America Is Not A Military Unit

By Benjamin H. Friedman 
January 25, 2012 
Courtesy Of "The National Interest"

At both the beginning and end of his State of the Union address last night, the president suggested that the country can solve its problems by modeling itself after the military. Near the start he said:

At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, [members of the military] exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.

He ended on the same note, comparing the unity of the Navy SEAL team that killed bin Laden to the political cooperation between himself, Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, and then suggested we all follow that example:

This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

One problem with this rhetoric is its militarism. Not content to thank the troops for serving, the president has adopted the notion that military culture is better than that of civilian society and ought to guide it. That idea, too often seen among service members, is corrosive to civil-military relations. Troops should feel honored by their society but not superior to it. We do not need to pretend they are superhuman to thank them.

There is an even bigger problem with this “be like the troops, put aside our differences, stop playing politics, salute and get things done for the common good” mentality. It is authoritarian. Sure, Americans share a government, much culture and have mutual obligations. But that doesn’t make the United States anything like a military unit, which is designed for coordinated killing and destruction. Americans aren’t going to overcome their political differences by emulating commandos on a killing raid. And that’s a good thing. At least in times of peace, liberal countries should be free of a common purpose, which is anathema to freedom.

The more we get shoved together under a goal, the less free we are and the more we have to fight about. Differing conceptions of good and how to achieve it are the source of our political disagreements. Those competing ends are manifest in different parties, congressional committees, executive agencies and policy programs. Our government is designed for fighting itself, not others.

There’s no danger that this suggestion that we emulate military cooperation to make policy will actually succeed. Our politicians are hypocritical enough to rarely believe their own rhetoric about escaping politics, thankfully. But the happy talk is at least a distraction from useful thought about successful legislating. Productive deals get done by recognizing and accommodating competing ends, not by wishing them away. That means better politics, not none.

America's Costly War Machine

Wounded soldiers attend the opening of the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio, Texas on January 29, 2007. To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.(Ben Sklar / Getty Images)


Fighting The War On Terror Compromises The Economy Now and Threatens It In The Future.

By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz
September 18, 2011
Courtesy Of "The LA Times"

Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.

Many of these costs were unnecessary. We chose to fight inIraq and Afghanistan with a small, all-volunteer force, and we supplemented the military presence with a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. These decisions not only placed enormous strain on the troops but dramatically pushed up costs. Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.

To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon spending spree that accompanied it and a battery of new homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11.

How have we paid for this? Entirely through borrowing. Spending on the wars and on added security at home has accounted for more than one-quarter of the total increase in U.S. government debt since 2001. And not only did we fail to pay as we went for the wars, the George W. Bushadministration also successfully pushed to cut taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, which added further to the debt. This toxic combination of lower revenues and higher spending has brought the country to its current political stalemate.

There is only one other time in U.S. history that a war was financed entirely through borrowing, without raising taxes: when the Colonies borrowed from France during the Revolutionary War.

Even if we were to leave Afghanistan and Iraq tomorrow, our war debt would continue to rise for decades. Future bills will include such things as caring for military veterans, replacing military equipment, rebuilding the armed forces and paying interest on all the money we have borrowed. And these costs won't be insignificant.

History has shown that the cost of caring for military veterans peaks decades after a conflict. Already, half of the returning troops have been treated in Veterans Administration medical centers, and more than 600,000 have qualified to receive disability compensation. At this point, the bill for future medical and disability benefits is estimated at $600 billion to $900 billion, but the number will almost surely grow as hundreds of thousands of troops still deployed abroad return home.

And it isn't just in some theoretical future that the wars will affect the nation's economy: They already have. The conditions that precipitated the financial crisis in 2008 were shaped in part by the war on terror. The invasion of Iraq and the resulting instability in the Persian Gulf were among the factors that pushed oil prices up from about $30 a barrel in 2003 to historic highs five years later, peaking at $140 a barrel in current dollars in 2008. Higher oil prices threatened to depress U.S. economic activity, prompting the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and loosen regulations. These policies were major contributors to the housing bubble and the financial collapse that followed.

Now, the war's huge deficits are shaping the economic debate, and they could keep Congress from enacting another round of needed stimulus spending to help the country climb out of its economic malaise. Many of these war debts are likely to continue to compromise America's investments in its future for decades.

For years, the public failed to adequately question how it was possible that we could spend and borrow so freely, with so few consequences. But now the painful legacy of these decisions has become clear. Throughout the past decade, Congress routinely approved huge "emergency" appropriations to pay for the wars. This process preempted the usual scrutiny and debate that accompanies large spending bills. In part, this is because the U.S. lacks the basic accounting tools necessary for informed debate. Our future debts from the war are not listed anywhere in the federal government's budget. We don't even know for certain where the money has been spent. The Pentagon hasn't produced a clean financial audit in the 20 years since government auditing began, nor has it developed an accounting framework that would allow an assessment of the future costs of current decisions. This has almost certainly increased the overall cost of the war.

Our response to Sept. 11 has weakened both the current economy and our future economic prospects. And that legacy of economic weakness — combined with the erosion of the credibility of our military power and of our "soft power" — has undermined, rather than strengthened, our national security.

Nearly 10 years into the Afghanistan war, the violence in that country shows little sign of abating. August was the deadliest month of the war yet for U.S. troops, and there were also multiple attacks on Afghan security forces, government officials and civilians. The surge in violence comes as NATO is drawing down and handing over security control to national forces. But tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through the end of 2014.

The costs of fighting the war on terror have already been far higher than they needed to be. The U.S. should not take on even greater war debt without understanding the true costs of continuing down that path.

Linda J. Bilmes is a faculty member at Harvard University. Joseph E. Stiglitz is a professor atColumbia University and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics. They are coauthors of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

Hollywood and The War Machine

By "Empire"
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Empire examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex.

