Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Will our generals ever shut up?
By Tom Engelhardt
The autumn issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan's "The
Transformer," an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he might leave his
post "sometime in 2011". The most significant two lines in the piece, however,
were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering. Part
of a Kaplan summary of Gates' views, they read: "He favors substantial
increases in the military budget ... He opposes any slacking off in America's
global military presence."
Now, if Kaplan had done a similar interview with Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, such lines might have been throwaways, since a secretary of state is
today little more than a fancy facilitator, ever less central to what that
magazine, with its
outmoded name, might still call "foreign policy". Remind me: When was the last
time you heard anyone use that phrase - part of a superannuated world in which
"diplomats" and "diplomacy" were considered important - in a meaningful way?
These days "foreign policy" and "global policy" are increasingly a single
fused, militarized entity, at least across what used to be called "the Greater
Middle East", where what's at stake is neither war nor peace, but that
"military presence".
As a result, Gates' message couldn't be clearer: despite two disastrous wars
and a global "war on terror" now considered "multi-generational" by those in
the know, trillions of lost dollars, and staggering numbers of deaths (if you
happen to include Iraqi and Afghan ones), the US military mustn't in any way
slack off. The option of reducing the global mission - the one that's never on
the table when "all options are on the table" - should remain nowhere in sight.
That's Gates' bedrock conviction. And when he opposes any diminution of the
global mission, it matters.
Slicing up the world like a pie
As we know from a Peter Baker front-page New York Times profile of Barack Obama
as commander-in-chief, the 49-year-old president "with no experience in
uniform" has "bonded" with Gates, the 66-year-old former spymaster,
all-around-apparatchik, and holdover from the last years of the George W Bush
era. Baker describes Gates as the president's "most important tutor", and on
matters military like the Afghan war, the president has reportedly "deferred to
him repeatedly".
Let's face it, though: deference has become the norm for the Pentagon and US
military commanders, which is not so surprising. After all, in terms of where
our money goes, the Pentagon is the 800-pound gorilla in just about any room.
It has, for instance, left the State Department in the proverbial dust. By now,
it gets at least $12 for every dollar of funding that goes to the State
Department, which in critical areas of the world has become an adjunct of the
military.
In addition, the Pentagon has taken under its pilotless predatory wing such
previously civilian tasks as delivering humanitarian aid and "nation-building".
As Gates has pointed out, there are more Americans in US military bands than
there are foreign service officers.
If it's true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then you can
gauge the power of the Pentagon by the fact that, at least in Iraq after 2011,
the State Department is planning to become a mini-military - an armed outfit
using equipment borrowed from the Pentagon and an "army" of mercenary guards
formed into "quick reaction forces", all housed in a series of new
billion-dollar "fortified compounds", no longer called "consulates" but
"enduring presence posts" (as the Pentagon once called its giant bases in Iraq
"enduring camps").
This level of militarization of what might once have been considered the
Department of Peaceful Solutions to Difficult Problems is without precedent and
an indicator of the degree to which the government is being militarized.
Similarly, according to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has managed to take
control of more than two-thirds of the "intelligence programs" in the vast
world of the US intelligence community, with its 17 major agencies and
organizations. Ever since the mid-1980s, it has also divided much of the globe
like a pie into slices called "commands". (Our own continent joined the crew as
the US Northern Command, or Northcom, in 2002, and Africa, as Africom in 2007.)
Before stepping down a notch to become Afghan war commander, General David
Petraeus was US Central Command (Centcom) commander, which meant military
viceroy for an especially heavily garrisoned expanse of the planet stretching
from Egypt to the Chinese border. Increasingly, in fact, there is no space,
including outer space and virtual space, where our military is uninterested in
maintaining or establishing a "presence".
On October 1, for instance, a new Cyber Command headed by a four-star general
and staffed by 1,000 "elite military hackers and spies" is to hit the keyboards
typing. And there will be nothing shy about its particular version of
"presence" either. The Bush-era concept of "preventive war" (that is, a war of
aggression) may have been discarded by the Obama administration, but the
wizards of the new Cyber Command are boldly trying to go where the Bush
administration once went. They are reportedly eager to establish a virtual
war-fighting principle (labeled "active defense") under which they could
pre-emptively attack and knock out the computer networks of adversaries.
And the White House and environs haven't been immune to creeping militarization
either. As presidents are now obliged to praise American troops to the skies in
any "foreign policy" speech - "Our troops are the steel in our ship of state" -
they also turn ever more regularly to military figures in civilian life and for
civilian posts. Obama's National Security Adviser James Jones is a retired US
Marine Corps four-star general, and from the Bush years the president kept on
army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute as "war czar", just as he appointed
retired army Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry as our ambassador to
Afghanistan, and recently replaced retired admiral Dennis Blair with retired
air force Lieutenant General James Clapper as the Director of National
Intelligence. (He also kept on David Petraeus, Bush's favorite general, and
hiked the already staggering Pentagon budget in Bushian fashion.)
