America's Phony Wars and the National Defense Strategy
U.S. troops and outposts and flags are everywhere, but for whose interests, and at what cost?
W.J. Astore
In my latest article for TomDispatch.com, I address America's real wars overseas and contrast them with the phony war in the so-called Homeland. What I mean by "phony" is the lack of national mobilization for, and even interest in, these overseas wars. These wars exist and persist; they are both ever-spreading and never-ending; yet few Americans outside of the military and the Washington beltway crowd have any stake in them. Except when U.S. troops die or a spectacular bomb is used, the mainstream media rarely covers them.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has defined a new National Defense Strategy (NDS) that has only expanded America's list of enemies and rivals. A quick summary:
Conventional conflict against peer enemies, e.g. Russia and China.
Conventional conflict against "rogue" states, e.g. North Korea and Iran.
Unconventional (anti-terror) operations, e.g. Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Niger, etc.
If that's not enough, the Pentagon also seeks extended nuclear supremacy (at a cost of at least $1.2 trillion over the next few decades) and full-spectrum dominance for space and cyber as well as land, sea, and air. As U.S. "defense" budgets continue to grow, there's really no sense of limits, monetary or otherwise. Rising budgets feed endless war, and vice-versa. It's a fail-safe recipe for imperial over-stretch and the decline if not collapse of America.
What follows is an excerpt from my latest article; you can read the entire article here at TomDispatch.com.
America’s New (Phony) National Defense Strategy
Even phony wars need enemies. In fact, they may need them more (and more of them) than real wars do. No surprise then that the Trump administration’s recently announced National Defense Strategy (NDS) offers a laundry list of such enemies. China and Russia top it as “revisionist powers” looking to reverse America’s putative victory over Communism in the Cold War. “Rogue” powers like North Korea and Iran are singled out as especially dangerous because of their nuclear ambitions. (The United States, of course, doesn’t have a “rogue” bone in its body, even if it is now devoting at least $1.2 trillion to building a new generation of more usable nuclear weapons.) Nor does the NDS neglect Washington’s need to hammer away at global terrorists until the end of time or to extend “full-spectrum dominance” not just to the traditional realms of combat (land, sea, and air) but also to space and cyberspace.
Amid such a plethora of enemies, only one thing is missing in America’s new defense strategy, the very thing that’s been missing all these years, that makes twenty-first-century American war so phony: any sense of national mobilization and shared sacrifice (or its opposite, antiwar resistance). If the United States truly faces all these existential threats to our democracy and our way of life, what are we doing frittering away more than $45 billion annually in a quagmire war in Afghanistan? What are we doing spending staggering sums on exotic weaponry like the F-35 jet fighter (total projected program cost: $1.45 trillion) when we have far more pressing national needs to deal with?
Like so much else in Washington in these years, the NDS doesn’t represent a strategy for real war, only a call for more of the same raised to a higher power. That mainly means more money for the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and related “defense” agencies, facilitating more blitz attacks on various enemies overseas. The formula -- serial blitzkrieg abroad, serial sitzkrieg in the homeland -- adds up to victory, but only for the military-industrial complex.