The Great Deformation (16 page)

The now open Soviet archives also prove there never was a Soviet defense-spending offensive. By the early 1980s Soviet military outlays were growing at only 1–2 percent per year, and even that figure was based on the dubious statistics of a command economy which was falling apart.

On the scary weapons front, the Soviets' heavy fixed-silo ICBMs turned out to be far less accurate than claimed, meaning they were never close to being the deadly first-strike weapons the neocons had ballyhooed. The new mobile ICBMs were not accurate enough to function as first-strike weapons, either.

Nor was there any heavy long-range bomber program—only an intermediate range aircraft that could not have actually threatened North American sites. Likewise, there was no massive civil defense program, just a mishmash of disorganized and poorly resourced local boondoggles.

In short, the neocon case against MAD was based mostly on fantasy. The Soviet leadership was not prepared to launch a world-ending first strike because it did not even remotely have the capabilities to do it, even if it had succumbed to suicidal impulses.

The far more relevant truth, which had been evident to free market libertarians all along, was that the Soviet economy was on an inexorable path toward failure. This militated heavily against the prospect that it could have initiated a nuclear war–winning strategy or carried out significant conventional force aggression beyond its own border regions, such as the morass it sunk into in Afghanistan.

Had the United States simply gotten a massive defense buildup that it didn't need, there might have been no lasting impact save for a modest waste of resources; perhaps a few percentage points of GDP. In fact, however, the Reagan defense buildup gave birth to a historical monstrosity: the Bush wars of occupation and imperial pretension that were possible only because of the immense conventional war machine the Gipper left behind.

THE ACTUAL REAGAN BUILDUP: RISE OF THE AMERICAN IMPERIAL ARMADA

What got built with the $1.46 trillion Reagan budget was a conventional war-making capacity and force projection ability that the only military expert to occupy the White House in the twentieth century, Dwight Eisenhower, had rejected as of marginal value against a nuclear adversary. The fiasco in Vietnam had already proven him correct, demonstrating painfully and tragically that massive conventional forces cannot successfully occupy, pacify, and rebuild third-world nations of the unwilling.

Yet that's exactly what the Reagan top line bought: an occupation force which would have left General Eisenhower rolling in his grave. At the center were fifteen naval carrier battle groups armed to the teeth with attack aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles, amphibious landing craft, and vast suites of communications and electronic warfare gear. Indeed, the standard
aircraft carrier was accompanied by a fleet of eighty aircraft and a dozen escort ships, the equivalent of the entire military establishment of all except a handful of nations.

It is these nuclear carrier battle groups which gave US policy makers their striking imperial arrogance. An example of how these platforms were suited to imperial power projection, not anti-Soviet defense, is the sea-based Tomahawk cruise missile force.

The rise of Tomahawk force began in 1983 during the Reagan buildup, but the demise of the Evil Empire did not slow down its development one bit. By the end of the century the United States had about 150 surface ships and attack submarines that could launch these deadly cruise missiles and an inventory of nearly 5,000 missiles.

Tomahawks have a range of seven hundred miles. This means that from their offshore platforms they can reach three-fourths of the world's population. And during the last two decades they have been used in just this “stand-off” manner against targets in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, and others—teaching presidents that they could meddle freely without getting bloodied.

The Reagan defense buildup also provided cover for a vast renewal of conventional fixed-wing and helicopter forces, a binge of procurement that had no peacetime precedent. During the eight Reagan years, the Pentagon was authorized to purchase nearly 9,000 planes and helicopters compared to only 3,000 during the previous eight years.

This profoundly wasteful binge was predicated on the specious notion that the Soviets were fixing to launch a suicidal conventional land war in Europe. Yet even then the Red Army was proving every day that it couldn't subdue RPG-toting tribesmen in the barren expanse of the Hindu Kush. Moreover, when the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991 high rates of aircraft procurement continued unabated: Congressmen had no trouble seeing them as “jobs” programs, even if Eastern Europe was now being rapidly occupied by Burger Kings and Pizza Huts.

The Reagan buildup thus bequeathed national security policy makers approximately 13,000 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. Except for 20 B-2 stealth bombers this giant inventory was designed for conventional war-making and power projection on distant shores, including 4,000 conventional attack and fighter aircraft and more than 5,000 helicopters whose mission was conventional battlefield support in an attack, transport, or utility role.

The two big land war programs launched during the Reagan build-up—the upgraded Abrams Tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle—experienced
a similar untoward evolution. At the time of the Reagan top line windfall in 1981, there was ferocious debate among the experts as to whether a new, more expensive generation of the M1 tank should be developed.

Yet issues of cost and efficacy were no longer even debatable after the 7 percent growth top line became operative on January 30, 1981. The empty space in DOD's new $1.46 trillion plan was so vast that both programs were sucked into its budget like air rushing into a vacuum. Over the next decade 7,000 Bradley's and 6,000 M1 Abrams tanks were procured—useless weapons against a Soviet nuclear strike, but ideal for missions of invasion and occupation.

Moreover, once the Bradley and Abrams production lines were open, the odds of closing them down were between slim and none. Armored battlefield vehicles consist of an intensive mix of iron, precision machining, and complex electronic components and circuitry—which is to say, they are a “jobs program” par excellence.

The case in point can be seen in Lima, Ohio, where the M1 tank line refuses to shut down—40 years after the 7 percent top line brought it unnecessarily to life. Since then all of the nation's industrial enemies have either expired, as in the case of the Soviets, or retired to civilian life, as in the case of China.

What passes for a state-based enemy is a nation of 78 million deeply unhappy citizens ruled by twelfth-century mullahs, whose major act of aggression over the past thirty years was to repel an attack by its Iraqi neighbor with twelve-year-old soldiers carrying stick rifles. Still, the military-industrial complex manages to keep retooling, upgrading, and modernizing its fleet of 9,000 Abrams tanks as if the Berlin crisis of 1961 never ended.

