How the Pentagon shapes the world

[seafan]

How the Pentagon shapes the world

By Frida Berrigan
Asia Times

May 31, 2008

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But when the countdown ends and Bush vacates the Oval Office, he will leave a legacy to contend with. Certainly, he wills to his successor a world marred by war and battered by deprivation, but perhaps his most enduring legacy is now deeply embedded in Washington-area politics - a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition.
The Pentagon's massive bulk-up these past seven years will not be easily unbuilt, no matter who dons the presidential mantle on January 19, 2009. "The Pentagon" is now so much more than a five-sided building across the Potomac from Washington or even the seat of the Department of Defense. In many ways, it defies description or labeling.

Who, today, even remembers the debate at the end of the Cold War about what role US military power should play in a "unipolar" world? Was US supremacy so well established, pundits were then asking, that Washington could rely on softer economic and cultural power, with military power no more than a backup (and a domestic "peace dividend" thrown into the bargain)? Or was the US to strap on the six-guns of a global sheriff and police the world as the fountainhead of "humanitarian interventions"? Or was it the moment to boldly declare ourselves the world's sole superpower and wield a high-tech military comparable to none, actively discouraging any other power or power bloc from even considering future rivalry?

The attacks of September 11, 2001, decisively ended that debate. The Bush administration promptly declared total war on every front - against peoples, ideologies, and, above all, "terrorism" (a tactic of the weak). That very September, administration officials proudly leaked the information that they were ready to "target" up to 60 other nations and the terrorist movements within them.

The Pentagon's "footprint" was to be firmly planted, military base by military base, across the planet, with a special emphasis on its energy heartlands. Top administration officials began preparing the Pentagon to go anywhere and do anything, while rewriting, shredding, or ignoring whatever laws, national or international, stood in the way. In 2002, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld officially articulated a new US military posture that, in conception, was little short of revolutionary. It was called - in classic Pentagon shorthand - the 1-4-2-1 Defense Strategy (replacing the Bill Clinton administration's already none-too-modest plan to be prepared to fight two major wars - in the Middle East and Northeast Asia - simultaneously).

Theoretically, this strategy meant that the Pentagon was to prepare to defend the United States, while building forces capable of deterring aggression and coercion in four "critical regions" (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East). It would be able to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously and "win decisively" in one of those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing." Hence 1-4-2-1.

And that was just going to be the beginning. We had, by then, already entered the new age of the mega-Pentagon. Almost six years later, the scale of that institution's expansion has yet to be fully grasped, so let's look at just seven of the major ways in which the Pentagon has experienced mission creep - and leap - dwarfing other institutions of government in the process.

1. The budget-busting Pentagon:

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[G_j]

1. K&R!! a Must Read!

thank you
:applause:

[seafan]

12. Agreed! This is a must read to understand how out of control the Pentagon has become since 2001.

We MUST reestablish the distinct agencies of our government again. The unchecked degree to which B*** has concentrated power in the executive branch is endangering us all.


I will never accept that this Congress has deliberately abdicated its responsibility to keep checks and balances on B*** and Cheney. We will pay for that failure for many years to come.


It has been so demoralizing to watch this Congressional tap dance in real time, especially now, as we are under rapidly increasing threat of B***'s attacking Iran.

[chill_wind]

13. Oh you said it! Kicked, rec'd and bookmarked. n/t

[seafan]

2. 1. The budget-busting Pentagon:

1. The budget-busting Pentagon:

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The Bush administration has presided over one of the largest military buildups in the history of the United States. And that's before we even count "war spending". If the direct costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the global "war on terror", are factored in, "defense" spending has essentially tripled.

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With the war added to the Pentagon's core budget, the United States now spends nearly as much on military matters as the rest of the world combined. Military spending also throws all other parts of the federal budget into shadow, representing 58 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government on "discretionary programs" (those that Congress gets to vote up or down on an annual basis).

The total Pentagon budget represents more than our combined spending on education, environmental protection, justice administration, veteran's benefits, housing assistance, transportation, job training, agriculture, energy, and economic development. No wonder, then, that, as it collects ever more money, the Pentagon is taking on (or taking over) ever more functions and roles.

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[seafan]

3. 2. The Pentagon as diplomat:

2. The Pentagon as diplomat:

The Bush administration has repeatedly exhibited its disdain for discussion and compromise, treaties and agreements, and an equally deep admiration for what can be won by threat and force. No surprise, then, that the White House's foreign policy agenda has increasingly been directed through the military. With a military budget more than 30 times that of all State Department operations and non-military foreign aid put together, the Pentagon has marched into State's two traditional strongholds - diplomacy and development - duplicating or replacing much of its work, often by refocusing Washington's diplomacy around military-to-military, rather than diplomat-to-diplomat, relations.

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The Pentagon invariably couches its bureaucratic imperialism in terms of "interagency cooperation".

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As Southcom head Admiral James Stavridis vividly put the matter, the command now likes to see itself as "a big Velcro cube that these other agencies can hook to so we can collectively do what needs to be done in (the Latin American) region".

