Putting 10 malfunctioning telephone poles [sic] in the ground to appease Warsaw and a radar in Czecho despite local public opposition never made strategic military sense. The hair brained scheme was an important lynch pin for the Neocon’s imperial fantasy. First BMD in Eastern Europe. Then roll back along the former Soviet Near Abroad. Followed by ‘lilypads’ across Central Asia. For a few years as a political construct it worked. The Imperial idea fell apart. Then economic collapse buried it in a heap of hopeless debt. Today’s decision to dynamite this anachronistic AgitProp artifact is a political double plus good regardless of motivations.
Another Inexplicable Stupidity
Amidst the re-assuringly competent execution of the Obama Administration’s handling of TARP, the stimulus boondoggle, and now health care, all of us doubtlessly draw comfort from Obama’s ringing declaration today that ‘winning’ in Afghanistan is essential because the war (however defined) is one of ‘necessity, not of choice.’ Now, Laurence O’Donnell may call him the ‘greatest orator of our generation’ (O’Donnell was also chief of the Senate Finance Committee staff if you didn’t know. Really). Today, The Greatest Orator droned through what could have been a first draft of a Bush speech before Gerson and Bartlett weighed in.
Just wait. There’s more. These Obama Twitter wunderkind didn’t just send him out to make a speech on Afghanistan in the middle of a health reform melt down. No, they’re far too savvy for that. They’re from Chicago. And Rahm Emanuel won The Mondale Trophy. The Administration orchestrated some heavy meme pyrotechnics in a brazenly clumsy collusion with the Washington Post. True, what’s left of the WaPo is now thin, largely Neocon and when not, mindlessly reactionary (the worst kind). But an orchestrated leak plus the speech? Sure to get people to stop talking about a disastrous August. What better way to seize control of the news cycle than shoveling stale news with useless trivia to create false insider scoop drama about how Gates, Mullen and Obama just *had* to force out McKiernan last April.
Because you know Obama is in it to win it. Just like the public option.
News value? Zero. Old news. McKiernan was bagged and tagged five months ago. All the rationales are known from April. Placement in August? A1. The joint contempt for the American people by both the Administration and the permanent government’s ad circular? Through the roof.
Pete Feaver over at Foreign Policy calls out Obama. He also wasted more time analyzing the speech than it deserved.
For a concise intellectual critique we refer readers to one of Andrew Bacevich’s recent pieces, “The War We Can’t Win: Afghanistan and the Limits of American Power.” Col. Bacevich came up conversationally the other week when an acquaintance from SAIS recalled how Wolfowitz forced him out. Wolfowitz unsurprisingly found the civilian Eliot Cohen more congenial. At about this time SAIS as an institution committed to area studies began to wither into the husk it is now. (It’s not all the Neocons’ fault; in the 1990s and 2000s everyone wanted to get to Wall Street and could care less about dirty people in far off places that didn’t speak American).
Per Bacevich:
In the immediate wake of 9/11, all the talk—much of it emanating from neoconservative quarters—was about achieving a “decisive victory” over terror. The reality is that we can’t eliminate every last armed militant harboring a grudge against the West. Nor do we need to. As long as we maintain adequate defenses, Al Qaeda operatives, hunkered down in their caves, pose no more than a modest threat. As for the Taliban, unless they manage to establish enclaves in places like New Jersey or Miami, the danger they pose to the United States falls several notches below the threat posed by Cuba, which is no threat at all.
As for the putatively existential challenge posed by Islamic radicalism, that project will prove ultimately to be a self-defeating one. What violent Islamists have on offer-a rejection of modernity that aims to restore the caliphate and unify the ummah [community]—doesn’t sell. In this regard, Iran—its nuclear aspirations the subject of much hand-wringing—offers considerable cause for hope. Much like the Castro revolution that once elicited so much angst in Washington, the Islamic revolution launched in 1979 has failed resoundingly. Observers once feared that the revolution inspired and led by the Ayatollah Khomeini would sweep across the Persian Gulf. In fact, it has accomplished precious little. Within Iran itself, the Islamic republic no longer represents the hopes and aspirations of the Iranian people, as the tens of thousands of protesters who recently filled the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities made evident. Here we see foretold the fate awaiting the revolutionary cause that Osama bin Laden purports to promote.
