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The Evil and Malevolence of the Pentagon’s Brilliant Strategy in Ukraine

Posted by M. C. on February 19, 2022

The canny FDR left American warships (but not American carriers) in Pearl Harbor as bait for the Japanese. His strategy worked brilliantly. Sure, he had to sacrifice some warships and some troops at Pearl Harbor (as well as in the Philippines), but his ingenious strategy enabled him to achieve his goal. Soon after the Japanese attack, Germany declared war on the United States. FDR dutifully went to Congress, played the innocent, exclaimed a day of infamy, and got his declaration of war and U.S. entry into World War II.

The Evil and Malevolence of the Pentagon’s Brilliant Strategy in Ukraine

by Jacob G. Hornberger

The crisis in Ukraine demonstrates the sheer brilliance of Pentagon strategists. Yes, granted, it’s an evil and malevolent strategy, but nonetheless one cannot help but admire it for its sheer ingenuity.

The strategy has involved maneuvering Russia into having to make a choice between two scenarios, both of which have bad consequences. The choices are these: (1) Russia does not invade Ukraine, in which case the U.S.-controlled NATO absorbs Ukraine, which means U.S. bases, missiles, tanks, and troops permanently situated on Russia’s borders; or (2) Russia invades Ukraine and takes over the reins of government, in which case U.S. officials portray Russia as a horrific aggressor that now threatens the rest of Europe, the United States, and all mankind.

Like I say, it’s an evil and malevolent strategy but everyone has to concede that it is absolutely ingenious. 

The box into which the Pentagon has placed Russia reminds me of the equally ingenious strategy that President Franklin Roosevelt employed to get the United States into World War II. Prior to U.S. entry into the war, the American people were overwhelmingly opposed to entering the conflict, especially after the fiasco of U.S. intervention into World War I. 

This was at a time when U.S. presidents were still complying with the constitutional provision that requires them to secure a declaration of war from Congress before being able to wage war legally and constitutionally against another nation-state. Owing to the overwhelming opposition to entering the war, FDR knew that he could not get Congress to declare war on Germany. 

Thus, FDR decided that he needed to figure out a strategy that would induce Germany to attack the United States, which would then enable him to go to Congress and exclaim, “We’ve been attacked! I am shocked! This is a day that will live in infamy! Now give me my declaration of war so that I can begin waging war against Germany.”

Thus, Roosevelt did everything he could to induce the Germans into attacking U.S. vessels in the Atlantic. But the strategy didn’t work. The Germans knew was FDR was up to and refused to take his bait. 

So, Roosevelt looked instead toward the Pacific and embarked on a course of action designed to induce Japan into attacking the United States. FDR hoped that such an attack would give him a “back door” to the European war.

Knowing that Japan’s military needed oil to operate its war machine in China, Roosevelt imposed a highly effective oil embargo on Japan. That left Japan with two choices: (1) Withdraw its military forces from China, or (2) Attack the Dutch East Indies to secure a permanent supply of oil.

Not surprisingly, Japan chose Option 2. But Japan knew that the U.S. Navy was almost certain to interfere with its oil supply after it invaded the Dutch East Indies. Thus, the only way to ensure that a continuous supply of oil was by knocking out the U.S. naval fleet. That’s what the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was all about. The attack was never about conquering the United States. It was always about simply trying to knock out the U.S. fleet to ensure a continuous supply of oil for Japan’s war machine in China.

The canny FDR left American warships (but not American carriers) in Pearl Harbor as bait for the Japanese. His strategy worked brilliantly. Sure, he had to sacrifice some warships and some troops at Pearl Harbor (as well as in the Philippines), but his ingenious strategy enabled him to achieve his goal. Soon after the Japanese attack, Germany declared war on the United States. FDR dutifully went to Congress, played the innocent, exclaimed a day of infamy, and got his declaration of war and U.S. entry into World War II.

Yes, Roosevelt’s strategy was evil and malevolent, but you can’t help but admire it for its sheer brilliance. Like the Pentagon has done with Ukraine, FDR manipulated the situation so that Japanese officials were put into a box that entailed choosing from two available alternatives, both of which came with bad consequences from the standpoint of Japan.

