As this year ends, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law military spending of $770 billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is eye-watering. It eclipses what the United States is willing to invest for overhauling its badly neglected civilian infrastructure and for combating the coronavirus pandemic that has killed far more people in the U.S. than in any other nation.

If there is one thing that portends a historic collapse of U.S. global power it is its pathological addiction to militarism that is hemorrhaging vital resources.

What is also amazing is how this gargantuan deformity in economic planning is presented as somehow rational and normal by the Western media.

Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces.

Biden’s budget – his first as president – exceeds the record set by the previous Trump administration for military largesse of $740 billion.

So much for wishing humanity peace and prosperity – as is the international tradition at this time of year – when the U.S. allocates such a grotesque amount of resources to the means of war and annihilation.

This obscene expenditure is not in any way conceivably a “defense budget” as it is termed in Orwellian newspeak. It is a dreadful and despicable war budget.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 11 top nations combined. Compared with China ($250bn) the U.S. budget is nearly three times bigger. The U.S. spends over 12 times more than Russia ($60bn) on its armed forces.

Those figures alone tell beyond any doubt which nation is the ultimate aggressor. Yet, farcically, the Western corporate media in Orwellian fashion portray China and Russia as the aggressors against whom the United States is “defending’ the rest of the world.

Biden’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as it is formally titled, devotes billions more to devising new nuclear weapons and to provoke China and Russia. Camouflaged with Orwellian rhetoric, there is some $7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and $4 billion for the “European Defense Initiative”.

The Biden administration has committed a further $300 million in military support for Ukraine over the next year. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in arms that Washington has plowed into Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 which brought to power a Russophobic regime.

Next week, U.S. and Russian officials are to hold negotiations in Geneva to deescalate tensions over Ukraine and Europe generally. It is blindingly obvious that the crisis over security has been created by the United States pushing a policy of militarizing Europe against Russia in the form of expanding the NATO alliance all the way to Russia’s borders.

With twisted logic, Moscow is accused of “threatening” Ukraine and European security even though its troops are on Russian soil and it is American weapons that are encroaching on Russia’s territory.

The inordinate military spending by the United States year after year is proof of the source of international tensions.

When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991 following the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a reasonable expectation around the world for a “peace dividend” to ensue. That is, whereby Cold War militarism would at last give way to peaceful economic development and cooperation. How lamentable the disappointment!

The inescapable fact is that the U.S. economy is a war-driven system. The military-industrial complex at the heart of American capitalism is dependent on massive taxpayer-funded financial subvention. If an economy is driven for war, then it follows that conflicts and wars are inevitable. This is why, 30 years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the United States is closer to starting a war with Russia and China than ever before.

In an insightful interview this week, former United Nations diplomat Alfred Maurice de Zayas condemned what he called the “universal provocation” of the US “war budget”. De Zayas points out that the United States is preeminently guilty of undermining global peace and security. Its relentless militarism compels other nations to spend excessively on defense in order to counter the threat posed by the United States. Both China and Russia have long-proposed multilateralism and “win-win” cooperation. Neither of these nations has threatened the United States. It is always the U.S. with its mixture of paranoia and hubris that constantly portrays others as enemies and existential dangers. Again, that is due to the need for justifying the abomination of American military orgy year after year.

The truth is the United States has been at war against the rest of the world since at least the end of the Second World War. For most of that period, the Cold War, Washington cited the threat of Soviet and Chinese communism. It waged wars in dozens of countries on every continent killing tens of millions of people purportedly in the “defense of democracy and the free world”. How godawful ridiculous is that?

The Cold War was supposed to have ended, yet the U.S. continues its remorseless warmongering. It retreated from Afghanistan this year after two decades of futile war, only to now wind up tensions with Russia and China. The pretexts and excuses change over the decades, but the fundamental story remains the same: the United States is at war with the rest of the world in the vain ambition of exerting hegemonic domination. Arguably, that’s an essential definition of fascism.

But it’s not just against the rest of the world that the U.S. rulers are waging war. They are waging war against their own American citizens. The Washington elite of both parties (comprising the de facto War Party) whistle through a military budget funded by taxpayers that dwarves anything the federal government is prepared to spend on societal infrastructure and decent human development.

Far above any other nation, the U.S. has a pandemic killing nearly 850,000 people so far and there is no end in sight. U.S. rulers refuse to allocate more financial help to the population to defeat the pandemic yet they are planning to spend billions on offensive weapons systems to threaten Russia and China.

The hideously perverse priorities of the United States as demonstrated by its wanton militarism are a portent and ultimate cause of its historic failure. It is a vile disgrace that the apparent solution to its inherent contradictions is to start a catastrophic war. Fortunately, Russia and China are strong enough militarily to not let that happen. And so the outcome we will witness more of over the coming year will be the United States cratering from its own internal corruption.

Professional sports is a cutthroat business. Succeed and the people running the show reap rich rewards. Fail to meet expectations and you get handed your walking papers. American-style war in the twenty-first century is quite a different matter.

Of course, war is not a game. The stakes on the battlefield are infinitely higher than on the playing field. When wars go wrong, “We’ll show ’em next year — just you wait!” is seldom a satisfactory response.

At least, it shouldn’t be. Yet somehow, the American people, our political establishment, and our military have all fallen into the habit of shrugging off or simply ignoring disappointing outcomes. A few years ago, a serving army officer of unusual courage published an essay — in Armed Forces Journal no less — in which he charged that “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

The charge stung because it was irrefutably true then and it remains so today.

As American politics has become increasingly contentious, the range of issues on which citizens agree has narrowed to the point of invisibility. For Democrats, promoting diversity has become akin to a sacred obligation. For Republicans, the very term is synonymous with political correctness run amok. Meanwhile, GOP supporters treat the Second Amendment as if it were a text Moses carried down from Mount Sinai, while Democrats blame the so-called right to bear arms for a plague of school shootings in this country.

On one point, however, an unshakable consensus prevails: the U.S. military is tops. No less august a figure than General David Petraeus described our armed forces as “the best military in the world today, by far.” Nor, in his judgment, was “this situation likely to change anytime soon.” His one-word characterization for the military establishment: “awesome.”

The claim was anything but controversial. Indeed, Petraeus was merely echoing the views of politicians, pundits, and countless other senior officers. Praising the awesomeness of that military has become twenty-first-century America’s can’t miss applause line.

As it happens, though, a yawning gap looms between that military’s agreed upon reputation here and its actual performance. That the troops are dutiful, seasoned, and hardworking is indisputably so. Once upon a time, “soldiering” was a slang term for shirking or laziness. No longer. Today, America’s troops more than earn their pay.

And whether individually or collectively, they also lead the world in expenditures. Even a decade ago, it cost more than $2 million a year to keep a G.I. in a war zone like Afghanistan. And, of course, no other military on the planet — in fact, not even the militaries of the next 11 countries combined — can match Pentagon spending from one year to the next.

Is it impolite, then, to ask if the nation is getting an adequate return on its investment in military power? Simply put, are we getting our money’s worth? And what standard should we use in answering that question?

Let me suggest using the military’s own standard.

Demanding Victory

According to the United States Army’s 2021 “Posture Statement,” for example, that service exists to “fight and win the nation’s wars.” The mission of the Air Force complements the Army’s: “to fly, fight, and win.” The Navy’s mission statement has three components, the first of which aligns neatly with that of the Army and Air Force: “winning wars.”

As for the Marine Corps, it foresees “looming battles” that “come in many forms and occur on many fronts,” each posing “a critical choice: to demand victory or accept defeat.” No one even slightly familiar with the Marines will have any doubt on which side of that formulation the Corps situates itself.

In other words, the common theme uniting these statements of institutional purpose is self-evident. The armed forces of the United States define their purpose as winning. Staving off defeat is not enough, nor is fighting to a draw, waging gallant Bataan-like last stands, or handing off wars-in-progress to pliant understudies whom American forces have tutored.

