If winning sundry wars and military conflicts, reducing the risk and prevalence of terrorism and other actual or perceived threats, and keeping the country and the world safe and secure are suitable measures by which to evaluate its overall effectiveness, then on such basic metrics alone the defense establishment's performance leaves quite a lot to be desired. This is before any consideration of whether such profligacy is providing American citizens with bang for their taxpayer buck. The utter failure of the purportedly impregnable, gold-plated defense apparatus of the U.S.--still the most formidable military machine ever assembled in history--to preempt and prevent the 9/11 attacks is stark evidence of this.
We only need factor in just one of the many head-shaking realities that attend the Pentagon/DoD narrative: It cannot account for around six and a half trillion dollars of expenditure over the past two decades. There's something decidedly 'other-worldly' about any bureaucracy already blessed with unlimited budgets--black and white--that can lose track of such staggering amounts of money, defies, avoids or resists all attempts to undergo external audits like other agencies and departments are required to, and no-one is held accountable.
And though it's far from an insignificant 'achievement' (this 'mother' of all 'case studies' will provide forensic accounting gurus much to dine out on for some time), we'd have to say any organization that can lose track of this amount of money forfeits from the off any claim to being efficient, competent or effective, especially one that can point to few substantive, verifiable successes in its core mission in recent memory, indeed, we might say, ever since it was created.
Of course the 'complex' still keeps demanding--and getting--more, with Trump now pledging even further increases. Yet as Spinney notes, this gigantic defense budget is 'not producing a greater sense of security for most Americans.' For the highly respected former defense 'lifer' and many others of his ilk, the positive outcomes--quantitative and qualitative--from all this expenditure have been few and far between at best, and non-existent at worst. Who could argue it has actually created the reality of greater instability and insecurity as well as the sense of it, in America and elsewhere? Spinney observes that throughout this process,
'...[w]e have become a fearful nation, a bunkered nation, bogged down in never ending wars abroad accompanied by shrinking civil liberties at home. We now spend almost as much on defense as the rest of the world, yet the sinews of our economy are weakening at an alarming rate, threatening the existence of the...middle-class society we built after World War II.'
Spinney rightly asks the question: How did America maneuver itself into such a self-destructive straitjacket? Although not an easy question to answer definitively, some reflection may assist us putting some of it in perspective. We might say said "reflection" is a matter of the utmost national security.
- With an Alert and Knowledgeable Citizenry (Going AWOL) -
In January 1961, the outgoing president of the United States Dwight D (aka Ike) Eisenhower delivered his last address and most memorable public utterance. In his much-cited speech, Ike warned of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex".
Now the vocabulary and themes of his speech are well known, so no need to expound on it too much. Suffice to say, though Ike stopped short of acknowledging his own administration's contribution to its emergence, he did however admit he'd become very concerned about the growing power of the bourgeoning but already Byzantine matrix of relationships between the US Military, security and intelligence community, Wall Street, Congress, and the private sector security/defense industry apparatus.
Yet well before Eisenhower uttered his immortal words, the train had left the station: The "unwarranted influence" and "misplaced power" he alluded to had already infected Washington's collective psychopathology, and today this now 70 year old monster corrupts and corrodes every nook and cranny of the U.S. body politic. And though it was the "military-industrial complex" bit that took up space in most folk's minds, we can now say the "alert and knowledgeable" bit he referred to, went decidedly AWOL.
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