War ain't what it used to be, and neither is our military. In
The Nation, a veteran explains one reason why we can't win anymore.
While the old-fashioned, uniformed military
guards its Cold War turf, preserved like some set of monstrous museum
exhibits, the mutant military strives with great success to expand its
power across the globe. Since 9/11, it's the mutant military that has
gotten the lion’s share of the action and much of the adulation—here’s
looking at you,
SEAL Team 6—along with its ultimate enabler, the civilian commander-in-chief, now acting in essence as America’s
assassin-in-chief.
Think
of it this way: a quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, the
U.S. military is completely uncontained. Washington’s foreign policies
are strikingly military-first ones, and nothing seems to be out of
bounds. Its two major parts, the Cold War-era “big” military, still very
much alive and kicking, and the new-era military of special ops,
contractors, and paramilitaries seek to dominate everything. Nuclear,
conventional, unconventional, land, sea, air, space, cyber, you name it:
all realms must be mastered.
Except it can’t
master the one realm that matters most: itself. And it can’t find the
one thing that such an uncontained military was supposed to guarantee:
victory (not in a single place anywhere on Earth).
Loaded with loot and
praised to the rafters, America’s uncontained military has
no discipline
and no direction. It never has to make truly tough choices, like getting
rid of ICBMs or shedding its obscenely bloated top ranks of officers or
cancelling redundant weapon systems like the F-35. It just aims to do
it all, just about everywhere. As Nick Turse reported recently, U.S.
special ops touched down in
150 countries
between 2011 and 2014. And the results of all this activity have been
remarkably repetitive and should by now be tragically predictable: lots
of chaos spread, lots of casualties inflicted, and in every case,
mission unaccomplished.
The Future Isn't What It Used to Be
Say
what you will of the Cold War, at least it had an end. The overriding
danger of the current American military moment is that it may lack one.
Once
upon a time, the U.S. military was more or less tied to continental
defense and limited by strong rivals in its hegemonic designs. No
longer.
Today, it has uncontained ambitions across the globe and even as it continually stumbles in achieving them, whether in
Iraq,
Afghanistan,
Yemen,
or elsewhere, its growth is assured, as our leaders trip over one
another in continuing to shower it with staggering sums of money and
unconditional love.
No military should ever be trusted and no military should ever be left uncontained. Our nation’s founders knew this lesson. Five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower took pains in his farewell address in 1961 to remind us of it again. How did we as a people come to forget it? WTF, America?
What
I do know is this: Take an uncontained, mutating military, sprinkle it
with unconditional love and plenty of dough, and you have a recipe for
disaster. So excuse me for being more than a little nervous about what
we’ll all find when America flips the calendar by another
quarter-century to the year 2040.
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