The Deep State (13 page)

President Guelleah commented afterward: “The fact that we
welcome the U.S. forces in our country shows our support for international peace and for peace in our region as well. We do that all for peace in the world and for peace in Africa.” Left unmentioned was the issue of why, if all this was done for the sake of peace, it was necessary for the policeman to bribe the protected party for the privilege of protecting him. The comments of Djibouti's president were all the more ironic in light of the later revelation that local air controllers have expressed hostility to their American guests, have slept on the job (miraculously, there have so far been no aviation catastrophes at the base), and U.S. personnel have been threatened.
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Setting aside the question of cost to the taxpayer, the base will certainly be a boon to military infrastructure contractors. In 2013, five contracts worth more than $322 million were awarded for Camp Lemonnier. These included a $25.5 million fitness center and a $41 million joint headquarters facility. All of this suggests the U.S. taxpayer, knowingly or not, is deeply invested in the global war on terrorism business for at least two decades to come. It also suggests that those in the Pentagon who are seeking to emulate Lawrence of Arabia's warrior spirit clearly did not inherit his asceticism. Twenty-five million dollars for a fitness center? How much can a few sets of barbells and workout machines cost? Congress, which investigated the General Services Administration's junkets to Las Vegas with the thoroughness of Inspector Javert, might wish to cast a jaundiced eye on the more than half a trillion dollars the Pentagon spends every year.

The common narrative about AFRICOM, when it is discussed at all, is that this new organization represents our national security policy for dealing with an ever-evolving Islamic extremism: it would appear our military and intelligence services' eternal whack-a-mole game with al-Qaeda and its affiliates, franchises, and wannabe clones has merely shifted from the mountains of the Hindu Kush to the sands of the Sahara and the Sahel belt farther to the south. There are, however, alternative or at least supplementary explanations.

One of these is that the United States receives about one-quarter of
its imported oil from Africa, while China, our principal sovereign creditor, now gets roughly a third of its oil from the continent. The fact that China is investing much of its huge capital surplus—derived in large part from its trade with the United States—in Africa has attracted notice in Washington: there are now more than two thousand Chinese companies and well over a million Chinese citizens on the continent.
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They can be found wherever there are mines, oil fields, container ports, or manufacturing facilities. The dollar volume of China's trade with Africa is double that of U.S.-African trade, and the disparity will only become greater in the future.
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When confronted with the suspicion of ulterior motives for America's sudden interest in Africa, official Washington demurs. The U.S. Army War College has produced a publication about AFRICOM that, among other things, “debunks” the “myths” that the activities of AFRICOM are about access to African petroleum or countering Chinese moves there.
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But in testimony before Congress supporting the creation of AFRICOM in 2007, Dr. J. Peter Pham, who has been an adviser to the DOD and the State Department, openly stated that oil and China were precisely what AFRICOM was about: “This natural wealth makes Africa an inviting target for the attentions of the People's Republic of China, whose dynamic economy, averaging nine percent growth per annum over the last two decades, has an almost insatiable thirst for oil as well as a need for other natural resources to sustain it. . . . Intentionally or not, many analysts expect that Africa—especially the states along its oil-rich western coastline—will increasingly become a theatre for strategic competition between the United States and its only real near-peer competitor on the global stage, China, as both countries seek to expand their influence and secure access to resources.”

My own hunch, based on three decades of professional observation, is that there is something to the charges of critics that this is about oil and global strategic rivalry. But what do a few score, or a few hundred, special forces operators and their supporting contractors running around the acacia savannas of the African Sahel on “training missions” have to do
with the much larger narrative of the Deep State: the financialization of the American economy, income stagnation, rotting infrastructure, the comprehensive surveillance of citizens, and the erosion of popular democracy? The answer has a lot to do with how you define the concept of national security.

War in Perpetuity?

