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"The Pentagon: Barack is taking it over."
"when President Obama crossed the Potomac last Thursday, he was on a mission to reclaim enemy territory."
Obama’s power grab at the Pentagon
By Michael Hastings
January 10, 2012
Barack Obama’s decision last week to cut the defense budget by $487 billion over the next 10 years was met with cries of derision from his critics (“inexcusable,” said GOP front-runner Mitt Romney) and shrugs of acceptance from his supporters. The reduction’s two headlines: 1. One hundred thousand troops are being chopped from the Marine Corps and Army; 2. The entire U.S. foreign policy focus will begin to shift from the Near East to the Far East (anxieties about China having replaced—or at least settled alongside—our permanently ingrained fears of Middle Eastern terror). The cuts themselves, though, are less significant as fiscal policy than as a statement about President Obama’s relationship with the Pentagon: Barack is taking it over.
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The tension between the president and his generals reached its climax in June 2010 in the weeks after I published a Rolling Stone story exposing the contempt the military leadership had for their civilian counterparts. The president fired McChrystal and replaced him with General David Petraeus (tying Petraeus to the fate of the doomed mission, an association that Petraeus had wanted to avoid, according to McChrystal). Within the next year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates would retire as well (but not before Obama twice overruled his advice—on Libya and the Bin Laden raid) and was replaced by Democratic ally Leon Panetta. Petraeus came home from Kabul in June 2011, and was quickly defrocked and installed at the CIA (preventing the popular general’s potential and oft-rumored run for the presidency, another outcome the White House wanted to avoid). When Petraeus pushed to move troops to eastern Afghanistan, rather than bringing them home, Obama overruled him, prompting General John Allen (the man there now) to admit the president was no longer following the military’s advice. Either by accident or by design, the young president had neutered his formidable opposition. The celebrity generals were gone, a friendly Defense Secretary was in and a string of what were perceived as foreign policy successes had been accomplished.
There were other signs of the president’s new confidence. Tucked into Obama’s defense strategy—which he unveiled the same day as the cuts–was another not-so-subtle rebuke of the military’s much beloved counterinsurgency doctrine, which accounted for much of the $1.2 trillion poured into Iraq and Afghanistan. The new defense strategy called for “limited counterinsurgency”—a concept akin to being “slightly pregnant,” as Wired’s Spencer Ackerman observed. Keeping a reduced counterinsurgency initiative was a sop to the brass who had built their careers on the past decade of war, but not a convincing one. It was a stronger signal that the true lesson of the past decade was to not get involved in nation building debacles. “For the Army’s four stars to suggest Americans should treat the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan as a rich source of lessons for future war is tantamount to insisting the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign or the 1920 Sunday shoot-up of Irish civilians by British Soldiers at Croke Park in Dublin were successes,” retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor told me in an email. “A smaller defense budget is not only inevitable; it’s a national economic necessity.” There’s even a possibility that President Obama might double the size of the cuts, taking out a total of $1 trillion. It seems he’s no longer intimidated by the crowd.
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Which, come to think of it, is perhaps the biggest threat to Obama’s newly restrained military. The overblown Iran rhetoric could easily hamstring a president from either party, narrowing the debate to solely military solutions. And a front-running Mitt Romney has already said he wants to increase the size of the military—the kind of insane, fiscally irresponsible promise that will fill the airwaves over the next 11 months should he get the nomination. All of that threatens what’s under way—reducing the 51st state to the size of Guam, or maybe the Virgin Islands. If we did that by 2020, we’d save a bunch of money. And we’d likely save a bunch of lives.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/01/10/obamas-power-grab-at-the-pentagon/
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