(Also, see my recent blog post “Setting Up Crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine.”)

Today, all that the Pentagon — along with its loyal supporters in the executive branch, including President Biden and the bureaucrats in the State Department, and along with its loyal acolytes in the mainstream press — has to do is sit back and watch Russia squirm. If it invades Ukraine, it will be portrayed as the supreme aggressor nation, which will then be used to justify the continued existence of the U.S. national-security establishment and NATO, along with ever-increasing budgets, power, and influence for the U.S. “defense” establishment. It Russia declines to invade, NATO absorbs Ukraine and the Pentagon installs its military bases, troops, missiles, and tanks on Russia’s border, thereby ensuring a state of constant tension and crisis, which, once again, ensures ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess for the national-security establishment, its Cold War dinosaur NATO, and the entire U.S. “defense” industry that feeds at the public trough.

The only way out of this evil statist morass lies with the American people. What is needed is a great awakening within Americans, one that comes with both a heightened sense of consciousness of the evil of a national-security state form of governmental structure and a heightened sense of conscience that enables people to recognize the evil and malevolence within their own government, not to mention the danger of playing games with a nation-state that has the potential of unleashing a massive number of mushroom clouds over American cities and towns. If that great awakening were to transpire, America could restore its founding governmental system of a limited-government republic and put our nation back on the road toward liberty, peace, prosperity, morality, and harmony with the people of the world. 

This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger

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The War Party Wants a New Cold War, and the Money that Comes with It | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on February 14, 2022

Note also that Mead uses the “spending as a percentage of GDP” metric which is a favorite metric of military hawks. They use this metric because as the US economy has become more productive, wealthy, and generally larger, the US has been able to maintain sky-high military spending levels without growing the amount of spending in relation to GDP.

https://mises.org/wire/war-party-wants-new-cold-war-and-money-comes-it

Ryan McMaken

In perhaps the most predictable column of the year, the Wall Street Journal this week featured a column by Walter Russell Mead declaring it’s “Time to Increase Defense Spending.”

Using the Beijing Olympics and the potential Ukraine War to push for funneling ever more taxpayer dollars into military spending, Mead outlines how military spending ought to be raised to match the sort of spending not seen since the hot days of the Cold War. 

Mead claims that “The world has changed, and American policy must change with it.” The presumption here is that the status quo is one of declining military spending in which Americans have embraced some sort of isolationist foreign policy. But the reality doesn’t reflect that claim at all. The status quo is really one of very high levels of military spending, and even outright growth in most years. This sort of gaslighting my military hawks is right up there with leftwing attempts to portray the modern economy as one of unregulated laissez-faire.  

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Rather, according to estimates from the White House’s office of management and budget, military spending is set to reach a post-World War II high in 2022, rising to more than $1.1 trillion. That includes $770 billion spent on the Pentagon plus nuclear arms and related spending. Also included is current spending on veterans. Keeping veteran spending apart from defense spending is a convenient and sneaky political fiction, but veterans spending is just deferred spending for past active duty members—necessary to attract and retain personnel. And finally, we have the “defense” portion of the interest of the debt, estimated to be about 20 percent of total interest spending. Taking all this together, we find military spending has increased 13 years out of the last twenty, and is now at or near the highest levels of spending seen since the Second World War. 

This, not surprisingly, is not enough for Mead who would like to see military spending much closer to the Cold War average of 7 percent of GDP, up from today’s spending of a little less than 4 percent. To get this average back up would require at least an extra $300 billion in spending, possibly even requiring spending levels not seen since the bad old days of the Vietnam War. In those days, of course, the US was busy spending enormous amounts of taxpayer wealth on a losing war that cost tens of thousands of American lives. The spending was so enormous that the US regime was driven to breaking the dollar’s last link to gold and subjecting ordinary Americans to years of price controls, inflation, and other forms of economic crisis. 

