"We Are Hiring Mercenaries"

We Pay $200,000 Bouns To Lure Foreign Soldiers

By Aleks Devic
Sun June 09, 2012 12:00AM
Courtesy Of "The Herald Sun"

June 08, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- Australia is boosting its military ranks with foreign soldiers by offering cash bonuses of up to AU$200,000 (US$198,060) and fast-tracked citizenship.

Veterans have hit out at hiring "mercenaries" from countries such as America, Germany and Singapore instead of recruiting more Australians.

Figures obtained by the Herald Sun show 726 international military personnel have come to Australia since 2006.

It is believed to have cost about AU$100 million to help them move.

War graves advocate John Saddington questioned the loyalties of foreign recruits.

"It's an absolute disgrace," he said. "We are hiring mercenaries."

Recruits are coming from America, Britain, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Italy, Singapore, Poland, Greece and Germany.

A Defence Department spokesman said, "The Australian Defence Force contributes to the cost of relocating lateral recruits. The costs vary according to the family composition and size, but is typically between AU$150,000 to AU$200,000. Given the significant cost of training and building experience in new military recruits, this cost represents good value."

In other incentives, recruits are also having their Australian citizenship fast-tracked after just three months of service.

The NATO/UN Army

Perpetual War … and Bankruptcy For U.S.

Written by William F. Jasper
Thursday, 24 May 2012 16:12
Courtesy Of "The New American"

Pretending to have achieved some kind of victory in Afghanistan, President Obama and the NATO leaders have pushed ahead on the globalist agenda to transform NATO more fully into the global military arm of the United Nations.

“We’re now unified behind a plan to responsibly wind down the war in Afghanistan,” declared President Obama, at the conclusion of the May 20-21 NATO Summit in Chicago. 

But don’t pop the champagne corks just yet; America’s longest war, now over a decade in duration, is not ending any time soon. What does “responsibly wind down the war” mean? According to President Obama and the other NATO leaders, it means NATO “combat troops” will have left Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Which is another way of spinning the grim fact that they intend to keep NATO forces (primarily U.S. forces) fighting in Afghanistan for another two-and-a-half years. And after 2014, an unspecified number of NATO/US forces will remain for “training” purposes for an indefinite period. 

The Afghanistan War, which has already cost half a trillion dollars (and over 12,000 American casualties), has succeeded in establishing Hamid Karzai and his clan in a ruling regime that is universally recognized as thoroughly corrupt and anti-American. It is also a regime without popular support that is sure to collapse after our withdrawal — if not before. And when the country breaks down into a bloody civil war? Well, in order to prevent that, President Obama says someone must come up with $4.1 billion per year to finance the equipping and training of the Afghan army and police force. 

The Washington Post reported: 

The United States spent $12 billion last year, 95 percent of the total cost, to train and equip an Afghan army and police force that is expected to total 352,000 by this fall. With a gross domestic product of about $17 billion, Afghanistan is incapable of funding a force that size.

As it looks for a way to cut future costs and assumes an eventual political solution to the war among the Afghans themselves, the administration has projected that Afghanistan’s security needs could be met even if the force were cut by up to one-third. It estimates the cost of sustaining the reduced force at about $4.1 billion a year, half of which the United States would provide. Afghanistan would pay about $500,000. 

President Obama, always generous with the taxpayers’ money, offered to cover half the costs of the “transition.” However, the other NATO partners failed to put any money on the table at Chicago. France said it was pulling its troops out.

NATO, impressive on paper, with its 28 member states and an additional 22 countries in its Partnership for Peace, is totally dependent on U.S. funding and U.S. military equipment and manpower. America’s foreign policy elites, as exemplified most especially by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), have been laboring for decades to empower the United Nations with its own global military, one that could carry out UN mandates without having to seek ad hoc military coalitions from often-reluctant member states. For the past two decades, NATO has increasingly filled this role: in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf of Aden, Libya. 