Mission accomplishment necessarily entails defeating the enemy. In General Douglas MacArthur’s famously succinct formulation, “There is no substitute for victory.” But victory, properly understood, necessarily entails more than just besting the enemy in battle. It requires achieving the political purposes for which the war is being fought.

So when it comes to winning, both operationally and politically, how well have the U.S. armed forces performed since embarking upon the Global War on Terror in the autumn of 2001? Do the results achieved, whether in the principal theaters of Afghanistan and Iraq or in lesser ones like Libya, Somalia, Syria, and West Africa qualify as “awesome”? And if not, why not?

A proposed Afghanistan War Commission now approved by Congress and awaiting President Biden’s signature could subject our military’s self-proclaimed reputation for awesomeness to critical scrutiny. That assumes, however that such a commission would forego the temptation to whitewash a conflict that even General Mark Milley, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged ended in a “strategic failure.” As a bonus, examining the conduct of America’s longest war might well serve as a proxy for assessing the military’s overall performance since 9/11.

The commission would necessarily pursue multiple avenues of inquiry. Among them should be: the oversight offered by senior civilian officials; the quality of leadership provided by commanders in the field; and the adequacy of the military’s training, doctrine, and equipment. It should also assess the “fighting spirit” of the troops and the complex question of whether there were ever enough “boots on the ground” to accomplish the mission. And the commission would be remiss if it did not take into account the capacity, skills, and determination of the enemy as well.

But there is another matter that the commission will be obliged to address head-on: the quality of American generalship throughout this longest-ever U.S. war. Unless the commission agenda includes that issue, it will fall short. The essential question is obvious: Did the three- and four-star officers who presided over the Afghanistan War in the Pentagon, at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and in Kabul possess the “right stuff”? Or rather than contributing to a favorable resolution of the war, did they themselves constitute a significant part of the problem?

These are not questions that the senior ranks of the officer corps are eager to pursue. As with those who reach the top in any hierarchical institution, generals and admirals are disinclined to see anything fundamentally amiss with a system that has elevated them to positions of authority. From their perspective, that system works just fine and should be perpetuated — no outside tampering required. Much like tenured faculty at a college or university, senior officers are intent on preserving the prerogatives they already enjoy. As a consequence, they will unite in resisting any demands for reform that may jeopardize those very prerogatives.

A Necessary Purge

President Biden habitually concludes formal presentations by petitioning God to “protect our troops.” While not doubting his sincerity in praying for divine intervention, Biden might give the Lord a hand by employing his own authority as commander-in-chief to set the table for a post-Afghanistan military-reform effort. In that regard, a first step should entail removing anyone inclined to obstruct change or (more likely) incapable of recognizing the need to alter a system that has worked so well for them.

On that score, Dwight D. Eisenhower offers Biden an example of how to proceed. When Ike became president in 1953, he was intent on implementing major changes in U.S. defense priorities. As a preliminary step, he purged the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which then included his West Point classmate General Omar Bradley, replacing them with officers he expected to be more sympathetic to what came to be known as his “New Look.” (Eisenhower badly misjudged his ability to get the Army, his own former service, to cooperate, but that’s a story for another day.)

A similar purge is needed now. Commander-in-chief Biden should remove certain active-duty senior officers from their posts without further ado. General Mark Milley, the discredited chair of the Joint Chiefs, would be an obvious example. General Kenneth McKenzie, who oversaw the embarrassing conclusion of the Afghanistan War as head of Central Command, is another. Requiring both of those prominent officers to retire would signal that unsatisfactory performance does indeed have consequences, a principle from which neither the private who loses a rifle nor the four stars who lose wars should be exempt.

However, when it comes to a third figure, our political moment would create complications that didn’t exist when Ike was president. When he decided which generals and admirals to fire and whom to hire in their place, Eisenhower didn’t have to worry about identity politics. Top commanders were of a single skin tone in 1950s America. Today, however, any chief executive who ignores identity-related issues does so at their peril, laying themselves open to the charge of bigotry.

Which brings us to the case of retired four-star general Lloyd Austin, former Iraq War and CENTCOM commander. As a freshly minted civilian, Austin presides as the first Black defense secretary, a notable distinction given that senior Pentagon officials have tended to be white or male (and usually both).  And while, by all reports, General Austin is an upright citizen and decent human being, it’s become increasingly clear that he lacks qualities the nation needs when critically examining this country’s less-than-awesome military performance, which should be the order of the day.  Whatever suit he may wear to the office, he remains a general — and that is a problem.

Austin also lacks imagination, drive, and charisma. Nor is he a creative thinker. Rather than an agent of change, he’s a cheerleader for the status quo — or perhaps more accurately, for a status quo defined by a Pentagon budget that never stops rising.

A speech Austin made earlier this month at the Reagan Library illustrates the point. While he threw the expected bouquets to the troops, praising their “optimism, and pragmatism, and patriotism” and “can-do attitude,” he devoted the preponderance of his remarks to touting Pentagon plans for dealing with “an increasingly assertive and autocratic China.” The overarching theme of Austin’s address centered on confrontation. “We made the Department’s largest-ever budget request for research, development, testing, and evaluation,” he boasted. “And we’re investing in new capabilities that will make us more lethal from greater distances, and more capable of operating stealthy and unmanned platforms, and more resilient under the seas and in space and in cyberspace.”

Nowhere in Austin’s presentation or his undisguised eagerness for a Cold War-style confrontation with China was there any mention of the Afghanistan War, which had ended just weeks before. That the less-than-awesome U.S. military performance there — 20 years of exertions ending in defeat — might have some relevance to any forthcoming competition with China did not seemingly occur to the defense secretary.

Austin’s patently obvious eagerness to move on — to put this country’s disastrous “forever wars” in the Pentagon’s rearview mirror — no doubt coincides with the preferences of the active-duty senior officers he presides over at the Pentagon. He clearly shares their eagerness to forget.

As if to affirm that the Pentagon is done with Afghanistan once and for all, Austin soon after decided to hold no U.S. military personnel accountable for a disastrous August 29th drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 noncombatants, including seven children. In fact, since 9/11, the United States had killed thousands of civilians in several theaters of operations, with the media either in the dark or, until very recently, largely indifferent. This incident, however, provoked a rare storm of attention and seemingly cried out for disciplinary action of some sort.

But Austin was having none of it. As John Kirby, his press spokesperson, put it, “What we saw here was a breakdown in process, and execution in procedural events, not the result of negligence, not the result of misconduct, not the result of poor leadership.” Blame the process and the procedures but give the responsible commanders a pass.

That decision describes Lloyd Austin’s approach to leading the Defense Department. Whether the problem is a lack of daring or a lack of gumption, he won’t be rocking any boats.

Will the U.S. military under his leadership recover its long-lost awesomeness?  My guess is no.  In the meantime, don’t expect his increasingly beleaguered boss in the White House to notice or, for that matter, care. With a load of other problems on his desk, he’s counting on the Lord to prevent his generals from subjecting the troops and civilians elsewhere on the planet to further abuse.

counterpunch.org

By William ASTORE

Where are you going to get the money?  That question haunts congressional proposals to help the poor, the unhoused, and those struggling to pay the mortgage or rent or medical bills, among so many other critical domestic matters.  And yet — big surprise! — there’s always plenty of money for the Pentagon. In fiscal year 2022, in fact, Congress is being especially generous with $778 billion in funding, roughly $25 billion more than the Biden administration initially asked for.  Even that staggering sum seriously undercounts government funding for America’s vast national security state, which, since it gobbles up more than half of federal discretionary spending, is truly this country’s primary, if unofficial, fourth branch of government.

