Salon’s Glenn Greenwald makes the important point that this is not an aberration in these dirty wars. “It’s the opposite: it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that’s rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we’re seeing it on video not because it’s rare, but because it just so happened… to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed.”

As part of an effort to extend the military’s “warrior culture” to unmanned planes, the Air Force is overhauling how it trains the crews that operate its rapidly growing fleet of Predators, Reapers and other remotely piloted aircraft.

The changes in training will affect hundreds of personnel who fly the unmanned aircraft remotely over war zones from distant bases and control their powerful cameras and targeting systems.

The effort is part of a move by the Air Force to put as much emphasis on drones as it does on traditional fighters and bombers, officials said.
. . .
The new training is a mix of the technical — details about the radar, camera and laser systems — and what Allen calls “infusing the Air Force warrior culture” into the job.

“They need to understand the battle space. They need to understand working with a crew,” Allen said. “This is absolutely flying a vehicle, and we want someone dedicated to this duty.”
. . .
“You do not want to feel you are not in the actual fight,” said Airman Paul South, 20, of East Smithfield, Pa., a member of the first class of new sensor trainees. “You are in the fight, and you need to realize what is on the line every time you are doing your job.”

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Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an “arc of instability” caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just “small wars in the midst of a big one.”

Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11, that’s 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat.

The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit spending of recent years, yield “virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors,” according to a New York Times budget analysis in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today’s younger generation of resources for their future.

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Administration officials announced last night that the President, in tomorrow’s State of the Union address, will propose a multi-year freeze on certain domestic discretionary spending programs. This is an “initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit,” officials told The New York Times.

But the freeze is more notable for what it excludes than what it includes. For now, it does not include the largest domestic spending programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And all “security-related programs” are also exempted from the freeze, which means it does not apply to military spending, the intelligence budget, the Surveillance State, or foreign military aid. As always, the notion of decreasing the deficit and national debt through reductions in military spending is one of the most absolute Washington taboos. What possible rationale is there for that?

The facts about America’s bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known. The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined, and spends roughly six times more than the second-largest spender, China. Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously. That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world’s. As one “defense” spending watchdog group put it: “The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six ‘rogue’ states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion.”

Original Article URL:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/01/26/defense

So you thought the Pentagon was already big enough? Well, what do you know, especially with the price of the American military slated to grow by at least 25% over the next decade?
. . .
The tired peace dividend tug boat left the harbor two decades ago, dragging with it laughable hopes for universal health care and decent public education. Now, the mighty USS War Dividend is preparing to set sail. The economic weather reports may be lousy and the seas choppy, but one thing is guaranteed: that won’t stop it.

The United States, of course, long ago captured first prize in the global arms race. It now spends as much as the next 14 countries combined, even as the spending of our rogue enemies and former enemies — Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria — much in the headlines for their prospective armaments, makes up a mere 1% of the world military budget. Still, when you’re a military superpower focused on big-picture thinking, there’s no time to dawdle on the details.

And be reasonable, who could expect the U.S. to fight two wars and maintain more than 700 bases around the world for less than the $704 billion we’ll shell out to the Pentagon in 2010? But here’s what few Americans grasp and you aren’t going to read about in your local paper either: according to Department of Defense projections, the baseline military budget — just the bare bones, not those billions in war-fighting extras — is projected to increase by 2.5% each year for the next 10 years. In other words, in the next decade the basic Pentagon budget will grow by at least $133.1 billion, or 25%.
. . .
Read More at:
www.tomdispatch.com/post/175129/jo_comerford_three_cheers_for_the_war_dividend

War is Not a Video Game
by David Sirota

I’m a video game geek, so as I sat through movie previews a few weeks ago, I was sure I was watching Nintendo ads.

There on the cinema’s screen was a super-sleek plane flying over a moonscape while communicating with an orbiting satellite. In the next moment, a multicolored topographical map, orders being barked — and in my own mind, memories of “Call of Duty” graphics. And then, finally, two guys in front of a computer console, and the jarring punch line: “It’s not science fiction; it’s what we do every day,” said the bold type, followed by a U.S. Air Force symbol.

Before giving the audience a chance to digest the slogan, it was onto another montage, this one of helicopters and explosions with 1970s music playing in the background. A preview for a Steve McQueen-themed game, I thought. Then, though, the familiar kicker: “The drones fight terrorism and protect America, and in the process, they keep the front lines unmanned,” said the voiceover, adding, “This isn’t science fiction; this is life in the United States Navy.”

. . .

More broadly, the American psyche’s slow progress toward an increasingly peaceful disposition could be stunted by the propaganda’s powerful paradox: While sanitizing ads play to the country’s growing disgust with militarism, they could ultimately lead us to be more supportive of militarism. How? By convincing us that violence can be just another innocuous expression of adolescent technophilia.

If we end up thinking that, we will have once again forgotten what all wars, even the justifiable ones, always are: lamentable human tragedies.

As the single largest consumer of energy in the world, the U.S. military is poised at the center of two of the most life-altering issues of our time: climate change and the height of oil production (”peak oil”). Surprisingly, the Pentagon began taking both matters seriously much sooner than the rest of government, which still has its fair share of skeptics.

A 2007 Pentagon-funded report by 11 high-level retired officers concluded that climate change is a “serious threat to America’s national security.” A few weeks later, another Pentagon-commissioned report called on the military to “fundamentally transform” its assumptions about energy because the current strategy of global engagement with highly energy consumptive technologies is “unsustainable in the long term.”

Before the antiwar movement rejoices in the end of U.S. hegemony and environmentalists celebrate the move toward sustainability, it’s important to remember that the Pentagon is still developing solutions to these issues and in the world of warfare things often don’t get fixed until they are first completely destroyed (e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan).
. . .
The DoD also likes to brag that its total site-delivered energy consumption declined more than 60 percent between 1985 and 2006, but when the reasons for this drop are examined the green veneer starts to fade. As energy analyst Sohbet Karbuz noted in a 2007 paper for the Energy Bulletin, “The main factor behind that reduction was the closure of some military bases, privatization of some of its buildings, and leaving some energy related activities to contractors.”
. . .
each soldier consumes 25 percent more energy than the average U.S. citizen—who already consumes 15 times more energy than does the average person in a developing country.
. . .
By the Pentagon’s own figures, the U.S. military uses more fossil fuels than any other single entity. But the Pentagon’s figures only take into consideration vehicle transport and facility maintenance. They don’t account for the energy needed to build something like the massive imperial embassy or mega-bases in Iraq or reconstruct the rest of the country.

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