But none of that will dissuade hawks like Mead who pound the drum incessantly for more military spending. Note also that Mead uses the “spending as a percentage of GDP” metric which is a favorite metric of military hawks. They use this metric because as the US economy has become more productive, wealthy, and generally larger, the US has been able to maintain sky-high military spending levels without growing the amount of spending in relation to GDP. The use of this metric allows hawks to create the false impression that military spending is somehow going down, and that the US is being taken over by peaceniks. In reality, spending levels remain very high—it’s just that the larger economy has been robust. 

Yet, even if we use this metric—and then compare it to other states with large militaries—we find that Mead’s narrative doesn’t quite add up. These numbers in no way suggest that the US regime is being eclipsed by rivals in terms of military spending. 

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For example, according to the World Bank, China—with a GDP comparable to that of the US—has military spending amounting to about 1.7 percent of GDP (as of 2020). Meanwhile, the total was at 3.7 percent of GDP in the United States. Russian military spending rose to 4.2 percent of GDP in 2020, but that’s based on a GDP total that’s a small fraction of the US’s GDP. Specifically, the Russian economy is less than one-tenth the size of the US economy. 

Thus, when we look at actual military spending, we find the disconnect to be quite clear. 

According to the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, in 2020 total Chinese military spending totaled approximately $245 billion in 2019 dollars. In Russia, the total was $66 billion. In the US, the total—which in the SIPRI database excludes veterans spending and interest—amounted to $766 billion in 2020. 

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In other words, total military spending by these presumed rivals amounts to mere fractions of total spending in the US. Moreover, as China scholar Michael Beckley has noted, the US benefits from pre-existing military capital—think military know-how and productive capability—built up over decades. Even if the US and China (or Russia) were spending comparable amounts on military capability right now, this would demonstrate any sort of actual military superiority in real terms. 

But, as usual, Mead’s strategy is to claim that financial prudence is in fact imprudence with the usual refrain of “you can’t afford to not spend boatloads of extra money!” This claim is premised on the new domino theory being offered by anti-Russia hawks today. This theory posits that if the US does not start wars with every country that pushed back against US hegemony—i.e., Iran or Russia—then China will see this “weakness” and start conquering countless nations within its own periphery. 

The old cold warriors were telling us this back in 1965 also, insisting that a loss in Vietnam would place all the world under the Communist boot. Needless to say, that didn’t happen, and it turned out Vietnam had nothing to do with American national security. 

But none of this will convince the usual hawks—for example the Heritage Foundation—that there’s ever enough military spending. 

Prudence, however, suggests the US should be going in the opposite direction. At its most belligerent, the US regime should be adopting a doctrine of restraint—focusing on naval defense and cutting back troop deployments—while changing its nuclear posture to one that is less costly and more defensive. 

The ideal solution is far more radically anti-interventionist than that, but a good start would be eliminating hundreds of nuclear warheads and freezing military spending indefinitely. After all, the US’s deterrent second-strike capability does not at all depend on keeping an arsenal of thousands of warheads, as many hawks insist. And geography today continues to favor US conventional defense, just as it always has. 

Unfortunately, we’re a long way from a change toward much more sane policy, but at the very least we must reject the latest opportunistic calls for a new cold war and trillions more taxpayer dollars burned in the name of “defense.” 

Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first.

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William Hartung, Mission (Im)possible — and You’re Paying for It

Posted by M. C. on February 4, 2022

When all else fails, the Pentagon’s fallback argument for the F-35 is the number of jobs it will create in states or districts of key members of Congress. As it happens, virtually any other investment of public funds would build back better with more jobs than F-35s would. Treating weapons systems as jobs programs, however, has long helped pump up Pentagon spending way beyond what’s needed to provide an adequate defense of the United States and its allies.

As it happens, though, there are just a few teeny, weeny glitches with it. For one thing, it reportedly can’t reliably either launch or retrieve the planes that make it an aircraft carrier. And for good measure, according to Bloomberg News, it can’t defend itself effectively from incoming missiles either. 

https://tomdispatch.com/what-a-waste/

Whatever the U.S. military may be considered, it isn’t usually thought of as a scam operation. Maybe it’s time to change that way of thinking, though. After all, we’re talking about a crew with a larger “defense” budget than the next 11 countries combined (and no, that’s not a misprint). Mind you, I’m not even focusing here on how a military funded, supplied, and armed like no other on this planet has proven incapable of winning a war in this century, no matter the money and effort put out. No, what’s on my mind is its weaponry in which American taxpayers have invested so many endless billions of dollars.

