Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA How the Pentagon shapes the world
By Frida Berrigan
asserted that, if the "war on terror" was going to stretch far into the future,
he did not want to continue the Pentagon's "near total dependence on the CIA".
And so Rumsfeld set up a new, directly competitive organization, the Pentagon's
Strategic Support Branch, which put the intelligence-gathering components of
the US Special Forces under one roof reporting directly to him. (Many in the
intelligence community saw the office as illegitimate, but Rumsfeld was riding
high and they were helpless to do anything.)
As Seymour Hersh, who repeatedly broke stories in the New
Yorker on the Pentagon's misdeeds in the "war on terror", wrote in January
2005, the Bush administration had already "consolidated control over the
military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations
to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-World War II national-security
state".
In the rush to invade Iraq, the civilians running the Pentagon also fused the
administration's propaganda machine with military intelligence. In 2002, under
secretary of defense Douglas Feith established the Office of Special Plans
(OSP) in the Pentagon to provide "actionable information" to White House
policymakers. Using existing intelligence reports "scrubbed" of qualifiers like
"probably" or "may" or sometimes simply fabricated ones, the office was able to
turn worst-case scenarios about Saddam Hussein's supposed programs to develop
weapons of mass destruction into fact, and then, through leaks, use the news
media to validate them.
Former CIA director Robert Gates, who took over the Pentagon when Rumsfeld
resigned in November 2006, has been critical of the Pentagon's "dominance" in
intelligence and "the decline in the CIA's central role". He has also signaled
his intention to roll back the Pentagon's long intelligence shadow; but, even
if he is serious, he will have his work cut out for him. In the meantime, the
Pentagon continues to churn out "intelligence" which is, politely put, suspect
- from torture-induced confessions of terrorism suspects to exposes of the
Iranian origins of sophisticated explosive devices found in Iraq.
5. The Pentagon as domestic disaster manager: When the deciders
in Washington start seeing the Pentagon as the world's problem-solver, strange
things happen. In fact, in the Bush years, the Pentagon has become the official
first responder of last resort in case of just about any disaster - from
tornadoes, hurricanes and floods to civil unrest, potential outbreaks of
disease or possible biological or chemical attacks.
In 2002, in a telltale sign of Pentagon mission creep, Bush established the
first domestic military command since the civil war, the US Northern Command
(Northcom). Its mission: the "preparation for, prevention of, deterrence of,
preemption of, defense against, and response to threats and aggression directed
towards US territory, sovereignty, domestic population, and infrastructure; as
well as crisis management, consequence management, and other domestic civil
support."
If it sounds like a tall order, it is.
In the past six years, Northcom has been remarkably unsuccessful at anything
but expanding its theoretical reach. The command was initially assigned 1,300
Defense Department personnel, but has since grown into a force of more than
15,000. Even criticism only seems to strengthen its domestic role. For example,
an April 2008, Government Accountability Office report found that Northcom had
failed to communicate effectively with state and local leaders or National
Guard units about its newly developed disaster and terror response plans. The
result? Northcom says it will have its first brigade-sized unit of military
personnel trained to help local authorities respond to chemical, biological or
nuclear incidents by this autumn. Mark your calendars.
More than anything else, Northcom has provided the Pentagon with the opening it
needed to move forcefully into domestic disaster areas previously handled by
national, state and local civilian authorities.
For example, Northcom's deputy director, Brigadier General Robert Felderman,
boasts that the command is now the United States's "global synchronizer - the
global coordinator - for pandemic influenza across the combatant commands".
Similarly, Northcom is now hosting annual hurricane preparation conferences and
assuring anyone who will listen that it is "prepared to fully engage" in future
Katrina-like situations "in order to save lives, reduce suffering and protect
infrastructure".
Of course, at present, the Pentagon is the part of the government gobbling up
the funds that might otherwise be spent shoring up America's Depression-era
public works, ensuring that the Pentagon will have failure aplenty to respond
to in the future.
The American Society for Civil Engineers, for example, estimates that $1.6
trillion is badly needed to bring the nation's infrastructure up to protectable
snuff, or $320 billion a year for the next five years. Assessing present water
systems, roads, bridges, and dams nationwide, the engineers gave the
infrastructure a series of C and D grades.
In the meantime, the military is marching in. Katrina, for instance, made
landfall on August 29, 2005. Bush ordered troops deployed to New Orleans on
September 2 to coordinate the delivery of food and water and to serve as a
deterrent against looting and violence. Less than a month later, Bush asked
Congress to shift responsibility for major future disasters from state
governments and the Department of Homeland Security to the Pentagon.
The next month, Bush again offered the military as his solution - this time to
global fears about outbreaks of the avian flu virus. He suggested that, to
enforce a quarantine, "One option is the use of the military that's able to
plan and move."
Already sinking under the weight of its expansion and two draining wars, many
in the military have been cool to such suggestions, as has a Congress concerned
about maintaining states' rights and civilian control. Offering the military as
the solution to domestic natural disasters and flu outbreaks means giving other
first responders the budgetary short shrift. It is unlikely, however, that
Northcom, now riding the money train, will go quietly into oblivion in the
years to come.
6. The Pentagon as humanitarian caregiver abroad: The US Agency
for International Development and the State Department have traditionally been
tasked with responding to disaster abroad; but, from Indonesia's
tsunami-ravaged shores to Myanmar after the recent cyclone, natural catastrophe
has become another presidential opportunity to "send in the Marines" (so to
speak). The Pentagon has increasingly taken up humanitarian planning, gaining
an ever larger share of US humanitarian missions abroad.