The American Art Of War

War is the American way of life -- Paul Atwood, War and Empire: The American Way of Life; Carl Boggs, The Crimes of Empire: Rogue Superpower and World Domination; Paul Rogers, Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st century; London: Pluto Press, 2010

13 - 19 May 2010
Issue No. 998
Courtesy Of "Al-Ahram Weekly"

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Click to view caption

Three new publications from the leading radical British press are the tip of a growing iceberg of passionate pleas for sanity in international affairs. Most of us prefer to stick our heads in the sand as the world goes to hell in a hand-basket, but there are works that can fascinate and uplift, perhaps even inspire us to do something before it is too late.

If what you need is a reference book for your own writing, with all the gory details of just how disreputable the world's hegemon is, The Crimes of Empire by Carl Boggs is what you pull down from your shelf. He has slogged through all the filth of "collateral damage", "humanitarian warfare", "client-state outlawry", "perpetual war", "biowarfare", "space imperialism", Guantanamo -- the Orwellian list is seemingly endless -- to provide a litany of horrors that will convince even the most sceptical of observers as to who is the real problem in the world.

Not a pretty read, but a commendable labour on the author's part.

More rivetting than Boggs's list of the empire's sins is the justification for them, as revealed by such neocons as Robert Kagan, who sees American force as necessary "to restrain the chaotic tendencies of a Hobbesian world", and who thus rejects any global restraints on US flexibility. "Human rights intervention", the latest buzzword to condone imperial ventures -- it once was called the "white man's burden" -- is for use by the big guns against the little ones. But Boggs's list of crimes is proof in itself that the imperial project actually creates "a comprehensive lawless whole".

This belies the Dawkinsian claim of evolutionary improvement in society's "moral zeitgest", which sees an upward trajectory from the slavery of yore to racial, gender and political correctness today, as "proved" by post-WWII multilateral treaties signed at the New York UN HQs or in Geneva. The New World Order is based on "sovereignty of nations", though Boggs points out that some nations are more sovereign than others, undermining the whole farce. The Kagans justify this as "US exceptionalism". But a sobre evaluation of today's world reveals that Reagan's "peace through strength" is really nothing but medieval "might makes right".

Anyone with even a smattering of US history can see that the Indian wars and Manifest Destiny of the 18th and 19th centuries were based on the same philosophy of "pre-emptive war" that solemn conferences on security today spout in defence of the indefensible.

This makes for frustrating reading, though it pushes you to make sense of the hypocrisy of world affairs, if nothing else. My own rule of thumb in considering how to resolve social problems is that only when the overwhelming majority wants something and are blessed with a charismatic political leader (take your choice in today's world -- they are there) does a real change for the better have a chance. This has nothing in common with a Darwin/Dawkins rational/natural evolutionary process. It is more like a Kuhnian revolutionary paradigm change, a combination of force majeure and luck, once a point-of-no- return is reached.

Corollary: No number of treaties will make for a just and equitable world order if one country overpowers all the others and seeks to impose its will. Another corollary is that the only evolutionary "moral zeitgeist" is the historic-economic order itself -- in our case, capitalism -- no matter how the dominant "culture" portrays itself for mass consumption. Hurt Locker may be a clever and gripping film by a talented woman director, but it is nonetheless a chauvinistic apologia for a criminal war, with the real victims largely airbrushed out of the picture so as to concentrate on the occupiers' angst. It does nothing to illuminate any possible "moral zeitgeist"apart from the chilling reality of US imperialism itself.

Finally, what the mass of horrors Boggs documents implies is that the only measure of human rights is "How many died?" If that is your rule of thumb, then there can be not one iota of doubt that, despite all the pious words of its leaders, the US is one of the worst offenders that the world has ever witnessed. And that its allies -- accomplices -- are no less to blame for illegal wars, war crimes, genocides. Thus the so-called pariahs -- Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba -- for better or worse, are direct products of US imperial actions, lumped together because they oppose the hegemon. Whatever crimes they may commit pale in comparison to the nobler-than-thou US. This is not to defend mistreatment of people anywhere, but to put things in a just light, so that we can navigate the treacherous tunnel we find ourselves globally rushing down.

***

Here in the Middle East, the US and its "client", spoiled offspring or whatever you want to call Israel have done nothing to lessen the Hobbesian chaos; on the contrary, they are the source of it. This is the message that Paul Rogers sets out calmly and compellingly in the third edition of Losing Control, which has become a popular text for those trying to chart a way through the darkness, and is much more a book to be read and to inspire than Boggs, though it too has lots of useful nitty-gritty for aspiring writers of contemporary politics and economics.

As a veteran peacenik, I found eloquent confirmation for what I and millions of others intuit about the deadend approach of writers who function within the dominant paradigm of international relations.

People's eyes glaze over at the mention of "peace". It's a bit like heaven: nice but boring. Rogers's argument, however, is compelling and his book readable. In the first edition, before 9/11, he presciently argued that US-NATO military posturing and war-mongering in the face of the growing rich-poor divide, environmental constraints and asymmetrical warfare was self-defeating and would only accelerate the collapse of the comfortable elite Western order.

A widely accepted argument, considered a truism, is that the US "won" the Cold War, that NATO helped the West survive through a "necessary and essentially safe process of maintaining very large military forces", an unpleasant but unavoidable balance of terror that ended with the collapse of the "enemy". Rogers deconstructs this fallacy, arguing that the Cold War was "highly dangerous and inordinately wasteful", that it created "a momentum in the development of a range of military technologies that has lasted well beyond the end of the Cold War itself", making present and future conflicts exponentially more devastating for victims and destabilising for the world as a whole.

This professor of peace studies at Bradford University provides telling examples from the North Ireland insurgency, which like the 9/11 attacks but for most of the 20th century penetrated to the very heart of the nation -- the nation in this case being Britain. Ireland is still divided, but the insurgency did not fail. Even after the cease-fire collapsed in 1996 with the Canary Wharf bombing, "the British and Irish governments commenced a new drive for peace within hours of the incident. A modern urban-industrial state was certainly vulnerable to political violence, even though most of the explosive devices used were home-made fertiliser bombs."

Rogers appeals to progressive thinkers in Britain, hoping that the Thatcher legacy of sabre-rattling elitism will eventually give way to an enlightened policy of promoting real security, which means rejecting military force and building a complex, multi-facetted foreign policy of economic assistance to undermine the logic of insurgents and "terrorists". It really boils down to rich countries voluntarily giving up their (imperial) privileges in the present world order, and effectively redistributing income through proactive trade policies benefitting poor farmers and third world producers, clamping down on huge international corporations, and controlling the excesses the "market" gives rise to.

