Strengthen American Defense: Budget-Cut Pork--Not Muscle--Reorganize and Gain New Capabilities
Interview on Fox Freedom Watch explaining why throwing more money to the DoD budget does NOT result in a corresponding improvement in military capabilities.
Interview on Channel 8 on why the surge in Afghanistan was misguided and ineffective:
Interview on RT about potential conflict with Iran--how Iran will be given nukes if attacked:
How to slash the Pentagon budget? Declare victory and go home.
BY DOUGLAS MACGREGOR | APRIL 26, 2011
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said it best, "When waves of change appear, you can duck under the wave, stand fast against the wave, or, better yet, surf the wave." Today, the same tsunami-like wave of debt that threatens to sweep away American economic prosperity is headed for America's defense establishment. President Barack Obama signaled as much with his April 13 budget address, in which he warned: "Just as we must find more savings in domestic programs, we must do the same in defense." Related
Obama gave no specifics, promising instead to work with the Pentagon to "conduct a fundamental review of America's missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world." But given the poor track record such reviews have -- both Quadrennial Defense Reviews and Roles and Missions Commissions -- and Obama's failure to even address the need to reduce defense spending, the president's words don't deserve to be taken seriously at all. Meanwhile, the Republican failure to take on defense spending -- the 800-pound gorilla in the room -- means the political discourse that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his colleagues seek may degenerate into pointless shouting matches with Capitol Hill's Democrats.
But the message for Republicans and Democrats alike should be that cutting defense doesn't mean going defenseless. It means reducing America's commitments overseas -- the latter-day version of "imperial overstretch" -- and changing the way the United States thinks about warfare. There's a way to do this, one that will allow for deep spending cuts, but in a manner that will preserve and enhance the U.S. military's competitive advantages while improving American national security.
Dealing with defense is admittedly a huge challenge. If directly questioned, the military brass will insist that given the missions they are obligated to undertake (along with a host of classified war plans they could be ordered to execute), reduced spending will put the Armed Forces and by implication the American people at grave risk. Then there's the chorus: a host of defense think tanks inside the Beltway that point out that the opportunity costs associated with cuts in spending and force structure are either unknown or too high; that unless specific alternative military options or tradeoffs are identified up front, capability gaps will emerge with potentially serious consequences for U.S. national security. These arguments are not entirely without merit. But they hardly justify keeping defense spending at current levels.
For one thing, there is no existential military threat to the United States or to its vital strategic interests. The nuclear arsenals in Russia and China could be used against the United States and its forces, but Russian and Chinese leaders have no incentive to contemplate suicide in a nuclear confrontation with the United States. Russia's diminished million-man armed forces are hard-pressed to modernize, let alone secure their own country, which borders 14 other states. For all its rhetoric, Russia's military focus is on restive Muslim populations in the Caucasus and Central Asia, not on NATO.
As for China, its top concern is not military confrontation with the United States, but domestic growing pains, especially the potential for its 1.3 billion people to overwhelm the Communist Party's internal political structures. China's internal focus on modernization and stability militates against external aggression, and this condition is unlikely to change for a very long time. Despite China's ability to steal or buy sophisticated technology, the military establishment cannot quickly or easily translate these technologies into new capabilities, and Beijing knows it.
Other possible threats are even less threatening. The North Korean regime, the poster child for the failure of state socialism, is on the road to extinction. In recent months, China has taken steps to secure its border with North Korea to ensure that millions of starving Koreans cannot rush north into China when the inevitable collapse occurs. Iran is a long way from possessing a nuclear weapon it can deliver, and its general-purpose forces are incapable of action beyond Iran's borders. Lastly, the world's leading scientific-industrial states -- most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the leading English-speaking powers, Britain, Australia, and Canada -- are close U.S. allies. All of their economies can and do support powerful military establishments.
What about the possibility that U.S. forces will be needed once again in the broader Middle East? Events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other parts of the Islamic world demonstrate that while many of the societies in the Middle East and North Africa are broken and their people are angry about it, these problems have nothing to do with the United States. The complex cultural problems plaguing the region, from state failure to persistent social pathologies to trouble adapting to modernity, will not be solved through U.S. military occupation and counterinsurgency operations aimed at exporting democracy at gunpoint. The million dollars a year it costs to keep one U.S. Soldier or marine on station in Iraq or Afghanistan makes no sense when, for a fraction of the cost, the U.S. government could easily protect America's borders from the wave of criminality, terrorism, and illegal immigration washing in from Mexico and Latin America.
