[R-G] Will the Pentagon Be the Next U.S. Institution to Crash?

[Anthony Fenton]

Will the Pentagon Be the Next U.S. Institution to Crash?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081002_will_the_pentagon_be_the_next_us_institution_to_crash/

Posted on Oct 2, 2008

By William Pfaff

The nuclear physicist Leo Szilard once remarked that the fall of the  
Soviet system would eventually lead to the fall of the American  
system. He said that in a two-element structure, the interrelationship  
and interdependence are such that the one cannot survive without the  
other.

This comment has been relayed by a friend, and as Szilard has passed  
to his reward I am in no position to explain his reasoning, but it is  
possible to restate it in political terms, and we are seeing the  
result in finance and in war. I think that Szilard was implying what a  
very intelligent opponent of the United States also said when the Cold  
War ended. Georgi Arbatov, former head of the U.S.A. and Canada  
Institute of the Soviet Union, said to an American interlocutor: We  
are about to do something truly terrible to you. We are going to  
deprive you of your enemy.

Without the enemy, the machinery of power begins to race, with nothing  
to resist it; megalomania sets in. The end of the Cold War coincided  
with the beginning in the United States of globalized finance,  
launched under the Clinton administration. It operated with ever more  
dazzling and daring gambles in which the constraints and tension of  
the Cold War were replaced by the psychology of greed and excess.

The economic crisis that has now overtaken the United States can be  
interpreted as the logical result of a financial system that reached  
the point where there was no limit to what you could take out of it  
even when you were incapable of understanding the transactions taking  
place.

Less apparent to most people, but just as real, are the signs of an  
impending crash of an American military system in which, since the end  
of the Cold War, Pentagon dysfunction has metastasized so  
uncontrollably as to scandalize both the man who was defense secretary  
when the so-called war on terror began and the current secretary,  
Robert M. Gates, the man in charge as that war mutates into the “Long  
War.”

The war has been renamed the “Long War” because no one has a better  
name for it, and nearly everyone fears that it may go on forever,  
since it seems to be a war against disorder, failed nations, rogue  
states and the collective miseries of all the world beyond the  
frontiers of the United States and Europe.

On Sept. 10, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delivered  
a speech in which he declared that the greatest threat to the security  
of the United States was the organization over which he presided, the  
Pentagon and its bureaucracy. He said that its waste and disorder had  
to be brought under effective control—an undertaking which he was not  
sure could succeed, but to which he was dedicating himself.

The next day brought the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center  
and the Pentagon. Rumsfeld’s planned reforms mostly had to be  
abandoned. He had a vision of postmodern war in which a limited number  
of special troops on the ground would control electronic intelligence  
systems, high-technology air forces and unmanned drones to destroy  
primitive enemies. Old-fashioned infantry would be obsolete. Rumsfeld  
kept a news photo in his office of a special forces horseman galloping  
across the Afghan plain while directing an assault from the air  
against the Taliban.

More conventional officers opposed Rumsfeld’s ideas, and the luckless  
Taliban, which had prepared entrenchments against ground assault,  
found itself decimated (or worse) by high-level B-52 raids coming from  
bases in the United States, Britain and the Indian Ocean, under whose  
bombardments peasant soldiers and tribal levees were helpless.

Afghanistan was then turned over to ethnic warlords who previously had  
been defeated by the Taliban, and Rumsfeld went on to a new shock-and- 
awe victory in Iraq, which rapidly turned into a fiasco, because there  
wasn’t enough old-fashioned infantry.

There still isn’t, because the use and abuse of occupation forces have  
discouraged recruitment in the all-volunteer army. There is a new/old  
war in Afghanistan, spilling into Pakistan, and commanders are  
demanding more ground troops. Secretary Gates doesn’t have them in  
sufficient numbers, unless he takes them from Iraq (and declares  
victory there, a rash move).

The speech he gave last Monday to the National Defense University in  
Washington accused the Pentagon bureaucracy of obsession with high- 
technology weaponry to defeat enemies the United States does not (yet)  
have, using hypermodern weapons yet to be invented. He accused it of  
“idealized, triumphalist or ethnocentric notions of future conflict  
that aspire to upend the immutable principles of war.”

He said that during four decades, the trend line of Pentagon  
procurement has been toward lower numbers and higher technology,  
toward weapons systems “that have been ever more baroque, ever more  
costly, taking longer to build, and fielded in ever dwindling  
quantities.” There could not be a better description of a bureaucracy  
in decadence, just as the same phrase must be applied to a financial  
system for multiplying the apparent value of fundamentally worthless  
securities. (It was Alan Greenspan who said that American finance had  
symbolically passed through the sound barrier of the known financial  
system and now was in an entirely new dimension. So it had, as we see  
now.)

I think that what Leo Szilard was saying is that a system cut free  
from the opposition that kept it honest passes into hubris, otherwise  
known as irrational exuberance, and after hubris comes the fall.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.