He has little faith that this will happen soon, but his strategy is a compelling one: for one or more "north" countries to take the initiative to break with the status quo and lead the way, working with the more enlightened "south" political and intellectual leaders. A bono fide truism in human affairs is the parable of the 99 monkeys: that at some point -- the "tipping point" -- the actions of the few will lead to rapid change, the Kuhnian paradigm shift. Regarding the world's future, this is what Rogers is staking his bets on.

Once we enter the shift period, the bits and pieces of peace- promotion of the past -- UN treaties, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the anti-personnel landmine treaty, the Non- proliferation Treaty, various STARTs -- will gain a new lease on life, and lead to a truly multinational drive towards a non- nuclear world and the conversion of arms industries to environmental and other beneficial production, "part of a wider agenda of actions to ensure a persistent programme of cooperative and sustainable development".

Rogers provides a check-list of the essential steps, and argues compellingly that "There Is No Alternative". When you are faced with the daily horrors of the current world, in which the raging US bull flails madly at one and all, dipping into Losing Control provides some solace. Security can only mean common security, truly global security. It is an elusive vision, but there are concrete steps we can take to work towards it: TINA.

***

aul Atwood's War and Empire is a stimulating revisionist romp through American history, though I found the first two chapters too depressing -- the deception and betrayal of the innocent natives and their ruthless massacre by greedy settlers is just too close to the tragedy of the Palestinians for comfort. I got hooked with the post-1776 integration of the "revolutionaries" into the corrupt world of international intrigue, and became fascinated with how US history has been a circus, if a nasty one, ever since, at times aping European revolutionaries and at other times the glamorous aristocracy. The hodge-podge that calls itself American culture today is a mix of all this, and its shallowness is no surprise.

War and Empire is based on the author's history lectures at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he regularly asks students why the US entered any of its many wars and is greeted by quizzical looks and a vacuous "Freedom? National security?", blissfully unaware of "the centrality of war to the creation and evolution of the US". The decline in literacy standards depresses Atwood; one of his students earnestly explained to him that "communists employed 'Asian Orange' herbicides on American troops" in Vietnam.

The author shows how in the 19th century the drive for suffrage was feared by the Hamiltonian elite as a threat to the goal of creating "an industrial society with centralised banking and control of money", and made expansion necessary to Democrats and Federalists alike "to provide the growing white population with at least a small stake of property in the new system". When the shores of the Pacific were reached, this meant building a navy to reach across the Pacific and later the Atlantic, dabbling in Europe's follies, to feed the hungry capitalist beast and keep the dogs of populism at bay. There is no room in this gruesome march of death for the paper ideals that the "founding fathers" penned. The "permanent war" of today has its genesis in the "permanent war" of yesterday.

Atwood turns up many fascinating tidbits. Arab regimes beware: as early as 1805 the American consul in Tunis asked permission from the (supposedly anti-imperialist) Jefferson to overthrow its ruler and replace him with one more inclined to US interests, thereby out-Hamiltoning his elitist federal rivals.

The presidency is a veritable rogues' gallery. Andrew Jackson, who killed at least one adversary in his wild youth and was an unapologetic racist to the end, is still unsurpassed as the most bellicose president in US history, having made his name invading the Spanish colony of Florida in pursuit of escaped slaves and pesky natives, doing President Monroe's dirty work for him. He became Florida's first governor and went on to win the presidency, benefiting from the extension of the vote to all white males -- an appropriate role model for Jeb and George Bush. To the horror of the elite, he scuttled the central bank created by Madison, fighting the bankers' plans for a centralised industrial state with them in control, and allowed local and state banks to issue money, the last such American- style Don Quixote.

The US has always enjoyed playing European rivals off against each other, using the Napoleonic wars as an opportunity to snatch colonies from both England and France, all the while smuggling goods to both sides. Finally the US Congress declared war against England, the War of 1812, which American history books insist -- falsely -- that they won. The attempts to annex Canada and Florida failed and the White House was burned to the ground. The most obvious results were the "Star-spangled banner" and the unifying role the war played for the still anarchic settler-state.

No American hero emerges untarnished. Even the saintly Walt Whitman cheer-led probably the most sordid of America's wars -- Polk's invasion of poor Mexico: "Yes! Mexico must be chastised. America knows how to crush as well as expand!"

The hallowed Civil War was not at all about abolishing slavery, but a direct result of the insatiable hunger for more land, about keeping the increasingly unwieldy and fractious union together, about whether or not the North or South should prevail in extending their economic systems westward. Lincoln's famous emancipation proclamation was issued only in 1863, two years after the start of this suicidal conflagration, and only because the North, despite its overwhelming advantages, was losing and needed to inspire its own blacks to join in the slaughter. They did, and they turned the tide, though there was no "emancipation" for them or their southern brothers, but only the Ku Klux Klan, segregation, lynching, debt servitude, and a legacy of racism still alive and well.

Draping itself hypocritically in anti-slavery rhetoric, Britain watched smugly as its obstreperous ex-colony tore itself apart over which elite would have its way. The weaker America was, the better for the British empire. The tragedy is hard to fathom: the death toll is still unsurpassed in (white) America's history at 600,000 dead vs WWII's 400,000, the South was devastated, the phenomenon of "soldier's heart" (post-traumatic stress disorder) was widespread, with tens of thousands of soldiers homeless and psychologically or physically incapacitated, reduced to begging as there was no social support system.

Atwood's diligent expose of the seamy side of America's past reveals striking parallels between US and Israeli history -- the importance of war and expansion, the genocide of the native people justified by racism and a chauvinistic religion, the playing off of European powers against each other, the arrogant nationalism that characterises both states, unconcern for the resentment and hatred that their bellicose behaviour inspires. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 -- the updated version of the Monroe Doctrine -- acted to extend US dominance over the world, including the Middle East, and was closely followed by the creation of Israel in 1948, with strong backing by the Truman administration. A telling coincidence.