Future conflicts in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America will not be insurgencies directed at unwanted U.S. military occupations. They are more likely to resemble the Balkan wars of the early 20th century, except that fights for regional power and influence will overlap with competition for energy, water, food, and mineral resources -- and the wealth they create. The United States can probably avoid involvement in these conflicts, but if its strategic interests compel intervention, America can do so with fewer, more potent ground forces than the ones it has today, capitalizing on its aerospace and naval supremacy.
Military strength is no longer based on the mass mobilization of the manpower and resources of the entire nation-state. Fewer, smarter Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and marines -- with intelligent technology -- can accomplish more than masses of troops with the brute-force tools of the past. Precision effects (kinetic and non-kinetic) utilizing a vast array of strike forces enabled by networked intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities point the way to a fundamental paradigm shift in the character of warfare. For example, today a military contest on the model of Kursk in July 1943, a battle that involved nearly 940,000 attacking German and Allied forces and 1.5 million defending Soviet forces in a geographical area the size of England, would result in catastrophic losses for the Soviet side. That's why those numbers you read about Chinese or Russian troops are less worrisome than they seem. Any future ground combat force that immobilizes itself in prepared defenses on the World War II model will be identified, targeted, and annihilated from a distance. Naval forces that concentrate large numbers of surface combatants risk similar losses in a future increasingly dominated by accurate strike weapons from various manned or unmanned platforms at sea and ashore.
What's needed now is more political courage, not more defense spending. It will fall to America's elected and appointed leaders to direct the Defense Department to aggressively accept more risk in reconciling defense expenditures with the country's urgent fiscal situation. Above all, members of Congress must have the fortitude to challenge the misguided hand-wringing inside the Beltway and put the country's long-term economic and defense interests ahead of winning the next election.
What is to be done?
Before turning to specific cuts, members of Congress should acknowledge that it is unacceptable to expend trillions of dollars for defense when the Defense Department cannot conduct an audit, let alone pass one. The only way to address this problem is to implement a statutory prohibition halting funding for defense beyond fiscal year 2014 until an audit is passed. If the Pentagon doesn't know where the money is going, how can American taxpayers feel confident that their hard-earned dollars are being spent wisely? It's high time for something new. What follows here is a plan -- arguably, somewhat radical -- to finally spend wisely and reconfigure the military for the threats of the 21st century. The annualized savings presented here would reduce the current U.S. defense budget by almost 40 percent, some $279.5 billion. This isn't just an accounting exercise, however. What's needed is new strategic thinking, thinking that avoids direct U.S. military involvement in conflicts where the United States itself is not attacked and its national prosperity is not at risk.
As French sociologist Émile Durkheim said, "Society is above all the idea it forms of itself." For Americans who have lived in a world with only one true center of military, political, and economic gravity -- the United States -- changing how their country behaves inside the international system is not an easy task. The temptation to meddle in the affairs of others is huge, especially when the perceived risk-to-reward ratio is low.
Put in the language of tennis, the use of U.S. military power since the early 1960s has resulted in a host of "unforced errors." Far too often, national decision-making has been shaped primarily by the military capability to act, not by rigorous risk assessment. Regardless of how great or small the military commitment, if success is ill-defined and the price of intervention is potentially excessive, then the use of force should be avoided. America has waited too long to learn this hard lesson.
DRAW-DOWN: Use it To Improve the U.S. Army with Combat Maneuver Groups
WARNING! Colonel Macgregor Predicts the Coming Melt-Down of the Socio-Political Order in a Speech at the U.S. Army War College
DEFENSE CUTS: Are our Only Choices Do-Nothing or Cut a Little of Everything? Colonel Macgregor Shows There IS a Better Way
South Korean Defense Reform: Colonel Macgregor at KODEF
(Click on pictures for full-sized versions)
First pictures of Colonel Macgregor as he presented his defense reorganization proposals to the South Korea Defence and Security Forum (KODEF) held at the National Assembly in Northeast Asia Peace and Security Forum, jointly organized by the Institute of International Relations at Korea University. KODEF focused on South Korea's defense reform, asking the question what would you do?