Final approval of the latest military budget, formally known as the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, may slip into January as Congress wrangles over various side issues. Unlike so much crucial funding for the direct care of Americans, however, don’t for a second imagine it won’t pass with supermajorities. (Yes, the government could indeed be shut down one of these days, but not — never! — the U.S. military.)

Some favorites of mine among “defense” budget side issues now being wrangled over include whether military members should be able to refuse Covid-19 vaccines without being punished, whether young women should be required to register for the Selective Service System when they turn 18 (even though this country hasn’t had a draft in almost half a century and isn’t likely to have one in the foreseeable future), or whether the Iraq War AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force), passed by Congress to disastrous effect in 2002, should be repealed after nearly two decades of calamity and futility.

As debates over these and similar issues, predictably partisan, grab headlines, the biggest issue of all eludes serious coverage: Why, despite decades of disastrous wars, do Pentagon budgets continue to grow, year after year, like ever-expanding nuclear mushroom clouds? In other words, as voices are raised and arms waved in Congress about vaccine tyranny or a hypothetical future draft of your 18-year-old daughter, truly critical issues involving your money (hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of taxpayer dollars) go largely uncovered.

What are some of those issues that we should be, but aren’t, looking at?  I’m so glad you asked!

Seven Questions with “Throw-Weight”

Back in my Air Force days, while working in Cheyenne Mountain (the ultimate bomb shelter of the Cold War era), we talked about nuclear missiles in terms of their “throw-weight.”  The bigger their throw-weight, the bigger the warhead.  In that spirit, I’d like to lob seven throw-weighty questions — some with multiple “warheads” — in the general direction of the Pentagon budget. It’s an exercise worth doing largely because, despite its sheer size, that budget generally seems impervious to serious oversight, no less real questions of any sort.

So, here goes and hold on tight (or, in the nuclear spirit, duck and cover!):

1. Why, with the end of the Afghan War, is the Pentagon budget still mushrooming upward?  Even as the U.S. war effort there festered and then collapsed in defeat, the Pentagon, by its own calculation, was burning through almost $4 billion a month or $45 billon a year in that conflict and, according to the Costs of War Project, $2.313 trillion since it began.  Now that the madness and the lying are finally over (at least theoretically speaking), after two decades of fraud, waste, and abuses of every sort, shouldn’t the Pentagon budget for 2022 decrease by at least $45 billion?  Again, America lost, but shouldn’t we taxpayers now be saving a minimum of $4 billion a month?

2. After a disastrous war on terror costing upwards of $8 trillion, isn’t it finally time to begin to downsize America’s global imperial presence?  Honestly, for its “defense,” does the U.S. military need 750 overseas bases in 80 countries on every continent but Antarctica, maintained at a cost somewhere north of $100 billion annually?  Why, for example, is that military expanding its bases on the Pacific island of Guam at the expense of the environment and despite the protests of many of the indigenous people there?  One word: China!  Isn’t it amazing how the ever-inflating threat of China empowers a Pentagon whose insatiable budgetary demands might be in some trouble without a self-defined “near-peer” adversary?  It’s almost as if, in some twisted sense, the Pentagon budget itself were now being “Made in China.”

3. Speaking of China and its alleged pursuit of more nuclear weaponry, why is the U.S. military still angling for $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years for its own set of “modernized” nuclear weapons? After all, the Navy’s current strategic force, as represented above all by Ohio-class submarines with Trident missiles, is (and will for the foreseeable future be) capable of destroying the world as we know it. A “general” nuclear exchange would end the lives of most of humanity, given the dire impact the ensuing nuclear winter would have on food production.  What’s the point of Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill, if America’s leaders are preparing to destroy it all with a new generation of holocaust-producing nuclear bombs and missiles?

4. Why is America’s military, allegedly funded for “defense,” configured instead for force projection and global strikes of every sort?  Think of the Navy, built around aircraft carrier strike groups, now taking the fight to the “enemy” in the South China Sea.  Think of Air Force B-52 strategic bombers, still flying provocatively near the borders of Russia, as if the movie Dr. Strangelove had been released not in 1964 but yesterday.  Why, in sum, does the U.S. military refuse to stay home and protect Fortress America?  An old sports cliché, “the best defense is a good offense,” seems to capture the bankruptcy of what passes, even after decades of lost wars in distant lands, for American strategic thinking.  It may make sense on a football field, but, judging by those wars, it’s been a staggering loss leader for our military, not to mention the foreign peoples on the receiving end of lethal weapons very much “Made in the USA.”

Instead of reveling in shock and awe, this country should find the wars of choice it’s fought since 1945 genuinely shocking and awful — and act to end them for good and defund any future versions of them.

5. Speaking of global strikes with awful repercussions, why is the Pentagon working so hard to encircle China, while ratcheting up tensions that can only contribute to nuclear brinksmanship and even possibly a new world war as early as 2027?  Related question: Why does the Pentagon continue to claim that, in its “wargames” with China over a prospective future battle for the island of Taiwan, it always loses?  Is it because “losing” is really winning, since that very possibility can then be cited to justify yet more requests for funds from Congress so that this country can “catch up” to the latest Red Menace?

(Bonus question: As America’s generals keep losing real wars as well as imaginary ones, why aren’t any of them ever fired?)

6. Speaking of global aggression, why does this country maintain a vast, costly military within the military that’s run by Special Operations Command and operationally geared to facilitating interventions anywhere and everywhere?  (Note that this country’s special ops forces are bigger than the full-scale militaries of many countries on this planet!)  When you look back over the last several decades, Special Operations forces haven’t proven to be all that special, have they? And it doesn’t matter whether you’re citing the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  Put differently, for every SEAL Team 6 mission that kills a big bad guy, there are a surprising number of small-scale catastrophes that only alienate other peoples, thereby generating blowback (and so, of course, further funding of the military).

7. Finally, why, oh why, after decades of military losses, does Congress still defer so spinelessly to the “experience” of our generals and admirals?  Why issue so many essentially blank checks to the gang that simply can’t shoot straight, whether in battle or when they testify before Congressional committees, as well as to the giant companies (and congressional lobbying monsters) that make the very weaponry that can’t shoot straight?

It’s a compliment in the military to be called a straight shooter. I suggest President Biden start firing a host of generals until he finds a few who are willing to do exactly that and tell him and the rest of us some hard truths, especially about malfunctioning weapons and lost wars.

Forty years ago, after Ronald Reagan became president, I started writing in earnest against the bloating of the Pentagon budget.  At that time, though, I never would have imagined that the budgets of those years would look modest today, especially after the big enemy of that era, the Soviet Union, imploded in 1991.

Why, then, does each year’s NDAA rise ever higher into the troposphere, drifting on the wind and poisoning our culture with militarism?  Because, to state the obvious, Congress would rather engage in pork-barrel spending than exercise the slightest real oversight when it comes to the national security state.  It has, of course, been essentially captured by the military-industrial complex, a dire fate President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about 60 years ago in his farewell address.  Instead of being a guard dog for America’s money (not to mention for our rapidly disappearing democracy), Congress has become a genuine lapdog of the military brass and their well-heeled weapons makers.

So, even as Congress puts on a show of debating the NDAA, it’s really nothing but, at best, a political Kabuki dance (a metaphor, by the way, that’s quite common in the military, which tells you something about the well-traveled sense of humor of its members).  Sure, our congressional representatives act as if they’re exercising oversight, even as they do as they’re told, while the deep-pocketed contractors make major contributions to the campaign “war chests” of the very same politicians.  It’s a win for them, of course, but a major loss for this country — and indeed for the world.

Doing More With Less

What would real oversight look like when it comes to the defense budget?  Again, glad you asked!