We all know that the pretext for the entry of the US into WWI was the sinking of the Lusitania. But I never knew that this ocean liner was carrying war materiel to England, that the German government warned secretary of state Bryan that it would be sunk, that Bryan's plea to president Wilson to prevent Americans from embarking was overruled. Bryan resigned and the rest is history -- the terrible nightmare history of the 20th century. My immediate thought was "Eureka!" This is exactly the way the US people were tricked into entering WWII, with Pearl Harbour the perfect pretext. Atwood hints at but demurs from exploring the willful refusal of the FDR to nip this well- known plan in the bud -- no doubt because his "Asian Orange"-spouting students would denounce him as a mentally unbalanced traitor. Nor does he venture into the 9/11 literature hypothesising US (and other) government involvement in our current "Pearl Harbour".

But that is not to detract from his cogent reasoning that the entry of the US into both wars was to prevent the rising German behemoth from dominating Europe and posing a threat to US imperial interests around the world. The consensus in ruling circles was "for a more rationalised world system open to American economic penetration. American entry to [WWI] would be sold as making the world 'safe for democracy'." He understands well that current US wars have a similar logic -- to reinforce US hegemony around the world.

For those who bemoan that a once pristine America is now descending into an Orwellian dictatorship with its infringements of the Constitution and illegal wars, it is at least some comfort to recall that such moments in US history abound. The Sedition Act of 1918 made any speech against the government's wartime policies illegal; the "Red Scare" following WWI led to the creation of the FBI and allowed the deportation of thousands of immigrants because of their political views. US troops assisted British, Czech and Japanese in the invasion of Russia in 1917 to crush the communist revolution, though Russia was already devastated, ensuring that the revolution would be born in blood and war.

The Korean war was so unpopular that by the end 90 per cent of troops hospitalised were from self-inflicted wounds. To soften up the Koreans, the US Air Force carpet bombed the north's dams and dikes -- a direct violation of the new Geneva Convention -- until two months before an exhausted North Korea finally agreed to an armistice in 1953, pressured by the new post-Stalin Soviet leadership anxious to reduce East-West tensions, fearing a nuclear war. "The West can and does vilify communist crimes. But there is nothing in the communist record not matched by capitalist societies in terms of crimes against humanity."

For those who admire Jimmy Carter as the peacenik president, Atwood reminds us that he extended the Monroe Doctrine with his own corollary: "Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the US." But, bless his heart, Carter fails to state the corollary to his corollary: that the only threats to the Persian Gulf were and are the Kissingers and Brzezinskis of US foreign policy. Atwood quotes Nixon and Ford's witty secretary of state during the post-1973 oil embargo: "Pick one of those sheikhdoms, any of them, and overthrow the government there, as a lesson to the Saudis."

Atwood valiantly fights the "Disney version" of his nation's past and his work is to be commended. It's hard to imagine how anyone who acquaints himself with the basic truths of US history can come away uncommitted to fighting its trajectory today. The US was born in war and has thrived by the sword. And its actions are more than adequate confirmation that, "War has never made the world safe for peace but only for more war."

Reviewed by Eric Walberg

Why Soldiers Get A Kick Out Of Killing

By John Horgan
Source: "Scientific American"
April 27, 2010
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

Do some soldiers enjoy killing? If so, why? This question is thrust upon us by the recently released video of U.S. Apache helicopter pilots shooting a Reuters cameraman and his driver in Baghdad in 2007. Mistaking the camera of the Reuters reporter for a weapon, the pilots machine-gunned the reporter and driver and other nearby people.

The most chilling aspect of the video, which was made public by Wikileaks, is the chatter between two pilots, whose names have not been released. As Elizabeth Bumiller of The New York Times put it, the soldiers "revel in their kill." "Look at those dead bastards," one pilot says. "Nice," the other replies.

The exchange reminds me of a Times story from March 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. The reporter quotes Sgt. Eric Schrumpf, a Marine sharpshooter, saying, "We had a great day. We killed a lot of people." Noting that his troop killed an Iraqi woman standing near a militant, Schrumpf adds, "I'm sorry, but the chick was in the way."

Does the apparent satisfaction—call it the Schrumpf effect—that some soldiers take in killing stem primarily from nature or nurture? Nature, claims Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard University and an authority on chimpanzees. Wrangham asserts that natural selection embedded in both male humans and chimpanzees—our closest genetic relatives—an innate propensity for "intergroup coalitionary killing" [pdf], in which members of one group attack members of a rival group. Male humans "enjoy the opportunity" to kill others, Wrangham says, especially if they run little risk of being killed themselves.

Several years ago, geneticists at Victoria University in New Zealand linked violent male aggression to a variant of a gene that encodes for the enzyme monoamine oxidase A, which regulates the function of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. According to the researchers, the so-called "warrior gene" is carried by 56 percent of Maori men, who are renowned for being "fearless warriors," and only 34 percent of Caucasian males.

But studies of World War II veterans suggest that very few men are innately bellicose. The psychiatrists Roy Swank and Walter Marchand found that 98 percent of soldiers who endured 60 days of continuous combat suffered psychiatric symptoms, either temporary or permanent. The two out of 100 soldiers who seemed unscathed by prolonged combat displayed "aggressive psychopathic personalities," the psychiatrists reported. In other words, combat didn't drive these men crazy because they were crazy to begin with.

Surveys of WWII infantrymen carried out by U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall found that only 15 to 20 percent had fired their weapons in combat, even when ordered to do so. Marshall concluded that most soldiers avoid firing at the enemy because they fear killing as well as being killed. "The average and healthy individual," Marshall contended in his postwar book Men Against Fire, "has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility…At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector."

Critics have challenged Marshall's claims, but the U.S. military took them so seriously that it revamped its training to boost firing rates in subsequent wars, according to Dave Grossman, a former U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and professor of psychology at West Point. In his 1995 book On Killing, Grossman argues that Marshall's results have been corroborated by reports from World War I, the American Civil War, the Napoleonic wars and other conflicts. "The singular lack of enthusiasm for killing one's fellow man has existed throughout military history," Grossman asserts.

