Turning to overfunded, the unofficial motto of the Pentagon budgetary process might be "aim high" and in this they have succeeded admirably. For example, President Trump denounced a proposed Pentagon budget of $733 billion for fiscal year 2020 as "crazy" high. Then he demonstrated his art-of-the-deal skills by suggesting a modest cut to $700 billion, only to compromise with his national security chiefs on a new figure: $750 billion. That eternal flood of money into the Pentagon's coffers -- no matter the political party in power -- ensures one thing: that no one in that five-sided building needs to think hard about the disastrous direction of U.S. strategy or the grim results of its wars. The only hard thinking is devoted to how to spend the gigabucks pouring in (and keep more coming).
Instead of getting the most bang for the buck, the Pentagon now gets the most bucks for the least bang. To justify them, America's defense experts are placing their bets not only on their failing generational war on terror, but also on a revived cold war (now uncapitalized) with China and Russia. Such rivals are no longer simply to be "deterred," to use a commonplace word from the old (capitalized) Cold War; they must now be "overmatched," a new Pentagon buzzword that translates into unquestionable military superiority (including newly "usable" nuclear weapons) that may well bring the world closer to annihilation.
Finally, there's overhyped. Washington leaders of all stripes love to boast of a military that's "second to none," of a fighting force that's the "finest" in history. Recently, Vice President Mike Pence reminded the troops that they are "the best of us." Indeed you could argue that "support our troops" has become a new American mantra, a national motto as ubiquitous as (and synonymous with) "In God we trust." But if America's military truly is the finest fighting force since forever, someone should explain just why it's failed to produce clear and enduring victories of any significance since World War II.
Despite endless deployments, bottomless funding, and breathless hype, the U.S. military loses -- it's politely called a "stalemate" -- with remarkable consistency. America's privates and lieutenants, the grunts at the bottom, are hardly to blame. The fish, as they say, rots from the head, which in this case means America's most senior officers. Yet, according to them, often in testimony before Congress, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, that military is always making progress. Victory, so they claim, is invariably around the next corner, which they're constantly turning or getting ready to turn.
America's post-9/11 crop of generals like Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, and especially Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus have been much celebrated here in the mainstream media. And in their dress uniforms shimmering with colorful ribbons, badges, and medals, they certainly looked the part of victors.
Indeed, when three of them were still in Donald Trump's administration, the pro-war mainstream media unabashedly saluted them as the "adults in the room," allegedly curbing the worst of the president's mad impulses. Yet consider the withering critique of veteran reporter William Arkin who recently resigned from NBC News to protest the media's reflexive support of America's wars and the warriors who have overseen them. "I find it disheartening," he wrote, "that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting." NBC News, he concluded in his letter of resignation, has been "emulating the national security state itself -- busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play."
Arkin couldn't be more on target. Moreover, self-styled triumphalist warriors and a cheeringly complicit media are hardly the ideal tools with which to fix a tottering republic, one allegedly founded on the principle of rule by informed citizens, not the national security state.
Can America Turn Defeat Into Victory?
Like Field Marshal Slim and his coalition army in Burma, America must find a way to turn defeat into victory. Here's the rub: Slim and his forgotten army knew that they were fighting a war of survival against a ruthless Japanese enemy. Under his results-oriented leadership, his forces proved willing to make the sacrifices necessary for victory. In the U.S. case, however, no such sacrifices would matter as there's no way to win thoroughly misbegotten wars by finding the right general or defining a new strategy or throwing more money at the Pentagon. The only way to win such wars is by ending them and, at some gut level, candidate Trump seemed to recognize this. On occasion as president, he has indeed questioned both the high cost and disastrous results of those wars, but so far he has been more interventionist than isolationist, greatly expanding air and drone strikes across the Greater Middle East as well as committing, at the urging of "his" generals, more troops to Afghanistan and Syria.
Endless war for any purpose other than the literal preservation of the republic isn't a measure of fortitude or toughness or foresight; however, it is the path to national suicide. And the "war on terror" has proven to be the very definition of endless war.
A quick recap: what started in 2001 as a punitive raid and blossomed into endless war against the Taliban and later other terrorist organizations in Afghanistan shows no sign of abating; a war to rid Saddam Hussein of (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction cratered in 2003 when none were found, the Iraqis did not greet their "liberators" with flowers, and no preparations had been made to stabilize an increasingly ethnically riven country after a massively destructive invasion; a shortsighted operation to overthrow a bothersome dictator in Libya in 2011 led to the spread of death, destruction, and weaponry throughout the region; efforts in Syria to train "moderate" Islamic forces to counter extremists and overthrow the country's autocratic ruler Bashar al-Assad only aggravated a preexisting civil war. These and similar interventions are already lost causes. There is no way for better leaders, cleverer tactics, or booming defense budgets to win them today.
In the future, the surest way to turn defeat into victory would be to avoid such needless wars. On the other hand, a surefire way to defeat is to persist in them out of fear, greed, opportunism, careerism, or similar motives. These are lessons America's gung-ho defense experts have little incentive to absorb, let alone act upon -- and because they won't, we must.
A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and professor of history, William Astore is a TomDispatch regular. His personal blog is Bracing Views.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2019 William J. Astore
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