Will our generals ever shut up?

[ensho]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LI09Ak03.html


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."

-snip-

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.

-snip-

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.

-snip-

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.)

-snipped were these sections:

Generals and admirals mouthing off
From combat to commentary
A chorus of military intellectuals
Producing war

and the article ends with:

"Nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what these men have to say. Nothing in the record indicates that Washington won't be all ears, the media won't remain an enthusiastic conduit, and Americans won't follow their lead. "
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the pentagon is destroying america