Colonel Macgregor Reveals Truth Behind West Point Classmate General McCrystal's Firing as Afghanistan Commander
McCrystal's Firing: How Integrity Must be Upheld Against the Corrupt Elites
July 2, 2010
Janine R. Wedel and Linda Keenan
The Huffington Post
: July 1, 2010
Shadow Elite: Rolling Stone's Hastings - How Outsiders Provide the Indispensable Check & Balance
General McChrystal wasn't the only one buffeted last week by Rolling Stone magazine. So was the news establishment, faced with the fact that a freelance reporter got access to the (former) Afghan war commander and his team, and had the apparent temerity to report exactly what he heard.
Michael Hastings broke custom with some reporters, like CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan who had this very revealing exchange with media reporter Howard Kurtz on CNN's Reliable Sources.
KURTZ: "When you are out with the troops and you're living together and sleeping together, is there an unspoken agreement......that you're not going to embarrass them by reporting insults and banter?"
LOGAN : "Yes."
KURTZ: "Tell me about that."
LOGAN : "Yes, absolutely. There is an element of trust."
In Logan 's view, Hastings violated the "trust," the "unspoken agreement" that cements the relationship between the military and many reporters. And in doing so, he acted as a consummate journalistic outsider.
The role of the outsider, whether in journalism, government or corporate America , has perhaps never been more important as a counterweight than in the current era of the shadow elite. That's the title of Janine's latest book, and in it, she traces the emergence over two decades, particularly since the end of the Cold War, of a new breed of power broker who press their own interests, while purporting to work in the public's interest. To do so, they subvert traditional process, put a stranglehold on (should-be) public information, and exploit the information and influence they gain while moving in and out of roles in government, business, media and think tanks.
The shadow elite are defined by "insider-ism." They work through semi-closed networks, whose member pursue a common agenda, abide by mutual obligations, uphold trust, "understandings," and the "unspoken agreement" that Kurtz underscores. They traffic in information gleaned from exclusive contacts, and use it to both serve their insider agenda and to keep others out. In an age when institutions of check and balance have withered - mainstream investigative journalism, government auditing, many regulatory agencies - the shadow elite are often the only ones who can connect-the-dots, both in terms of the interests they promote, and their own activities to further those interests. They can also best brand their agenda and activities for the public, with few watchdogs to call them on it.
That means those who try to breach the circle, outsiders - who have any number of personal motives (they are not simply "do-gooders") - may be the only ones standing in their way. They play the indispensable role of questioning the activities of the shadow elite, though some recent examples show that their voices often don't get heard until it's too late, and disaster has struck.
Case in point: Brooksley Born, the former chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. As one of only 7 women to graduate from her 1964 Stanford Law class, she was used to being an outsider by virtue of gender, but at crucial moments in the 1990's, she had another kind of outsider status. Born stood well outside the Wall Street-Washington-Harvard power clique that believed generally in financial "innovation," and specifically in blocking a proposed regulation of a new kind of exotic derivative, complex financial instruments that Born thought (correctly, as we know now) were dangerous.
By most accounts, Born did not like to be pushed around, and when pushed, tended to dig in her heels. Born stood up against the clique led by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, his deputy, former Harvard professor (and, years later, Harvard president) Lawrence Summers, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr.
At a 1998 meeting, Rubin, according to one participant, reportedly said to Born, "you're not going to do anything, right?" Wrong. She continued to fight them, hoping the collapse months later of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management would serve as a "wake-up call" on the risk of unregulated derivatives. She said that to the House Banking committee - one of at least 17 times she testified before Congress. Born lost the battle, retiring in 1999 to volunteer and pro bono work. And the members of that power clique? Each one, in the spirit of the shadow elite, would go on to take a role at a Wall Street firm, bank, private equity or hedge fund which made bundles on ....unregulated derivatives.
7 years later, another outsider would rattle cages, this time on the risk of subprime mortgages: FDIC chairman Sheila Bair. Bair, who's thought to have political ambitions, was once a bank teller in her native Kansas . According to a New Yorker profile, she respected the bygone culture of small-town banking with its simple, sensible mortgages. But there was nothing simple or sensible about the subprime mortgages that she saw piling up in the years leading into the 2008 crash. Bair agitated the banks to modify loans, and blames Alan Greenspan's Fed for not imposing stricter standards. The New Yorker describes the insider environment of the Washington economic elite:
Advisers with ties to New York banks have dominated both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration, and Bair has consistently stood out for her skepticism of Wall Street and for her eagerness to confront the big banks. A Kansas Republican, she has become an unlikely hero to economic liberals, who see her as the counterweight to the more Wall Street-centric view often ascribed to Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary.
