Silencing of the Military Retirees?

A Department of Defense directive released on April 18 of this year states that Donald Rumsfeld has the authority to call military retirees back on active duty.

The Practical Nomad reports that:

Exhausting all means of getting people into uniform short of a draft, yesterday the USA Department of Defense published new regulations on Management and Mobilization of Regular and Reserve Retired Military Members (32 CFR 64, 71 Federal Register 19827-19829, 18 April 2006)…

…The only time in the last 40 years, before the current wars, that military retirees were recalled to active duty was during the crisis in military staffing in medical professions in the first USA-Iraq war in 1990-1991, when the call-ups of retirees began with retired physicians' assistants. The new regulations provide for the possible call-up of any and all retired soldiers, but the first call-ups of retirees are likely to be of those with medical or perhaps other specialized skills.

The DoD directive does, in fact, make anyone drawing military retirement pay eligible to be recalled to service at the pleasure of the Secretary of Defense, and they assigned to virtually any federal "wartime" position that the government deems fit. No further permission of Congress is required because such measures are already allowed under Title 10 of U.S. Code. It is not subject to review under numerous federal laws such as Unfunded Mandates Reform Act or the Regulatory Flexibility Act because, among other reasons, the cost isn't expected to exceed $100 million in any one year.

In other words, the life of every American citizen who retired honorably from the United States military is under the direct control of one Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Why Now?

We're over three years into the Iraq war and almost five years into the Global War on Terror. Why is the Secretary of Defense just now deciding he needs to draw on the retired military community? Why does the entire retired community need to be in the eligible pool? Why wasn't this directive announced at the DoD website, and why hasn't the mainstream media covered it?

A number of possible answers to these questions exist, of course, but the release of the directive on the heels of the well publicized revolt of the retired generals is timing too close to dismiss as pure coincidence.

While the retired generals critical of the war and Rumsfeld have received the most attention in the media, scores of military retirees of lower pay grades have voicing their displeasure with the administration and the Pentagon for years. As dissent began to disappear from traditional military publications--rumored to have been by the order Rumsfeld himself--many retired war critics took refuge in the Internet. My personal experience and anecdotal evidence shared by fellow military affairs writers indicate that numerous government agencies have been keeping tabs on web sites that regularly publish articles unfavorable to the war effort by military retirees and other veterans.

Just Because You're Paranoid…

Up until about two years ago, I'd have considered the kind of thing I'm suggesting is going on to be a wild eyed conspiracy theory. But given the Bush administration's track record for ruthlessly suppressing any and all political opposition, I find the notion that it is tracking military dissenters more likely than unlikely.

According to the just released directive, if the Department of Defense finds retirees it wants to shut up, all it has to do is call them back to active duty. It doesn't really matter how old or disabled the retirees are, or whether they have any specialty the DoD could possibly use, because Rumsfeld has essentially written himself a blank check to tap anyone he wants to.

Once retirees are back on active duty, they come under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and their constitutional rights--including the right to freedom of speech--are essentially stripped from them.

If retirees resist a call back to active duty, they'll be in violation of federal law and subject to criminal prosecution either under the UCMJ or civilian law. This would likely lead to, at the very least, loss of all retirement pay and benefits.

Does this sound like a trick too dirty for even the Bush administration to pull? Not to me it doesn't.

I doubt that Rumsfeld would pull this kind of number on the retired generals who have publicly called for his resignation. Their cases are already too high profile to sneak under the radar.

But if any of you lesser retired beings get a call in the middle of the night, please let somebody know about it.

Tony Snow: The New Cape in the Bush Bull Ring

I'm all a-chuckle over the general description of Fox News pundit Tony Snow's appointment as the new White House Press Secretary as being part of the "White House makeover." Heh. It will take a lot more than lipstick to make that pig look pretty.

We have the most transparently secretive government in the history of this country.

We know that the Iraq policy was formulated by the Project for the New American Century in the nineties, and that the 9/11 attacks were the "convenient excuse" the neoconservatives in and around the administration were looking for to execute that policy.

We know that Cheney and others cooked the intelligence on Hussein's WMD, and that the Rove machine used White House friendly reporters like Judith Miller to spread disinformation to the American public through the mainstream news media.

And that's just where it starts.

What's more, as the polls show, the Bush administration's line of bull has run thin. Even American citizens who understand little to nothing about rhetoric and propaganda tricks know that every time administration officials and supporters open their mouths, they're blowing smoke.