It would focus on actual defense, on preventing wars, and above all, on scaling down our gigantic military.  It would involve cutting that budget roughly in half over the next few years and so forcing our generals and admirals to engage in that rarest of acts for them: making some tough choices.  Maybe then they’d see the folly of spending $1.7 trillion on the next generation of world-ending weaponry, or maintaining all those military bases globally, or maybe even the blazing stupidity of backing China into a corner in the name of “deterrence.”

Here’s a radical thought for Congress: Americans, especially the working class, are constantly being advised to do more with less.  Come on, you workers out there, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and put your noses to those grindstones!

To so many of our elected representatives (often sheltered in grotesquely gerrymandered districts), less money and fewer benefits for workers are seldom seen as problems, just challenges. Quit your whining, apply some elbow grease, and “git-r-done!”

The U.S. military, still proud of its “can-do” spirit in a warfighting age of can’t-do-ism, should have plenty of smarts to draw on.  Just consider all those Washington “think tanks” it can call on!  Isn’t it high time, then, for Congress to challenge the military-industrial complex to focus on how to do so much less (as in less warfighting) with so much less (as in lower budgets for prodigal weaponry and calamitous wars)?

For this and future Pentagon budgets, Congress should send the strongest of messages by cutting at least $50 billion a year for the next seven years.  Force the guys (and few gals) wearing the stars to set priorities and emphasize the actual defense of this country and its Constitution, which, believe me, would be a unique experience for us all.

Every year or so, I listen again to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech.  In those final moments of his presidency, Ike warned Americans of the “grave implications” of the rise of an “immense military establishment” and “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” the combination of which would constitute a “disastrous rise of misplaced power.”  This country is today suffering from just such a rise to levels that have warped the very structure of our society. Ike also spoke then of pursuing disarmament as a continuous imperative and of the vital importance of seeking peace through diplomacy.

In his spirit, we should all call on Congress to stop the madness of ever-mushrooming war budgets and substitute for them the pursuit of peace through wisdom and restraint. This time, we truly can’t allow America’s numerous smoking guns to turn into so many mushroom clouds above our beleaguered planet.

tomdispatch.com

The reader who sent in this story says “there’s no question the U.S. military is now the armed wing of the Democratic Party.” Read on:

President Joe Biden’s nominee for the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Senate “gender advisers” for combat troops are critical to the United States’ success, a position some veterans say is nothing more than a left-wing initiative that distracts from the military’s core duties.

The revelation came during a Dec. 8 exchange with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.), who asked how Adm. Christopher Grady intends to implement “women, peace, and security” legislation within the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“The role of a gender adviser is a way to attack a very significant issue, and if confirmed, I look forward to leveraging those advisers who can make me think better and smarter about the issues that you raise,” Grady said. “So I look forward to, if confirmed, understanding that ecosystem and helping advance that cause going forward again.”

More:

The Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 required the Department of Defense to require training in “security initiatives that specifically addresses the importance of meaningful participation by women” and to develop “effective strategies and best practices for ensuring meaningful participation by women.”

Grady’s answer drew outrage from veterans such as Jason Church, who earned a Purple Heart when serving in Afghanistan. Church told the Washington Free Beacon that “gender advisers” are nothing more than “liberal pet projects” to score points with Democratic lawmakers.

“When someone nominated to be the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says something like this, it tells me top brass is aligned with radical political elements in the country,” he said. “You have people’s lives on the line. These positions aren’t about how to communicate with Afghan women, we have a diplomatic corps for that.”

Read it all.

Here’s an academic paper from 2016 examining what gender advisers do in NATO armies, and suggesting that the US military add them to its ranks. The paper cites several examples of overseas deployments in which gender advisers were useful in helping soldiers understand complex gender standards, and how respecting them helped the mission. That said, are you confident that in the current highly politicized environment in the US, that gender advisers will be of practical help, versus being de facto political commissars? I’m not — but I could be wrong.

Ms. magazine recently cited a Georgetown report about the need to further feminize the US military. Excerpts:

Changing military culture to improve women’s integration and equality, and increase compliance with international law obligations, the report argues, will require fundamental strategic and operational alterations to the military status quo, including measures to eliminate the “entrenched culture of militarized masculinities” throughout the armed forces.

To ensure women’s meaningful participation, the report suggests that women must be promoted to leadership positions and their input must be valued. To do so, the military must adopt better and more complete childcare and parental leave policies and decouple physical fitness standards from advancement. Only by incorporating women into senior ranks—thereby giving them influence throughout the chain of command—will the culture shift.

To address gender participation gaps, the report suggests that the Department of Defense should also conduct a comprehensive review of physical fitness requirements and occupational standards. De-emphasizing physical fitness would help address the “culture of toxic masculinity rooted in beliefs of physical superiority.”

This is infuriating. The military has to offer childcare, and disregard physical fitness standards — for soldiers, sailors, and airmen?! Are we still about fighting wars, or are we instead about fighting culture wars? There is no question that on average, men are physically superior to women. Now we have to pretend that that isn’t true, for the sake of equity?

More:

As part of the report launch, women with military experience offered comments on how best to ensure meaningful participation of women. Kyleanne Hunter, a U.S. Marine combat veteran, highlighted the need for new metrics for leadership success, such as social acumen and empathy. By not forcing women to adhere to traditional notions of masculinity, women will advance more quickly and their new perspectives will increase the U.S.’s overall security.

How, exactly, will America’s war-fighting capabilities be improved by having commanders who are more empathetic? How in the world do empathetic officers “increase the US’s overall security”? It’s mind-boggling.

You will not be surprised to learn that the article ends with a call for more gender advisers to feminize the US military.

Also in today’s mailbag, from another reader:

I might be the only person to ever think you’re insufficiently alarmist, but your recent article about conservatives leaving the Army should have made everyone’s eyes widen.  A military that’s been politicized, especially along racial/ethnic lines, in a politically polarized country is a disaster.  For much of the country to have voluntarily (if understandably) contributed to this polarization is a bad, bad development.

To see why, here’s a link to the BBC Documentary “The Death of Yugoslavia.”  It starts at 9:25 of episode 4.  A crony of Slobodan Milosevic boasts about how, in anticipation of Bosnia declaring independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, he and Milosevic re-jiggered the Yugoslavian army within the borders of Bosnia to only contain Bosnian Serbs.  That way, when Bosnia declared independence, the Bosnian Army would have already essentially chosen sides in the resulting ethnic war between Serbs, Muslims, and Croats.

The Army’s corruption apparently caught Bosnian Muslims off-guard.  Their president, as the following article makes clear, had expected the Army to be a neutral force protecting civilians from Milosevic’s paramilitary chetnik units that had already been tearing up Croatia. He found out the very hard way that the Army had different ideas.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/10/world/serb-backed-guerrillas-take-second-bosnia-town.html

theamericanconservative.com

The mandatory Covid vaccination policy in the U.S. army is an extension of Biden’s ideological purging program, but the logic behind it is not thoroughly understood by the public.

Conservatives see a likely decrease in morale and enlistment, while liberals see an opposite likely outcome. But enlistment in a volunteer army may not be the end-goal, and so we must interpret the moves in light of the growing potential of a blanket draft.

Superficially, the premise for the purge is the equating of vaccine hesitancy with so-called ‘Trumpism’, which in turn is ‘linked’ to right-wing extremism such as white nationalism – a logical fallacy. Because the logical fallacy is so clear, and the purge of norm-centric political views is the goal, it gives rise to all kinds of questions and theories.

Military officials would absolutely know that this is a false equivalence, as the recent Pew Research poll on vaccine hesitancy shows that roughly 40% of Americans do not want the jab. Certainly 40% of Americans are not white nationalists. Because this data is readily accessible, and really because claims to the contrary are heuristically absurd prima facie, it effectively fuels any number of questions about the patriotism and intentions of the brass:

“Why would top brass stand by while the false equivalence is used as a pretext for an ideological purge of America’s most patriotic and pro-constitution elements?”