For example, take the latest, most up-to-date, most expensive aircraft carrier in history, the USS Gerald Ford. (Yes, it’s named after the president everyone’s forgotten, the one who took over the White House when Richard Nixon fled town in disgrace.)  Hey, what a bargain it was when Huntington Ingalls Industries delivered that vessel to the Navy for a mere (and no this isn’t a misprint either) $13 billion — $20 billion, if you’re including the aircraft it carries. And it only represents the first of a four-ship, $57-billion program.  You might imagine that, with $13 billion invested in a single ship, you’d be getting the sort of vessel that would do Star Trek proud, a futuristic creation for at least the 21st, if not the 22nd century of war.

As it happens, though, there are just a few teeny, weeny glitches with it. For one thing, it reportedly can’t reliably either launch or retrieve the planes that make it an aircraft carrier. And for good measure, according to Bloomberg News, it can’t defend itself effectively from incoming missiles either.  After “cannibalizing” parts from another aircraft carrier under construction, it is, however, finally being deployed, only four years late.

Honestly, it would be easy enough to think that I was writing a ridiculous parody here, but no such luck. And, remarkably enough, as TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert William Hartung points out today, that ship is anything but alone in the U.S. arsenal. Just see his comments below on the F-35 jet fighter for another obvious example. In fact, as you read Hartung, ask yourself whether this boondoggle — and just about the only thing that Congress can agree on with remarkable unanimity — turns out to be a “defense” version of Watergate. So, where’s Gerald R. Ford when we really need him? Tom

What a Waste!

$778 Billion for the Pentagon and Still Counting

By William Hartung

2021 was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for.

It can’t be emphasized enough just how many taxpayer dollars are now being showered on the Pentagon. That department’s astronomical budget adds up, for instance, to more than four times the cost of the most recent version of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which sparked such horrified opposition from Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and other alleged fiscal conservatives. Naturally, they didn’t blink when it came to lavishing ever more taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.

Opposing Build Back Better while throwing so much more money at the Pentagon marks the ultimate in budgetary and national-security hypocrisy. The Congressional Budget Office has determined that, if current trends continue, the Pentagon could receive a monumental $7.3 trillion-plus over the next decade, more than was spent during the peak decade of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when there were up to 190,000 American troops in those two countries alone. Sadly, but all too predictably, President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops and contractors from Afghanistan hasn’t generated even the slightest peace dividend. Instead, any savings from that war are already being plowed into programs to counter China, official Washington’s budget-justifying threat of choice (even if outshone for the moment by the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine). And all of this despite the fact that the United States already spends three times as much as China on its military.

The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste — from vast overcharges for spare parts to weapons that don’t work at unaffordable prices to forever wars with immense human and economic consequences. Simply put, the current level of Pentagon spending is both unnecessary and irrational.

Price Gouging on Spare Parts

See the rest here

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Where is JFK When You Need Him? – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on January 30, 2022

What are the chances that President Biden will stand up to the Pentagon and the CIA and come up with a satisfactory resolution of the Ukraine crisis? Slim and none. No president since Kennedy has been willing to stand up to the national-security establishment. It’s not difficult to understand why.

https://www.fff.org/2022/01/26/where-is-jfk-when-you-need-him/

by Jacob G. Hornberger

President Kennedy had a unique way of viewing his communist adversaries during the Cold War. He would put himself in their shoes and try to figure out what was motivating them to take the actions they were taking. He would then attempt to fashion a solution to a particular crisis that satisfied the other side’s concerns. 

America’s Cold War generals lacked the mental capacity to think at that level. Their mindsets were always in terms of black and white: Communists are bad and cannot be trusted. There can never be negotiation with communists. Kill all communists. 

A good example of this dichotomy occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the United States and the Soviet Union to within an inch of all-out nuclear war. 