The one-worlders at the CFR want to go further. Anne-Marie Slaughter is a professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a former director of policy planning in the Obama/Clinton State Department (2009-2011). Besides being a member of the CFR, she has served on its board of directors. She is one of the big guns in the CFR opinion cartel and can be counted on to push relentlessly for treaties and arrangements that will ever erode American sovereignty and increasingly subject the United States to “international law” and international institutions. In her syndicated column of May 19 (timed for the opening of the NATO Summit the next day) entitled, “Globalizing NATO,” Professor Slaughter signified that the globalist dream to arm the UN with its own military is still alive, and NATO is the vehicle to achieve it. She declared: 

Even skeptics of NATO expansion and operations like the intervention in Libya now recognize that joint operations by member countries, operating under a UN mandate and in conjunction with regional partners, is likely to be a model for the future. As General Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser for President George H.W. Bush, observed recently, the UN Charter originally envisioned a standing military force to enforce Security Council resolutions – a vision that the NATO partner model might ultimately realize. 

On May 22, Charles A. Kupchan, the CFR’s Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow (and a Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University) wrote in his blog on the CFR web site that: 

NATO's Chicago summit went more or less according to plan. The allies agreed upon a timetable and strategy for winding down the war in Afghanistan…. And the presence at the summit of more than thirty non-NATO leaders advanced the alliance's commitment to developing new partnerships and deepening its global engagement. 

Prof. Kupchan did not expound in detail in his blog about the referenced “new partnerships” and “deepening global engagement.” However, in his recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for its hearing on “NATO: Chicago and Beyond,” he asserted that “NATO should intensify and expand the numerous programs it already maintains” and initiate new ones. Here are some of the details he provided at the hearing: 

Some of the most important security institutions of the 21st century are likely to be regional ones – such as the Gulf Cooperation Council, the African Union, the Association of Southeast Asia States, and the Union of South American Nations. NATO should be investing in the efficacy of these regional bodies. 

In pursuit of this objective, NATO should intensify and expand the numerous programs it already maintains to advance these goals, including: 

• Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and Partnership for Peace: engages 22 European partner countries in multilateral and bilateral relations with NATO. 

• Mediterranean Dialogue: engages Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia in NATO activities. 

• Istanbul Cooperation Initiative: provides training and exchanges with Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. 

• NATO Partners: engages non-NATO members in NATO operations, including Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. 

• Support for African Union: provides NATO assistance to the AU mission in Somalia and to AU peacekeeping capacity. 

• Training Mission in Iraq (2004-2011): trained Iraq’s armed forces. 

In similar vein, CFR Fellow James M. Goldgeier authored a Special Report for the Council in 2010 entitled, The Future of NATO (a pdf of the report can be downloaded here). 

Goldgeier, who is Dean of the School of International Service at American University, regularly writes columns favoring greater empowerment of NATO and the United Nations. He has teamed up in the past with Ivo Daalder (CFR) to co-author some of these columns. Mr. Daalder now, of course, is President Obama’s U.S. Permanent Representative on the Council of NATO, a position more commonly referred to as our “NATO Ambassador.” Before assuming this post, Daalder was on the staff of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council and served as an International Affairs Fellow at the CFR.

The internationalists at the Council on Foreign Relations have been pushing for providing NATO with its own independent, permanent military assets, so that national politicians responding to war-weary voters will not be able to stifle the globalist agenda. That has been partially achieved with adoption at the Chicago summit of the “smart defense” advocated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

 CFR globalists like Slaughter, Scowcroft, Kupchan, Daalder and Goldgeier are deliriously happy that NATO has gone “out of area,” that is, that it no longer restricts itself to the North Atlantic (European) area it was formed, ostensibly, to protect against Soviet aggression. This is part of NATO’s “evolution,” of “reinventing itself,” of “finding a new purpose.” So where does this evolution end? Where does it take us?