The reluctance of ordinary men to kill can be overcome by intensified training, direct commands from officers, long-range weapons and propaganda that glorifies the soldier's cause and dehumanizes the enemy. "With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill," Grossman writes. Many soldiers who kill enemies in battle are initially exhilarated, Grossman says, but later they often feel profound revulsion and remorse, which may transmute into post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments. Indeed, Grossman believes that the troubles experienced by many combat veterans are evidence of a "powerful, innate human resistance toward killing one's own species."

In other words, the Schrumpf effect is usually a product less of nature than of nurture—although "nurture" is an odd term for training that turns ordinary young men into enthusiastic killers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Horgan, a former Scientific American staff writer, directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. (Photo courtesy of Skye Horgan.)

The Pentagon's Game Plan

OBAMA'S WAR MACHINE

Part 1

By Jack A Smith
May 5, 2010
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online

There's more war in America's future - a great deal more, judging by the Barack Obama administration's

reports, pronouncements and actions in recent months.

These documents and deeds include the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the Ballistic Missile Defense Report, the nuclear security summit in New York and the May 3-28 United Nations nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, as well as the continuing wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the 2011 Pentagon war budget request.

The United States government presides as a military colossus of unrivalled dimension, but the QDR, which was published in February, suggests Washington views America as being constantly under the threat of attack from a multitude of fearsome
forces bent on its destruction. As such, trillions more dollars must be invested in present and future wars - ostensibly to make safe the besieged homeland.

The NPR says the long-range US goal is a "nuclear-free" world, but despite token reductions in its arsenal of such weapons, the Pentagon is strengthening its nuclear force and bolstering it with a devastating "conventional deterrent" intended to strike any target in the world within one hour. In addition this document, published in April, retains "hair-trigger" nuclear launch readiness, refuses to declare its nuclear force is for deterrence only (suggesting offensive use) and for the first time authorizes a nuclear attack, if necessary, on a non-nuclear state (Iran).

Meanwhile, Obama is vigorously expanding the George W Bush administration's wars, and enhancing and deploying America's unparalleled military power.

The Obama administration's one positive achievement in terms of militarism and war was the April 9 signing in Prague of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia that reduces deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 warheads each. It was a step forward, but all agree it was extremely modest, and it does not even faintly diminish the danger of nuclear war.

The QDR is a 128-page Defense Department report mandated by congress to be compiled every four years to put forward a 20-year projection of US military planning. A 20-member civilian panel, selected by the Pentagon and congress, analyzes the document and suggests changes in order to provide an "independent" perspective. Eleven of the members, including the panel’s co-chairmen - former defense secretary William Perry and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley - are employed by the defense industry.

Although the Pentagon is working on preparations for a possible World War III and beyond, the new report is largely focused on the relatively near future and only generalizes about the longer term. Of the QDR's many priorities three stand out.

