere in the neighborhood of a half trillion dollars for our Department of Defense, an expenditure that matches the military spending of the rest of the world combined.  

Por que?  Are we planning to fight a war with the entire rest of the world all at once?  I’m thinking even the chicken hawk neoconservatives who run this country aren’t mad enough to contemplate a move like that.  At least I hope they aren’t.  

Military Industrial Complexities

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight David Eisenhower cautioned Americans that…

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

In  October of last year, I outlined the state of the military industrial complex’s stranglehold on contemporary America’s economy and foreign and domestic policy for ePluribus Media in an article titled “In an Arms Race with Ourselves.”

Civilian service secretaries, appointed by the President, responsible for weapons and equipment acquisition, largely come from the executive ranks of the U.S. defense industry. Current Secretary of the Navy and Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England is a prime example. Before entering public life, England was a senior officer with defense giants General Dynamics and Lockheed Corporation. Donald Winter, nominated to replace England as Navy secretary, is a highly placed executive with Northrup Grumman, the world’s third largest military contractor.

Supporting these “captains of industry” are the military officers and senior enlisted personnel who establish second careers in the private defense sector as “beltway bandits.” Their’s is a story well known around inner circles, but one seldom told outside of them.

Generals who manage doctrine and weapons programs late in their active-duty days retire from the military and go to work for the very corporations whose programs they sponsored while in uniform. The colonels, majors and sergeant majors who served under the generals retire as well and go back to work for their old bosses.

The retired guys work hand-in-purse with their still on-duty cronies — who are looking to stake out second careers themselves — to insert pet programs into so-called “battle experiments,” war games designed to determine how to fight future conflicts. The games get rigged to ensure that the pet programs prove victorious.  Impressive after-action reports are written, contracts are signed, appropriations are passed in Congress, and the gravy caisson goes rolling along.

Here’s an illustration of just how far off the rails the collusion between industry, politicians and the military has gone.  

In November of 2005, Representative Randall “Duke” Cunningham (R-California), the Vietnam era Navy fighter ace, pleaded guilty to charges of taking over $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors to steer business in their direction.  A key figure in the scandal was Mitchell Wade, CEO of the defense contracting firm MZM who not only bribed Cunningham but whose firm contributed to Cunningham’s congressional campaigns.  

One MZM employee said that Wade twisted his subordinates’ arms to donate to his MZM political action committee. “We were called in and told basically either donate to the MZM PAC or we would be fired.”

Coercing employees to make political contributions is a direct violation of federal election campaign laws.

MZM PAC money went to the congressional campaigns of Cunningham, Virgil Goode (R-Virginia) and Katherine Harris (R-Florida).

MZM has a facility in Goode’s Virginia district, from which it supports the Army National Ground Intelligence Center, one of its biggest government customers.  

In February of this year, Wade confessed to funneling $32,000 in illegal contributions through his employees to Katherine Harris’s 2004 congressional campaign in order to obtain a $10 million dollar defense contract in Harris’s Florida district.  Harris attached the contract as an “earmark” to another bill.  The bill didn’t pass, but that’s not the point.  The point is that politicians like Harris constitute a bargain basement opportunity for arms contractors.  

When Wade stepped down as MZM CEO over the Cunningham controversy in June 2005, his place was taken by retired three-star general James C. King, who’s last job on active duty was head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.  In 2001, King retired to join MZM as a vice president.  He played a key role in helping Cunningham funnel over $20 million in defense contracts to MZM between 2002 and 2004.  

In 2003, MZM partnered with General Dynamics and other defense contractors to support the Air Force Information Warfare Center.  As of 2005, General Dynamics was the fifth largest defense contracting conglomerate in the world, and the same General Dynamics that, as we noted earlier, now assistant Secretary of Defense Gordon England was a senior executive with.

Small world, that military industrial complex.  

If a relatively little guy defense contractor like MZM was strong-arming employees to contribute to GOP campaigns, what do you think is going on with the big guys like General Dynamics and Northrup Grumman?  And how exponentially overbalanced do you think the campaign contribution to the defense dollar is?

You can’t count the hands of everyone who’s knocking down a piece of the defense budget because their hands are all buried in the taxpayers’ pockets.  

We won’t be able to build and maintain an effective, affordable military force until we find a way to trust bust the pyramid scheme known as the American arms industry.  

Coming up in the Next World Order series: America’s armed force identity crisis.

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Other Jeff Huber articles on national security issues:

In an Arms Race With Ourselves

Wars and Empires

Invasion of the Transformers

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Part I of the Next World Order series explored the issues involved with calculating a 21st century American military force planning strategy.  Part II addresses the failed efforts of Donald Rumsfeld and others to “transform” the force to support the neoconservative dreams of a “New American Century.”