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[seafan]

4. 3. The Pentagon as arms dealer:

3. The Pentagon as arms dealer:

In the Bush years, the Pentagon has aggressively increased its role as the planet's foremost arms dealer, pumping up its weapons sales everywhere it can - and so seeding the future with war and conflict.

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To maintain market advantage, the Pentagon never stops its high-pressure campaigns to peddle weapons abroad. That's why, despite a broken shoulder, Gates took to the skies in February, to push weapons systems on countries like India and Indonesia, key growing markets for Pentagon arms dealers.

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[Kaleko]

6. Thank you. K & R

[seafan]

5. 4. The Pentagon as intelligence analyst and spy:

4. The Pentagon as intelligence analyst and spy:


In the area of "intelligence", the Pentagon's expansion - the commandeering of information and analysis roles - has been swift, clumsy, and catastrophic.

Tracing the Pentagon's takeover of intelligence is no easy task. For one thing, there are dozens of Pentagon agencies and offices that now collect and analyze information using everything from "humint" (human intelligence) to wiretaps and satellites. The task is only made tougher by the secrecy that surrounds US intelligence operations and the "black budgets" into which so much intelligence money disappears.

But the end results are clear enough. The Pentagon's takeover of intelligence has meant fewer intelligence analysts who speak Arabic, Farsi or Pashto and more dog-and-pony shows like those four-star generals and three-stripe admirals mouthing administration-approved talking points on cable news and the Sunday morning talk shows.

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.....according to Tim Shorrock, investigative journalist and author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, the Pentagon now controls more than 80% of US intelligence spending, which he estimated at about $60 billion in 2007. As Mel Goodman, former CIA official and now an analyst at the Center for International Policy, observed, "The Pentagon has been the big bureaucratic winner in all of this."

It is such a big winner that CIA director Michael Hayden now controls only the budget for the CIA itself - about $4 or 5 billion a year and no longer even gives the president his daily helping of intelligence.

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After the US invaded (Afghanistan) in 2001, Rumsfeld recognized that, unless the Pentagon controlled information-gathering and took the lead in carrying out covert operations, it would remain dependent on - and therefore subordinate to - the CIA with its grasp of "on-the-ground" intelligence.

In one of his now infamous memos, labeled "snowflakes" by a staff that watched them regularly flutter down from on high, he asserted that, if the "war on terror" was going to stretch far into the future, he did not want to continue the Pentagon's "near total dependence on the CIA". And so Rumsfeld set up a new, directly competitive organization, the Pentagon's Strategic Support Branch, which put the intelligence-gathering components of the US Special Forces under one roof reporting directly to him. (Many in the intelligence community saw the office as illegitimate, but Rumsfeld was riding high and they were helpless to do anything.)

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[seafan]

7. 5. The Pentagon as domestic disaster manager:

5. The Pentagon as domestic disaster manager:

When the deciders in Washington start seeing the Pentagon as the world's problem-solver, strange things happen. In fact, in the Bush years, the Pentagon has become the official first responder of last resort in case of just about any disaster - from tornadoes, hurricanes and floods to civil unrest, potential outbreaks of disease or possible biological or chemical attacks.

In 2002, in a telltale sign of Pentagon mission creep, Bush established the first domestic military command since the civil war, the US Northern Command (Northcom). Its mission: the "preparation for, prevention of, deterrence of, preemption of, defense against, and response to threats and aggression directed towards US territory, sovereignty, domestic population, and infrastructure; as well as crisis management, consequence management, and other domestic civil support."

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In the past six years, Northcom has been remarkably unsuccessful at anything but expanding its theoretical reach. The command was initially assigned 1,300 Defense Department personnel, but has since grown into a force of more than 15,000. Even criticism only seems to strengthen its domestic role. ..... More than anything else, Northcom has provided the Pentagon with the opening it needed to move forcefully into domestic disaster areas previously handled by national, state and local civilian authorities.

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Of course, at present, the Pentagon is the part of the government gobbling up the funds that might otherwise be spent shoring up America's Depression-era public works, ensuring that the Pentagon will have failure aplenty to respond to in the future.
The American Society for Civil Engineers, for example, estimates that $1.6 trillion is badly needed to bring the nation's infrastructure up to protectable snuff, or $320 billion a year for the next five years. Assessing present water systems, roads, bridges, and dams nationwide, the engineers gave the infrastructure a series of C and D grades.

In the meantime, the military is marching in. Katrina, for instance, made landfall on August 29, 2005. Bush ordered troops deployed to New Orleans on September 2 to coordinate the delivery of food and water and to serve as a deterrent against looting and violence. Less than a month later, Bush asked Congress to shift responsibility for major future disasters from state governments and the Department of Homeland Security to the Pentagon.

The next month, Bush again offered the military as his solution - this time to global fears about outbreaks of the avian flu virus. He suggested that, to enforce a quarantine, "One option is the use of the military that's able to plan and move."