The first priority is to "prevail in today's wars" in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and wherever else Washington's post-9/11 military intrusions penetrate in coming years. Introducing the report February 1, Bush-Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued this significant statement: "Success in wars to come will depend on success in these wars in progress." The "wars to come" were not identified. Further, the QDR states that military victory in Iraq and Afghanistan is "only the first step toward achieving our strategic objectives". Second, while in the past the US concentrated on the ability to fight two big wars simultaneously, the QDR suggests that's not enough. Now, the Obama administration posits the "need for a robust force capable of protecting US interests against a multiplicity of threats, including two capable nation-state aggressors." Now it's two-plus wars - the plus being the obligation to "conduct large-scale counter-insurgency, stability and counter-terrorism operations in a wide range of environments", mainly in small, poor countries like Afghanistan. Other "plus" targets include "non-state actors" such as al-Qaeda, "failed states" such as Somali, and medium-size but well-defended states that do not bend the knee to Uncle Sam, such as Iran or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and some day perhaps Venezuela. Third, it's fairly obvious from the QDR, though not acknowledged, that the Obama government believes China and Russia are the two possible "nation-state aggressors" against which Washington must prepare to "defend" itself. Neither Beijing nor Moscow has taken any action to justify the Pentagon's assumption that they will ever be suicidal enough to attack the far more powerful United States. After all, the US, with 4.54% of the world's population, invests more on war and war preparations than the rest of the world combined. Obama's 2010 Pentagon budget is US$680 billion, but the real total is double that when all Washington's national security expenditures in other departmental budgets are also included, such as the cost of nuclear weapons, the 16 intelligence agencies, Homeland Security and interest on war debts, among other programs. Annual war-related expenditures are well over $1 trillion. In calling for a discretionary freeze on government programs in January's state of the union address, Obama specifically exempted Pentagon/national security expenditures from the freeze. Obama is a big war spender. His $708 billion Pentagon allotment for fiscal 2011 (not counting a pending $33 billion Congress will approve for the Afghan "surge") exceeds Bush's highest budget of $651 billion for fiscal 2009. At present, US military power permeates the entire world. As the QDR notes: "The United States is a global power with global responsibilities. Including operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, approximately 400,000 US military personnel are forward-stationed or rotationally deployed around the world." The Pentagon presides over 1,000 overseas military bases (including those in the war zones), great fleets in every ocean, a globe-spanning air force, military satellites in space and nuclear missiles on hair trigger alert pre-targeted on "enemy" or potential "enemy" cities and military facilities. A reading of the QDR shows none of this will change except for upgrading, enlarging (the Pentagon just added six new bases in Colombia) and adding new systems such as Prompt Global Strike, an important new offensive weapon system, which we shall discuss below. The phrase "full spectrum military dominance" - an expression concocted by the neo-conservatives in the 1990s that was adopted by the Bush administration to define its aggressive military strategy - was cleverly not included in the 2010 QDR, but retaining and augmenting dominance remains the Pentagon's prime preoccupation. The QDR is peppered with expressions such as "America’s interests and role in the world require armed forces with unmatched capabilities" and calls for "the continued dominance of America’s Armed Forces in large-scale force-on-force warfare". Gates went further in his February 1 press conference: "The United States needs a broad portfolio of military capabilities, with maximum versatility across the widest possible spectrum of conflicts." Obama bragged recently that he commanded "the finest military in the history of the world". Evidently, the Pentagon is planning to engage in numerous future wars interrupted by brief periods of peace while preparing for the next war. Given that the only entity expressing an interest in attacking the United States is al-Qaeda - a non-government paramilitary organization of extreme religious fanatics with about a thousand reliable active members around the world - it is obvious that America's unprecedented military might is actually intended for another purpose. In our view that "other purpose" is geopolitical - to strengthen even further the Pentagon's military machine to assure that the United States retains its position as the dominant global hegemon at a time of acute indebtedness, the severe erosion of its manufacturing base, near gridlock in domestic politics, and the swift rise to global prominence of several other nations and blocs. The QDR touches on this with admirable delicacy: "The distribution of global political, economic and military power is shifting and becoming more diffuse. The rise of China, the world’s most populous country, and India, the world’s largest democracy, will continue to reshape the international system. While the United States will remain the most powerful actor, it must increasingly cooperate with key allies and partners to build and sustain peace and security. Whether and how rising powers fully integrate into the global system will be among this century’s defining questions, and are thus central to America’s interests." At the moment, the QDR indicates Washington is worried about foreign "anti-access" strategies that limit its "power projection capabilities" in various parts of the world. What this means is that certain countries such as China and Russia are developing sophisticated new weapons that match those of the US, thus "impeding" the deployment of American forces to wherever the Pentagon desires. For instance: China is developing and fielding large numbers of advanced medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles, new attack submarines equipped with advanced weapons, increasingly capable long-range air defense systems, electronic warfare and computer network attack capabilities, advanced fighter aircraft and counter-space systems. China has shared only limited information about the pace, scope and ultimate aims of its military modernization programs, raising a number of legitimate questions regarding its long-term intentions. To counter this trend in China and elsewhere, the Pentagon is planning, at a huge and unannounced cost, the following enhancements: "Expand future long-range strike capabilities; Exploit advantages in subsurface operations; Increase the resiliency of US forward posture and base infrastructure; Assure access to space and the use of space assets; Enhance the robustness of key ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) capabilities; Defeat enemy sensors and engagement systems; and Enhance the presence and responsiveness of US forces abroad." In addition, the US not only targets China with nuclear missiles and bombs, it is surrounding the country (and Russia as well, of course) with anti-ballistic missiles. The purpose is plain: In case the US finds it "necessary" to launch ballistic missiles toward China, the ABMs will be able to destroy its limited retaliatory capacity. According to an article in the February 22 issue of China Daily, the country's English-language newspaper: "Washington appears determined to surround China with US-built anti-missile systems, military scholars have observed ... Air force colonel Dai Xu, a renowned military strategist, wrote in an article released this month that 'China is in a crescent-shaped ring of encirclement. The ring begins in Japan, stretches through nations in the South China Sea to India, and ends in Afghanistan'." Compared to the Bush administration's 2006 QDR, there has been a conscious effort to tone down the anti-China rhetoric in the current document. But it is entirely clear that China is number one in the QDR's references to "potentially hostile nation states". According to the February 18 Defense News, a publication that serves the military-industrial complex, "Analysts say the QDR attempts to address the threat posed by China without further enraging Beijing. 'If you look at the list of further enhancements to US forces and capabilities ... those are primarily capabilities needed for defeating China, not Iran, North Korea or Hezbollah,' said Roger Cliff, a China military specialist at Rand. 'So even though not a lot of time is spent naming China ... analysis of the China threat is nonetheless driving a lot of the modernization programs described in the QDR'." Incidentally, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, this year's Chinese defense budget, for a country four times larger than the United States, is $78 billion, compared to the $664 billion for the Pentagon (without all the national security extras harbored in other department budgets). China possesses 100-200 nuclear warheads compared to America's 9,326 (when both deployed and stored weapons are included). China is contemplating the construction of an aircraft carrier; the US Navy floats 11 of them. China has no military bases abroad. In our view, China appears to be constructing weapons for defense, not offense against the US - and its foreign policy is based on refusing to be pushed around by Washington while doing everything possible to avoid a serious confrontation. Russia as well is treated better in the new QDR than in 2006, but it is included with China in most cases. Despite Moscow's huge nuclear deterrent and abundant oil and gas supplies, it's only "potential enemy" number two in terms of the big powers. Washington feels more threatened by Beijing. This is largely because of China's size, rapid development, fairly successful state-guided capitalist economy directed by the Communist Party, and the fact that it is on the road to becoming the world's economic leader, surpassing the US in 20 to 40 years. It seems fairly obvious, but hardly mentioned publicly, that this is an extremely dangerous situation. China does not seek to dominate the world, nor will it allow itself to be dominated. Beijing supports the concept of a multipolar world order, with a number of countries and blocs playing roles. At issue, perhaps, is who will be first among equals. Washington prefers the situation that has existed these 20 years after the implosion of the Soviet Union and much of the socialist world left the United States as the remaining military superpower and boss of the expanded capitalist bloc. During this time Washington has functioned as the unipolar world hegemon and doesn't want to relinquish the title. This is all changing now as other countries rise, led by China, and the US appears to be in gradual decline. How the transition to multi-polarity is handled over the next couple of decades may determine whether or not a disastrous war will be avoided. Next: America's Nuclear Posture Jack A Smith is editor of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter in New York State and the former editor of the Guardian Newsweekly (US). He may be reached at jacdon@earthlink.net (Copyright 2010 Jack A Smith.)

American Blitzkrieg

Loving The German War Machine To Death

By William J. Astore and Tom Engelhardt,
February 19, 2010
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

Remember the 100 hours of combat that made up the first Gulf War, the mere weeks it took for Kabul to fall in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, or the "shock and awe" wave of air attacks that led off the 2003 invasion of Iraq, followed by the 20-day blitzkrieg-like campaign that left American troops occupying Baghdad? Those were the days when, as retired lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore reminds us, the civilians in the Bush Pentagon thought they were the masters of lightning war. Now, skip almost seven years, and in Afghanistan the U.S. military has just launched the largest campaign since the invasion of 2001. Fifteen thousand U.S., British, and Afghan troops have been dispatched to take Marja, a single, modest-sized, Taliban-controlled city of 80,000 in one of more than 700 districts in Afghanistan, many under some degree of Taliban control or influence. How the time frame for success has changed.