Changing the color of the smoke by substituting Snow for McClellan won't change the perceptions of anyone but already terminally brainwashed, and their perceptions don't need changing, at least not as far as the White House is concerned.

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The Bush administration's rhetoric has seldom reflected anything resembling reality. In that regard, they are typical of what Princeton Professor Emeritus Harry G. Frankfurt described in his celebrated essay "On Bullshit."

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. ...The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Thus it is with the Rovewellians. Facts and evidence matter not a whit. If you can come up with the right talking points, and speak them forcefully enough, and echo them often enough, the truth is irrelevant. Until, of course, you've bullshit your way through one too many truths, and all but the most gullible have caught on to you. At that point, hiring a bigger and better bullshit artist to talk to the press for you isn't going to do any good.

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Speaking of bullshit artists…

I don't know how this happened, but I've gotten myself on a number of conservative publishers' e-mail lists. Maybe somebody was playing a practical joke on me, but whatever the case, I'm glad it happened, because all these right wing literature promos give an insight to the extent of the cognitive dissonance of the right wing mindset. One of these outfits--Human Events Online--just sent me a promo for Ann Coulter's upcoming book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

According to the Human Events promo, Ann "proves" that in The Church of Liberalism, abortion is a sacrament, Roe v. Wade is "holy writ" and Soviet spies like Alger Hiss are martyrs. Ann even "refutes" the sacred liberal myth of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

And all in one book!

For subscribing to the Human Events book club, you can get Godless--a $27.95 value--for free!

I find it an utterly fantastic fact of the American condition that a book by Ann Coulter costs $27.95 in an age when you can buy a leather bound copy of Shakespeare's complete works for $19.99.

A thousand monkeys pecking away at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years couldn't come up with a single one of Shakespeare's soliloquies. But they could probably produce something vastly superior to the complete works of Ann Coulter.

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I just heard former Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers say on MSNBC that Tony Snow will have to listen to "two voices in his head." One will no doubt tell him what incredible bullshit he's handing out to the White House Press Corps. The other one will be saying, "Take the money, then run to Ann Coulter's publisher, and take more money."

All the nonsense we're hearing about Tony's criticisms of Bush is, well, bullshit. At heart, he's a Coulter-class administration and neoconservative agenda supporter . On his Fox News show, he toed the company line about Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson, John Kerry and the Swift Boaters, liberal justices, George W. Bush's Vietnam era service, and much more.

Tony Snow is just a bigger, redder cape in the Bush administration bullring. We'll see how effective he is at continuing to fool the mindless beasts.

Van Riper Rips Rummy

In a Fox News interview, Retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul van Riper joined the chorus of former general officers calling for Donald Rumsfeld to leave his post as Secretary of Defense. (Hand salute to Think Progress for the link to the video.)

Van Riper has been long regarded as a leading iconoclast in the retired flag community. Long active in simulated war games, he resigned as commander of the opposition force during Millenium Challenge 2002, the battle experiment conducted by the United States Joint Forces Command just prior to the invasion of Iraq. Using unorthodox tactics, van Riper managed to sink most of the simulated U.S. naval forces in the Arabian Gulf, decisively defeating the "blue force" and repudiating such Rumsfeld favored "transformational warfare" concepts as network-centric warfare, shock and awe, and effects based operations. The game was stopped, the fleet re-floated, and the exercise continued with significant restrictions placed on the "red" force's actions. Van Riper resigned in disgust.

Almost four years later, we have seen what amounts to a real world recreation of the 2002 war game in Iraq. Except this time, Rumsfeld and his loyal generals can't stop the clock, go back, and make the enemy fight the way they want them to.

Rumsfeld is a nightmare, and I agree that nothing is going to get better as long as he's on the job. I don't think a new man in the Defense cabinet post can fix the fiasco in Iraq, and the same probably holds true for the "defeat snatched from the jaws of victory" situation in Afghanistan. There is nothing that can constitute "winning" in those two theaters of operations. The best we can hope for is avoidance of a complete loss.

But we have the war on terror--the real war on terror, not the distraction in Iraq--to conduct, and to date, Rumsfeld has handled it horribly.

Almost six years after the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon has at long last come out with a comprehensive set of plans to fight terrorism outside of the two war theaters. We don't know too much about the plans because they're secret, so the only parts of it we'll hear about are the parts Rumsfeld authorizes to be leaked. But from what's been officially leaked so far, it sounds like a global Special Forces operation that will be run under the direct control of Donald Rumsfeld. And boy, isn't that just what we need: Field Marshal Don and his Howling Commandos running roughshod over the formal military chain of command, the State Department, the CIA, and the entire universe of international law enforcement agencies. If, by some chance, America has a genuine friend left in the world, it won't have any after two and a half more years of Rumsfeld slapping everybody in the face with a poop pie.