When Pentagon and CIA officials discovered that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, their position was that Kennedy needed to immediately start bombing Cuba and then follow up with a full-scale ground invasion. Their position was much the same as the Russian position today with respect to Ukraine: They didn’t want Russian nuclear missiles pointed at the U.S. from only 90 miles away, just as today Russia doesn’t want U.S. nuclear missiles pointed at Russia from along Russian borders. 

Thus, for the generals, the situation was black and white. In their minds, the only way to deal with this problem was to show toughness by bombing and invading Cuba. For them, failure to do that would display “weakness,” which would only encourage the worldwide communist movement. 

Much to the anger and even rage of the generals, Kennedy took a different position. He tried to figure out what was motivating the Russians to engage in this dangerous nuclear brinkmanship. 

Rather than immediately start bombing and invading Cuba, Kennedy imposed a blockade on the island, which he called a “quarantine.” It prohibited any Soviet ships with missiles from proceeding to Cuba. 

At the same time, Kennedy figured out that the Soviets had placed their missiles in Cuba for two reasons: 

One, the Soviets and the Cubans knew that the Pentagon and the CIA were hell-bent on effecting regime-change in Cuba through violence. Even though the CIA’s invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs had failed miserably, the Soviets and the Cubans knew that the Pentagon and the CIA were more determined than ever to oust the Cuban communist regime from power and install another pro-U.S. dictatorship, either through assassination, terrorism, or outright military invasion.

That, of course, is what the CIA’s assassination plots against Castro, in partnership with the Mafia, were all about. The Soviets and the Cubans were also right about the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s insistence on invading Cuba. Consider, for example, Operation Northwoods. That was a top-secret plan that was unanimously approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that provided fraudulent pretexts for war with Cuba. To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he rejected any and all plans that entailed fraudulent pretexts for war with Cuba.

Two, the U.S. government had nuclear missiles based in Turkey that were pointed at the Soviet Union. Given such, the Soviet position was that it had as much right to install its nuclear missiles in Cuba that were pointed at the United States.

Kennedy figured all this out and decided to fashion a solution based on his insights into why the Soviets were behaving in that way. The solution entailed a promise that the United States would not invade Cuba, along with a separate secret side promise to remove U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey. The Soviets, for their part, agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba and take them home. The crisis was over.

But not the war between Kennedy and the Pentagon and the CIA, which had gotten increasingly worse after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The generals were livid with Kennedy. During the crisis, Gen. Curtis LeMay, who loathed Kennedy, compared his actions to those of Neville Chamberlain at Munich. After the crisis was over, LeMay called Kennedy’s resolution of the crisis the biggest defeat in U.S. history. 

There is no reasonable doubt that this was when the national-security establishment decided that Kennedy needed to be removed from office and replaced by Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, who was on the same Cold War page as the Pentagon and the CIA. By his failure to provide needed air support for the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, followed by his failure to approve Operation Northwoods, through his decision to leave Cuba permanently in communist hands, and by his decision to withdraw America’s nuclear missiles from Turkey, as far as the Pentagon and the CIA were concerned, Kennedy had proven that he was not capable of confronting and defeating the supposed communist threat to America.

For his part, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy realized the role that the Pentagon and the CIA had played in causing the crisis. If the Pentagon and the CIA had not been hell-bent on bringing about regime change in Cuba and had not installed U.S. nuclear missiles in Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union, the Soviets would not have placed their nuclear missiles in Cuba.

More important, Kennedy came to the realization that the entire Cold War was nothing but a highly dangerous and destructive racket. Therefore, in June 1963, he delivered his famous Peace Speech at American University, where he effectively declared an end to the Cold War and called for peaceful and friendly relations with the Soviet Union and the rest communist world. If there was anyone in the military and CIA hierarchy who still had doubts that Kennedy needed yo be removed from office in order to save America from a communist takeover, those doubts would have been eliminated after JFK’s Peace Speech. 

Don’t forget, after all, that establishing peaceful and friendly relations with the communist world is why the CIA violently ousted the democratically elected Guatemalan president, Jacob Arbenz, in 1954 and why the CIA would orchestrate the violent ouster of Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, from 1970 through 1973.