Elmo Roper (CFR) explicitly spelled out the globalist vision in a 1960 speech to the Atlantic Union Committee entitled “The Goal is Government of All the World,” which was subsequently published as a pamphlet under the same title. Roper, who was then treasurer of the AUC, declared: 

But the Atlantic Pact (NATO) need not be our last effort toward greater unity. It can be converted into one more sound and important step working toward world peace. It can be one of the most positive moves in the direction of One World. 

Roper continued: 

For it becomes clear that the first step toward world government cannot be completed until we have advanced on the four fronts: the economic, the military, the political, and the social. 

Few of the one-worlders speak as candidly as Mr. Roper did in that speech. Vice President Joe Biden, however, comes close, vigorously championing the transformation of NATO’s armed might into the operational arm of the United Nations. During the Senate confirmation hearing for Warren Christopher (CFR), the nominee of President Bill Clinton (CFR) for Secretary of State, on January 13, 1993, then-Senator Biden stated: 

[O]rganizing for collective security — means strengthening  the U.N. by assigning to the Security Council certain predesignated 

military forces and facilities: a conception unanimously endorsed by this committee last October. It also means converting NATO into a military instrument for peacekeeping, and peacemaking, under U.N. or CSCE auspices. (Emphasis added.) 

Sen. Biden went on to invoke Woodrow Wilson and to endorse Wilson’s radical vision of “world order” under a League of Nations with its own global army and navy. Said Biden: 

Collective security, a multinational commitment to repel aggression and defend the peace, was the central precept of Woodrow Wilson's vision. Wilson recognized it as a principle so essential to world order that he would not yield it in the fight over the ratification of the Versailles Treaty. It is the principle that the Senate finally accepted in 1949 with the advent of NATO, though it took the carnage of the Second World War to prove Wilson right. And it is that principle we must now extend, by empowering the U.N. and transforming the Atlantic alliance. 

Finally, Sen. Biden called for a Wilsonian “new world order” with “sweeping, visionary change”: 

Today we stand at the threshold of this new world order. I believe the people and governments, in growing numbers worldwide, recognize what needs to be done. And I believe the American people are prepared to see the United States take the lead in engineering sweeping, visionary change. 

As a Senator and as Vice President, Joe Biden has helped propel that “sweeping, visionary change” forward. He was visibly elated when NATO went “out of area” to effect regime change in Libya. "NATO got it right," he declared. "In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn't lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past."

This “prescription” which he enthusiastically endorses (along with President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and much of the political establishment) is a prescription for endless illegal wars, fought without the constitutionally required declaration of war by Congress, that would drain America of her blood, treasure, and her liberty.

NATO: An Alliance Past Its Prime

By Doug Bandow
April 26, 2012
Courtesy Of "The National Interest"

On May 20, the 2012 NATO Chicago summit will bring together the heads of state from the alliance. The agenda reads like a rundown of major world events in the past two years: the Arab Spring, the Libyan civil war, the global financial crisis and the war in Afghanistan. It seems no problem is too big for NATO.

Of these topics, the most pressing and headline-grabbing will be the plan NATO and the United States establish to gradually turn responsibility for security in Afghanistan over to the Afghan national forces. But also of note are the topics—“lessons learned from Libya” and the"Smart Defense Initiative,”—that display the reliance of Europe on the United States for advanced military capabilities. Libya in particular showcased Europe's inability to act without Washington.

The lessons from Libya are twofold, and it is important to keep them in mind as policy makers and pundits in Washington call for the next U.S. intervention, possibly in Syria or Iran. First, the results so far have been disappointing for America’s latest stab at coercive democratization.

Libya also was a disappointment as a supposed new model for U.S. intervention. In fact, that conflict reinforces the fact that NATO really stands for North America and The Others. Without the United States, the Europeans would be essentially helpless.