Ultimately, we're only going to make genuine progress in defeating terrorism by repudiating the entire neoconservative philosophy and the havoc it has wrought on our foreign policy and our own military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. We need to get rid of a lot more people that Donald Rumsfeld--Cheney, Bolton and Rice are up at the top of my list.

But, you have to start somewhere, and Rumsfeld is as good a place to start as any.

At Long Last, a Plan for the War on Terror

Ann Scott Tyson of The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has approved a comprehensive plan to fight the war on terror. About time, huh?

The long-awaited campaign plan for the global war on terrorism, as well as two subordinate plans also approved within the past month by Rumsfeld, are considered the Pentagon's highest priority, according to officials familiar with the three documents who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about them publicly.

Two things. First, if memory serves me correctly, we've been in a war on terror for almost five years now. If coming up with a plan to fight it has really been the Pentagon's "highest priority," I'd hate to see what happens with stuff they keep on the back burner these days.

Second, I wonder who authorized the anonymous officials not to speak about the plans publicly. How much longer are we going to play this "official/unofficial leak" patty cake?

The program is secret, of course, which is no doubt why it had to be leaked.

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The plans involve stepped up use of Special Forces. General Doug Brown, head of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), began working on the plans in 2003 when Rumsfeld first designated SOCOM as the "lead command for the war on terrorism."

Author Tyson doesn't speculate on why Rumsfeld waited until 2003 to name a lead command to fight terror and start putting together a plan to fight it. One would imagine he was too busy getting ready to invade Iraq to think about fighting terror.

One of the main reasons it took three years after that to finish the plans was tension inside the military as well as with the CIA and the State Department over who's in charge of special force counterterrorism teams within any given theater of operations. They don't appear to have to answer to U.S. embassies, or even, in some circumstances, to four-star regional commanders.

I smell trouble brewing.

One of the most important principles of military operations of any kind is "unity of command." There must be a clear line of authority that extends from the private infantry soldier to the regional commander to the Secretary of Defense to the President. Any time you have an "elite" outfit careening around in a regional commanders' area of responsibility that the regional commander doesn't have control of, bad stuff happens.

But if bad stuff happens under this plan, we probably won't know about it because it's secret, and nobody gets authorized speak publicly about bad secret stuff. Only the good secret stuff gets leaked.

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You don't need to read the secret war on terror plans to figure out they're exactly what Rummy wanted them to be. That's pretty much how everything has been in the Department of Defense since early 2001. There's no reason to think this Rummy plan will work any better than any other Rummy plan.

Why should we be concerned? Because the DoD took six years to institutionalize a plan for fighting the war on terror, one that comes straight out of the box with built in warning flags. If it doesn't work, we won't know about if for at least another two and a half years because Rummy doesn't recognize any idea of his isn't working, and Lord knows that at this point that nobody's going to blow any whistles, and even if they do, it won't do any good because Rummy is bulletproof and he's not going anywhere as long as his boss is still in office.

Come 2008, we'll have been fighting a war for seven and a half years with no good plan for fighting it, and somebody will have to come up with a better plan, and who knows how long that might take?

The Cost of War and Peace in the Next World Order

According to the CIA World Fact Book, the U.S. spent an estimated $518 billion on its military in 2005. Second was scary old China, which spent a paltry $81.5 billion. Following behind the big two were Japan, England, Germany, Italy and South Korea, ranging between $21 billion and $45 billion. (CIA figures for England, Germany and Italy are from 2003.)

A perennial defense of America's defense spending has been that it's only a small percentage of the Gross Domestic Product. In 2005, for example, it was 4.06 percent of the total $12.41 trillion economy. Taken out of context, that sounds like a small number, until you note that China's military budget is around 1 percent of its GDP of $8.182 trillion. Besides which, nobody ever won or deterred a war based on the percentage of its GDP it spent on its military. Nations that spend a greater percent of their GDP on arms than the U.S. include such traditional war fighting powerhouses as Djibouti (4.3 percent), Brunei (5.1 percent) and Eritrea (17.7 percent). Even 100 percent of very little is still very little.