Kennedy was not a dumb man. He knew the dangers he was facing from his national-security establishment. That was why he helped to make the novel Seven Days in May, which posited the danger of a military takeover, into a movie. He wanted to warn the American people of the dangers posed by the national-security state governmental system, which America had adopted after World War II. Before you call Kennedy a “conspiracy theorist” though, keep in mind that President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, had also warned the American people of the dangers that the military-industrial complex posed to America’s democratic processes. Keep in mind also President Truman’s op-ed that was published in the Washington Post only a month after the Kennedy assassination stating that the CIA had become a sinister force in American life.

What are the chances that President Biden will stand up to the Pentagon and the CIA and come up with a satisfactory resolution of the Ukraine crisis? Slim and none. No president since Kennedy has been willing to stand up to the national-security establishment. It’s not difficult to understand why. EMAIL

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Pentagon on Russia Invasion: ‘Just Kidding’

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2022

After weeks of hysterically hyping the story that Russia is poised to invade Ukraine, Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby walked way back as Ukraine’s own government officials called nonsense on the narrative. Was the whole thing just bluster for ratings? Also today: Capitol Hill Cops spying on social media of staff and visitors for no reason?

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The Praetorian Psyop | The Z Blog

Posted by M. C. on January 14, 2022

There is some of that, for sure, but the FBI has been framing people as domestic terrorists for generations. They used to work with organized crime to frame people for murders committed by gangsters. That made the FBI look good and they did not have to do any real work.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=26305

Z Man

The Pentagon announced that it will be conducting guerilla warfare training in North Carolina in the coming weeks. The point of the exercise is to train American soldiers to battle “seasoned freedom fighters”, according to the Army. They say they made the announcement so that the public would not be shocked by the sound of weapons or the sight of the soldiers conducting war games. The exercises are going to be conducted on private lands in the western part of the state

This announcement coincides with the Department of Justice announcing the formation of a specialized unit focused on domestic terrorism. According to the DOJ, “We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.” What they are saying is the hysterical reaction to the January 6 protests is entirely justified as there is an invisible army out there making bombs.

See the rest here

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Will we finally accept that ‘precision airstrikes’ don’t exist? – Responsible Statecraft

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2021

A Times exposé revealing a ‘system of impunity’ at the Pentagon regarding civilian casualties should be a catalyst for change.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/22/will-we-finally-accept-that-precision-airstrikes-dont-exist/

Written by
Kate Kizer

“Strive.” “Lawfulness.” “An honest mistake.” “Unintended consequences.” “Access to classified intelligence.”

These are words that come up repeatedly in U.S. justifications of “regrettable” civilian casualties caused by U.S. or U.S. supported military operations. The U.S. military responded similarly to this week’s bombshell investigative reporting by Azmat Khan in the New York Times revealing that Pentagon documents regarding alleged civilian harm in 1,311 airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan — the “Civilian Casualty Files” or CCF — highlight “a system of impunity” rather than a system of accountability in the U.S. post-9/11 wars. 

Just as the Air Force Inspector General found in an investigation into the now infamous August 29 drone strike of Zemari Ahmadi and his family in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Pentagon didn’t find any “wrongdoing” in the CCF. It instead focused on ways to “improve process” in order to avoid such situations in the future. The military’s hindsight reveals flaws but nothing nefarious; there was no wrongdoing in these strikes because it was not the drone operator’s, or the military’s intent to kill civilians or misidentify them, rather it was a miscalculation of the estimated costs to civilians.

Debating the legality of individual strikes or admitting the need to improve the strike process misses the forest for the trees: this investigation shows, once again, the very idea of a precise air warfare is flawed and attempts to make it more humane only reinforce the entrenchment of the status quo. The U.S. military’s intent behind these strikes does not matter to the hundreds, possibly thousands of unacknowledged civilian victims of U.S. “precision” airwars over the last two decades. It does not matter to survivors of drone strikes that killing a handful was worth killing hundreds.

