Rachel Maddow on the military’s inertia problem

by kucheka on June 17, 2013

Selections from Rachel Maddow’s Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power:

The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter… With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians’ control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us… war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

…[T]he American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars…

If you added up what every other country spent on its military in 2001, the US military budget was about half that total; by 2005, those two numbers were equal. In other words, the United States spent as much on national defense as every other country in the world combined. And the Pentagon can now spend those dollars in a way that insulates the decision makers from the political consequences of making life uncomfortable for the voting public…

When the Pentagon farms out soldiers’ work to contractors, it not only puts extra bodies in the field, it puts a different type of body in the field; the American public doesn’t mourn contractor deaths the way we do the deaths of our soldiers. We rarely even hear about them. Private companies are under no obligation to report when their employees are killed while, say, providing armed security to tractor-trailer convoys running supplies into Iraq. In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States employed one private contract worker for every one hundred American soldiers on the ground; in the Clinton-era Balkans, it neared one to one — about 20,000 privateers tops. In early 2011, there were 45,000 US soldiers stationed inside Iraq, and 65,000 private contract workers there…

Just the nuke budget [$8 trillion and counting] was more than that half-century’s federal spending on Medicare, education, social services, disaster relief, scientific research (of the non-nuclear stripe), environmental protection, food safety inspectors, highway maintenance, cops, prosecutors, judges, and prisons … combined. The only programs that got more taxpayer dollars were Social Security and non-nuclear defense spending…

How about the fact that it is not a simple thing to walk away from a sixty-year, eight-trillion-dollar investment? Eight-trillion-dollar habits die hard. In 2005, Gen. Lance Lord, described as a “man with missile in his DNA,” said in a speech to a Washington think tank, “As the wing commander at F. E. Warren, routinely I was asked, ‘How does winning the Cold War change your mission?’ ” His answer: “It doesn’t.” Institutions have inertia. When the original justification for a huge investment goes away, the huge investment finds another reason to live. It’s not just the military; it’s true of pretty much all organizations. The more money and work and time it takes to build something, the more power it accrues, and the more effort it takes to make it go away. But in the case of the nuclear arms race, what built it wasn’t just money (tons of money), work, and time, it was also a grab-you-by-the-throat existential urgency.

And on that last point, Maddow refers to an Army Times report, hammers seeking nails:

If they are no longer needed in Iraq, could the Guard instead send soldiers to South Korea for yearlong rotations? How about using the Reserve’s medical soldiers for three months at a time in South America? Maybe the engineers can build schools and wells in the Horn of Africa?

“From our perspective, and to [former Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey’s] credit, last summer, he decided he needed to figure out where the Army and its two components were going to go after Afghanistan and Iraq,” Carpenter said. “What is the use of the reserve component with declining demand and increasing budget pressures?”

Today, about 38,500 Guard soldiers and about 30,000 Reserve soldiers are deployed around the world.

The Guard and Reserve are working to give their soldiers four years at home for every year they’re mobilized and deployed.

“We’re in a situation now where the soldiers we have recruited … want to serve, and if we don’t continue to challenge them and maintain that combat edge, we think we’re going to see soldiers leave us because what we recruited them for and what we promised them, we weren’t able to deliver on,” he said. “This country has made a huge investment [in the reserve component] to this point, and we think they’ll get short-changed if we don’t take advantage of this operational reserve.”

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