But 50 percent of everything is a hell of a lot, which is where America's military spending stands. As Jane's Defense Weekly notes, America now spends as much on its military as the rest of the world combined.

Is the Bush administration planning on fighting a war with the rest of the entire world? I'm thinking that even those yahoos know better than to try something like that. Then again, you never know with that crowd.

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It's pretty clear that America's military industrial political complex has us spending way, way, way more than we need to on military arms. But it's also intuitively obvious that the United States can't afford to do without a robust armed force in the Next World Order. But how much force do we need, and what do we need it for?

In terms of symmetric force versus force war, the two most obvious--though unlikely--scenarios are defending Taiwan from an invasion by China and defending South Korea from an invasion from the North. The former is largely a maritime interdiction problem. We'd want to stop the Chinese invasion force as it crossed the Strait of Formosa. The latter would be a land war.

We'll no doubt want to maintain a security sponsorship of Israel, which is still surrounded by nations unfriendly to it. But Israel has proven itself rather adept at repelling invasions with little if any direct help from us.

There's an outside possibility that Russia, in a desperate attempt to regain its former prestige and glory, might try to invade Western Europe. But seriously, folks. Russia's done. Its economy is roughly the size of Brazil's ($1.5 trillion) and its once mighty Cold War arsenal is rusting on the flight line, molding in the silo, sinking at the pier, or burning in Chechnya.

There are unpredictable unknowns, of course. Panama could go up for grabs. Syria might invade Lebanon. Somebody might try to take over a weakened Iraq by force, but after having observed our fiasco in that country, who'd be crazy enough to want to repeat it?

Speaking of Iraq, if there's one lesson we needed to learn from that woebegone war it's that we don't want to do preemptive invasions and occupations any more.

What about the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction?

We have these things called deterrence and retaliation. We also have enough city buster nukes left over from the Cold War to barbecue our entire planet, and Mars and Venus and Mercury besides. Anybody who pops a ballistic missile nuke off in our direction knows that we'll know where it came from right away. And anybody who wants to give a nuke to a terrorist knows we'll know where the terrorist got it.

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What do we need defense wise? A lot less than we have now. How much less? Well, if we leave the decision on that to the Pentagon and the military industrial political complex, we'll wind up with more, not less.

So here's my proposal. Start by cutting the Department of Defense Budget in half. Don't cut corners by chipping away at military veterans' benefits. Get rid of stuff, and quit making more of it. Dump at least two aircraft carriers and only produce one per decade, at most. Cut off funding for further procurement of Cold War dinosaurs like the F-22 fighter and the B-2 bomber. Bring along the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and make that the last of the manned combat aircraft. No new classes of submarines. The ones we have now are swift and silent enough. No new classes of naval surface combatants. If we didn't get it right with the Arleigh Burke missile destroyers, we never will. The tanks we have now are fine. You want them to burn less gas, give them new engines. If you want them more invulnerable, give them new armor.

Whatever you do, don't let generals and politicians and arms industry CEOs convince you that you need to spend more and more tax dollars on fantastical weaponry to "keep America safe."

Because you don't.

The Next World Order Series:

Part I: America's 21st Century Military

Part II: Network-centric Warfare

Part III: America's Military Industrial Complex

Part IV: The Revolt of the Retired Generals

Part V: What Good is War?

Part VI: Body Count

Part VII: Order in the Next World Order

The Order of the Next World Order

If you want to know what the Next World Order will look like, just take a look around. It's already here. The last world order--the one in which the United States served the function of "global hegemon"--was over in less time than it took the American neoconservatives to cook up the idea, due in large part to our disastrous experiment in Iraq.

Our foreign policy aims should now be to land in a position as the first among nations in a fluid, multi-tiered global power structure.

At present, the world's state and non-state political entities are roughly divided into five levels of power. For the sake of creating a common vocabulary, we'll tentatively define those tiers as major powers, balance powers, regional powers, wild cards, and others.

Top Guns

In light of the U.S. military's proven decreased capacity for decisively achieving strategic aims, economy has more than ever become the premier instrument of political power. Hence, at the top of the power tier we have the globe's three largest Gross Domestic Products. According to the CIA World Factbook, these are the United States ($12.4 trillion), the European Union ($12.2 trillion) and China ($8.2 trillion). Combined, these three entities account for 55 percent of the entire worlds gross product ($59.6 trillion).

Following at numbers four and five and six are Japan ($3.9 trillion) and India ($3.7 trillion) and Germany ($2.45 trillion). England, France, Italy, Brazil, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Spain are all under $2 trillion, and everybody else is under $1 trillion. So it's a good bet that the major powers will remain so for at least a decade, and perhaps throughout the 21st century.