Overwhelmingly, our government and media choose to categorize national security as the identification of foreign (and occasionally internal) threats and the selection and employment of violent, coercive, or covert means to neutralize those threats. The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Pentagon's primary summary of strategic goals, identifies the following regions as arenas for potential national security concern: the homeland (a tiresome post-9/11 buzzword meaning the landmass of the United States), Europe, Russia, the Middle East, South Asia, China, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, the Indian Ocean, Latin America, Africa, the Arctic, and Cyberspace. Other than Antarctica and the nonpolar regions of Canada, that pretty much covers the planet. It is a pretty expansive definition of national security, one that requires a heavy monetary commitment to back it up.

The QDR's definition of vital interests also implies that the United States will be in a condition of war, cold war, or near war in perpetuity. This state of affairs has already had profound effects on politics, behavioral patterns (as anyone who has passed through an airport in the last dozen years will have discovered), and even psychology. Just as a state of perpetual war has lodged the Teutonic-sounding and creepy term “homeland security” in the national vocabulary, so has our military virtually ceased to consist of citizen-soldiers in popular speech.

Traditional slang terms for a soldier—GI, dogface, ground-pounder, grunt—used to be humorous and mildly self-deprecating designations connoting a citizen who happened to be in uniform performing an onerous task. Now the preferred term is “warrior,” a term not often heard
before in American history in reference to our soldiers. In tribal societies, warriors are members of a caste, like priests and aristocrats, and the term does not seem fitting in a constitutional republic. I am still unsure whether “warrior” is a popular coinage that emerged on its own or whether Pentagon public relations operatives inserted it into the national demotic speech by means of constant repetition. But it is one small semantic clue as to how our governing classes define national security and the citizen's role in it. The all-volunteer force has evolved from GIs into warriors.

Courtiers in Uniform

Parallel to the transformation of the citizen-soldier to a professional warrior, there has been an alarming evolution among senior officers. The military writer Thomas Ricks recently devoted a book to the thesis that the U.S. military's general officer class has become distinguished by its mediocrity.
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To get ahead, one must go along and get along, and the officer evaluation system rewards play-it-safe behavior and avoidance of mistakes rather than creativity and risk taking. This syndrome has fostered a culture of conformity that serves to weed out unconventional problem solvers. Unlike during World War II, when the Army's chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, routinely sacked generals who failed to perform, the tradition during the last fifty years, beginning with General William C. Westmoreland in Vietnam, has been to “stay the course” with the same failed plans implemented by the same commanders.

The postretirement careers of the senior officer corps also encourage a don't-rock-the-boat attitude. According to Bloomberg News, “The top 10 U.S. defense contractors have 30 retired senior officers or former national security officials serving on their boards. Press releases issued by those companies since 2008 announced the hiring of almost two dozen prominent flag officers or senior officials as high-ranking executives.” The article also states that senior executives at the largest U.S. defense contractors are paid from $1 million to $11 million a year. Could this explain the enthusiasm in the general officer ranks for overpriced weapon systems?

To what Ricks has written, I would add that that our dysfunctional politics have exacerbated the military's inability to reform its personnel system. The knee-jerk reflex to “support the troops” in any and all circumstances tacitly means “support the generals.” While civilian administration officials testifying before congressmen of the opposite party can usually be assured a rough time, congressional interrogators always want to make sure that their patriotism and love of the military are on public display, so they make an exception when questioning uniformed officials. Generals who appear as witnesses get markedly politer treatment, and the incisiveness of the questioning declines in proportion.

I was struck by how senior senators like Lindsey Graham, John McCain, or Joseph Lieberman fawned over General David Petraeus like fans of a pop star. Their technique of questioning the general did not always increase the sum total of knowledge about military problems in the Middle East. These generals, in turn, do the American people a disservice when they routinely sloganeer about how the U.S. military is the finest fighting force in history: its record since Korea has been decidedly mixed.