A new alliance study underscores Europe’s relative ineffectiveness. Reports the New York Times:

Despite widespread praise in Western capitals forNATO’s leadership of the air campaign in Libya, a confidential NATO assessment paints a sobering portrait of the alliance’s ability to carry out such campaigns without significant support from the United States.

The report concluded that the allies struggled to share crucial target information, lacked specialized planners and analysts, and overly relied on the United States for reconnaissance and refueling aircraft.

This should surprise no one. After all, during the war against Serbia—another nation which had not threatened America or any American ally—Europe was estimated to have a combat effectiveness less than 15 percent that of the U.S. The Europeans had large conscript armies, but outside of Britain and France had very little ability to project power. Later European participation in Afghanistan has been marred by the dozens of national “caveats” limiting participation in combat.

Yet alliance expansion is also on the agenda for the May NATO summit in Chicago. The list of alliance wannabes includes such powerhouses as Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia. Former Soviet republics notable mostly for their tangled and/or troubled relations with Russia—Georgia and Ukraine—are also on the list. All of these nations would be security liabilities, not assets, for America.

As the NATO study demonstrates, should the alliance’s Article 5 commitment get invoked, America would do most of the fighting. It would be one thing to take that risk where vital interests were at stake. But they are not in the Balkans, let alone in the Caucasus, which was part of Imperial Russia even before the Soviet Union.

Alliances should reflect the security environment. The Cold War is over. The Europeans have developed, the Soviet Union is kaput, and the potential European conflicts of the future—distant and unlikely—are linked to no hegemonic threat against America.

Instead of talking about NATO expansion, the United States should set down the burden of defending Europe. Let the Europeans take over NATO or create their own European defense organization, as they have discussed for years. The latest reminder of Europe’s relative military ineffectiveness reinforces the case for ending the Continent’s cheap ride. It is time to turn North America and The Others into simply The Others.

Global Gangster

By Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt, 
February 20, 2012 
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

If all goes as planned, it will be the happiest of wartimes in the U.S.A. Only the best of news, the killing of the baddest of the evildoers, will ever filter back to our world.

After all, American war is heading for the “shadows” in a big way. As news articles have recently made clear, the tip of the Obama administration’s global spear will increasingly be shaped from the ever-growing ranks of U.S. special operations forces. They are so secretive that they don’t like their operatives to be named, so covert that they instruct their members, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blognotes, “not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.” By now, they are also a force that, in any meaningful sense, is unaccountable for its actions.

Although the special-ops crew (66,000 people in all) exist on our tax dollars, we’re really not supposed to know anything about what they’re doing — unless, of course, they choose the publicity venue themselves, whether in Pakistan knocking off Osama bin Laden or parachuting onto Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard to promote Act of Valor.In case you somehow missed the ads, that’s the new film about “real terrorist threats based on true stories starring actual Navy SEALs.” (No names in the credits, please!)

Of course, those elite SEAL teams are Johnnies-come-lately when compared to their no less secretive “teammates” in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia — our ever-increasing armada of drones. Those robotic warriors of the air (or at least their fantasy doppelgangers) were, of course, pre-celebrated — after a fashion — in theTerminator movies. In Washington’s global battle zones, what’s called our “traditional combat role” — think big invasions, occupations, counterinsurgency — is going, going, gone with the wind, even evidently in Afghanistan by 2013. War American-style is instead being inherited by secretive teams of men and machines, both hunter-killers who specialize in assassination operations, and both of whom, as presented to Americans, just couldn’t be sexier.