In the second tier, the balance powers, I include England, Russia, and Japan. I base balance power status less on economy than on geographical and historical factors. England, Russia, and Japan have all had extensive empires of their own at some point in the previous two centuries, and have a long history of both friendly and belligerent relationships with today's major powers.

Given its economy and potential for growth, India may well become a balance or even a major power by the end of this century, but for now, I classify it as a significant regional power. To date, it doesn't have anywhere near the same experience in influencing global politics as do the entities in the first two tiers. Other regional powers include Brazil, which not only has South America's largest economy but which is developing its own nuclear program.

Wild Cards

Wild card number one is the Middle East. America's attempts at getting the region under control have had the unfortunate effect of letting the cat herd out of the corral, and there's no telling where they'll decide to settle down. The best tea leaf reading I've heard is that Osama bin Laden's real goal is to establish a political coalition of Sunni Islamic states, one that would look similar to the pre-World War I Ottoman Empire, and one that would have a working if sometimes uneasy relationship with the Shiite Persians in Iran.

If we can get him to openly admit that that's what he's aiming for, I say let him have a go at it. Pull off to the periphery, as Jack Murtha suggests, and see if the region can pull itself into a cooperative. If it can't, and that part of the world falls into Hobbesian conflict, oh well. We stay on the periphery and contain it, and find other solutions to our energy needs.

If that conflict spreads into hapless sub-Saharan Africa (another wild card), well, it's not like that part of the world isn't already in a Hobbesian quagmire already. And we're not doing a whole lot about that now, are we? And what can we do? Attempts to fix things in Somalia turned into a disaster, what's to think trying to fix things anywhere else in that part of the world--militarily at least--will turn out any better?

Speaking of Wild Cards: we've done what we can in the Balkans, and it didn't do all that much good. And it's really not America's problem. It's the European Union's and Russia's problem.

The geographically immediate Wild Card America needs to concern itself most with is Latin America. And just how wild is that? The worst bad guy in our hemisphere is Cuba's Fidel Castro. How big and bad is he? Not big and bad enough to threaten with invasion, or you can bet the Bush administration would have threatened him with that by now.

Venezuela? For all his bluster, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says he'd be content with $50 a barrel oil prices, which is considerably lower than the $70 plus prices we're paying today.

Who are "the others?" Canada. New Zealand. Australia. Switzerland. Netherlands. Singapore. Countries that will always be friendly to the U.S. and its allies of the moment, but that will never rise above the level of regional powers, even though they could become vital geo-strategic allies in the unlikely event of another global war.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

It leaves us in a bad position for as long as the hegemons of Team Bush are in power. Swapping out chiefs of staff and press secretaries won't make a change in the fundamental policies and philosophies that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, Krauthammer, Kristol and the rest of the neoconservative junta has finagled on America and the rest of the world.

Global sanity can only be restored when the philosophical descendants of Alexander, Caesar, Stalin, Hitler, et al are jack booted out of office.

Body Count in the Next World Order

Much has been made of the American casualty count in our war in Iraq. U.S. forces have suffered more than 2,300 deaths and over 17,000 wounded. Some refer to these figures as the "horrible human price" of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Others sneer at these numbers, and consider them a trifling compared to the casualty counts of earlier U.S. wars.

To a large extent, the debate over war casualties is moot. Body count is seldom an accurate measure of success in war, nor is a low own force casualty rate a reason to support one. You can have no casualties and still lose a war; you can have millions of casualties and still win. Likewise, some wars justify millions of casualties and some wars don't justify a single one.

There's a tendency for many military thinkers to compare World War II to all the wars that followed it. In most cases, such analogies are flawed.

America did not join the allied side to "liberate the freedom loving peoples" of Germany and Japan from their oppressive political leadership. Either actively or through passive acquiescence, the German and Japanese populations supported their totalitarian governments. We were not merely fighting Hitler and Tojo. We were at war with their entire nations, nations that were better prepared for war than we were at the outset of hostilities. While in retrospect we view attacks on civilian populations like the air raids on Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima with mixed moral judgments, we need to modulate those judgments by considering the context in which we took those actions. Never before had an alliance of nations engaged another one in a truly global war with a stated objective of unconditional surrender of the enemy. Such a war has not occurred since, and hopefully never will.