As the Americans went in, Marine Commander Brigadier General Larry Nicholson was already warning that it might take up to 30 days, longer than it took to capture Baghdad, just to clear Marja of hidden explosives and, despite overwhelming power arrayed against perhaps a few hundred Taliban guerrillas, the fighting in the town has gone on relatively steadily for days. What, in 1991, 2001, and 2003 was the swift claim of total victory is now a long-haul campaign, according to American military sources, to blunt Taliban success (or, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, to "degrade the capability of the Taliban") and so, evidently, bring the enemy in a chastened state to the negotiating table before an American drawdown begins.

As for timelines, U.S. officials now talk about the combat portion of the Marja campaign being but the beginning of a full-scale, militarized version of nation-building on a local level. Think of it as city- or district-building, and the process includes (we’re told by the U.S. war commander with some pride) the unpacking of an imported "government in a box" – the governing and security forces of Hamid Karzai’s central government — and the launching of a well-funded, local reconstruction program to win "hearts and minds." As a result, the test of success is now considered to be months down the line, and that’s if the Marja campaign doesn’t turn out to be a classic counterinsurgency quagmire.

The story of how Pentagon strategists and the U.S. military went from being the masters of war to a force of would-be long-haul city-builders in the backlands of Afghanistan is a strange one indeed, made stranger yet by the bizarre detour they took through modern German military lore. (To catch William Astore in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview discussing the U.S. military’s fascination with the Wehrmacht, click here.) Tom

Loving the German War Machine to Death
By William J. Astore

"Why do people have a fixation with the German military when they haven’t won a war since 1871?" — Tom Clancy

I’ve always been interested in the German military, especially the Wehrmacht of World War II. As a young boy, I recall building many models, not just German Panther and Tiger tanks, but famous Luftwaffe planes as well. True, I built American tanks and planes, Shermans and Thunderbolts and Mustangs, but the German models always seemed "cooler," a little more exotic, a little more predatory. And the German military, to my adolescent imagination, seemed admirably tough and aggressive: hard-fighting, thoroughly professional, hanging on against long odds, especially against the same hordes of "godless communists" that I knew we Americans were then facing down in the Cold War.

Later, of course, a little knowledge about the nightmare of Nazism and the Holocaust went a long way toward destroying my admiration for the Wehrmacht, but — to be completely honest — a residue of grudging respect still survives: I no longer have my models, but I still have many of the Ballantine illustrated war books I bought as a young boy for a buck or two, and which often celebrated the achievements of the German military, with titles like Panzer Division, or Afrika Korps, or even Waffen SS.

As the Bible says, we are meant to put aside childish things as we grow to adulthood, and an uninformed fascination with the militaria and regalia of the Third Reich was certainly one of these. But when I entered Air Force ROTC in 1981, and later on active duty in 1985, I was surprised, even pleased, to discover that so many members of the U.S. military shared my interest in the German military. To cite just one example, as a cadet at Field Training in 1983 (and later at Squadron Officer School in 1992), I participated in what was known as "Project X." As cadets, we came to know of it in whispers: "Tomorrow we’re doing ‘Project X’: It’s really tough …"

A problem-solving leadership exercise, Project X consisted of several scenarios and associated tasks. Working in small groups, you were expected to solve these while working against the clock. What made the project exciting and more than busy-work, like the endless marching or shining of shoes or waxing of floors, was that it was based on German methods of developing and instilling small-unit leadership, teamwork, and adaptability. If it worked for the Germans, the "finest soldiers in the world" during World War II, it was good enough for us, or so most of us concluded (including me).

Project X was just one rather routine manifestation of the American military’s fascination with German methods and the German military mystique. As I began teaching military history to cadets at the Air Force Academy in 1990, I quickly became familiar with a flourishing "Cult of Clausewitz." So ubiquitous was Carl von Clausewitz and his book On War that it seemed as if we Americans had never produced our own military theorists. I grew familiar with the way Auftragstaktik (the idea of maximizing flexibility and initiative at the lowest tactical levels) was regularly extolled. So prevalent did Clausewitz and Auftragstaktikbecome that, in the 1980s and 1990s, American military thinking seemed reducible to the idea that "war is a continuation of politics" and a belief that victory went to the side that empowered its "strategic corporals."

War as a Creative Act

The American military’s fascination with German military methods and modes of thinking raises many questions. In retrospect, what disturbs me most is that the military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and highly-motivated leaders can impose their will on events.

In this notional construct, war became not destructive, but constructive. It became not the last resort of kings, but the preferred recourse of "creative" warlords who demonstrated their mastery of it by cultivating such qualities as flexibility, adaptability, and quickness. One aimed to get inside the enemy’s "decision cycle," the so-called OODA loop – the Air Force’s version of Auftragstaktik – while at the same time cultivating a "warrior ethos" within a tight-knit professional army that was to stand above, and also separate from, ordinary citizens.

This idolization of the German military was a telling manifestation of a growing militarism within an American society which remained remarkably oblivious to the slow strangulation of its citizen-soldier ideal. At the same time, the American military began to glorify a new generation of warrior-leaders by a selective reading of its past. Old "Blood and Guts" himself, the warrior-leader George S. Patton – the commander as artist-creator-genius — was celebrated; Omar N. Bradley – the bespectacled GI general and reluctant soldier-citizen — was neglected. Not coincidentally, a new vision of the battlefield emerged in which the U.S. military aimed, without the slightest sense of irony, for "total situational awareness" and "full spectrum dominance," goals that, if attained, promised commanders the almost god-like ability to master the "storm of steel," to calm the waves, to command the air.