And this merely skims the surface of the non-stop growth of the Pentagon and
its influence. One irony of that process: even as the US military has failed
repeatedly to win wars, its budgets have grown ever more gargantuan, its sway
in Washington ever greater, and its power at home ever more obvious.
Generals and admirals mouthing off
To grasp the changing nature of military influence domestically, consider the
military's relationship to the media. Its media megaphone offers a measure of
the reach and influence of that behemoth, what kinds of pressures it can apply
in support of its own version of foreign policy, and just how, under its
weight, the relationship between the civilian and military high commands is
changing.
It's true that, in June, the president relieved Afghan war commander General
Stanley McChrystal of duty after his war-frustrated associates drank and
mouthed off about administration officials in an inanely derogatory manner in
his presence - and the presence of a Rolling Stone magazine reporter. ("Biden?
... Did you say: Bite Me?") But think of that as the exception that proves the
rule.
It's seldom noted that less obvious but more serious - and egregious - breaches
of civilian/military protocol are becoming the norm, and increasingly no one
blinks or acts. To take just a few recent examples, in late August commandant
of the Marine Corps General James Conway, due to retire this autumn, publicly
attacked the president's "conditions-based" July 2011 drawdown date in
Afghanistan, saying, "In some ways, we think right now it is probably giving
our enemy sustenance."
Or consider that, while the Obama administration has moved fiercely against
government and military leaking of every sort, when it came to the strategic
leaking (assumedly by someone in, or close to, the military) of the "McChrystal
plan" for Afghanistan in the autumn of 2009, nothing at all happened even
though the president was backed into a policy-making corner. And yet, as Andrew
Bacevich pointed out, "The McChrystal leaker provid[ed] Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban leadership a detailed blueprint of exactly how the United States and
its allies were going to prosecute their war."
Meanwhile, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen, on a
three-day cross-country "tour" of Midwestern business venues (grandiloquently
labeled "Conversations with the Country"), attacked the national debt as "the
most significant threat to our national security". Anodyne as this might sound,
with election 2010 approaching, the national debt couldn't be a more political
issue.
There should be, but no longer is, something startling about all this. Generals
and admirals now mouth off regularly on a wide range of policy issues,
appealing to the American public both directly and via deferential (sometimes
fawning) reporters, pundits, and commentators. They and their underlings
clearly leak news repeatedly for tactical advantage in policy-making
situations. They organize what are essentially political-style barnstorming
campaigns for what once would have been "foreign policy" positions, and
increasingly this is just the way the game is played.
From combat to commentary
There's a history still to be written about how our highest military commanders
came to never shut up.
Certainly, in 1990 as Gulf War I was approaching, Americans experienced the
first full flowering of a new form of militarized "journalism" in which, among
other things, retired high military officers, like so many play-by-play
analysts on Monday Night Football, became regular TV news consultants. They
were called upon to narrate and analyze the upcoming battle ("showdown in the
Gulf"), the brief offensive that followed, and the aftermath in something close
to real time. Amid nifty logos, dazzling Star Wars-style graphics, theme music,
and instant-replay nose-cone snuff films of "precision" weapons wiping out the
enemy, they offered a running commentary on the progress of battle as well as
on the work of commanders in the field, some of whom they might have once
served with.
And that was just the beginning of the way, after years of post-Vietnam War
planning, the Pentagon took control of the media battlefield and so the popular
portrayal of American-style war. In the past, the reporting of war had often
been successfully controlled by governments, while generals had polished their
images with the press or - like Omar Bradley and Douglas MacArthur - even
employed public relations staffs to do it for them. But never had generals and
war planners gone before the public as actors, supported by all the means a
studio could muster on their behalf and determined to produce a program that
would fill the day across the dial for the full time of a war.
The military even had a version of a network Standards and Practices department
with its guidelines for on-air acceptability. Military handlers made decisions
- like refusing to clear for publication the fact that Stealth pilots viewed
X-rated movies before missions - reminiscent of network show-vetting practices.
When it came time for Gulf War II, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military
had added the practice of putting reporters through pre-war weeklong "boot
camps" and then "embedding" them with the troops (a Stockholm Syndrome-type
experience that many American reporters grew to love). It also built itself a
quarter-million-dollar stage set for nonstop war briefings at Centcom
headquarters in Doha, Qatar.
All of this was still remarkably new in the history of relations between the
Pentagon and the media, but it meant that the military could address the public
more or less directly both through those embedded reporters and over the
shoulders of that assembled gaggle of media types in Doha.
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