Some estimates peg the total deaths incurred during that war at over 62 million. The total property loss is likely incalculable, as is any attempt to determine whether the results of World War II justified its cost. It did, after all, lead to a half-century of Cold War between the victors with the U.S. led western coalition on one side and the Soviet bloc on the other.

But at least we can say of World War II that it began with formal declarations of war and ended when formal documents of surrender were signed by recognized authorities of the vanquished belligerents.

The "third world" proxy wars that the Cold War spawned were undeclared and produced indecisive results at best. Hostilities in the Korean Conflict ended in a tie with the signing of a cease-fire agreement. North Korea still gives us security fits. Our Vietnam terminated in a scramble to catch the last plane out of Saigon and a bitterly divided United States.

Examine later U.S. military incursions in Grenada, Lebanon, Somalia, the Arabian Gulf, and elsewhere, and you won't find a single decisive "victory" or achievement of long-term American political goals in the bunch.

Many might argue that America's persistent pursuit of arms superiority and willingness to apply it in key hot spots was the "constant pressure" that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

But what good did that really do? From all indications, the Soviet's demise only served to let the cats out of the corral, and America has shifted from a generational war against the Evil Empire to another one against the Axis of Evil, the evil doers, the evil ones, the forces of evil, those who would perpetrate evil, evil geniuses and all the other minions of Doctor Evil.

How many casualties does America need to sustain to counter all that evil?

The answer is very, very few. Despite what the Rovewellian mind control machine would have us believe, terrorism is not a military problem, it's a law enforcement and diplomatic issue.

Al Qaeda doesn't have an army, or a navy, or an air force, or a state department. Nobody's facing an April 15th deadline to file tax returns with the Islamo-fascist Revenue Service. Nobody elected Osama bin Laden to power, and his strategies weren't crafted by a think tank called the "Project for the New Islamic Century." Radical militant groups are sustaining far greater casualties that U.S. forces and whatever remains of our "coalition of the paid off" are, and yet who has a recruiting problem and who doesn't?

Who's doing something right in the Global War on Terror, and who isn't?

Can more Americans killed or injured in a misdirected military effort turn the tide?

I seriously doubt it.

I also seriously doubt whether more terrorists killed or injured or captured can make much of a difference either.

But guess what? I've spoken with more than one influential retired senior military officer who thinks war serves the purpose of keeping the world's population in check. Seriously.

I've asked these characters if they think maybe proliferating modern birth control methods throughout the third world might not serve the purpose of keeping the global population in check as well, but they shake their heads no.

That would be encouraging immoral behavior among primitive peoples, they say.

And besides, if we controlled population through modern birth control rather than war, what would happen their high dollar retirement jobs in the military industrial complex? What, they're going to make the same kind of money they're making now lobbying for the condom industry?

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The Next World Order Series:

Part I: America's 21st Century Military

Part II: Network-centric Warfare

Part III: America's Military Industrial Complex

Part IV: The Revolt of the Retired Generals

Part V: What Good is War?

What Good is War in the Next World Order?

Part V of the "Next World Order" series, which asks the blasphemous question "why do we need a military?" Links to parts I through IV are included at the bottom of this article.

In its 1997 "Statement of Principles," the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) urged a return to a "Reaganite policy of military strength" and a need to increase defense spending significantly "if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future[.]"

For all their collective brainpower, the PNACers overlooked the elephant hiding behind the couch in their clubhouse. During the Reagan era, America had a peer military competitor. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it hasn't. Even so, at the urging of the neoconservatives, America will spend upwards of a half trillion dollars for our Department of Defense in 2006, an expenditure that matches the military spending of the rest of the world combined. And that half trillion doesn't cover the cost of Homeland Security and other federal domestic security programs.

For all our politicians' and generals' talk about "transforming" the military to meet the needs of the new century, our force doesn't look significantly different from the one we had in the middle of the last one.

In World War II, our Navy had aircraft carriers, surface combatants, submarines, amphibious assault craft and Marines. Our Air Force--then a branch of our Army--had bombers, fighters and cargo planes. The Army had armor, infantry, artillery and special forces.

What we have now is a higher tech version of what we had then. We've traded our old fashioned P.F. Flyers for new fangled Nike Air Jordans that run faster, jump higher and stop on a smaller dime. But our old shoes did something that our news ones never have: win an actual war in which the enemies actually surrendered and signed actual documents to that effect, and effectively told their populations to shut the hell up and deal with it.

