[Money drives the US military machine.] [[link removed]]

WHY AMERICA GOES TO WAR  
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Andrew Cockburn
September 9, 2021
The Nation
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_ Money drives the US military machine. _

The B-1 bomber is notoriously unreliable. But on the plus side,
it’s very expensive.,

 

ADAPTED FROM _THE SPOILS OF WAR_ BY ANDREW COCKBURN (VERSO BOOKS,
SEPTEMBER 2021).

Innumerable wars originate, wrote Alexander Hamilton
in _Federalist_ No. 6, “entirely in private passions; in the
attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears of leading
individuals in the communities of which they are members.” As an
illustration of this truth, he cited the case of Pericles, lauded as
one of the greatest statesmen of classical Athens, who “in
compliance with the resentment of a prostitute, at the expense of much
of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished, and
destroyed the city of the Samnians” before igniting the disastrous
Peloponnesian War in order to extricate himself from political
problems back home.

It should come as no surprise that this version of Athenian history is
not echoed by orthodox historians, despite credible sources
buttressing Hamilton’s pithy account. Instead, Pericles’s attack
on Samos is generally ascribed to his concern for protecting a
democratic regime in the neighboring city of Miletus or the need to
preserve Athenian “credibility” as a great power.

The compulsion to endow states and leaders with respectable motives
for their actions is far from confined to ancient historians. It
extends across the spectrum of contemporary foreign and defense policy
analysis and commentary, from academic ivory towers housing
international relations and national security studies departments to
think tanks, research institutes, and, of course, media of every
variety. Thus, in modern times, two former national security eminences
for the Brookings Institution stated
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the goal of expanding NATO into Eastern Europe in the 1990s was to
“promote peace and stability on the European continent through the
integration of the new Central and Eastern European democracies into a
wider Euro-Atlantic community, in which the United States would remain
deeply engaged.”

Actually, it wasn’t. The driving force behind the expansion, which
ensured Russian paranoia and consequent _in_stability in Eastern
Europe, was the necessity of opening new markets for American arms
companies, coupled with the prospect of political reward for President
Bill Clinton among relevant voting blocs in the Midwest.

Outsiders generally find it hard to grasp an essential truth about the
US military machine, which is that war-fighting efficiency has a low
priority by comparison with considerations of personal and internal
bureaucratic advantage. The Air Force, for example, has long striven
to get rid of a plane, the inexpensive A-10 “Warthog,”
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works supremely well in protecting ground troops. But such combat
effectiveness is irrelevant to the service because its institutional
prosperity is based on hugely expensive long-range (and perennially
ineffective) bombers that pose lethal dangers to friendly soldiers,
not to mention civilians, on the ground. The US armed services are
expending vast sums on developing “hypersonic” weapons of proven
infeasibility on the spurious grounds that the Russians have
established a lead in this field. Despite the fact that hundreds of
thousands of veterans of the post–9/11 wars suffer from traumatic
brain injury induced by bomb blasts
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the Army has insisted on furnishing soldiers with helmets from a
favored contractor that enhance the effects of blasts. The Navy’s
Seventh Fleet arranged its deployments around Southeast Asia at the
behest of a contractor known as “Fat Leonard,” who suborned the
relevant commanders with the help of a squad of prostitutes.

Fat Leonard’s inducements were not, of course, limited to carnal
delights. The corrupt officers also received quantities of cash (in
return for directing flotillas to ports where he held profitable
supply contracts), thus confirming the timeless maxim that “follow
the money” is the surest means of uncovering the real motivations
behind actions and events that might otherwise appear inexplicable.
For example, half the US casualties in the first winter of the Korean
War were due to frostbite, as I learned from a veteran of the conflict
who related how, in the freezing frontline trenches, soldiers and
Marines lacked decent cold-weather boots. Like some threadbare
guerrilla army, GIs would raid enemy trenches to steal the warm,
padded boots provided by the communist high command to their own
troops. “I could never figure out why I, a soldier of the richest
country on earth, was having to steal boots from soldiers of the
poorest country on earth,” my friend recalled in describing these
harrowing expeditions. The “richest country on earth” could of
course afford appropriate footwear in limitless quantities. Nor was it
skimping in overall military spending, which soared
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the outbreak of war in 1950. To the casual observer, it might seem
obvious that the fighting and spending were directly related. However,
although the war served to justify the budget boost, much of the money
was diverted far from the Korean Peninsula, principally to build large
numbers of B-47 strategic nuclear bombers as well as fighters designed
to intercept enemy nuclear bombers, of which the Russians possessed
very few and the Chinese and North Koreans none at all.

MONEY LOST AT SEA: The US spent about $22.5 billion in R&D costs for
just three Zumwalt-class ships, according to the US Naval
Institute. (US Navy via Sipa USA)

The reason for this disparity in the allocation of resources should be
obvious: The aerospace industry, as aircraft manufacturers had sleekly
renamed themselves, was more powerful and demanding than the
bootmakers, and so that was where the money went. The pattern was
repeated half a century later as American families went into debt to
buy armored vests, socks, boots, and night-vision goggles for sons and
daughters in Iraq, even as some $50 billion was poured into esoteric
devices to detect insurgents’ homemade $25 bombs. One such was
Compass Call, a $100 million Lockheed EC-130H aircraft equipped with
ground-penetrating radar that could supposedly seek out buried
explosives. Unfortunately, a military intelligence unit in Baghdad in
April 2007 concluded
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after analyzing hundreds of flights, that the system had “no
detectable effect.”