And we’ll all be just so happy — as a recent poll indicates we are — with our robotic warriors and their shadowy special ops teammates, if with nothing else in our fraying world. They present such an alluring image of the no-pain, all-gain battlefield and are undoubtedly a relief for many Americans, distinctly tired — so the polls also tell us — of wars that aren’t covert and don’t work. So who even notices that, as Andrew Bacevich, bestselling author and (most recently) editor of The Short American Century: A Postmortem, points out, we’re being plunged into a real-life war novel that has no plot and no end. How postmodern! How disastrous, if only we have the patience to wait! (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses the changing face of the Global War on Terror, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

Scoring The Global War On Terror

From Liberation To Assassination In Three Quick Rounds 

By Andrew Bacevich

With the United States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has styled an “era of persistent conflict,” the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse. Without achieving victory, yet unwilling to acknowledge failure, the United States military has withdrawn from Iraq. It is trying to leave Afghanistan, where events seem equally unlikely to yield a happy outcome.

Elsewhere — in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, for example — U.S. forces are busily opening up new fronts. Published reports that the United States is establishing“a constellation of secret drone bases” in or near the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula suggest that the scope of operations will only widen further. In a front-page story, The New York Times described plans for “thickening” the global presence of U.S. special operations forces. Rushed Navy plans to convert an aging amphibious landing ship into an “afloat forward staging base” — a mobile launch platform for either commando raids or minesweeping operations in the Persian Gulf — only reinforces the point. Yet as some fronts close down and others open up, the war’s narrative has become increasingly difficult to discern. How much farther until we reach the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin? What exactly is the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin? In fact, is there a storyline here at all?

Viewed close-up, the “war” appears to have lost form and shape. Yet by taking a couple of steps back, important patterns begin to appear. What follows is a preliminary attempt to score the WFKATGWOT, dividing the conflict into a bout of three rounds. Although there may be several additional rounds still to come, here’s what we’ve suffered through thus far.

The Rumsfeld Era

Round 1: Liberation. More than any other figure — more than any general, even more than the president himself — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dominated the war’s early stages. Appearing for a time to be a larger-than-life figure — the “Secretary at War” in the eyes of an adoring (if fickle) neocon fan club — Rumsfeld dedicated himself to the proposition that, in battle, speed holds the key to victory. He threw his considerable weight behind a high-tech American version of blitzkrieg. U.S. forces, he regularly insisted, were smarter and more agile than any adversary. To employ them in ways that took advantage of those qualities was to guarantee victory. The journalistic term adopted to describe this concept was “shock and awe.”

No one believed more passionately in “shock and awe” than Rumsfeld himself. The design of Operation Enduring Freedom, launched in October 2001, and of Operation Iraqi Freedom, begun in March 2003, reflected this belief. In each instance, the campaign got off to a promising start, with U.S. troops landing some swift and impressive blows. In neither case, however, were they able to finish off their opponent or even, in reality, sort out just who their opponent might be. Unfortunately for Rumsfeld, the “terrorists” refused to play by his rulebook and U.S. forces proved to be less smart and agile than their technological edge — and their public relations machine — suggested would be the case. Indeed, when harassed by minor insurgencies and scattered bands of jihadis, they proved surprisingly slow to figure out what hit them.

In Afghanistan, Rumsfeld let victory slip through his grasp. In Iraq, his mismanagement of the campaign brought the United States face-to-face with outright defeat. Rumsfeld’s boss had hoped to liberate (and, of course, dominate) the Islamic world through a series of short, quick thrusts. What Bush got instead were two different versions of a long, hard slog. By the end of 2006, “shock and awe” was kaput. Trailing well behind the rest of the country and its armed forces, the president eventually lost confidence in his defense secretary’s approach. As a result, Rumsfeld lost his job. Round one came to an end, the Americans, rather embarrassingly, having lost it on points.

The Petraeus Era

Round 2: Pacification. Enter Gen. David Petraeus. More than any other figure, in or out of uniform, Petraeus dominated the WFKATGWOT’s second phase. Round two opened with lowered expectations. Gone was the heady talk of liberation. Gone, too, were predictions of lightning victories. The United States was now willing to settle for much less while still claiming success.

Petraeus offered a formula for restoring a semblance of order to countries reduced to chaos as a result of round one. Order might permit the United States to extricate itself while maintaining some semblance of having met its policy objectives. This became the operative definition of victory.