But there’s a further problem in this conflation of anti-vax and far-right. This vaccine hesitant view also has a high correlation with African-American enlistees who may be aware of the history of the U.S. government experimenting on this demographic, which also reflects an overall distrust in governmental institutions within various African-American communities.

And this is compounded by a view in the populist right, that the problem with vaccine safety means there is a design to weaken the military. Then there is the government’s heavy-handed and politicized response to the Covid pandemic, including the publicized concentration camps for quarantining.

Moderna Covid-19 vaccine administered at Vilseck Army health clinic, Germany. Dec. 28, 2020 

Through understanding military sociology alongside the real challenges that the U.S. faces, both internally and geopolitically, we can trace future plans of the American elites.

While the brass have become convinced that a ‘Woke Army’ will be well-situated to suppress constitutionalist and anti-reset citizens in an insurgency, the same woke policies aim to improve resilience against Chinese propaganda in a conflict scenario. Eliminating anti-Covid vax soldiers is quietly equated to eliminating soldiers who will also refuse other orders likely to result in death or serious injury.

There are invisible costs to this proposition. Enlistment may take a hit, but there will be even more pushback if there is a full-scale military conflict which requires a draft. The hedge against this is to increase wokeness, as counter-intuitive as this seems for many.

What we are seeing is how the military is doing sociology in the present year, which may be quite wrong. The whole premise of the purge is only as useful as the sociology is accurate. Typically, good military sociology – results-driven – accurately gauges the public’s attitude in order to translate that into sound military policy and training. That’s how the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy was arrived at. It matched Main Street’s attitude in the 1990’s.

The U.S. military does not openly track the party affiliation or belief-systems of its enlisted members, and unscientific voluntary polls by publications like ‘Military Times’ tend more to reflect the views of its regular readers (conservative) than the actual population of enlisted on the whole. Of course, there are career enlisted, and those who just perform four years active duty and two years inactive IRR in their minimum MSO. Career enlisted probably tend to be more conservative than general enlisted numbers would indicate. But it would be an error to think that such tracking did not take place within the institution, but more, such analysis has been carried out by notable military sociologists.

But because of the ideological purge in academia over the last fifteen years, which hit the social sciences first and hardest, there has been a dangerous and growing principles-driven approach.

This principles-driven approach – ‘woke because we should be woke’ – is at odds with the realist and functionalist schools in state-sanctioned sociology which orient towards making policy on the pragmatic basis of results.

Marxian tools in sociology have proved invaluable over the past century, when they are utilized in harmony with Durkheim’s functionalist theory. C. Wright Mills, who wrote extensively on Marx, also informs the framework of military sociology. But the Marxist school by itself is rooted in conflict theory, where the principle of conflict (the class struggle) is central to society.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills on his BMW motorcycle – pictured in this undated photo

Naturally, the wokeness campaign is being couched in the language of pragmatism, – ‘woke because this is smarter’ – because this is still the attitude of the brass. In brief, the brass is being misled by academia, which in turn is unfit for purpose.

The weaponization of conflict theory towards the perceived pragmatic aims of the state, as the population is ruled through division, carries a high-risk of misapplication when the present body of literature is dominated by actual conflict theorists. This can lead to a bigger disaster if the aim is to prepare for a draft.

A key factor to understand, again, is the increasing push to normalize the draft. As Max Margulies of West Point writes on this military sociology question:

“One common belief is that maintaining draft registration bolsters the link between civilians and soldiers, which has weakened significantly since the U.S. military became an all-volunteer force. Through the last two decades of war, only 1 percent of Americans have served in the military.

Some experts suggest that such a weak civilian-military connection contributes to a number of problems, including a lack of familiarity with the military, a military that is not representative of society and an unfair distribution of the human costs of war.”

Rather than aiming to defang the military, a transformation of military ideology is underway that is believed to a.) better prepare it for future conflicts abroad, b.) attract more recruits from minority groups (or make a future draft more palatable), and c.) prepare the force for use against American citizens identifying as constitutionalist, conservative, etc.

Point ‘c.)’ is probably the most disconcerting. The old-left with its ties to both the Soviet Union and organized labor had been traditionally considered the likely source of domestic counter-insurgency crises. Hence, committed anti-communist conservatives were drawn into the volunteer military, especially true for pipe-hitters in the special forces. This was part of a relatively clear world-view: communism is the enemy at home and abroad.

A social shift occurred with the collapse of the USSR, in combination with the insertion of Frankfurt School theories and the successful co-option of left-radicalism by the Soros associated non-profit industrial complex. The outsourcing of industrial jobs to developing countries was also part of this change of left-radicalism, from labor-industrial unionism into the loftier and deeply abstracted halls of academia.

Now with social media, as part of the intelligence services, there is an ability to entirely control radical left-movements. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, for example, is effectively the ‘Minister of Information’ for Antifa and BLM. There was a pragmatic rationale behind American elites push for progressivism as the unofficial ideology of the state. This is because American conservatism, with its roots in classical liberalism, favors decentralization, while progressivist socialism generally favors the centralization of state authority.

In our analysis “Biden’s Pro-Terrorism Policy & Ideological Purging Is a Dangerous Combination That Strains Social and Military Support”, we emphasized that “America’s deep state and oligarchy have landed upon a type of civilizational about-face, where the legitimating social ideology is increasingly being made into the legitimating ideology of the military.”

This much is to be expected, however, since the median views among the ranks of the enlisted including NCOs ought to generally reflect those of society. It is a greatly related matter, though, that the NGO industrial complex in the U.S. has promoted this ideological shift among the civilian population.

In other words, American culture has been artificially shifted in the most radical way, not seen since the introduction of mandatory public schooling a century ago.

But the changes being implemented in the military come at a high cost, because they strain support from historically pro-military and conservative segments of the population. This may lend towards the creation of a counter-insurgency crisis as much as they are believed to be in place as a counter-measure.

In strategic planning for future conflicts in light of 4^th Generation Warfare (4GW) where a Baudrillardian simulacrum is constructed, there is an ostensible benefit side to this high cost in the equation.

This relates both to morale, unit cohesion, but also the motivations of individual soldiers in America’s future conflicts – likely in Latin America and also against China across numerous possible theaters. A conflict with Russia is also a potential conflict included in the thinking behind the ideological shift in the military

The thinking here is in part that soldiers indoctrinated into a culturally left outlook (or at least a left ‘dictionary’) will be better prepared in occupation and subsequent counter-insurgency operations at home and abroad, but also better inoculated against foreign/enemy propaganda aimed at the enlisted which increases perceived racial inequities in American society.

If the conflict is with Russia, then the thinking here is that since Russia is painted as an ultra-conservative state in liberal western media, then a ‘woke’ U.S. military might find similar inspiration as American soldiers in WWII.

Another part of the thinking as Margulies would likely affirm, is that this type of ‘woke’ sensitivity training among NCOs in the field may influence a change in banter and even decision making on operation assignments, so that soldiers of color do not believe opportunities and risks are assigned on the basis of race.

Historically, America’s opponents have weaponised social contradictions in the U.S. along the lines of race, which is in part attributed to the morale crash in the Vietnam War.

So-called Vietnam syndrome was warned about by Northwestern University sociologist Charles Moskos, architect of the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy. Moskos, a veteran himself, dedicated his career to the study of the U.S. military as a social institution, and his analysis and the methods he developed continue to form the basis of military policy.

A 2018 Blue Star Families Military Lifestyle Survey results showed that military felt both disconnected from their communities and from the military itself:

“Forty-eight percent of respondents reported not feeling a sense of belonging to their civilian community, and 43 percent felt the same about their military community. This finding was critical because “a lower sense of belonging to a community has been linked with both depression and suicide.”

