By Patricia Lee Sharpe.
Drip, drip, drip, and whoooosh: that’s the sound of our hard-earned personal income, once taxed, going down the drain in the Pentagon. And now I know why the military gets away with it.
America the Fearful
First off, there’s the fear factor. Too many Americans have been terrorized by military fear-mongering into granting whatever the Pentagon asks for. As for “our” representatives, they have a different fear. They’ll support the iffiest military project, lest campaign donations dwinde to a dribble that won’t be enough to get them re-elected in our increasingly plutocratic star-and-serf system.
Here’s some context: the U.S. spends nearly as much money on its military-related functions as the rest of the world altogether and nearly half of all U.S. discretionary funding is allocated for the use of the Pentagon, yet all those trillions are still not enough, we’re told. No, we sheep are not yet 100% safe from free-wheeling, copy cat terrorists, let alone the occasional malefactor dispatched by organizations like Al Qaeda. So the dictum is: give up your Social Security, give up your Medicare, give up your carefully-inspected food, give up your well-tested medical devices, and fork it all over to the national security apparatus.
Playing expertly on those fears, Leon Panetta, Obama’s new Secretary of Defense, accompanied for intimidation purposes by the usual be-medaled general, in this case the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey, was in Congress this week, doing his best to protect the humongous Pentagon budget from cuts that may go beyond the present $450 billion over the next ten years. The specter of a $1.2 trillion lopping looms. To put all those zeros (count ‘em: eleven) in perspective, that’s the cost of three or four military aircraft. Seems entirely doable at a time when ordinary people have been losing their jobs and homes, doesn’t it? Not to the military.
An Audit for the Pentagon, at Last
Meanwhile, Panetta also let a very interesting, very relevant and potentially damaging cat out of the bag: the military doesn’t know how it spends all its money—or whether the funds have achieved their nobly intended goals, which (in practice) may come down to box-checking or promotion-seeding (see Van Buren below). Evidently, while other executive departments are being hounded to stop waste, fraud and abuse right down to the last paperclip, the Pentagon has escaped thorough scrutiny. Panetta, clearly on the defensive, has promised to expedite “a full audit” of the Pentagon budget—and (wow! what speed!) to have it done by 2014, not the previously anticipated 2017. Says Panetta: “ I have also directed increased emphasis on accountability and a full review of the Department’s financial controls....” Who’d have thunk the Pentagon wasn’t already paying attention to such basics? Even I had more faith, and I’ve got pretty cynical in recent years.
The FederalTimes reports that “many lawmakers have latched onto the Pentagon’s inability to pass an audit as a [relatively painless] way to make the Department more efficient in light of upcoming budget cuts. However,” the report continues, “most defense analysts agree that efficiencies alone will not generate the kind of budget savings needed.”
Indeed! But easier said than done, as Americans have discovered, whenever attempts to cut military programs or eliminate military bases have been advanced. Can you say pork? Have you ever heard, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Today, if you listen closely enough, you’ll discover that many of the stingiest no-more-taxes Tea Party freshmen have already learned these little tricks.
The Need for Anecdotes
Still, it might help those who are really, not just cosmetically, trying to put an end to the malallocations of business as usual, if we had a trustworthy accounting of exactly where the Pentagon-designated money goes (including the security stuff that’s being turned against us)—and whether this billion or those millions actually achieved anything but ribbon-cutting publicity (also see Van Buren). Until we have this complete and systematic audit, we’re left with various outrage-producing but isolated examples and anecdotes of a sort that are easily criticized as “atypical” or “merely subjective.”
Mr. Steve Donnelley (who replied to my colleague’s excellent review of Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, does this sort of sneering at “mere” anecdotes when he defends his participation, as a contractor or sub-contractor, in the spectacularly failed rebuilding of Iraq. (As in, where’s the piped water, the electrical grid, the sewage system, after all these years and all this American money? And no feeble or far-fetched excuses, please.) Perhaps this allergy to anecdote is what prevents Donnelly from giving us specific examples of the rebuilding successes that he claims are far more numerous than the duds Van Buren describes, but generalities don’t make his assertions very convincing. Actually, he lost all credibility with me when he decided to defend the ambassador’s determination to grow grass around the imperial-sized new U.S. embassy in Baghdad. The cost to U.S. taxpayers of that hopeless attempt to turn desert green: millions.
