Behind Schedule And Ahead Of The Curve

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Behind Schedule And Ahead Of The Curve
By: Spencer Ackerman Tuesday August 3, 2010 5:00 pm	Tweet

At the risk of unfurling banners on the aircraft carrier that this blog represents in my mind: wow, are these guestposts great. I post here with apprehension. You guys are putting me to shame. And I love it. Keep up the great work. (Though I have to ask Mikey: what’s your beef with the X-Men? Check out the Second Coming storyline before you make any final critical assessments.)

So I’ve been hanging out at Andrews AFB since yesterday, making use of iffy-to-good internet access and waiting in vain to get to Germany on a big Air Force bird before moving on to Bagram. Flight yesterday got delayed until 11 or so. About an hour after we finally boarded, we learned there was a non-trivial problem with the aircraft and went back to the terminal. A few hours passed without us learning if we’d be able to get off the ground. By 4:30 I managed to get some sleep. Long story short: after one big scare this afternoon, it looks like I won’t miss the plane in Germany that I’m scheduled to take to Afghanistan. Not counting chickens. Everyone who’s ever flown mil-air knows what I’m talking about. Adam sagely alluded to it yesterday.

On to the reading front: Chris Preble has a really excellent response to the Perry/Hadley counter-QDR; the QDR; and critics of both documents. He teases out both documents’ presumptions of hegemony:

Trade routes need not be policed by a single dominant power; the international economy is complex and resilient. Supply disruptions are likely to be temporary, and the costs of mitigating their effects should be borne by those who stand to lose — or gain — the most. Islamic extremists are scary, but hardly comparable to the threat posed by a globe-straddling Soviet Union armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. It is frankly absurd that we spend more today to fight Osama bin Laden and his tiny band of murderous thugs than we spent to face down Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao.

And on and on. You could even presume hegemony and find yourself agreeing with Chris’ points. One option in that regard would be to question whether expenditures relative to U.S. global burdens are too bloated, while presuming the burdens are in the U.S. interest. Another would be to question whether those expenditures ultimately jeopardize those burdens by bringing them to the point of fiscal and political insolvency, risking a contraction dangerous to sustained hegemony. (Though, in fairness, Chris might be disinclined to accept that as a genuine argument, given his assessment that “We could choose to shift money out of other government programs; we could raise taxes; or we could continue to finance the whole thing on debt, and stick our children and grandchildren with the bill.”)

None of this is meant to make a case for hegemony, just to highlight that Chris is making insightful points about a mismatch between strategy and resources.

2 Comments

2 Responses to “Behind Schedule And Ahead Of The Curve”

Frank33 August 3rd, 2010 at 6:13 pm

I got a kick out of the QDR, written by war criminals Stephen Hadley and Richard Armitage, plus gaggle of war profiteers. This reminds me of the SSCI Report on the Christmas Day Bombing which had nothing about the Christmas Day Bombing. The QDR Report has nothing about nine years of failure, corruption and war crimes. Of course Hadley and Armitage have never told the truth about anything, and they have blood on their hands as they add to their Swiss Bank accounts.

The QDR calls for indefinite War. It is published by the Institute for Peace. But the QDR describes the consolidation and infiltration of more neo-cons into the national security “community”.

Most obviously, the number, duration, and character of conflicts in the greater Middle East have been unanticipated…

The conflict with Iraq…an effort that—if successful—will stretch indefinitely into an ongoing strategic partnership. But Iraq is neither the only example nor an anomaly: the American commitment to Afghanistan is in its ninth year and disengagement is likely to be many years away.

The QDR describes how to infiltrate even more neo-cons into the national security “community”, and purge the unreliable liberals and defeatists. All agencies of the government will now serve neo-con national security goals. Their fascist takeover has a name, “Whole Of Government”.

Both the QDR and the recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) use the term ―whole of government, to denote the integration of all tools of national power (defense, diplomacy, economic, development, democratic reform and human rights, homeland security, intelligence, strategic communications, and the American people and the private sector) in support of U.S. national security goals and objective.

There is also something called “continuum-of-service”. This would allow government employees to move fluidly between the private sector and “other employment”. This other employment would include difficult jobs that should not be publicized such as, Assassins, Torturers, Secret Informants and work in False Flag Operations.

Instituting a continuum-of-service model that allows service members to move fluidly between the active and reserve components and between the military, private sector, civil service, and other employment.