The formal name for the formula that Petraeus devised was counterinsurgency, or COIN. Rather than trying to defeat the enemy, COIN sought to facilitate the emergence of a viable and stable nation-state. This was the stated aim of the “surge” in Iraq ordered by President George W. Bush at the end of 2006.

With Petraeus presiding, violence in that country did decline precipitously. Whether the relationship was causal or coincidental remains the subject of controversy. Still, Petraeus’s apparent success persuaded some observers that counterinsurgency on a global scale — GCOIN, they called it — should now form the basis for U.S. national security strategy. Here, they argued, was an approach that could definitively extract the United States from the WFKATGWOT, while offering victory of a sort. Rather than employing “shock and awe” to liberate the Islamic world, U.S. forces would apply counterinsurgency doctrine to pacify it.

The task of demonstrating the validity of COIN beyond Iraq fell to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, appointed with much fanfare in 2009 to command U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Press reports celebrated McChrystal as another Petraeus, the ideal candidate to replicate the achievements already credited to “King David.”

McChrystal’s ascendancy came at a moment when a cult of generalship gripped Washington. Rather than technology being the determinant of success as Rumsfeld had believed, the key was to put the right guy in charge and then let him run with things. Political figures on both sides of the aisle fell all over themselves declaring McChrystal the right guy for Afghanistan. Pundits of all stripes joined the chorus.

Once installed in Kabul, the general surveyed the situation and, to no one’s surprise,announced that “success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.” Implementing that campaign would necessitate an Afghan “surge” mirroring the one that had seemingly turned Iraq around. In December 2009, albeit with little evident enthusiasm, President Barack Obama acceded to his commander’s request (or ultimatum). The U.S. troop commitment to Afghanistan rapidly increased.

Here things began to come undone. Progress toward reducing the insurgency or improving the capacity of Afghan security forces was — by even the most generous evaluation — negligible. McChrystal made promises — like meeting basic Afghan needs with “government in a box, ready to roll in” — that he proved utterly incapable of keeping. Relations with the government of President Hamid Karzai remained strained. Those with neighboring Pakistan, not good to begin with, only worsened. Both governments expressed deep resentment at what they viewed as high-handed American behavior that killed or maimed noncombatants with disturbing frequency.

To make matters worse, despite all the hype, McChrystal turned out to be miscast — manifestly the wrong guy for the job. Notably, he proved unable to grasp the need for projecting even some pretense of respect for the principle of civilian control back in Washington. By the summer of 2010, he was out — and Petraeus was back in.

In Washington (if not in Kabul), Petraeus’s oversized reputation quelled the sense that with McChrystal’s flame-out Afghanistan might be a lost cause. Surely, the most celebrated soldier of his generation would repeat his Iraq magic, affirming his own greatness and the continued viability of COIN.

Alas, this was not to be. Conditions in Afghanistan during Petraeus’s tenure in command improved — if that’s even the word — only modestly. The ongoing war met just about anyone’s definition of a quagmire. With considerable understatement, a 2011 National Intelligence Estimate called it a “stalemate.” Soon, talk of a “comprehensive counterinsurgency” faded. With the bar defining success slipping ever lower, passing off the fight to Afghan security forces and hightailing it for home became the publicly announced war aim.

That job remained unfinished when Petraeus himself headed for home, leaving the army to become CIA director. Although Petraeus was still held in high esteem, his departure from active duty left the cult of generalship looking more than a little the worse for wear. By the time Gen. John Allen succeeded Petraeus — thereby became the eighth U.S. officer appointed to preside over the ongoing Afghan War — no one believed that simply putting the right guy in charge was going to produce magic. On that inclusive note, round two of the WFKATGWOT ended.