When the Soviet Union fell apart and what was left of its military did the same, the U.S. armed services fell all over themselves to justify their continued existence and their slices of the federal budget pie.

With no maritime power to challenge its dominance of the open oceans, the Navy adopted a strategy of patrolling littoral waters from which it could project air power (carrier aircraft, cruise missiles, and naval gunfire) and land power (Marines) ashore.

The Air Force suffered from both its proven successes and failures. The two Gulf Wars illustrated that air supremacy is a given in any U.S. conflict, and that the "shock and awe" value of strategic bombing isn't worth the cost of the point papers air power advocates wrote about it. The Air Force's main function has become to take the Army wherever it needs to go to do whatever it needs to do when it gets there. And yeah, support whatever the Army's doing with direct air support. Except the Air Force doesn't really like doing direct support of Army ground operations, and the Navy's better at doing that anyway.

The poor Army folks--God bless them--don't know which way to point their gun barrels. Are they a heavy force? Are they a light force? Are they Patton's tank warriors or Sergeant Fury's Howling Commandos? Do they pull triggers or punch buttons on computer keyboards? Do they pitch their own tents or does a subsidiary of Halliburton do that for them?

In short, the best-trained, best-equipped, best-financed force in history is something of a Chinese fire department. It's a navy that's a coast guard with an air force and an army, an air force that's an airline, and an army that's neck deep in its outsourced latrine.

And you wonder why a bunch of sand herders have the mighty U.S. military stymied in the Middle East?

I don't.

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I'm one of those fuddy-duddies who still doesn't think terrorism is a military problem. It's a law enforcement problem. You won't hear this at any war college or university national security program, but military force is good for two basic things: destroying stuff and killing people. It is best used to destroy the stuff and kill the people of other military forces. If there's no other military force to destroy or kill, the whole idea of applying military force to a problem gets fuzzy. Sure, it's great to rebuild electrical generators and paint schools, but you don't really need a military to do that. You need a Peace Corps.

And if we ever again decide that our political aims will be served by large scale destruction of population centers and industrial sites, well, we can do that without putting a single boot on the ground.

There are more than a few highly respected people in the field of military science who think a Nagasaki-style demonstration is just the thing we need to put an end to terrorism. I happen to think the people who think that are nuts. There's every reason to believe that turning, say, Tallil into solar panel would only add to terrorist recruiting.

Besides, is that really the kind of thing we want to do? Is that what we want to be?

The mightiest nation in human history that blows "freedom loving peoples" to smithereens in order to liberate them?

That's not my idea of enlightened world leadership.

Coming in the Next World Order: what do we need, what don't we need?

Earlier in the Next World Order series:

Part I: America's 21st Century Military

Part II: Network-centric Warfare

Part III: America's Military Industrial Complex

Part IV: The Revolt of the Retired Generals

Much Ado About Rummy

Calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation is becoming something of an alternative national pastime. Neoconservative icon Bill Kristol, founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) of which Rumsfeld was a key member, was advocating giving Dandy Don the boot clear back in July of 2001, prior to the 9/11 attacks. Between then and now, almost everyone from the left, right and center whom the press will cover has demanded that Rummy be given the ax.

Now six retired generals have joined the chorus. A fat lot of good that's going to do, even if Rummy actually resigns this time. Which he won't.

Rummy deserves a lot more than getting run out of the Pentagon in a rail and feathers ceremony. He deserves a special room in the McNamara suite at the LBJ Hilton in hell. But sending him there tomorrow won't fix the disaster he's helped create.

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Rumsfeld deserves the bulk of the blame for mis-micromanaging the war, and he had much to do with the policy of preemptively invading Iraq. But he didn't come up with the idea of thumping Hussein from his throne with military power all on his lonesome. Bill Kristol, one of the first neoconservatives to turn on Rummy, was a ringleader of the PNAC cabal that first publicly proposed an Iraq invasion in 1998. Other members of this flock of hawks included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Jeb Bush, and a whole cast of unsavory characters that have since infested every department in the administration.

Firing Rumsfeld as SecDef will effect about as much fundamental change in the Land of Bush as replacing Andrew Card as White House Chief of Staff did.

In its 1997 Statement of Principles, the PNAC castigated the Clinton administration, stating that, "American foreign and defense policy is adrift," and promised, "We aim to change this."

They changed it all right: from adrift to bow down in the water. In retrospect, foreign and defense policy wise, 1997 looks like the good old days.

