Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [11]
Finally, not to be forgotten, is Strategic Command—formerly known as Strategic Air Command—with its sea- and land-based ballistic missiles and its fleet of long-range bombers standing ready “to deliver integrated kinetic and non-kinetic effects to include nuclear and information operations” anywhere in the world at any time;15 information operations is a euphemism for cyberwarfare, that mission soon to be assumed by yet another new headquarters to be called CYBERCOM.
Inside the Washington Beltway, none of this qualifies as controversial. Beyond the Beltway, the Pentagon’s global posture generates far less interest than the latest doings of Hollywood celebrities.
Call it habit or conditioning or socialization: The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy. To cast doubts on the principles of global presence, power projection, and interventionism, as Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich did during the 2008 presidential primaries, is to mark oneself as an oddball or eccentric, either badly informed or less than fully reliable; certainly not someone suitable for holding national office.
Because these concepts are so deeply entrenched, what passes for a “debate” over national security policy seldom rises above technical issues. Bureaucratic process—the never-ending review of and wrangling over budgetary priorities—becomes a mechanism for perpetuating the status quo and for distracting attention from the extent to which the Washington rules—the American credo of global leadership and the sacred trinity of U.S. military practice—commit the United States to what is in effect a condition of permanent national security crisis.
James Forrestal, the first person to serve as secretary of defense, coined a term to describe this permanent crisis. He called it semiwar.16 Conceived by Forrestal at the beginning of the Cold War, and reflecting his own anticommunist obsessions, semiwar defines a condition in which great dangers always threaten the United States and will continue doing so into the indefinite future. When not actively engaged in hostilities, the nation faces the prospect of hostilities beginning at any moment, with little or no warning. In the setting of national priorities, readiness to act becomes a supreme value.
Semiwarriors created the Washington rules. Semiwarriors uphold them. Semiwarriors benefit from their persistence.
Regardless of what threats actually exist, semiwarriors, some in uniform, others wearing suits, concur in the need to sustain high levels of military spending. Even as they sometimes make a show of bemoaning a stupendously profligate military-industrial complex, they routinely write off tens of billions of wasted taxpayer dollars. Professing alarm at the prospect of any would-be adversary gaining an edge anywhere in anything, they devote huge sums not just to enhancing existing U.S. capabilities, but to developing entirely new ones—weapons systems sometimes set decades into the future and blue-sky technologies that sound like material for science-fiction novels. Although careful to genuflect before the historic achievements of the citizen-soldier, they also nurture a warrior class largely divorced from the society it serves. Never missing an opportunity to proclaim their undying devotion to peace, these semiwarriors insist that nothing should impede U.S. preparations for war.
Amid this constant clatter of sabers being honed, rattled, drawn, and thrust, fundamental questions about efficacy go unasked. The commonplace assertion that an ever-quickening pace of change confronts the United States with ever more complex problems reinforces this tendency. If the challenges of the present are without precedent, then the past has little of relevance to offer. So habits become entrenched. Contradictions