These would include our latest perfect weapon, the pilotless drone; nifty cyberwar-style online combat; plenty of new spy and advanced surveillance gear; and sexy shadow wars, just the thing for "environments where adversaries try to deny us access." Elite special operations forces -- the secret military, cocooned inside the regular military, that took down Osama bin Laden -- would be further expanded; and finally, there would be a "pivot to Asia" to confront the planet's rising superpower, China, by sea and air, leaving all those nasty Arabs and Pashtuns and their messy, ugly guerrilla insurgencies, IEDs, and suicide bombers behind.
It couldn't have sounded cheerier once the media speculation began and it offered something for just about anyone who mattered in imperial Washington. In fact, as sober as Obama looked and as business-like as his surroundings were, if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine a flight suit and an aircraft carrier deck, for this felt eerily like his "mission accomplished" moment.
Hostilities of the old nasty sort were practically at an end and a new era of high-tech, super-secret, elite warfare was upon us. The future would be so death-of-bin-Laden-ish all the way. It would be safe, secure, and glorious in the hands of our reconfigured military and its efficiently reconfigured budget.
Military-First Imperial Realism
This particular reconfiguration also allowed the globe's last great imperial power to put a smiley face on a decade of military disasters in the Greater Middle East and -- for all the clever politics of the moment -- to cry uncle in its own fashion. More miraculous yet, it was doing so without giving up its global military dreams.
It was a way of saying that, if the U.S. ever gets itself out of Afghanistan, when it comes to invading and occupying another Muslim land, building hundreds of bases and an embassy the size of the Ritz, and running riot in the name of "nation-building" and democracy: never again -- or not for a few decades anyway.
Consider this a form of begrudging imperial realism that managed never to leave behind that essential American stance of garrisoning the planet. In fact, in order to fly all those drones and land all those special operations units, Washington may need more, not less bases globally. And of course, those 11 carrier battle groups are themselves floating bases, massively armed American small towns at sea.
As it happens, though, we already know how this story ends and it's nothing to write home about. Yes, they're going with what's hot, especially those drones. But keep in mind that, only a few years ago, the hottest thing in town was counterinsurgency warfare and its main proponent, General David Petraeus, was being hailed as a new Alexander the Great, Napoleon, or U.S. Grant. And you know what happened there.
Now, counterinsurgency is history. The new hot ticket of the moment, that "revolutionary weapon" of our time -- the drone or robotic airplane -- is to fit the bill instead. Drones are, without a doubt, technologically remarkable and growing more sophisticated by the year. But air power has historically proved a poor choice if you want to accomplish anything political on the ground. It hardly matters whether those planes in the distant heavens have pilots or not, or whether they can see ants crawl from 20,000 feet and blast them away with precision.
Despite hosannas about the air war in Libya, count on one thing: air power will prove predictably inept when it comes to an American version of "revolutionary" counterterror warfare in the twenty-first century. So much for the limits of realism.
Washington-style realism assumes that we made a few mistakes, which can be rectified with the help of advanced technology and without endangering the military-industrial-crony-capitalist way of life. That's about as radical as Obama's Washington is likely to get.
When compared to the Republicans (Ron Paul aside again) storming the rhetorical barricades daily, threatening war with Iran nightly, promising to reinvade Iraq, or swearing that a military budget larger than those of the next 10 countries combined is wussiness itself, the Obama administration's approach does look like shining realism. Up against this planet as it actually is today, its military-first policies look like wishful thinking.
What Drones Can't Do
Climate-change advocates sometimes say that we're on a new planet. (Bill McKibben calls it "Eaarth," with that ungainly extra "a" to signify an ungainly place that used to be comfy enough for humanity.) It is, they say, a planet under pressure and destabilizing in all sorts of barely imagined ways.
Here's the strange thing, though. Set aside climate change, and to the passing, modestly apocalyptic eye, this planet still looks as if it were destabilizing. Your three economic powerhouses -- the European Union, China, and the United States -- are all teetering at the edge of interrelated financial crises. The EU seems to be literally destabilizing. It's now perfectly reasonable to suggest that the present Eurozone may, within years, be Euro zones (or worse). Who knows when European banks, up to their elbows in bad debt, will start to tumble or whole countries like Greece go down (whatever that may mean)?
At the same time, the Chinese, with the hottest economy on the planet, have a housing bubble, which may already be bursting. (Americans should have at least a few passing memories of just what kinds of troubles a popped housing bubble can bring.) And for all we know, the U.S. economy, despite recent headlines about growing consumer confidence and an unemployment rate dropping to 8.5%, may be on life support.
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