That said, one should not blame the generals overmuch, and the troops not at all—to a considerable extent, they and the institution they represent have been betrayed by a civilian leadership that has frequently used the armed forces as a first, rather than last, resort, and in circumstances of dubious national interest. There are certainly exceptions to Ricks's critique: the most sensible statements by a senior official at the onset of the Ukraine crisis came from General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His noninflammatory comments were a refreshing change from the usual calls to escalate the situation, and Dempsey emphasized that he kept in daily contact with his Russian counterpart: a wise move when two nuclear powers are at loggerheads.

Weapon Systems as Wedgwood China

During the early 1990s, the president and CEO of Lockheed Martin, Norman Augustine, joked that combat systems were becoming so
expensive that eventually the U.S. military would have only one supremely expensive, supremely capable airplane that the separate services would take turns sharing. Augustine's jest about diminishing numbers of aircraft is becoming a reality, although many experts do not believe the newest generation of combat fighters is supremely capable. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the combined U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps tactical fighter strength of 5,783 in 1992, at the end of the cold war, dropped to 3,985 in 2000, and continued to fall to 3,542 in 2008, despite many years of record budgets. The Congressional Budget Office projects combined inventories could fall to around 2,500 after the year 2020, despite the services' having mortgaged virtually their entire aviation budgets to buy the F-35.
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The planes such as the F-22 and the F-35 that are replacing the previous generation of aircraft are extravagantly expensive to purchase and require an exorbitant number of maintenance hours per flight hour; their stealth coating is so delicate that the military brass seems loath to risk them in conflicts. In addition, they gulp fuel at a rate that limits their tactical flexibility and stretches the availability of aerial refueling aircraft. The F-22, at a shocking total acquisition cost of $412 million per aircraft, was introduced into squadron service in 2007, but finally saw action against ISIS targets in Syria only in late 2014.

One would think an air-superiority fighter like the F-22 would have been ideal for enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya, but instead it was a no-show. Likewise, in 2014, when the Air Force deployed combat aircraft to Eastern Europe to deter the purportedly fearsome Russian bear, it sent the workhorse F-16, which had been in service for thirty-four years. The F-22 is like the good china that stays in the dining room buffet rather than running the risk of being chipped. As for the $135-million-a-copy F-35, the “cheap” fighter for our future inventory, two RAND Corporation analysts war-gamed its performance in a hypothetical matchup against Chinese fighter aircraft. The F-35s, overweight and ponderous because of their complexity, were bested by their adversary. RAND, dependent on government contracts, backed away from the study after being
pressured.
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The Pentagon has many such examples of gold-plated weapon systems that are too expensive to use in any but benign and controlled environments and with lavish support.

Contracting Out Morality

Much of that support will come from contractors at a premium price. In 1992, at the initiative of then–secretary of defense Dick Cheney, the military began contracting out many of its logistical and support functions. Cheney's scheme has succeeded so well that, in contradiction to Napoleon's dictum, today's Army cannot travel on its stomach. Having Halliburton or Sodexo as its caterer may have improved the taste of the food, but that arrangement wouldn't work if the military were ever again to get into a really desperate slugging match like the Battle of the Bulge. The Pentagon and the State Department have even contracted out combat to soldiers for hire. The lack of training, discipline, and accountability of mercenary organizations is notorious, as it became evident with Blackwater's shooting of seventeen innocent civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, in 2007.

While it was clear after the bloodletting that Blackwater's trigger-happy actions had further jeopardized the U.S. position in Iraq and made our soldiers' jobs even more difficult, the real story did not come out for another seven years. Even before the massacre, State Department investigators were probing the company's operation in Iraq, calling the firm's culture “an environment full of liability and negligence.” But the probe ended when a top Blackwater manager threatened to kill a State Department investigator, saying that “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq.”
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The American embassy in Baghdad, which had been all but taken over by intelligence operatives and contract personnel of various kinds, sided with Blackwater against the State Department, its own nominal superior.