The egregious human costs of the U.S. drone and air strike campaigns are a failure, but also a symptom of larger strategic dissonance in U.S. counterterrorism doctrine. The Times report shows, time and again, that the intelligence prompting target tracking and, in part, strike authorization, is flawed. The misidentification of the target, often due to confirmation bias, and the presumption of guilt, keep the institutional incentives behind continued airstrikes. Moreover, the myth of surgical strikes doesn’t hold up when thousand pound payloads are dropped in urban or residential areas, no matter how precise the weaponry.

Meanwhile, the underlying factors driving support of armed nonstate groups — government corruption and/or non-presence, lack of economic opportunity, insecurity and state violence — remain unaddressed. Civilian-harming U.S. drone strikes (often in alliance with the local ruling authority) then provide fresh fodder to inflame these grievances for mobilization. Never mind the fact that the very threats these strikes are supposed to address were very much born from previous U.S. military misadventures in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Instead, we continue to implement policies that terrorize children in response to our own perceptions of insecurity.

For all its boasts of reviewing “lessons learned,” the decision to keep the systematic harm to civilians produced by U.S. drone wars hidden from public view sure seems like evidence of an attempt to paper over those lessons, and the larger ineffectiveness of the endless war enterprise they expose. As the United States expanded its endless post-9/11 ground wars into drone wars across the Levant, Central Asia, and Africa, the question of whether and under what auspices these wars were happening became less and less transparent. Revealing the true costs of remote warfare presents an inconvenient truth for the U.S. military as the Biden administration seeks to pivot to a new era of counterterrorism and gReAt PoWeR competition.

According to administration officials, this approach will be guided by investing in the capacity of partners to fight these wars for us, combined with “over-the-horizon” operations, cybersecurity, and law enforcement efforts. That’s less a pivot to the future than a re-emphasis of certain tools already in the toolkit, belying a fundamental misunderstanding of the challenge at hand. It isn’t a critical evaluation of the last 20 years, or the very strategy that has guided the expansion of these wars. And it doesn’t address the flaws identified in the CCF or the broader post-9/11 wars following multiple nation-building failures.

The “Civilian Casualties Files,” just like the “Afghanistan Papers” before it, are yet more evidence that the U.S. government — at the very least the U.S. military — knew the costs and failures of these wars, decided the collateral damage was acceptable, and continued on with bombing as usual. Will these files help create momentum for accountability? If it’s left up to the military and the president, the apparent answer is a resounding “no.” The question remains, what will Congress’s response be, and if any change will finally come.

Written by
Kate Kizer

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We Ended the War in Iraq (Yes Again, But Also Not Really) | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on December 12, 2021

but all 2,500 troops that are currently in the country will stay in an advisory role.

As so the cycle resumes.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/we-ended-the-war-in-iraq-yes-again-but-also-not-really/

by Dave DeCamp

On Thursday, the Pentagon announced the formal end to the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, but all 2,500 troops that are currently in the country will stay in an advisory role.

The Biden administration agreed with Iraq back in July to end the U.S. combat mission by the end of this year, and it was clear when the announcement was made that US troops would stay and nothing would really change.

The Iraqi government has been under pressure to expel the U.S. since January 2020, when the U.S. killed Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a drone strike in Baghdad. In the wake of the assassination, Iraq’s parliament voted unanimously to kick the U.S. out.

Tensions flared earlier this year when President Biden bombed Iraqi Shia militias in eastern Syria and then again in Iraq. The deal to formally end the U.S. combat role was meant to placate the militias that the U.S. has been targeting, but without any significant drawdown of troops, they will likely not be satisfied.

“Remember, this is a change in mission, right? Not necessarily a change in physical posture,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said. “There won’t be a dramatic shift from yesterday to tomorrow, based on how we’ve already been working ourselves into this new mission.”

Keeping troops in Iraq will achieve little but create a tripwire for further conflicts with Iraq’s Shia militias. The U.S. troops are technically staying in Iraq to advise and train the government in its fight against ISIS remnants. But the U.S. presence is likely more about curbing Iranian influence and supporting the US occupation of eastern Syria.

This article was originally featured at Antiwar.com

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Pentagon: U.S. military footprint staying right where it is – Responsible Statecraft

Posted by M. C. on December 1, 2021

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, National Guard units from Virginia and Kentucky sent 1,000 troops to Africa for “Task Force Red Dragon.” As Page/Plant wrote, “everything that’s small has got to grow,” and this footprint isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet.