Raids on the public purse such as these are rendered easier by a
widening gulf between the military services and the population at
large. For decades, thanks to the draft, most Americans had either
served in the military or knew someone who had, and so were aware at
some level
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the services were beset with bumbling bureaucratic incompetence. But
these days most people are ignorant of the military world and rely for
insight on a press that is all too often either clueless or
compromised by the need to maintain access to self-interested sources.
This lack of awareness is exacerbated by an aversion to challenging
military claims regarding technology, not least because such claims
are broadcast and vigorously promoted by a well-endowed public
relations apparatus. The June 2014 disaster
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which a B-1 bomber, thanks to endemic technological shortcomings,
killed six friendly servicemen (five Americans and one Afghan)
provided an instructive example. The Air Force responded rapidly to
the tragedy by inviting a _New York Times _reporter for a joyride on
a B-1, thereby generating a predictably uninformed but positive review
of the lethal (especially to friendly troops and civilians) machine.

Even when a weapons program’s deficiencies are too egregious to be
ignored, media criticism seldom strays beyond timidity, such as
decrying excessive “waste” in the program, without probing how and
why huge costs have become routine. The truth that ballooning costs
can be directly ascribed to ever more complex technology, as was
exposed in detail as far back as the 1980s by the Pentagon analyst
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, is never addressed. Thus, for example,
the alarm prompted by Russia’s takeover of Ukraine in 2014 generated
budgetary rewards for the Pentagon but relatively puny forces in terms
of fighting strength—initially a mere 700 troops in Poland, for
example, to face the putative Russian hordes poised to invade.
Overall, despite remorseless growth in spending, the US military
continues to shrink, fielding fewer ships, aircraft, and ground combat
units with every passing decade. Remarkably, more money apparently
produces less defense.

Uninterested in such prosaic realities, liberals bemoan the money
spent on arms and lament the “militarism” manifest in America’s
appetite for war, while avoiding the underlying driving force: the
military services’ eagerness for ever more money, shared with the
corporations that feed off them, as well as the officers who will cash
in with high-paid employment with these same corporations once they
retire. In other words, the military is not generally interested in
war, save as a means to budget enhancement. Thus, when President
Donald Trump was induced to order a minor surge in Afghanistan in
2018, a conclave of senior Marine generals agreed to go along with the
plan on the grounds, according to someone who was present at the
relevant meeting, “that it won’t make any difference in the war,
but it will do us good at budget time.” Col. John Boyd, the former
Air Force fighter pilot who famously conceived and expounded a
comprehensive theory of human conflict, once pointed out that there
was no contradiction between the military’s professed mission and
its seeming indifference to operational proficiency. “People say the
Pentagon does not have a strategy,” he said. “They are wrong. The
Pentagon does have a strategy. It is: ‘Don’t interrupt the money
flow, add to it.’”

Once this salient truth regarding our military strategy is understood,
it becomes simpler to make sense of US actions, notably in provoking a
new Cold War with Russia as well as toadying to the repellent Saudi
regime—an ever eager customer for US arms—even in the face of its
complicity in the 9/11 attacks or its war crimes in Yemen.

The true dynamics driving actions such as those described above are
usually well understood internally, even if they are unnoticed or
misunderstood by outsiders. Civilians may not comprehend what is at
stake in the interservice battle for budget share, but every officer
in the Pentagon surely does. Likewise, frontline soldiers and Marines
are well aware that they are condemned to rely for support on the
inaccurate B-1 bomber because the Air Force is determined to protect
its lucrative bomber mission at the expense of the effective A-10.

While people have no problem in understanding the real political
dynamics affecting their own group, there appears to be a barrier to
understanding that the same dynamics might apply elsewhere. For
example, Marines in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province long cherished
the support of the powerful tribal leader Sher Mohammed Akhundzada in
battling the Taliban, whose forces he would helpfully identify. But
the enemies he designated were all too often not Taliban but
supporters of his chief business rival in the drug trade, another
tribal leader who was meanwhile enjoying a similarly fruitful alliance
with the British forces sharing the same headquarters as the Marine
Corps. Overall, this woeful ignorance pervaded the entire US-led
misadventure in Afghanistan, a saga of disastrous errors that is
comprehensible only if it is assumed that the goal of the effort was
“to do us good at budget time,” which, as the trillion-dollar-plus
tab for the war attests, it certainly did.

Comprehending that it is private passions and interests that
customarily propel acts of state makes the consequences for their
victims appear even more disgusting. The CIA long ago struck budgetary
gold in covert warfare, leading it to ultimately forge a profitable
partnership with Al Qaeda in its various assorted nominations. The
agency’s involvement in the Syrian civil war, in de facto alliance
with Al Qaeda spin-offs, is commonly cited as the most expensive in
its history. Equally gruesome, sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s,
which killed hundreds of thousands of children, were supposedly
enforced to compel Saddam Hussein to abandon his purported arsenal of
weapons of mass destruction. But, as was later confirmed to me by the
chief UN weapons inspector for much of the period, Rolf Ekéus, the
Clinton administration knew very well, at least from the spring of
1997, that Hussein had no WMD, because he, Ekéus, had secretly told
them so and planned a conclusive report to the UN detailing his
findings. There would therefore have been no legal basis for
continuing the embargo. But Clinton was fearful that lifting sanctions
would cost him politically, since the Republicans would surely trumpet
complaints that he had “let Saddam off the hook.” Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright therefore announced that sanctions would
continue, WMD or no, with the predictable and intended result that
Hussein ceased cooperation with the UN inspectors and uncountable more
Iraqi children died.

Sometimes the naked pursuit of self-interest is unabashed, but even
when the real object of the exercise is camouflaged as “foreign
policy” or “strategy,” no observer should ever lose sight of the
most important question: Cui bono? Who benefits?

_ANDREW COCKBURN is the author, with Patrick Cockburn, of Out of the
Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein. His most recent book
is Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins._

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