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Bush: "Yet today our military is still organized more for Cold War threats than for the challenges of a new century - for industrial age operations, rather than for information age battles."
Internet freedom has already been compromised by recent changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. These changes fail to provide the necessary judicial oversight to prevent warrantless, mass spying on American citizens' Internet activities and e-mail exchanges. Bush's illegal warrantless surveillance program conducted between 2001 and 2007 appears to be a part of PNAC's concept of controlling cyberspace. In the name of national defense, the National Security Agency has engaged in copying, parsing and downloading millions of American citizens' computerized records into a central government database (so-called Total Information Awareness).
Defense Research and Development
PNAC: build new kinds of conventional forces for different strategic challenges and a new technological environment.
Bush: "The real goal is to move beyond marginal improvements - to replace existing programs with new technologies and strategies."
It is obvious that the economy, health care, education and social services would be sacrificed in order to finance the research and development of such high-tech weaponry under a Bush/PNAC plan. An administration that placed a premium on defense R&D, as McCain's commitment to the PNAC ideology requires, could not realistically address these other concerns. Indeed, the thrust of the PNAC plan has been toward vastly increased R&D defense spending:
PNAC: "… increase defense spending gradually to a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually."
Bush: "The transformation of our military will require a new and greater emphasis on research and development. So I will also commit an additional $20 billion to defense R&D between the time I take office and 2006."
As you can see, Bush's figure of a $20-billion increase in R&D did not come out of thin air. It is the high end of the figure that PNAC had recommended in its 2000 "RAD." In fact, according to the Department of Defense, between 2001 and 2004 Bush "steadfastly increased R&D investments" from $41.1 billion to $64.3 billion, an increase of $23.2 billion, "in order to skip a generation of weapons and transform the military into the 21st Century fighting force it must become."
Using a "New Pearl Harbor" to Propel the PNAC/Bush Plan
In a post-9/11 world where fear of another attack on the U.S. homeland had reached concert pitch, PNAC/Bush was able to exploit the situation to attain the massive increases in defense spending. Bush appears to have been aware of this "homeland" advantage in 1999 before he took office and two years before the tragic attacks took place. And in 2000, one year before the attacks, PNAC lucidly conjectured about the utility of such an attack as a "catalyst" for financing its transformative objective:
PNAC: "… the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."
Bush: "Not since the years before Pearl Harbor has our investment in national defense been so low as a percentage of GNP."
Fighting Multiple Simultaneous Preemptive Wars
On the surface, the PNAC/Bush case for a massive increase in defense R&D can be made on the grounds that it is needed to defend the U.S. homeland from terrorist attacks. However, when seen in the broader context of the PNAC/Bush objective of maintaining the geopolitical pre-eminence of the U.S., this concern becomes only a corollary. It is a truism that we would be safer if we could defend ourselves more effectively; however, the PNAC/Bush mission was never purely defensive; it was and is essentially offensive - to threaten and if necessary militaristically defeat any potential competitors for the title of pre-eminent world power. Indeed, advancing U.S. economic (oil) interests in the Persian Gulf, not defending our turf from a terrorist attack, appears to have been the real reason for the PNAC/Bush invasion of Iraq and its present preoccupation with Iran:
PNAC: "Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has."