The blatant politicization of once-respected research institutions like MIT has increased a growing distrust in institutions. And this feeds right into vaccine hesitancy – not only among conservative soldiers, but also black American soldiers, overlap here aside. But it is also true for those on the other end of the spectrum who exhibit trait openness, and are accustomed to critically challenging mandates from authorities.

The tone-deaf approach of the brass under the Biden administration on vaccines has worked against the desired result. At the end of the day, the military can mandate the vaccine. But what happens when these become bi-annual, tri-annual? Quarterly? Monthly? What happens if we move from adverse reactions to long-term chronic impairment and illness?

The present rate of vaccination for Covid among the enlisted is reportedly about the same as in the general population – just under 60%. But the costs against morale and cohesion may be much higher.

In concluding our thoughts, it will be a surprise to many conservative citizens that there are ostensibly strategic reasons for the introduction of elements of Critical Race Theory and ‘revisionist’ American history into the training of commissioned officers and enlisted of the U.S. military.

It is especially important to understand the rationale behind this sea-change underway, as they are sociological in nature, but to do so requires letting go of certain assumptions and beliefs. This is because conservative thinking is also principles-driven, and can lose sight of results. Instead our thinking must be carried out in terms of realism and pragmatism.

The U.S. military today is insufficient for a full-scale conflict, let alone a total war with Russia or China. If both are allied, there is a close to zero chance of victory. The idea of reinstating the draft has been bandied about for some time, but it is a view that has grown in popularity.

The morale disaster in Vietnam, with its drafted army, was a strong indicator that the vulnerabilities and inequities in American society on the basis of race would prove to be an Achilles’ heel. Vietnamese propaganda was highly effective in creating an illusion that a disproportionate number (relative to population) of black draftees were killed in action. The propaganda also buttressed already persistent views that the war they were fighting was on the side of those who were oppressing them at home.

While Moskos believed that that the successes of the Civil Rights movement were in part predicated on the desegregation of the military under Truman in 1948, this was still based in a functionalist sociology: Americans were ready for desegregation before Truman’s policy.

Biden’s advisors have turned sociology on its head, changing it from ‘what works’ to ‘what ought to be’. Moskos would not approve.

From CRT ideological tests to vaccine-refusal purges, the toll on the military will be high. While this much is understood, the real value and efficacy of the benefits of these new policies may be similar to those of the vaccine itself.

Part of the thinking is that a ‘woke’ indoctrinated army will be more ready to put down a civilian insurrection, now identified with the far-right as opposed to the historical left. But rather than trying to ideologically train the army for domestic counter-insurgency, the aim should be to be to end the policies that give rise to them.

Rather than trying to fulfill some absurd mandate to ideologically prepare our soldiers for an unwinnable total war with two nuclear powers, managing multipolarity and spheres of influence should be the goal at the foundation of military doctrine.

Most Americans do not know that in the United States currently there are approximately 900 Active-duty generals and flag officers to lead 1.3 million troops in the combined armed forces. This is a ratio of one senior officer per every 1,400 men and women. During World War II, an admittedly different era, there were roughly twice as many flag and general officers for a little more than 12 million active duty troops a ratio of one to 6,000. In the Navy there are 32 flag officers for each ship currently in commission. In 1944, there was one flag officer for every 24 ships.

This development is referred to as “rank creep” which does not improve performance and instead clutters the chain of command by adding multiple bureaucratic layers to decision-making while also costing more due to funding the higher paygrades. And lest one be confused about why there continue to be so many flag officers, possibly concluding that they are needed to provide the leadership to fight wars, it could be pointed out that most of them will never get anywhere near combat even if the U.S. continues its belligerency on a global scale in an effort to establish and enforce its leadership of a fictional “rules based international order.”

It turns out that current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley was, during the latter days of the Donald Trump Administration, talking to his counterparts in China as well as to some folks in Congress who had no love for Trump. Some of the conversations were routine, but others were apparently driven by the notion that Donald Trump just might do something stupid like starting a war unless some restraints were placed on his ability to do mischief. Inevitably, there have emerged major differences of opinion regarding the propriety of what Milley was engaged in, with Democrats in general and Trump haters in particular finding no problem with the intrusion into policy-making while many Republicans have been calling for a thorough investigation to include possible consequences up to and including court-martial.

The various conversations were reported in a just released book “Peril” written by Bob Woodward and, Robert Costa and, based on a claimed 200 interviews, are generally conceded to be accurate by both sides to include the Milley camp plus the journalists involved. Some of the calls at least were made with other officials in the room and on separate phone lines, though there were also conversations with politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, that were clearly considered off-the-record as they dealt with keeping nuclear weapons out of the president’s hands.

Milley, according to the book, reportedly told the Chinese General Li Zuocheng in a back-channel phone call that had as a subject the possibility that the president might order an attack directed against China, something in the nature of a “surprise attack.” He reportedly said “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.” Milley apparently justified the action by stating that he disapproves of surprise attacks in principal and his defenders cite the example of “Pearl Harbor,” which was viewed so repugnantly by the American public that something like a war of extermination became inevitable. Unstated by the Milley supporters, though implicit in their argument, is the assumption that Donald Trump was both ignorant and a loose cannon on deck who would do something stupid like initiating a conflict with China.

Milley also shared his view that Trump had experienced a “mental decline” after the election with Nancy Pelosi in a phone call to her on January 8^th, two days after the alleged insurrection at the Capitol. Pelosi reportedly demanded that Milley take the nuclear launch codes away from Trump, which admittedly he did not seek to do. On the same day Milley also reviewed procedures with the senior officers at the National Military Command Center for launching nuclear weapons, insisting that he also had to be involved. To be completely clear, Milley had no legal authority or power to insert himself into the chain of command, though “Peril” reports that he did just that and at a minimum he was acting “extra-constitutionally” in his interpretation of his government role.

But it is the outreach to China is most disturbing. It is indeed possible to regard Donald Trump negatively while at the same time responding rationally with one’s international nuclear armed adversaries. One does not know what Milley intended to do by his phone call, but “Peril” makes the case, without providing any evidence, that “American intelligence showed that the Chinese believed that Mr. Trump planned to launch a military strike to create an international crisis that he could claim to solve as a last-ditch effort to beat Joseph R. Biden Jr.” In any event, it is unlikely that the Milley phone call reassured Li of anything. Indeed, Li and the Chinese government would have only two possible responses to the threat. First would be to shut up shop, batten down the hatches, and sit still for punishment. The other option would be to preemptively strike U.S. forces in and around China which presumably would be used for the attack. Either option could easily lead to a nuclear exchange once things cease to go according to plan, presuming that the surprise attack itself was not intended to include nuclear weapons in the first place.

Colonel Richard Black observes sagely that “If the report of Milley’s intentions is accurate, he should be relieved for cause, for though he did not consummate a criminal act by making that promise, the promise was so fraught with impropriety that an officer who betrayed his government in such fashion should ever be trusted to serve. Indeed, it is likely that had his Chinese counterpart made such a promise to General Milley, he’d have been executed for doing so.”

Beyond the disruption of the chain of command and ignoring the Constitution, there are, of course, some other problems with Milley’s line of thinking. Trump has, to be sure, demonstrated enough irrational behavior to make one suspect that he is not in full possession of all his marbles, but that is not the point. He was elected president of the United States and the U.S. Constitution was set up to ensure civilian control of the military, not vice versa.

And there is no solid evidence, only innuendo, that Trump ever seriously contemplated war with China. Indeed, he ran for office pledging to end the pointless wars that Washington was engaged in in Asia and towards the end of his administration he negotiated an exit from Afghanistan, which Joe Biden then postponed before bungling the evacuation. Trump did indeed assassinate a senior Iranian General and also launched cruise missiles against Syria based on bad intelligence, but otherwise his record is significantly better than that of his predecessor Barack Obama who both initiated and broadened the policy of assassinating American and Afghan citizens overseas by drone and also was party to the overthrow of the Libyan government while also conniving to replace the government of Ukraine.