The Vickers Era

Round 3: Assassination. Unlike Donald Rumsfeld or David Petraeus, Michael Vickershas not achieved celebrity status. Yet more than anyone else in or out of uniform, Vickers, who carries the title undersecretary of defense for intelligence, deserves recognition as the emblematic figure of the WFKATGWOT’s round three. His low-key, low-profile persona meshes perfectly with this latest evolution in the war’s character. Few people outside of Washington know who he is, which is fitting indeed since he presides over a war that few people outside of Washington are paying much attention to any longer.

With the retirement of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Vickers is the senior remaining holdover from George W. Bush’s Pentagon. His background is nothing if not eclectic. He previously served in U.S. Army Special Forces and as a CIA operative. In that guise, he played a leading role in supporting the Afghan mujahedeen in their war against Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Subsequently, he worked in a Washington think tank and earned a Ph.D. in strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University (dissertation title: “The Structure of Military Revolutions”).

Even during the Bush era, Vickers never subscribed to expectations that the United States could liberate or pacify the Islamic world. His preferred approach to the WFKATGWOT has been simplicity itself. “I just want to kill those guys,” he says — “those guys” referring to members of al-Qaeda. Kill the people who want to kill Americans and don’t stop until they are all dead: this defines the Vickers strategy, which over the course of the Obama presidency has supplanted COIN as the latest variant of U.S. strategy.

The Vickers approach means acting aggressively to eliminate would-be killers wherever they might be found, employing whatever means are necessary. Vickers “tends to think like a gangster,” one admirer comments. “He can understand trends then change the rules of the game so they are advantageous for your side.”

Round three of the WFKATGWOT is all about bending, breaking, and reinventing rules in ways thought to be advantageous to the United States. Much as COIN supplanted “shock and awe,” a broad-gauged program of targeted assassination has now displaced COIN as the prevailing expression of the American way of war.

The United States is finished with the business of sending large land armies to invade and occupy countries on the Eurasian mainland. Robert Gates, when still secretary of defense, made the definitive statement on that subject. The United States is now in the business of using missile-armed drones and special operations forces to eliminate anyone (not excluding U.S. citizens) the president of the United States decides has become an intolerable annoyance. Under President Obama, such attacks have proliferated.

This is America’s new MO. Paraphrasing a warning issued by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Washington Post dispatch succinctly summarized what it implied: “The United States reserved the right to attack anyone who it determined posed a direct threat to U.S. national security, anywhere in the world.”

Furthermore, acting on behalf of the United States, the president exercises this supposed right without warning, without regard to claims of national sovereignty, without congressional authorization, and without consulting anyone other than Michael Vickers and a few other members of the national security apparatus. The role allotted to the American people is to applaud, if and when notified that a successful assassination has occurred. And applaud we do, for example, when a daring raid by members in SEAL Team Six secretly enter Pakistan to dispatch Osama bin Laden with two neatly placed kill shots. Vengeance long deferred making it unnecessary to consider what second-order political complications might ensue.

How round three will end is difficult to forecast. The best we can say is that it’s unlikely to end anytime soon or particularly well. As Israel has discovered, once targeted assassination becomes your policy, the list of targets has a way of growing ever longer.

So what tentative judgments can we offer regarding the ongoing WFKATGWOT?Operationally, a war launched by the conventionally minded has progressively fallen under the purview of those who inhabit what Dick Cheney once called “the dark side,” with implications that few seem willing to explore. Strategically, a war informed at the outset by utopian expectations continues today with no concretely stated expectations whatsoever, the forward momentum of events displacing serious consideration of purpose. Politically, a war that once occupied center stage in national politics has now slipped to the periphery, the American people moving on to other concerns and entertainments, with legal and moral questions raised by the war left dangling in midair.

Is this progress?

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author most recently of Washington Rules: The American Path to Permanent War and the editor of the new book The Short American Century: A Postmortem, just out from Harvard University Press. To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses the changing face of the Global War on Terror, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2012 Andrew Bacevich