Below the fold: net-eccentrics and sticker shock and awe

Upon assumption of office, George W. Bush directed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to “transform” the American military.  Rumsfeld appointed retired Vice Admiral Donald Cebrowski, a Vietnam era Navy fighter pilot and former U.S. Naval War College president, as his Director of Force Transformation.  Cebrowski wasted no time in establishing his beloved notion of “network-centric warfare” (NCW) as the key component of force transformation.  

Many senior military officers were skeptical of Cebrowski’s ideas.  As one Army official put it, “That guy needs to come up for oxygen more.”  In some circles, Cebrowski and his followers were referred to as the “net-eccentrics.”

Still, Cebrowski had the ear of Rumsfeld and other leading administration officials, so his concepts were adopted.  

What exactly was this network-centric idea that Cebrowski and Rumsfeld were so certain would revolutionize the efficacy of war?

In a 1999 address to the Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Cebrowski said:

Network-centric warfare is a concept. As a concept, it cannot have a definition, because concepts and definitions are enemies. Concepts are abstract and general, while definitions are concrete and specific.  Thus, if a concept can be defined, it is no longer a concept.

Other Cebrowski acolytes described NCW as a “system of systems” that would, by logical conclusion, need to be supported by the good old boy military industrial network of networks.  

Somewhere along the line, network-centric warfare encompassed such equally murky concepts as “effects based operations” and “shock and awe.” In 2002, Cebrowski went so far as to describe NCW a ” new theory of war.”  But by empirical standards, NCW has as legitimate a claim to being a new “warfare theory” as cigarettes have to being a cure for lung cancer.

Multiple sources have confirmed that during his tenure as president of the Naval War College in the 90s, Cebrowski used his power and influence to ensure that his pet projects and doctrines proved victorious in the school’s annual Global War Game.  

Network-centric strategies were employed in the Cebrowski influenced U.S. Joint Forces Command’s war game Millennium Challenge 2002, a practice exercise in the run up to Gulf War II.  Here’s how the U.K.’s Guardian described it:

At the height of the summer, as talk of invading Iraq built in Washington like a dark, billowing storm, the US armed forces staged a rehearsal using over 13,000 troops, countless computers and Dollars 250m. Officially, America won and a rogue state was liberated from an evil dictator.

What really happened is quite another story, one that has set alarm bells ringing throughout America’s defence establishment and raised questions over the US military’s readiness for an Iraqi invasion. In fact, this war game was won by Saddam Hussein, or at least by the retired marine playing the Iraqi dictator’s part, Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper.

In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt. What happened next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in the playground. Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and “refloated” the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines making abrasive remarks until the three-week war game – grandiosely entitled Millennium Challenge – staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15, with a US “victory”.

Roughly a year later, the United States invaded Iraq.  Of the guerilla style resistance of Iraqi militia groups, the Lieutenant General William Wallace, commander of the Army’s V Corps, said, “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against.”

But in fact, a guerilla style militia resistance was precisely the type of enemy Van Riper was trying to simulate in Millennium Challenge 2002.  

Van Riper aired his thoughts on military transformation and network-centric warfare in an April 2004 episode of PBS’s Nova.

NOVA: Isn’t the current revolution–transformation, network-centric warfare–supposed to change how war is fought?

Van Riper: We hear many terms, whether it’s “transformation,” “military technical revolution,” “revolution of military affairs,” all indicating something revolutionary has happened that’s going to change warfare. Nothing has happened that’s going to change the fundamental elements of war. The nature of war is immutable, though the character and form will change. The difficulty is that those who put forth this argument believe that something fundamentally has changed, and you can change very quickly without thinking your way through it. They want to apply the technology without the brainpower.

NOVA: You don’t think that transformation and network-centric warfare are powerful ideas?

Van Riper: My experience has been that those who focus on the technology, the science, tend towards sloganeering. There’s very little intellectual content to what they say, and they use slogans in place of this intellectual content. It does a great disservice to the American military, the American defense establishment. “Information dominance,” “network-centric warfare,” “focused logistics”–you could fill a book with all of these slogans.

Even Fredrick Kagan of the West Point military academy and the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute is less than impressed with the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski vision of military transformation.  Writing on the results of the Afghanistan and Iraq incursions for the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review in August of 2003, he commented:

Neither [network-centric warfare] nor “shock and awe” provides a reliable recipe for translating the destruction of the enemy’s ability to continue to fight into the accomplishment of the political objectives of the conflict.

Kagan also noted that:

The most important problem with these visions of war is not anything within them, but the fact that they leave out the most important component of war — that which distinguishes it from organized but senseless violence.

Yet, remarkably, as late as May of 2004, Cebrowski’s main assistant John Gartska was claiming that the network-centric concept of warfare had been “proven” in Iraq.  