In short, time is on our side, not on the side of those who proclaim their intention of turning back the clock to the fifteenth century. The ethos of consumption and individual autonomy, privileging the here and now over the eternal, will conquer the Muslim world as surely as it is conquering East Asia and as surely as it has already conquered what was once known as Christendom. It’s the wreckage left in the wake of that conquest that demands our attention. If the United States today has a saving mission, it is to save itself. Speaking in the midst of another unnecessary war back in 1967, Martin Luther King got it exactly right: “Come home, America.” The prophet of that era urged his countrymen to take on “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.”
Dr. King’s list of evils may need a bit of tweaking—in our own day, the sins requiring expiation number more than three. Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our peril. That Barack Obama should fail to realize this qualifies as not only ironic but inexplicable.
Lest we forget:
If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .
‘I Told You “Podlodka” Wasn’t The Word For Airplane!’
All the world is a stage today for President Clinton and the returned journalists. We agree with Bob Herbert and others that this is a moment to be savored; America (except for the Neocons) coming together to celebrate their release. We’ll hold back from Tweety-gasms about it all, which ring hollow and seem more an effort to make amends for his misogyny and borderline sociopathic eruptions against HRC in the past.
And we can’t think of anything original to say on the other big story of the week – Paula Abdul leaving American Idol. We know, right?
Instead, we’re having fun seeing Vlad’s attempt to mimic both Reagan on horseback and Mao swimming the Yangtze. You’ve probably heard about the Sovs Russians sending two subs off the Atlantic coast. And their ongoing attempts to get their Bulava missile to work. (We shouldn’t laugh overlong. We’ve had our own problems in the past when we actually had the human capital base which knew how to build missiles. Today it is much worse).
We were just thinking back when we represented almost all the companies that blew things up, made platforms to deliver things that blew up, or the networks that allowed people to target, track and then rain down a firestorm of things blowing up. Good times, good times. Well, except for dealing with some of the wingnuts on both sides. Trudging to Pat Boone prayer breakfasts with cheques in hand, etc. got a bit old. (But he’s a nice guy even at 8:00 AM and he did make that metal cover album – so some props for a sense of humor).
We could almost visualize this actually happening. You know who’s all over this pimping Virginia class boats and other solutions inside the procurement knife fighting. After all, we would.
Shoot To Thrill, Way To Kill
One symbolic skeet shoot is a success.
Since 2005 we here have together been talking at great length about the inevitable procurement scissors crisis. So it begins. And as we’ve been talking for some time, this is only the cusp. The milporn national security bloggers (including the usual rah rahs like Arianna), etc. are reveling in their new playground of defense planning, budgets, defense-Statist-industrial planning and — GASP — congressional complicity.
DoD Acquisition — A Bad Joke
There is broad agreement on the need for acquisition and contracting reform in the Department of Defense. There have been enough studies. Enough hand-wringing. Enough rhetoric. Now it’s the time for action.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
If only, as Hunter mentioned, there was more to it. And how sad to see Obama shills like Center for American Progress and former Reagan DoD minion Larry Korb herald Gates’ proposed budget increases and ancillary measures as real reform.
Much of this conversation is old hat for our merry band here. Together we’ve anticipated this procurement scissors crisis for the better part of 4 and 1/2 years or so. The defense industrial apparat’s inertial divorce from any reasonably coherent American strategy premised on both goals *and* means continues. We’re all adults here. We know how the game is played. Ramp up huge budget proposals before a new administration arrives to either box them in or force them to eat ‘soft on defense’.
For all of that, Obama is Warlord-lite once again. Agitprop spinners and gullible U.S.-we-canners aside, the defense industry quite rightfully breathes a sigh of relief — as their stocks soar on the news. Indeed:
For one, defense spending is going up next year, by at least 4%, as Gates is proposing, to $534 billion (not counting $130 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan). That’s more than half of all spending Congress has a hand in deciding. The Pentagon budget is not being gutted, despite loud criticism to the contrary.