The "best trained, best equipped" military in all of history has proven itself impotent in the face of an asymmetric opponent. As John Murtha and others have said, competitor countries like China and ideological enemies like al Qaeda are laughing in their sleeves as we grind national treasure into hourglass fill in Iraq (as if Iraq didn't have enough sand in it to begin with). Nobody except England wants to play ball with us. The only guy left in England who likes us in Tony Blair, and everybody else in England seems to be getting sick and tired of him.

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Regardless of whether it does any immediate good, I'm glad to see all these retired generals speaking up, if for no other reason than forcing the Rove patrol onto the information pavement to perform its standard song-and-dance counter-attack. The more the public sees the likes of Senator George Allen (R-Virginia) try to pawn off the same old polly cracker talking points in defense of the administration, the more of the public that isn't completely Limbaugh lobotomized will realize what a flaming bag of dog plop on America's front porch the Bush administration and its supporters are.

And the more they realize that, the more they'll realize the need to stomp that flaming bag out come November by smothering the GOP oxygen that feeds it.

Otherwise, the flaming bag of dog plop will burn the whole house down.

The Next World Order and the "Revolt of the Retired Generals"

Part IV of the "Next World Order" series explores how military officers and politicians have virtually changed roles.

Thomas E. Ricks of The Washington Post reports of yet another retired general who has come forward with harsh criticism of Donald Rumsfeld.

John Batiste, a former Army two-star who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq from 2004-2005 thinks it's time for a "fresh start" at the top of the Pentagon, and says a lot of his peers feel the same way.

As Ricks notes:

Batiste's comments resonate especially within the Army: it is widely known there that he was offered a promotion to three-star rank to return to Iraq and be the No. 2 U.S. military officer there but he declined because he no longer wished to serve under Rumsfeld.

Ex generals coming out of the woodwork to tell us what we already pretty much knew about Rumsfeld is hardly news these days. Ricks' piece also includes disparaging remarks recently made by former Army two-star Paul Eaton and retired Marine generals Gregory Newbold and Anthony Zinni.

The most interesting parts of the Ricks article cover Rumsfeld supporters' attempts to "tamp down the revolt of the retired generals."

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Peter Pace said on Tuesday that no officers were "muzzled" during the planning of the Iraq invasion. "The articles that are out there about folks not speaking up are just flat wrong."

There's a grain of truth in that statement. Lots of folks, like then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinsecki, did speak up. Like Shinseki, they were castigated by Rumsfeld and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz and shown the door.

Defense Department spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said of Rumsfeld's leadership style, "People are entitled to their opinions. What they are not entitled to is their own facts. . . .The assertions about inadequate exposure to military judgment are just fundamentally incorrect."

Di Rita is the Pentagon's version of the White House's Scott McClellan, and he's mastered the Rovewellian art of altering the truth without actually telling a lie. Rumsfeld probably did have adequate exposure to military judgment. He just chose to pay attention to the judgments that agreed with his own and ignored the ones who didn't.

Most disturbing to me was Ricks' account of concerns expressed by military "experts" about "the new outspokenness of retired generals."

"I think it flatly is a bad thing," said Richard H. Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina who writes frequently on civilian-military relations. He said he worries that it could undermine civilian control of the military, especially by making civilian leaders feel that that they need to be careful about what they say around officers, for fear of being denounced as soon as they retire.

"How can you prosecute a war if the military and civilians don't trust each other?" Kohn asked.

I'm sure that somewhere in his vast academic experience Professor Kohn heard the adage that trust is a two-way street. If an administration of war hawks comes into power hell bent on starting an armed conflict the generals don't think is necessary and fighting it in a way the generals don't think will work, and ignore everything the dissenting generals say, why should the generals trust the civilians?

And from whom does America have more to fear: generals who caution against war or presidents who claim unfettered powers to wage them?

But at the heart of Kohn's arguments is a fundamentally sinister assault on the notion of an open information society: that retired officers do not have a First Amendment right to speak their minds, that somehow their time in service puts them under a lifetime "gag order," and that retired officers can be held accountable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice or have their retirement pay withdrawn for speaking out against the establishment.

That bodes ill not only for retired officers but American society as well. If retired officers can't tell truth to power on military related issues, who can?

And if nobody can do that, what's to keep the country from becoming a military dictatorship? It's a bizarre turn of affairs when America's best safeguard against coming under control of the military is the military itself.

But what would you expect in an environment where the politicians run all the wars and all the generals left on active duty are all politicians?

For more on presidential authority, see Smoke, Mirrors and War Powers.