As of April 2006, even the most casual observer of military affairs understands that network-centric warfare is a proven failure.

One might think that by this point, the network-centric true believers in the Office of Transformation would have given up the ghost on any claims to the legitimacy of their cherished philosophy, but no.  The DoD’s Office of Force Transformation has changed the title from “network-centric warfare” to “network-centric operations,” but the song remains the same.  If we can somehow combine the latest technology with the right kind of supercalifragilistic doctrine, use of armed force can somehow become the key to achieving the neoconservative vision of achieving U.S. hegemony over the rest of the world.  

We’ve heard this tune before.  The “war to end all wars.”  Airpower makes all other forms of military power obsolete.  Nuclear weapons make all forms of conventional military power moot.  Peace through superior firepower.  Yada-yada, yakety-yak.    

This isn’t to say that technology doesn’t have value at the tactical level or war.  It’s just that warfare itself has passed the diminishing point as an instrument of national power.  You can win a thousand battles…

The most frightening aspect of all this is that the network-centric concept is still the driving impetus behind U.S. force planning strategy and, by extension, all of America’s foreign and domestic policy.

Coming in the “Next World Order” series: the price of delusion.  

Other Jeff Huber articles on national security issues:

In an Arms Race With Ourselves

Wars and Empires

Invasion of the Transformers

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Retired Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold has added his voice to the criticism of the White House and Pentagon’s Iraq fiasco.  Newbold was the top Joint Chiefs operations officer at the time of the Operation Iraqi Freedom planning.  He voiced his objections then retired in protest.  

Below the fold: blasting the war…

Now, he’s giving a “full throated critique” in Time Magazine.  Some selected passages:

From 2000 until October 2002, I was a Marine Corps lieutenant general and director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 9/11, I was a witness and therefore a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq–an unnecessary war. Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots’ rationale for war made no sense. And I think I was outspoken enough to make those senior to me uncomfortable. But I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat–al-Qaeda. I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11’s tragedy to hijack our security policy…

… The cost of flawed leadership continues to be paid in blood. The willingness of our forces to shoulder such a load should make it a sacred obligation for civilian and military leaders to get our defense policy right. They must be absolutely sure that the commitment is for a cause as honorable as the sacrifice…

… To those of you who don’t know, our country has never been served by a more competent and professional military. For that reason, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent statement that “we” made the “right strategic decisions” but made thousands of “tactical errors” is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting the blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting. The truth is, our forces are successful in spite of the strategic guidance they receive, not because of it…

… My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions–or bury the results.

Flaws in our civilians are one thing; the failure of the Pentagon’s military leaders is quite another. Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military’s effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction…

… It is time for senior military leaders to discard caution in expressing their views and ensure that the President hears them clearly. And that we won’t be fooled again.

Newbold admits that he has waited perhaps too long to speak up.  I for one wish he’d done so a long time ago.  But late is better than never.

And as far as timing goes, Newbold’s isn’t half bad considering all the saber rattling we’re hearing about Iran.  There is no reason on earth to think that administration and Pentagon leadership is being any more competent or truthful about Iran than they were about Iraq.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

I’m uncertain what to make of Sy Hersh’s recent New Yorker story about Pentagon plans to conduct a series of air strike on Iran, plans that include the use of nuclear “bunker buster” weapons.

Below the fold: best laid plans

On one hand, I’d be shocked if military planners weren’t coming up with such plans.  As a former operational and tactical contingency planner myself, I can assure you that the military constantly spins plans in an effort to anticipate the strategic desires of our country’s political leaders.  If I had a piece of coin or currency for every hour I spent planning or practicing for a final showdown with Soviet naval forces in the north Pacific during the cold war, I’d have enough dead presidents lying around in my file cabinet to pay off my mortgage.  

So it’s no surprise to me that the boys and girls still in uniform are figuring out what to do about Iran’s nuclear program in case the commander in chief orders them to do something about it.  And all this contingency planning wouldn’t alarm me if the commander in chief were anyone but Mister Bush, and his inner circle consisted of anyone but Cheney, Rice, Rove and Rumsfeld.  Their foreign policy track record hasn’t seemed terribly rational to date.

We invaded and occupied a country that didn’t have nukes (Iraq).

We’re making boo noise about striking a nation that doesn’t have nukes with nukes (Iran).

We promised not to attack a country that we know has nukes (North Korea).

We struck a deal to assist the nuclear program of a country that has nukes but isn’t part of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (India).  

So please forgive me if I’m less than confident that our foreign policy brain trust knows what it’s doing.  

And keep in mind that our National Security Council is populated with 30 something Gen Xers who don’t think the Cold War involved WMD and say things like, “Arms control, what’s that?”

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his weekday commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.