In any event, in America war is clearly playing politics by other means. President Joe Biden has already declared that he has full confidence in Milley. Several Republican Senators, including Marco Rubio, have instead demanded that he be fired. Given the fact that at least one of the general’s phone calls to his Chinese counterpart could have started a war that might have gone nuclear, he should at least have the integrity to resign and take up his expected board appointment with a defense contractor.

This is the real reason why Disney Lesbian army ads are the new normal, Tim Kirby writes.

Ted Cruz has come under fire for recently stating his disapproval of a woke/LGBT military recruitment video when compared side-by-side to a contemporary Russian equivalent. The American video was animated in a sort of Disney style, telling the tale of a young woman, the “daughter” of two mothers going off to fight for America as a continuation of her fight for what’s right as a Left Wing street activist. The Russian video was more of a gritty low-saturation short about men needing to prove themselves as soldiers. The ad with shaved-headed Russians has a much more tried and true message aimed at the gender that historically has done almost all the fighting throughout human history – men. It is obvious that anthropomorphic-suit Ted Cruz was not praising Russia or exalting the superiority of the Russian military as his beta-male detractors have tweeted. The quintessential pre-Trump Republican simply and honestly wants what he thinks is best for the U.S. military – having effective recruitment ads that will actually get results by enticing (mostly) young men to sign up for various combat roles that we could essentially classify into the umbrella term “infantrymen”. But perhaps Cruz is actually wrong, not for saying the Russians are doing recruitment right, but for believing in the antiquated notion that infantrymen are actually needed.

One of the main criticisms from those with traditional/masculine views is that “wokeness” either does not work or is highly inefficient. But these detractors from the dogma of the 21^st century forget that you can be as woke as you want as long as you are functionally useless or there are zero blatantly perceivable consequences. This is the real reason why Disney Lesbian army ads are the new normal. And even if a woke army leads to more casualties the politicians do not care, this new ideology comes first.

As I have stated many times over the years, thanks to the media, our perception of war looks something like World War II or at the very most modern Vietnam. One could make an argument that besides disease, the big killers or 20^th century warfare were artillery and bombardment, not so much “guy with gun” as Hollywood would like us to believe. Having a main character lost in the first five minutes of a film to an artillery strike that he couldn’t even see coming is nor particularly dramatic. Although we may not like it, and it is bad for developing good action scenes, the infantryman as a major player in war is already a romantic concept of the past. The “victories” of the U.S. Armed Forces in the 21^st century in the Middle-East have all come from the skies and NOT M-16s, bayonets or John Wayne Bushido.

The real last remaining role of grunt infantry is occupation. Essentially, when an enemy is defeated it is the infantry that make the presence of the victory known and secure. Much like the police their function is to keep the locals pacified and respond to minor threats, not win huge glorious battles. This is much in the same way that no matter how heroic a cavalry charge may be (successful or not) there is really no role left for cavalry other than to allow certain military units to traverse particularly brutal terrain when helicopters are non-viable such as on a routine daily border patrol of a mountainous region. Perhaps certain special forces units look far from as pathetic as 21^st century “cavalry” but the average grunt in Iraq/Afghanistan is pretty close – doing home raids, policing, frying under the sun while contemplating the futility of his life.

For those who find this concept unacceptable, think of it this way: what actually keeps America safe from its enemies? ICBMs with nuclear warheads or guys with guns?

Although I myself and Ted Cruz would prefer to play it safe and keep the military as the bastion of hyper-masculinity just in case, it would seem that technology has allowed American Armed Forces to become woke since the individual soldier and especially the infantryman may no longer matter. The soldier is not there to win wars or defend the homeland to the death but stand around as an occupation unit for a bit above minimum wage. They just need someone to stand there and get shot at a shilling a day to keep an occupation going.

So far there is no wokeness in Alaskan oil work as it would collapse this vital system. Brutal outdoor work in the cold requires a certain kind of character, but perhaps with the nature of 21^st century warfare certain people in Washington have sent the signal that the military can be as woke as it wants because it doesn’t matter anymore in large scale operations. Again special forces and more delicate work is still an exception for now. The elite will continue to party like it’s 1950 in their heterosexuality while the potato peelers will be gender fluid.

The Russians are always scared when their media reports that 5,000 or so U.S. Troops are training at their border in Estonia or somewhere. But, what are they actually afraid of? Again due to media manipulation the average Russian expects some sort of ground based attack which is utter madness. Russia should only be so lucky as to have their enemy charge them, rainbow flags unfurled crying a rebel yell of diversity. No modern eighteen-year-olds are going to die en masse to take a few meters of Russian soil. Even if these were the same type of men who went over the top in 1914 it wouldn’t matter as infantry are just not as useful as they used to be.

On the surface, we do not seem to need a temple of masculinity in our high-tech world so it is no surprise the military is under attack by the Extreme Left’s crusade to castrate the planet starting with the West. We should expect more and more standards shifting and LGBT influence being pushed down the pipeline onto the Armed Services of the United States. They know they are never going to have to charge the Russians with bayonets so who cares? Anyone can move boxes and mop the floor, testosterone is not mandatory.

In my own personal opinion, now would be the time to do the exact opposite, and retain the hyper-masculinity of the military but in a new way. Since the “automata” of Friedrich II are no longer the core of the army, perhaps now would be a great opportunity to recreate the scholarly cultured warriors of the past. Testosterone-fueled warriors and learned men like knights, the samurai or the great Roman generals would be a good goal post to set. Like the rainbow-haired crowd I also think the army can have a cultural and social function, I just believe it has a radically different one. We are at an amazing time when the idea of what a soldier could be is changing, and could very well change for the betterment of society, but his gender and sexual orientation should remain a timeless classic.

Vice President Kamala Harris spent the weekend under fire from Republicans, which of course means that Kamala Harris spent the weekend being criticized for the most silly, vapid reason you could possibly criticize Kamala Harris for.

Apparently the likely future president tweeted “Enjoy the long weekend,” a reference to the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, instead of gushing about fallen troops and sacrifice.

That’s it, that’s the whole entire story. That silly, irrelevant offense by one of the sleaziest people in the single most corrupt and murderous government on earth is the whole entire basis for histrionic headlines from conservative media outlets like this:

‘DISGUSTING’ DISRESPECT: Vice President Kamala Harris ignites outrage over ‘misfire’ Memorial Day tweet https://t.co/J8VMtU2OCM

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 29, 2021

Harris, the born politician, was quick to course correct.

“Throughout our history our service men and women have risked everything to defend our freedoms and our country,” the veep tweeted. “As we prepare to honor them on Memorial Day, we remember their service and their sacrifice.”

Which is of course complete bullshit. It has been generations since any member of the US military could be said to have served or sacrificed defending America or its freedoms, and that has been the case throughout almost the entirety of its history. If you are reading this it is statistically unlikely that you are of an age where any US military personnel died for any other reason than corporate profit and global domination, and if you are it’s almost certain you weren’t old enough to have had mature thoughts about it at the time.

Whenever you criticize the US war machine online within earshot of anyone who’s sufficiently propagandized, you will invariably be lectured about the second World War and how we’d all be speaking German or Japanese without the brave men who died for our freedom. This makes my point for me: the fact that apologists for US imperialism always need to reach all the way back through history to the cusp of living memory to find even one single example of the American military being used for purposes that weren’t evil proves that it most certainly is evil.

But this is one of the main reasons there are so very many movies and history documentaries made about World War Two: it’s an opportunity to portray US servicemen bravely fighting and dying for a noble cause without having to bend the truth beyond recognition. The other major reason is that focusing on the second World War allows members of the US empire to escape into a time when the Big Bad Guy on the world stage was someone else.

