Bellum Se Ipsum Alet – War Feeds Itself
As has been a theme in these pages: when problems are solved politically, political power becomes entrenched and unadaptive; the problem then exists outside a rational feedback loop, and costs and benefit calculations are eclipsed by political ones, incumbents left with distorted power. Repeat the cycle enough times and you are left with, well, distorted political power. And distorted political power is a deadpan way to describe the Defense Department. Remember from the last Washington Monument piece when I had you readers imagine your leaders wearing a Groucho Marx get-up when they employ their ancient, Vaudevillian gags of resistance to spending cuts? Here is just a wee bit of how the capers work with defense, with the wars on terror and the budget-reduction sequester:
A recent study shows an astonishing amount of the Pentagon’s budget is simply wasted, but threaten to cull the military budget, attempt to require financial discipline, and the aircraft carriers will be photogenically lined up at pier, out of service, closed for business, the nation naked before aerial nautical threats. Incredible that men who will unhesitatingly risk their lives for their country will create core failure in their mission out of competition for money, but there it is.
Left unsaid is that we’ve worn out half of our naval aviation assets chasing phantom insurgents in places tangential, if not irrelevant, to America’s commitment as upholder of global freedom of navigation, the chase going on for half of a generation now. That same job could just as well have been done with armed crop dusters. Juxtapose the Navy fighter, the most expensive way to bring aerial ordinance there is, with the Islamic insurgent, traveling by donkey, to see why they say “Americans have the watches, but we have the time.” What is obvious to these Islamo-fascist resurrectors of the dark ages, has not penetrated the melons of the aviation-happy Admirals in the inner rings of our defense sanctum, who insist on having a piece of the war action, irrespective of inefficiency Tying the carriers up at the pier for the whole Global War on Terror might not have been a bad idea, for the types of warfare we wore them out with. It’s diamond bullets for shooting rats.
When Apple’s sales were off, they did not hold iPads off the shelves to extort more money from their customers. They adapted because they compete in an ecosystem that requires constant successful adaptation. And few companies have successfully made all the successful adaptations needed for losing-term survival, which is why only one, General Electric, has been on the Fortune 500 list for a Century. Knowing right is hard, doing right is hard, and getting it wrong should bring failure. Unless we are talking about the government, where failure only ever raises an argument for more. The military, particularly in this age of high stakes, nigh-instant destruction, should not be this expensively sedate. Everything that lives and breathes wants more, but the rules of getting the wants of more vary greatly by ecosystem. Apple and GE had to ask for it, but the government and the military can make everyone else adapt to them, so adaptation is, predictably, quite rare.
Inefficiency (axiomatic to say that the more efficiency, the less expense, the greater the wealth for other things) in managing the public’s purse is bad enough, but in the case of war it’s lives that feed the constituencies. In this light, consider how the US military adapted itself to the collapse of the adversary it was built against: the Soviet Union. Consider how the US security apparatus has brought itself increase, contriving to use aircraft carriers to counter a question of spirituality, soul and culture: Islamic terror, whose most decisive weapon has been the box cutter. Marvel at the size of the defense institution that grew up to counter the Islamic terror threat, and be astonished at the complete lack of value for our defense dollar. We did more with less when we blew up Europe.
Congress makes the army buy M1 tanks it does not want and cannot use, meanwhile a new affront of neglect of the veterans by the Veterans Administration shows up in the media nigh daily. The distorted power of the political war ecosystem is why Afghanistan can have phantom water projects, but we can’t provide water for Flint MI. And that’s conceding the idea that government should do infrastructure. A libertarian case against government controlling infrastructure would be: shipping infrastructure money away to Afghanistan because of political calculus made by unaccountable controllers is why you don’t trust the unaccountable controllers with the power.
Has there ever been a senior Pentagon Official who has come to the Press or Congress offering the argument: “Security of base is strategy 101, applied when we were the most junior officers with one bar of rank. That base is the American economy, and we need to think of it the same way we think of sappers in our wire, or detecting submarines. Yet by the time all the staff and command schools are finished, senior Pentagon officers prosper over the ruinous expense of the strategies we advocate.” If you know of one so career-suicidally honest, write me in the comments, I’d love to see it.
Here’s the rare exception I found:
If the Department of Defense can’t figure out a way to defend the United States on a budget of more than half a trillion dollars a year, then our problems are much bigger than anything that can be cured by a few more ships and planes.
That was Robert Gates, maybe the senior national security official in the nation, one of the last respected non partisan figures, and obviously no mom’s-basement blogging, libertarian neck-beard. Incredibly, in my opinion, Mr. Gates underestimates the case by almost half.
Again, this shows how hard it is to go inside a distorted political loop and unloop it, reform it. The people living in the loop will not want it untangled, naval aviator, Admiral, or Baltimore cop.
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