Already sinking under the weight of its expansion and two draining wars, many in the military have been cool to such suggestions, as has a Congress concerned about maintaining states' rights and civilian control. Offering the military as the solution to domestic natural disasters and flu outbreaks means giving other first responders the budgetary short shrift. It is unlikely, however, that Northcom, now riding the money train, will go quietly into oblivion in the years to come.

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[Disturbed]

10. Pres. Eisenhower warned against this but to no avail.

The MIC has won.

[seafan]

8. 6. The Pentagon as humanitarian caregiver abroad:

6. The Pentagon as humanitarian caregiver abroad:

The US Agency for International Development and the State Department have traditionally been tasked with responding to disaster abroad; but, from Indonesia's tsunami-ravaged shores to Myanmar after the recent cyclone, natural catastrophe has become another presidential opportunity to "send in the Marines" (so to speak). The Pentagon has increasingly taken up humanitarian planning, gaining an ever larger share of US humanitarian missions abroad.

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Despite the obvious limitations of turning a force trained to kill and destroy into a cadre of caregivers, the Pentagon's mili-humanitarian project got a big boost from the cash that was seized from Saddam Hussein's secret coffers. Some of it was doled out to local American commanders to be used to deal with immediate Iraqi needs and seal deals in the months after Baghdad fell in April 2003. What was initially an ad hoc program now has an official name - the Commander Emergency Response Program (CERP) - and a line in the Pentagon budget.

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In fact, the Pentagon doesn't do humanitarian work very well. In Afghanistan, for instance, food-packets dropped by US planes were the same color as the cluster munitions also dropped by US planes; while schools and clinics built by US forces often became targets before they could even be put into use. In Iraq, money doled out to the Pentagon's sectarian-group-of-the-week for wells and generators turned out to be just as easily spent on explosives and AK-47s.

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[seafan]

9. 7. The Pentagon as global viceroy and ruler of the heavens:

7. The Pentagon as global viceroy and ruler of the heavens:

In the Bush years, the Pentagon finished dividing the globe into military "commands", which are functionally viceroyalties. True, even before 9/11, it was hard to imagine a place on the globe where the United States military was not, but until recently, the continent of Africa largely qualified.

Along with the creation of Northcom, however, the establishment of the US Africa Command (Africom) in 2008 officially filled in the last Pentagon empty spot on the map. A key military document, the 2006 National Security Strategy for the United States signaled the move, asserting that "Africa holds growing geostrategic importance and is a high-priority of this administration". (Think: oil and other key raw materials.)

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Meanwhile, should the Earth not be enough, there are always the heavens to control. In August 2006, building on earlier documents like the 1998 US Space Command's Vision for 2020 (which called for a policy of "full spectrum dominance"), the Bush administration unveiled its "national space policy". It advocated establishing, defending and enlarging US control over space resources and argued for "unhindered" rights in space - unhindered, that is, by international agreements preventing the weaponization of space. The document also asserted that "freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power".

As the document put it, "In the new century, those who effectively utilize space will enjoy added prosperity and security and will hold a substantial advantage over those who do not." (The leaders of China, Russia and other major states undoubtedly heard the loud slap of a gauntlet being thrown down.)

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Of all the frontiers of expansion, perhaps none is more striking than the Pentagon's sorties into the future. Does the Department of Transportation offer a Vision for 2030? Does the Environmental Protection Agency develop plans for the next 50 years? Does the Department of Health and Human Services have a team of power-point professionals working up dynamic graphics for what services for the elderly will look like in 2050?

These agencies project budgets just around the corner of the next decade. Only the Pentagon projects power and possibility decades into the future, colonizing the imagination with scads of different scenarios under which, each year, it will continue to control hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Complex 2030, Vision 2020, UAV Roadmap 2030, the army's Future Combat Systems - the names, which seem unending, tell the tale.

[seafan]

11. 'It is an institution that has escaped the checks and balances of the nation.'

As the clock ticks down to November 4, 2008, a lot of people are investing hope (as well as money and time) in the possibility of change at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But when it comes to the Pentagon, don't count too heavily on change, no matter who the new president may be.


After all, seven years, four months and a scattering of days into the Bush presidency, the Pentagon is deeply entrenched in Washington and still aggressively expanding. It has developed a taste for unrivaled power and unequaled access to the treasure of this country. It is an institution that has escaped the checks and balances of the nation.

The carnivorous monster at the world's throat.


Within its gaping maw lies our money, our entire governmental structure and the source of wars, famines, ecological disasters and massive loss of human life.

[defendandprotect]

14. Report the other day said something like 2200 top Pentagon officials now with contractors . . .

after retirement they moved in with these guys -- !!!

Surprised no one here had the story ---

Usually, something like that gets picked up???

[New Dawn]

15. K&R

[windoe]

16. Holy New World Order, Batman

Isn't this how Rome fell? Too many fronts, I could be wrong, perhaps our situation is different.

[Octafish]

17. The United States of America is supposed to be a democracy -- not an empire.

The War Party rules. Why? It not only has the guns, it uses them on anyone who opposes them, including the nation's Commander-in-Chief.