Happy Memorial Day pic.twitter.com/khOjpLZpET

— ᴀɴɪꜱʜᴇᴅ ᴇʀɴɪᴇ (@BanishedBernie) May 30, 2021

From the end of World War Two to the fall of the USSR, the US military was used to smash the spread of communism and secure geostrategic interests toward the ultimate end of engineering the collapse of the Soviet Union. After this was accomplished in 1991, US foreign policy officially shifted to preserving a unipolar world order by preventing the rise of any other superpower which could rival its might.

A 1992 article by The New York Times titled “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop”, reporting on a leaked document which describes a policy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine after then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, reads as follows:

In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting stage, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union.

A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states that part of the American mission will be “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”

The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.

This is all US troops have been fighting and dying for since the Berlin Wall came down. Not “freedom”, not “democracy”, and certainly not the American people. Just continual uncontested domination of this planet at all cost: domination of its resources, its trade routes, its seas, its air, and its humans, no matter how many lives need to risked and snuffed out in order to achieve it. The US has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century in the reckless pursuit of that goal.

And, as Smedley Butler spelled out 86 years ago in his still-relevant book War is a Racket, US military personnel have been dying for profit. Nothing gets the gears of industry turning like war, and nothing better creates chaotic wild west environments of shock and confusion during which more wealth and power can be grabbed. War profiteers pour immense resources into lobbying, think tanks and campaign donations to manipulate and bribe policy makers into making decisions which promote war and military expansionism, with astounding success. This is all entirely legal.

It’s important to spread awareness that this is all US troops have been dying for, because the fairy tale that they fight for freedom and for their countrymen is a major propaganda narrative used in military recruitment. While poverty plays a significant role in driving up enlistments as predatory recruiters target poor and middle class youth promising them a future in the nation with the worst income inequality in the industrialized world, the fact that the aggressively propagandized glorification of military “service” makes it a more esteemed career path than working at a restaurant or a grocery store means people are more likely to enlist.

Without all that propaganda deceiving people into believing that military work is something virtuous, military service would be the most shameful job anyone could possibly have; other stigmatized jobs like sex work would be regarded as far more noble. You’d be less reluctant to tell your extended family over Christmas that you’re a janitor at a seedy massage parlor than that you’ve enlisted in the US military, because instead of congratulating and praising you, your Uncle Murray would look at you and say, “So you’re gonna be killing kids for crude oil?”

And that’s exactly how it should be. Continuing to uphold the lie that US troops fight and die for a good cause is helping to ensure a steady supply of teenagers to feed into the gears of the imperial war machine. Stop feeding into the lie that the war machine is worth killing and being killed for. Not out of disrespect for the dead, but out of reverence for the living.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

If the U.S. Armed Forces are compelled to internalize the Biden administration’s ideology, they will cease to be a national military establishment.

By Douglas MACGREGOR

The Biden administration took Americans on the right by surprise. In the opening weeks of the new administration, very few expected to see the sudden, massive influx of illegal migrants and drugs through open and unsecured borders, the deliberate suspension of the rule of law in the nation’s largest cities, the demonization of the police, and the official tolerance for racially motivated violence.

Americans on the right are no longer surprised. In the minds of conservative Americans there is now real evidence for a political regime in Washington that defines itself in opposition to just about everything the United States stands for.

The White House should feel reassured, however, since very few Americans have challenged the Biden administration’s monopoly of control over the machinery of government in any meaningful way. But doubts clearly linger. The National Guard presence and the barriers of concrete, steel and barbed wire that surround the Capitol building are still a metaphor for an administration that lives in a psychological state of siege, anger, and unease.

In April of this year, the Biden administration appointed Bishop Garrison to be the senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense for diversity and inclusion. In this role, Garrison, a 2002 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, heads the Defense Department’s new “Countering Extremism” working group. Other than his virulent hatred for anyone who supported President Donald Trump, and his advocacy for Critical Race Theory, not much is known about him.

Whether Garrison’s arrival signals the implementation of a new system inside the U.S. Armed Forces tasked with the responsibility to identify alleged extremists for removal is unclear. Much depends on how the Biden administration and officials like Garrison define their missions, but it would not be a stretch to imagine such a development. It has happened before.

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, Communist Party officials called commissars were installed throughout the military to ensure the loyalty and obedience of the officer corps to the orders and directives of Lenin and the new Bolshevik state. The commissar’s duty as explained by Leon Trotsky, the chairman of the Revolutionary Committee, was to “prevent army institutions from becoming nests of conspiracy.” If Russian officers failed to obey orders, the commissars could execute the offending officers and ensure their families would also be executed—a policy Stalin used during the Second World War to compel both officers and soldiers to fight the Germans.

At first glance, concerns that a system on the Soviet model would embed itself in the armed forces seem overwrought. For instance, the notion that anyone could treat tattoos as evidence for extremism is absurd. Thirty-six percent of the U.S. Armed Forces have tattoos. But perhaps the Biden administration thinks tattoos are significant given that the majority of those in uniform with tattoos are white men and women?

The point is, a woke witch hunt will have an impact. It will implant the fear in service members that they could easily lose a career or a pension for expressing an opinion that diverges from the Biden administration’s ideology. As one serving officer quietly put it, “the fear of being censored for simply loving your country is one thing. Wondering when the knock on the door is coming or to what extent officers and soldiers are being monitored is another.”

There is more. Military experience over the last 245 years teaches that to be effective in combat, Americans in uniform must be transformed through ruthless and demanding discipline to endure extreme hardship and deprivation. Soldiers must understand that the needs of the nation come first, that these needs always outweigh their own. There must also be trust up, down, and sideways across the force.

Yet, in a recent Army recruitment video entitled “The Calling” there was nothing to indicate the slightest appreciation for the aforementioned reality. The star of the video, Corporal Emma Malonelord from California, a young woman with two moms, relates how she’s marched and fought for civil rights from an early age; the Department of the Army turned off the comment section for the video on YouTube after it received ridicule and negative reactions.

Fortunately, there is no evidence that the culture, character and beliefs of a great nation can be fundamentally changed according to plan. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union certainly tried to transform Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Finns, Poles, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and a host of other nationalities into an amorphous mass of obedient “Soviet men.” The millions of men, women, and children who resisted were worked to death in hundreds of labor camps, starved or shot before, during, and after the Second World War to guarantee the transformation, all to crush the human soul.

The transformation failed. Today, there are no “Soviet men” in sight anywhere.

It is one thing to temporarily engineer consent through the manipulation of mass media and surveillance systems, but putting affirmative action on steroids to diminish the representation of one race in the hope of benefitting another will cultivate tension and resentment, not equity. Americans long ago embraced equality before the law, but very few Americans buy the argument that equal rights automatically translate into equal ability or outcomes.

The United States, virtually alone among nations, found its identity in shared historical experience, English-speaking culture, and in the dedication to freedom of thought, trade, and belief. American monuments, flags, and traditions honor this classical liberal creed and make it a fundamental element in the cohesion of American society.

If compelled to internalize the Biden administration’s transformational ideology, the U.S. Armed Forces will cease to be a national military establishment. And it is this emphasis on denationalization that leads many Americans to privately harbor the suspicion that the real goal of the Biden administration is to turn the American military into the armed wing of the left or the Democratic Party.

It would be wise for the Biden administration to pause and consider how Americans feel about their transformational efforts—actions to revise or replace U.S. history, culture, and identity with the ideology of globalism and materialism. Feelings of patriotism and nationalism are the lifeblood of every nation’s armed forces. If the administration ignores these feelings, then, in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville in the months before the Revolution of 1848, they are “sleeping in a volcano.”

theamericanconservative.com