But any number of contractors turned a nifty little profit on that ungreen greening boondogle, no doubt. It’s no secret, though we don’t have neatly damning totals, so far as I know, that the Pentagon spends far more money on contracting out than it would cost to perform many functions in house. One hopes that these financial excesses will be glaringly clear once we have a decent auditing of Pentagon finances. Billions could be saved, I suspect, by not so generously subsidizing the private sector. Which makes me wonder. Once the Republicans have accomplished their task of destroying or merely crippling government, how is the private sector going to survive? No subsidies! Have they thought of that as they rail against pernicious, initiative-sapping unemployment benefits?
The Wonders of Clarity
Clarity and specificity. Let’s hope that Panetta’s accelerated audit brings us these benefits, so that we can begin to hold the Pentagon to account. Meanwhile, clarity and specificity are the virtues of Van Buren’s page-turner of a book which, by a happy miracle, escaped through the cracks of the State Department’s censorship apparatus. Anyone who has tried to read the opaque boilerplate prose of a SIGIR report on Iraqi reconstruction (there are several) has no clear idea of what actually happened on the ground. Specific examples are few and far between, although pledges of future improvement are effusive, which does lend credibility to suspicions that, rather frequently, all was not well from conception through implementation. Read Van Buren and then go back to SIGIR. You’ll have the key you need for translating it into real world language.
Although Van Buren doesn’t hesitate to nail the State Department’s poorly conceived and mismanaged reconstruction efforts, the minuscule monetary value of State projects pales to insignificance when set beside the enormous sums thrown away by the military in Van Buren’s corner of Iraq. Donnelly’s claims to the contrary, it would seem, from what I’ve read elsewhere, that Van Buren’s experience can be taken as typical for reconstruction efforts throughout the country. What’s especially shocking is that the big bosses in both departments didn’t give a hoot about whether the projects were workable or whether there were reliable partners handy to implement them. They needed the simulacrum of success stories to tell bosses on successively higher rungs of the relevant organizational ladders.
Get the Military Out of Development
The military’s unsuitability for administering development programs is a truth that rings loud and clear from the pages of Van Buren’s book. Panetta could winnow his financial needs by reversing the mission creep—picture an enormous insatiable amoeba—that has infected the U.S. military in recent years and by recognizing, once and for all, that a fighting machine isn’t designed to win hearts and minds. Picture it. A troupe of heavily-booted, helmeted foreigners draped in all sorts of equipment and armed to the teeth gives candy to kids, says “Ma’am” to the ladies on the rare occasions that women appear and holds kindergarten-level ritual conversations with assorted illiterate male villagers, who—surprise! surprise!—say “Yes” to everything—and continue to say “Yes” as long as the soldiers are around in sufficient numbers and are giving out money. Well, duh! That’s not pacification. It’s certainly not democracy-building. It’s occupation.
But Iraq’s not the only illustration of the military’s incompetence off the battle ground. There’s evidence from elsewhere as well. A recent inspection report described how some $60 billion dollars has been wasted in Pakistan and Afghanistan, much of it lavished on trying to win the stubborn hearts and minds of Pakistan’s military, which gladly accepts toys and training in order to bolster its defenses against India, which wasn’t exactly America’s idea for application.
My colleague’s review of the Van Buren volume also details other budget-inflating elements of the Pentagon’s penchant for trying to swallow the functions of other agencies. Panetta could save tens of billions by reversing this trend. He could meet other requests for sacrfice by a very simple decision: cut that airplane wish list by three or four. And then, as a chaser, he might tighten lax procurement policies.
The Threat to Civilian Ascendency
Unfortunately, in America today, denying anything to the military is almost impossible, politically. Ian Baruma captures our plight with painful accuracy in a recent issue of Foreign Policy: “The gradual militarization of American society,” he writes, “the ritual genuflections to ‘our men and women in uniform’ the bloated military budgets, the fawning attitude to generals—has [sic] resulted in something more often associated with tin-pot dictatorships in the developing world: crumbling bridges, potholed roads, rotten schools and an over-bearing military loaded with all the best and latest hardware.”
When Barack Obama was considering whether he should appoint Leon Panetta and General Dempsey to be the civilian and military heads of the U.S. defense establishment respectively, he must have had a conversation with each about the need for the military to take a haircut. Are these gentlemen performing as he expected? Are they acting in defiance? Or did Obama not press them on this issue? Anyhoo, we all know that any President who takes on the Pentagon will be crucified as unpatriotic and/or culpably weak on security issues. Even the slayer of the bin Laden dragon would not be immune from vicious stone-throwing. Does Obama want to be re-elected so badly that he too is ready to bow down to the frightening military jaggernaut? Has he become another pathetic captive to the mystique of military omniscience?
And does anyone believe that Panetta’s Pentagon audit will be structured to tell us—we citizens and taxpayers—what we need to know to make informed intelligent decisions about the performance of the military that is supposed to be serving us and not the other way around?