PENTAGON GONE ROGUE

Pentagon spending has to be brought under control. It has grown to the point where, to use a tired old cliché, the tail is waging the dog. Just like a rogue general, we have to bring it back under civilian control. We did not heed the Eisenhower warning concerning the military industrial complex. Now, we are paying the price. Almost every congressional district in the union has a defense contractor. Which in an economic crisis means every one of them has a good reason to vote in support of “defense contracting”. It means jobs for the voters in their districts. This seems to be the heart of a vicious and in many ways paradoxical circularity. I do not want war but I need a job. Only a small number of the 300,000 people in our great country really want war for the sake of war, which is what Iraq was; by far most of us want peace.  

The circularity continues. We use culturally established traditions to recruit “cannon fodder”; if they put on a uniform they are heroes, they are the macho among us, they are our defenders of liberty, which includes the sentiment that we do not want our returning “warriors” especially the wounded to suffer. Thus, we unbalance society by creating a moral group for them: job preference, medical care, and rehabilitation programs, among many other things. We respond by creating expensive NGO’s and governmental veteran organizations.   There are few among us who would say we should not do these things. Yet, most of us would agree that we should not go to war because it creates more wounded veterans.

The pentagon with our help has corrupted our university system with sponsored research; the change from teaching to patentable research that has now gotten out of hand. That starts with the need to develop the “machines of war” and continues unabated. Our heroes should be professors not generals. Teachers who educate our teachers, who in turn educate our children and university professors in their ivory towers who develop and disseminate knowledge for the sake of knowledge and not for the sake of more money are the real heroes. The subject of the Amazon book University Industrial Complex, which is about the only book on the market that does not champion the industrialist who are taking over our institutions of higher education.

The Secretary of Defense, with huge hands full of money, engages in mission creep. As Generals, who keep asking for more troops, when given the resources they find a need. You can not fight an enemy unless you have an enemy to fight. The best way for an excessively funded war machine to engage in mission creep is to be the major force in foreign relations. The Department of “War” is taking over the function of the State Department, which is the Department of “Peace”. They use the huge Pentagon budget to do it. The people of the United States have to ask why the Sec. of Defense would be running around the world sprinkling sums of money by supplying material to countries: 200 marines to Guatemala, 20 pickup trucks to Belize, and who knows how much to Taiwan. The first question is why is he is doing it. Are these the seeded of war. The second question is how can he afford to do it? We know that answer.

Obama is in a bind. Reckless spending in the Bush administration created an economic crisis, which for the military industrial complex is a crisis they are trying not to waste. The bind is that Obama needs jobs to save our economy. This brilliant man is struggling mightily for jobs to build this countries infrastructure and not defense contracting for the Pentagon. For the sake of the world, I hope he wins.