Another disaster that just might have been averted had outsiders been able to exert more influence: the Gulf oil spill.
In this case, the outsiders were EPA investigators up against BP, a company that had massive lobbying power, former top government officials on its advisory board, and a dysfunctional, conflicted and allegedly corrupt regulator - the Minerals Management Service. These EPA investigators went after BP on a deadly Texas refinery fire and two Alaskan oil leaks but they say the Justice Department didn't allow them to go as far as they wanted. One unnamed investigator told Newsweek, "we felt like [these decisions] went all the way to the very top."
One EPA lawyer based in Seattle, Jeanne Pascal, has been speaking out since she retired a few months ago on her efforts to strip BP from government contracts because of its repeated safety violations. Pascal was foiled when she says the Pentagon told her that "BP was supplying 80 percent of the fuel going to the U.S. military in Iraq ." Speaking to Newsweek she added, "when a major economic and political giant tells you it has direct access to the White House, it's very intimidating."
Pascal was attempting to breach what one Polish sociologist has called "dirty togetherness," which he (and Janine) saw at play in eastern Europe under communism. The scarcity of consumer goods and distrust of that communist system inadvertently encouraged family, friends, and trusted associates to help each other out through under-the-table transactions - merely to live a somewhat better life. "Dirty togetherness" applies aptly to the shadow elite, but this time it is used to help the powerful become even more powerful. In both cases, one is only as successful as one's insider network. Loyalties are cemented not only by the access to resources and opportunities that their pooled efforts reap, but also by the awareness that they can blackmail one another. In BP's case, those "dirtily together" were the company and its circle of allies: the compromised regulator, the friends in the White House, Justice Department and Pentagon, the hired guns on K-Street, the former top officials paid to sit on boards.
As for Rolling Stone freelancer Michael Hastings, he broke the understandings maintained for mutual benefit by the military, many of the reporters who regularly cover it, and perhaps some allied think tanks as well. The rule is that loose talk among public officials in a casual setting is generally off the record unless stated otherwise.
Hastings of course won instant journalistic fame, but he also took big risks in violating that code. Top officials may now shun him, and if they do, a daily news outfit may be wary of ever hiring him. Think tanks that hire those officials once out of public service may not want him either. As we mentioned, he's facing the wrath of some established reporters who say he's made their job much harder, and broke the code for sensational, not journalistic gain: did the loose talk really say anything about current strategy? For these reasons, Hastings might have short-circuited not just McChystal's military career, but risked circumscribing his own career as well.
So it seems strange when some suggest that a freelancing outsider like Hastings had a luxury that other reporters did not. New York Times columnist Frank Rich sums up the irony well. While "Beltway media heavies and their most bold-faced subjects were dressing up for the annual White House correspondents' dinner," Hastings was overseas, reporting his story.
Macgregor on 21st Century Warfare and U.S. Force Structure
Colonel (USA, Ret.) Douglas Macgregor, recently gave a well-received presentation at Fort Lee on 21st Century Warfare and U.S. Force Structure. Although directed to an audience of military professionals; it is of much wider interest, and is above as a link.
NEW DETAILED WARRIOR'S RAGE PRESENTATION!
Colonel Macgregor's devastatingly hard-hitting presentation made at the Empire Salon on his new book: Warrior's Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting on March 10, 2010 describing the most significant battle of the 1991 Gulf War and its Geostrategic aftermath, explaining how a victory won decisively by Soldiers on the battlefield, was then lost by the U.S. Army chain of command.
In February 1991, after crossing the Iraqi border, Macgregor and his cavalry squadrons caught part of Iraq's Republican Guard by surprise and destroyed them in the largest tank battle in the history of the U.S. Army since World War II. Instead of exploiting the successful attack, the Army commanders halted Macgregor's advance and allowed the main body of the Republican Guard to escape. Thus, Saddam Hussein had the force to suppress the Kurdish and Shiite insurrections and stay in power.
Macgregor is one of the strongest critics of the American military and its industrial complex. Macgregor argues that Desert Storm was turned into a myth, creating a polarized celebrity culture transforming generals into iconic figures who began appearing as TV commentators, basking in book deals, consultancy sinecures, corporate board seats and lobbying contracts. Macgregor decries Congress and the press for not holding generals accountable which he believes led to the series of disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