When all is said and done, the accidental and unnecessary 7 percent top line of January 1981 gave birth to a vast imperial expeditionary force and conventional war-fighting machine. Yet after the Velvet Revolution of December 1988, it inhabited a world that had no need for imperial expeditions or industrial-strength conventional wars.

THE PERSIAN GULF: PROVING GROUND FOR THE REAGAN ARMADA

The remains of the Soviet empire soon settled into a handful of kleptocracies, Europe adverted to welfare-state senescence, and Red China morphed into the sneakers and Apple factory of the world. In short, there remained no place for a great expeditionary force to operate, save for the littoral states of the Middle East.

The latter, unhappily, provided the ideal venue. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the six-hundred-ship navy began to steadily loose girth, but its
capacity to rain destruction on the lands ringing the Persian Gulf from a standoff platform in the deep water could not be gainsaid.

Likewise, the helicopter fleets, the close air support and attack aircraft wings, the fighter-bomber forces, and the raft of tactical missiles and smart munitions all proved suited for occupying the Middle Eastern lands of the unwilling and mostly unarmed. Nor could the vast open deserts and the crumbling mud and stone walls of its towns and villages have provided a more conducive proving ground for Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

The only thing missing was any plausible and justifiable reason of state for the deployment of this accidental expeditionary force to the desolate hills and mountains of Afghanistan, the bloody plains of the Tigris-Euphrates, or even the empty, scorpion-ridden dunes of Kuwait. None of this made oil any cheaper, even if that were a valid reason of state, which it is not.

By the Pentagon's own reckoning there were never more than a few hundred Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan. There should have been no surprise, therefore, when the holy warrior himself was found to have been holed up for six years in a farmhouse with three wives, six children, and a dozen goats. Above all else, Bin Laden's final demise proved that it takes a few bundles of greenbacks, not an expeditionary army, to hunt down such terrorists as actually exist.

There can be little doubt, therefore, that George W. Bush, and his father before him, carried out their imperial adventures in the lands ringing the Persian Gulf because they could. An accident of history had bestowed upon them a massive conventional war-fighting machine, so they went to war without having to prove the case or raise an army by taxing the people and getting a declaration of Congress.

That much is plainly evident from the outcomes. What valid domestic security reason, for instance, can distinguish between the corrupt, violent Afghan warlords still on our payroll ten years later and the equally venal tribal chieftains for whom the bloody terror of the Taliban is a way of life.

Likewise, Iraq now consists of three principalities of corruption and thuggery rather than just one. Yet neither the old régime nor the new régimes did have or will have any bearing on the well-being of the American public.

The same is true of Kuwait next door. From the viewpoint of the true national interest the only difference between the Emir Al-Sabah IV and Saddam Hussein is that the latter is dead, having been on the wrong side of an ancient border dispute that was none of our business in the first place.

George W. Bush was appropriately castigated for landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declaring victory after great swaths of the ancient
city of Baghdad had been reduced to rubble in only a few weeks. But that was not proof of victory at all, just evidence that wanton destruction could be rained on any city located within a thousand miles of the very aircraft carrier on which the forty-third president stood.

THE WARFARE STATE'S 1981 TIPPING POINT: ALMOST GONE, UNNECESSARILY REVIVED

At the dawn of the 1980s, the Soviet empire was dying under the weight of its statist economic yoke; its militarized “state-within-the-state” was sucking the larger society dry. What the United States needed to do at that juncture was to wait it out—safe behind an ample strategic retaliatory force of Minutemen missiles and Trident submarines. That this more benign course—upon which history had already firmly embarked—was denied at the eleventh hour can be blamed on the neocons primarily.

Yet they prevailed only because they had a powerful assist from the willful obstinacy of two men—Caspar Weinberger and Ronald Reagan. Of the two, Weinberger is by far the more culpable.

During his twenty years holding high positions in Washington, Weinberger gained a reputation as a conservative ideologue, but it wasn't warranted. Weinberger was actually an ersatz statist—a relentless solicitor for whatever branch of the state he was currently heading. His calling card read: “have brief, won't bend.”

During his time at the Federal Trade Commission he was an enthusiastic regulator. At Nixon's White House budget office, he became “Cap the Knife.” During his stint as Secretary of HEW in 1973–1975, its budget grew by 45 percent—the greatest two-year surge in social spending recorded at any time before or since.

Within ten days of assuming his brief at the Defense Department, the “top line” blanks were filled in and thereafter Weinberger's lawyerly summation never changed: 7 percent defense growth was held to be a first principle, meaning no debate was needed and no deviation was even thinkable.

And so the Secretary of Defense clung to every single dime of the $1.46 trillion—obstinately, dogmatically, indefatigably. A crucial episode in March 1983 illuminates how Weinberger's dogged adherence to the 7 percent top line unnaturally extended the Pentagon's bonanza.

At that point the fiscal equation had hemorrhaged, causing the deficit for the year underway—fiscal 1983—to reach nearly $210 billion or more than 6 percent of GDP. There had never been a deficit remotely that large since the Second World War, so the alarm bells were ringing loudly.

That was especially the case among the Republican mainstream leadership on Capitol Hill, which hadn't been all that enthusiastic about the Reagan Revolution from the beginning. Worse, the President's recently submitted budget for fiscal 1984 was a calamity—calling for $200 billion annual deficits as far as the eye could see, or what amounted to $1 trillion of planned borrowing over the five-year fiscal horizon.

The generation of Republican Congressional leaders then in power still respected the old-time religion of fiscal discipline. They had therefore been horrified by where the President's budget was taking them.