For America, War is Like Breathing

The National Defense Authorization Act, signed by Bush in 2008, had already ratified the presence of atomic propulsion in new aircraft carriers, submarines and cruisers.

Motivation: “The future of our naval force must free itself from fossil fuel. If we eliminate the necessity for fossil fuel, the effectiveness and power of our forces will increase a lot.”

But the Defense National Authorization Bill for 2009–approved by 384 of 407– adds a further alarming element: atomic propulsion will be operating in “Landing Vehicles,” as well. In short, landing crafts, included in the progressive overgrowth of American armament: LHDs* and LHAs* are designed with a platform used for vertical take-off; smaller Landing Platform Docks (LPDs) carry heavy vehicles as well as storm troops. They are all “expendable” warships, subject to direct enemy fire and therefore to an inevitable damage.

“If one of these vehicles is shot or crashes it will create a radioactive tide, a contamination that will last hundreds of years,” noticed Linda Gunter of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.

Even the U.S. Navy is alarmed: atomic propulsion would add $800 million to the cost of a single assault vehicle, bringing the total price to $1.5 billion.

Not even the construction industry is pleased by the situation; there are only two construction sites in the whole U.S.A. authorized to develop ships with atomic propulsion: Northrop Grunman in Newport News (Virginia) and General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut.

Besides, nowadays warships with atomic propulsion are shut out from most of the international ports, limiting their use–at least until another great war is on. Is this what they’re getting ready for?

Maybe, but the actual motive is meaner. Successfully pushing for this decision was the democratic representative Gene Taylor, who presides over the board “Seapower and Expeditionary Forces” board of the lower house. Now, purely by chance, within Taylor’s constituency in Mississippi the most important site that specializes in landing crafts, again a Northrop Grunman “system facility” property, based in Pascagoula.

What else to say? On January 16, 1961, leaving the White House, President Eisenhower delivered a farewell speech (often cited in course books) in which he warned of the danges that a too powerful military-industrial complex (he was the first to use this expression) may produce in the society.

“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. Its full influence–economic, political and spiritual–is felt in every city, every office of the Federal government. We must understand its grave implications. It has an effect on our work, on resources, on our daily life; actually, on the very structure of our society.

As a government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination (military-industrial) endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

That’s a pretty good prediction, and proves the uselessness of predictions, because the U.S.A. is exactly at the point foreseen by Eisenhower: the large weight of the military-industrial complex has distorted society–economically and spiritually–to such an extent that the society now depends on war like a drug addict depends on his dose.

It’s not just that members of Congress invested their money in the huge defense industry; nor is it that the military-industrial complex is a powerful lobby and almost invincible. The fact is that for the people, good jobs (the ones with industrial and professional content) are only in defense departments; following deindustrialization in favor of China and Asia, armed forces are now the greatest employer for qualified and stable jobs. They are also the principal research centers for scientific and technological activities.

It seems like the average American man has no freedom when it comes to choosing his work: either he becomes a technician for the army, a waitress or a burger fryer. Thus, the strange, pathological, unprecedented nature of American militarism. It has nothing to do with Prussian militarism, let alone the Hitlerian one; it is a plc militarism, a job-related one; more and more incompetent, ineffective, without glory, without heroes; it abandons soldiers to themselves (past militarisms glorified them, honoring survivors and assisting disabled ex-servicemen) and–what’s more–is of very poor quality, in spite of higher expenses.

Let alone the effects of outsourcing to mercenary companies (another “honest” employer), caused by the darkening of the chain of command, and let alone the 16 intelligence agencies with dark and secret military tasks, among which the CIA became the Presidential private weapon.

No future Normandy, no Iwa Jima is going to require atomic landing crafts. There aren’t any strategic enemies, and nowhere near, who justify the construction of huge atomic landing crafts or the nuclearization of US fleets; it’s just the necessity of making the economy work, of running a society that identifies itself as the industrial-military system, at the extent that it fears peace.

This is why–as pointed out by the Belgian site Dedefensa – presidential candidates, either Democrats or Republicans, kept on singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” like McCain, or promising the “ticket-printing” of Iran like Hillary Clinton (only ten years ago an unlikely warmonger) or justifying a relative disengagement in Iraq–like Obama–promising an increase of efforts in Afghanistan. And why is Obama losing ground to McCain? Because he is considered not very inclined to wars.

“Not only is an anti-war position impossible in the American system; now it has even become unthinkable; opposition is limited to a discussion about which war to choose. Neoconservatives, with their military hysteria, beyond influencing and manipulating the USA, expressed a fundamental change in the psychology of this power”. A change in which “warmongering became the base of U.S. politics, its own manifestation; a demeanor in itself, a politics in itself, beyond imperialist, strategic and defensive necessities. By now it’s a psychological need”. Again: “As for the system, war is the only way to survive”.

Needless to say, war is against “an external enemy absolutely elusive by definition, because the real enemy is inside the system itself, in its destructuring decadence. War has become, for American psychology, a survival act like breathing for a human body”.

Even though these expressions appear exaggerated, they find a disturbing confirmation in a document just released by the Minister Robert Gates, “US National Defense Strategy”. In this record, the unquestioning priority for the future of US Army is indicated in the “long war” against extremism, rather than the “conventional challenges” against Russia and China. The tragic part is, Gates paradoxically used this priority – the endless fight against an elusive enemy – to support an opposite aim: to reduce the Pentagon’s huge expenses for conventional armaments.

Third World War weapons (used State-against-State) dominate the huge and dark balance sheet, explained Gates, while there are no “political interests” that urge for the new needs of asymmetric war and guerrilla tactics. As we have seen, Senators encourage excessive armament, with an eye on their constituencies and on military-industrial activities that provide jobs; defense industries are interested in selling atomic landing crafts, F-16s and B-2s, just because they produce a profit; in short, strategic necessities move in the background of the “plc warmongering” paradigm; wars are fought to increase sales although now the huge U.S. power is diminished in Afghanistan and Iraq, where wars are irregular.

“The danger is not that modernization will be sacrificed to finance the asymmetric reaction process, but rather that in the future we will neglect this same process”, said Gates. He could become Secretary of Defense under the next President (whoever he will be) and yet he has often criticized the “creeping militarization of American foreign policy”…need I say more?

He’s desperately trying to restore a rational limit on Pentagon activities, which are more and more taking over tasks that were once assigned to civil authority, but like everybody else, he’s obligated to choose “which” war to fight first, and he must reassure about what normal people would find terrifying: “the long war”.

*Multi-Purpose Amphibious Assault Ships