VA and KY Guard in Africa. How does that defend VA and KY?

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/11/30/pentagon-u-s-military-footprint-staying-right-where-it-is/

Written by
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

An unclassified summary of the Defense Department’s Global Posture review was released Monday and in the words of the indomitable Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, the song of American military primacy worldwide pretty much “remains the same.”

Of course the summary of the GPR, which has been long anticipated, doesn’t offer much detail, but the bottom line is this: China remains a key “pacing threat” and it will be met. There seems to be no plan, however, for reshuffling U.S. military forces from other theaters to grow the foot print in East Asia. Instead, Washington aims to build upon its strategic partnerships in the region. Where there is actual growth in the footprint, mentioned below, much of that had already been announced previously:

(The GPR) directs additional cooperation with allies and partners to advance initiatives that contribute to regional stability and deter potential Chinese military aggression and threats from North Korea.  These initiatives include seeking greater regional access for military partnership activities; enhancing infrastructure in Australia and the Pacific Islands; and planning rotational aircraft deployments in Australia, as announced in September.  The GPR also informed Secretary Austin’s approval of the permanent stationing of a previously-rotational attack helicopter squadron and artillery division headquarters in the Republic of Korea, announced earlier this year.

Most of the hullabaloo over the Australia-UK-U.S. (AUKUS) agreement in September had been over the transfer of nuclear submarine technology to Australia. But as David Vine pointed out in this RS article, AUKUS is also allowing the U.S. to station more assets and personnel Down Under, including, “combined logistics, sustainment, and capability for maintenance to support our enhanced activities, including…for our submarines and surface combatants” and “rotational deployments of all types of U.S. military aircraft to Australia.”

As the Wall Street Journal noted Monday in its summary of the summary, the Biden administration’s goal of meeting “China’s military buildup and more assertive use of power” doesn’t seem to be coming at the expense of U.S. force posture in other parts of the world. Those forces are largely staying put.

According to the DoD summary, in Europe, the GPR “strengthens the U.S. combat-credible deterrent against Russian aggression and enables NATO forces to operate more effectively.” This includes leaving the 25,000 troops President Trump wanted to take out of Germany right where they are in the region (which we already knew about). There is no further detail on how Washington plans to “strengthen the deterrent” against Russia, though we know there have been plenty of efforts on Capitol Hill to send more troops to Europe.

Those hoping to see the Biden administration begin to extricate from the Middle East won’t find much solace in this summary either. Without committing either way, the DoD says “the GPR assessed the department’s approach toward Iran and the evolving counterterrorism requirements following the end of DoD operations in Afghanistan. In Iraq and Syria, DoD posture will continue to support the Defeat-ISIS campaign and building the capacity of partner forces.  Looking ahead, the review directs DoD to conduct additional analysis on enduring posture requirements in the Middle East.”

The big news here is that Washington is not even considering leaving Iraq and Syria, which many smart analysts deem essential not only for American interests, but for the security of the region. On the greater question of whether there will be a major shift toward reducing the U.S.-led security obligations in the Middle East, the summary, at least, seems to punt. On Africa and the Americas, as indicated by the release yesterday, no discernible change in posture.

This shouldn’t come as any surprise, as the signs of status quo are all around us — just read the RS piece by Nick Turse on U.S. commando presence in Africa, and then in Europe. Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, National Guard units from Virginia and Kentucky sent 1,000 troops to Africa for “Task Force Red Dragon.” As Page/Plant wrote, “everything that’s small has got to grow,” and this footprint isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet.

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Theater Of Absurd… Pentagon Demands Russia Explain Troops On Russian Soil | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on November 21, 2021

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/theater-absurd-pentagon-demands-russia-explain-troops-russian-soil

Tyler Durden's Photoby Tyler Durden

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin this week performed impressive, albeit pathetic, mental gymnastics.In a press conference, the Pentagon chief called on Russia to be more transparent about troop movements “on the border with Ukraine”. In others words, on Russian soil.

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