In the process, any sense of war as thoroughly unpredictable and enormously wasteful was lost. In this infatuation with German military prowess, which the political scientist John Mearsheimer memorably described as "Wehrmacht penis envy," we celebrated our ability to Blitzkrieg our enemies — which promised rapid, decisive victories that would be largely bloodless (at least for us). In 1991, a decisively quick victory in the Desert Storm campaign of the first Gulf War was the proof, or so it seemed then, that a successful "revolution in military affairs," or RMA in military parlance, was underway.

Forgotten, however, was this: the German Blitzkrieg of World War II ended with Germany’s "third empire" thoroughly thrashed by opponents who continued to fight even when the odds seemed longest.

What a remarkable, not to say bizarre, turnabout! The army and country the U.S. had soundly beaten in two world wars (with a lot of help from allies, including, of course, those godless communists of the Soviet Union in the second one) had become a beacon for the U.S. military after Vietnam. To use a sports analogy, it was as if a Major League Baseball franchise, in seeking to win the World Series, decided to model itself not on the New York Yankees but rather on the Chicago Cubs.

The New Masters of Blitzkrieg

Busts of Clausewitz reside in places of honor today at both the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and the National War College in Washington, D.C. Clausewitz was a complex writer, and his vision of war was both dense and rich, defying easy simplification. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S. military from simplifying him. Ask the average officer about Clausewitz, and he’ll mention "war as the continuation of politics" and maybe something about "the fog and friction of war" — and that’s about it. What’s really meant by this rendition of Clausewitz for Dummies is that, though warfare may seem extreme, it’s really a perfectly sensible form of violent political discourse between nation-states.

Such an officer may grudgingly admit that, thanks to fog and friction, "no plan survives contact with the enemy." What he’s secretly thinking, however, is that it won’t matter at all, not given the U.S. military’s "mastery" of Auftragstaktik, achieved in part through next-generation weaponry that provides both "total situational awareness" and a decisive, war-winning edge.

No wonder that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were so eager to go to war in Iraq in 2003. They saw themselves as the new masters of Blitzkrieg, the new warlords (or "Vulcans" to use a term popular back then), the inheritors of the best methods of German military efficiency.

This belief, this faith, in German-style total victory through relentless military proficiency is best captured in Max Boot’s gushing tribute to the U.S. military, published soon after Bush’s self-congratulatory and self-adulatory "Mission Accomplished" speech in May 2003. For Boot, America’s victory in Iraq had to "rank as one of the signal achievements in military history." In his words:

"Previously, the gold standard of operational excellence had been the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France in 1940. The Germans managed to conquer France, the Netherlands, and Belgium in just 44 days, at a cost of ‘only’ 27,000 dead soldiers. The United States and Britain took just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison."

How likely is it that future military historians will celebrate General Tommy Franks and elevate him above the "incompetent" Rommel and Guderian? Such praise, even then, was more than fatuous. It was absurd.

Throughout our history, many Americans, especially frontline combat veterans, have known the hell of real war. It’s one big reason why, historically speaking, we’ve traditionally been reluctant to keep a large standing military. But the Cold War, containment, and our own fetishizing of the German Wehrmacht changed everything. We began to see war not as a human-made disaster but as a creative science and art. We began to seek "force multipliers" and total victory achieved through an almost Prussian mania for military excellence.

Reeling from a seemingly inexplicable and unimaginable defeat in Vietnam, the officer corps used Clausewitz to crawl out of its collective fog. By reading him selectively and reaffirming our own faith in military professionalism and precision weaponry, we tricked ourselves into believing that we had attained mastery over warfare. We believed we had tamed the dogs of war; we believed we had conquered Bellona, that we could make the goddess of war do our bidding.

We forgot that Clausewitz compared war not only to politics but to a game of cards. Call it the ultimate high-stakes poker match. Even the player with the best cards, the highest stack of chips, doesn’t always win. Guile and endurance matter. So too does nerve, even luck. And having a home-table advantage doesn’t hurt either.

None of that seemed to matter to a U.S. military that aped the German military, while over-hyping its abilities and successes. The result? A so-called "new American way of war" that was simply a desiccated version of the old German one, which had produced nothing but catastrophic defeat for Germany in both 1918 and 1945 — and disaster for Europe as well.

Just Ask the Germans

Precisely because that disaster did not befall us, precisely because we emerged triumphant from two world wars, we became both too enamored with the decisiveness of war, and too dismissive of our own unique strength. For our strength was not military élan or cutting-edge weaponry or tactical finesse (these were German "strengths"), but rather the dedication, the generosity, even the occasional ineptitude, of our citizen-soldiers. Their spirit was unbreakable precisely because they — a truly democratic citizen army — were dedicated to defeating a repellently evil empire that reveled fanatically in its own combat vigor.

Looking back on my youthful infatuation with the German Wehrmacht, I recognize a boy’s misguided enthusiasm for military hardness and toughness. I recognize as well the seductiveness of reducing the chaos of war to "shock and awe" Blitzkrieg and warrior empowerment. What amazes me, however, is how this astonishingly selective and adolescent view of war — with its fetish for lightning results, achieved by elevating and empowering a new generation of warlords, warriors, and advanced weaponry — came to dominate mainstream American military thinking after the frustrations of Vietnam.

Unlike a devastated and demoralized Germany after its defeats, we decided not to devalue war as an instrument of policy after our defeat, but rather to embrace it. Clasping Clausewitz to our collective breasts, we marched forward seeking new decisive victories. Yet, like our role models the Germans of World War II, we found victory to be both elusive and illusive.

So, I have a message for my younger self: put aside those menacing models of German tanks and planes. Forget those glowing accounts of Rommel and his Afrika Korps. Dismiss Blitzkrieg from your childish mind. There is no lightning war, America. There never was. And if you won’t take my word for it, just ask the Germans.

William J. Astore (wastore@pct.edu), a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular, teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. To catch him in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview discussing the U.S. military’s fascination with the Wehrmacht, click here.

2010 William J. Astore

Read more by Tom Engelhardt

• Pimping Weapons to the World – February 16th, 2010
• Hold Onto Your Underwear – February 14th, 2010
• America’s Shadowy Base World – February 9th, 2010
• Destabilizing Pakistan – February 7th, 2010
• Will Iraq’s Oil Ever Flow? – February 2nd, 2010