Long time readers know our take on specific programs i.e. ‘Jedi Knight’ platforms like the F-22, the still touted ‘economical’ (with more importantly stronger international political support) F-35, BMD, the Army’s ‘hey we can be as high-tech as the fly boys’ FCS boondoogle, etc. Over at STSOZ 1.0 we shared at length our general, safe for public/non-sensitive observations on the LCS and the catastrophe of *that* program from Art Cebrowki’s original vision. And let’s not even mention the absurd Zumwalts.
The alleged Gates “cutbacks” are merely a piece with the Potemkin nature of Obama’s budget and TARP/financial rescue plan. Essentially to anyone not still drunk from the Inaugural buzz, the Obama Administration’s claim to fame so far is ‘hey we’re slightly less whacked than those other guys’. Change yes, but less than meets the eye. The ‘vital’ Obama federal budget delivered less than a month ago is blown into vapor by their sudden admission (DOH! – as everyone outside the Administration knew) that the economy in fact wouldn’t grow and begin recovery this June as they claimed. Much less reachg 3.3. GDP next year.
If Obama can present such blatantly delusional, nay, knowingly outright deceptive ‘national priorities’ in a joint address to Congress then one can understand that Gates’ proposed but unsustainable ‘floor’ (read still massively bloated and making permanent as a benchmark the staggering increase since 2002) is similarly a chimera. Let’s just say it out loud: after a couple trillion dollars of printing non-existing money on a meaningless, fictional ‘national budget’ and half assed bank plan, why should the Pentagon be held to a different standard?
Oh there is the usual this-or-that about this-or-that system, platform, etc. True, long overdue outsourced contractor-trimming is *proposed* from insanely out of control to merely dangerously crazed, etc. It’s a real step forward to push out some of the 40% (yes, 40%) of the Pentagon workforce that the Warlord turned over to private contractors. The proposed reforms? To hire real government employees as full time program managers. To hire real auditors. For possible – one hopes – additional (but illusory) savings in 10 years.
All well and good. And we can talk about specifics on any of those issues if people here wish. As long time readers know, the Stiftung has represented about every single major defense industrial/technological/contracting entity at the VP/retired two star, retired three star level across Congress, in OSD, at OMB, HLS and OEOB. We’ve spent time on the Pol/Mil analytical side if that interests people.
To recap 4 years of our conversations here, the U.S. is stumbling oblivious into the gaping razor blade jaws of procurement impossibilities without the financial-economic means (or even pretense to means) to paper over all the rampaging irrationality. And with a decadent political process to boot. A defense budget one can rightfully argue, like a CVN, doesn’t turn on the dime. But Obama unfortunately is far more status quo than his Kool Aid contingent will allow. (And would someone rid us please of that nauseatingly naive and smug Maddow? Her usefulness as an Oppositionist came and went long ago).
We’re still waiting for the Harvard-Larry Summers types and other whiz kidz there to glom on the fact we can’t afford any of it. Really. It is that bad. We’ll be waiting a long while. We maintain their ineptitude, American historical immaturity, financial illiteracy and obtuseness will require something like gaiatsu (Japanese for shock, usually a foreign imposed circumstance ala the Arab 1973 oil embargo or Baker at the 1985 Plaza Accords) to impose even a dazed recognition of empirical truth.
In the interim, we commend again to all the Obama drinking game. At every event each time he proclaims ‘Let me be clear’, ‘I can’t say this more clearly’ etc. — do a shot. Pretty soon he will start to sound clear if the proof is high enough. Maybe one day he really gets clear about reality, U.S. power and the cruelly inexorable, undeniable audit of means. If you think Obama’s hair is turning white now, just wait for that moment. As John Madden would say — “Boom!”
What’s worse? Scenario One — Bartlett et al. proclaiming they can make up reality and force the rest of us to chase after them; or Scenario Two — a bunch of self-convinced, complicit, financially self-dealing poseurs jury rigging an economic house of cards, grasping for a toe hold on any reality, trying to convince *themselves* they get it by constantly reminding *us* how clear they are?
A Psych 101 major at any junior college already knows what that means. And rightly so.