From Kenya to Afghanistan, from the Philippines to Peru, the US military is
also now regularly the one building schools and dental clinics, repairing roads
and shoring up bridges, tending to sick children and doling out much needed
cash and food stuffs, all civilian responsibilities once upon a time.
The Center for Global Development finds that the Pentagon's share of "official
development assistance" - think "winning hearts and minds" or "nation-building"
- has increased from 6% to 22% between 2002 and 2005. The Pentagon is fast
taking over development from both the Non governmental organization-community
and civilian agencies, slapping a smiley face on military operations in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and beyond.
Despite the obvious limitations of turning a force trained to kill and destroy
into a cadre of caregivers, the Pentagon's mili-humanitarian project got a big
boost from the cash that was seized from Saddam Hussein's secret coffers. Some
of it was doled out to local American commanders to be used to deal with
immediate Iraqi needs and seal deals in the months after Baghdad fell in April
2003. What was initially an ad hoc program now has an official name - the
Commander Emergency Response Program (CERP) - and a line in the Pentagon
budget.
Before the House Budget Committee last summer, Gordon England, the deputy
secretary of defense, told members of Congress that the CERP was a
"particularly effective initiative", explaining that the program provided
"limited but immediately available funds" to military commanders which they
could spend "to make a concrete difference in people's daily lives". This, he
claimed, was now a "key part of the broader counter insurgency approach". He
added that it served the purpose of "complementing security initiatives" and
that it was so successful many commanders consider it "the most powerful weapon
in their arsenal".
In fact, the Pentagon doesn't do humanitarian work very well. In Afghanistan,
for instance, food-packets dropped by US planes were the same color as the
cluster munitions also dropped by US planes; while schools and clinics built by
US forces often became targets before they could even be put into use. In Iraq,
money doled out to the Pentagon's sectarian-group-of-the-week for wells and
generators turned out to be just as easily spent on explosives and AK-47s.
7. The Pentagon as global viceroy and ruler of the heavens: In
the Bush years, the Pentagon finished dividing the globe into military
"commands", which are functionally viceroyalties. True, even before 9/11, it
was hard to imagine a place on the globe where the United States military was
not, but until recently, the continent of Africa largely qualified.
Along with the creation of Northcom, however, the establishment of the US
Africa Command (Africom) in 2008 officially filled in the last Pentagon empty
spot on the map. A key military document, the 2006 National Security Strategy
for the United States signaled the move, asserting that "Africa holds growing
geostrategic importance and is a high-priority of this administration". (Think:
oil and other key raw materials.)
In the meantime, funding for Africa under the largest US military aid program,
Foreign Military Financing, doubled from $10 to $20 million between 2000 and
2006, and the number of recipient nations grew from two to 14. Military
training funding increased by 35% in that same period (rising from $8.1 million
to $11 million). Now, the militaries of 47 African nations receive US training.
In Pentagon planning terms, Africom has unified the continent for the first
time. (Only Egypt remains under the aegis of the US Central Command.) According
to Bush, this should "enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the
people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health,
education, democracy and economic growth in Africa".
Theresa Whelan, assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, continues
to insist that Africom has been formed neither to facilitate the fighting of
wars ("engaging kinetically in Africa"), nor to divvy up the continent's raw
materials in the style of 19th century colonialism. "This is not," she says,
"about a scramble for the continent." But about one thing there can be no
question: It is about increasing the global reach of the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, should the Earth not be enough, there are always the heavens to
control. In August 2006, building on earlier documents like the 1998 US Space
Command's Vision for 2020 (which called for a policy of "full spectrum
dominance"), the Bush administration unveiled its "national space policy". It
advocated establishing, defending and enlarging US control over space resources
and argued for "unhindered" rights in space - unhindered, that is, by
international agreements preventing the weaponization of space. The document
also asserted that "freedom of action in space is as important to the United
States as air power and sea power".
As the document put it, "In the new century, those who effectively utilize
space will enjoy added prosperity and security and will hold a substantial
advantage over those who do not." (The leaders of China, Russia and other major
states undoubtedly heard the loud slap of a gauntlet being thrown down.) At the
moment, the Bush administration's rhetoric and plans outstrip the resources
being devoted to space weapons technology, but in the recently announced
budget, the president allocated nearly a billion dollars to space-based weapons
programs.
Of all the frontiers of expansion, perhaps none is more striking than the
Pentagon's sorties into the future. Does the Department of Transportation offer
a Vision for 2030? Does the Environmental Protection Agency develop plans for
the next 50 years? Does the Department of Health and Human Services have a team
of power-point professionals working up dynamic graphics for what services for
the elderly will look like in 2050?
These agencies project budgets just around the corner of the next decade. Only
the Pentagon projects power and possibility decades into the future, colonizing
the imagination with scads of different scenarios under which, each year, it
will continue to control hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.
Complex 2030, Vision 2020, UAV Roadmap 2030, the army's Future Combat Systems -
the names, which seem unending, tell the tale.
As the clock ticks down to November 4, 2008, a lot of people are investing hope
(as well as money and time) in the possibility of change at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue. But when it comes to the Pentagon, don't count too heavily on change,
no matter who the new president may be.
After all, seven years, four months and a scattering of days into the Bush
presidency, the Pentagon is deeply entrenched in Washington and still
aggressively expanding. It has developed a taste for unrivaled power and
unequaled access to the treasure of this country. It is an institution that has
escaped the checks and balances of the nation.
Frida Berrigan is a senior program associate at the New America
Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative. She is a columnist for Foreign
Policy in Focus and a contributing editor at In These Times magazine. She is
the author of reports on the arms trade and human rights, US nuclear weapons
policy, and the domestic politics of US missile defense and space weapons
policies. She can be reached at berrigan@newamerica.net.
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