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The Domestic Roots of
Perpetual War
Franklin Spinney
Later this month, the Straus Military Reform Project will release its latest publication, The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It. Given the uncertainty of the DOD budget environment, continuing questions about how to proceed with Afghanistan, the Middle East and China, and Americans' tentative sense of security in a time of extremely high defense spending, we believe the release of this unique publication is timely.
The Pentagon Labyrinth is a short (160 page) anthology from 10 authors with over 400 years of experience inside the DOD bureaucracy, the armed forces, military history, defense journalism, Capitol Hill national security work and other defense related specialties.
In the next few weeks you will receive more materials about this new handbook-guide to the Pentagon, and we will send you invitations to events about it in the Washington area.
This past January, Challenge Magazine released - in article form - what is the introductory essay to The Pentagon Labyrinth. "The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War" is Challenge's featured article for the current issue. It is by my friend and colleague Franklin (Chuck) Spinney. Chuck introduces and comments on many of the issues our new handbook will address.
If, for example, you believe that the Defense Department's last "Quadrennial Defense Review" was a genuine attempt to deal with the problems the Pentagon faces, I urge you to read this article. If you believe our technological edge makes it possible for us to win in Afghanistan, you might find that this article and some of the materials in The Pentagon Labyrinth present arguments you have not fully considered before.
(A short note on Challenge Magazine. It's Web Site is at http://www.
See below Chuck Spinney's article, "The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War;" it is also at http://www.
The Domestic Roots of
Perpetual War
Franklin Spinney
Why does the United States spend so much on
defense? Why do we feel no more secure? As the
government faces pressure to cut federal spending,
it is time to get a clearer picture of what motivates
our military spending. This former Pentagon analyst
provides it.
Franklin Spinney retired from the Defense Department in 2003 after a military/civilian
career spanning thirty-three years, twenty-six of them as a staff analyst in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense. He is author of Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch
(Westview Press, 1985) and has written for many other publications. This essay is adapted
from The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It, ed. Winslow
Wheeler, Straus Military Reform Project, Center for Defense Information, winter 2010-1011
(forthcoming), chap. 1.
People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy
They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy;
it is: "Don't interrupt the money flow, add to it."
-Col. John R. Boyd (U.S. Air Force, ret.)
Fighter Pilot, Tactician, Strategist,
Conceptual Designer, Reformer
Today, twenty years after the end of the cold war and the disappearance
of the Soviet Union, the United States spends more on
defense than at any time since the end of World War II. This is
true even if one removes the cumulative effects of sixty-five years of
inflation from the current defense budget. Yet, notwithstanding the
absence of a nuclear-armed superpower to threaten our existence, this
gigantic defense budget is not producing a greater sense of security
for most Americans.
Indeed, we have become a fearful nation, a bunkered nation, bogged
down in never-ending wars abroad accompanied by shrinking civil
liberties at home. We now spend almost as much on defense as the rest
of the world combined, yet the sinews of our supporting economy,
particularly the all-important manufacturing sector, are weakening
at an alarming rate, threatening the existence of the high-income,
middle-class consumer society we built after World War II.
President Barack Obama promised change, but he is under intense
pressure to increase the defense budget even further, in part because
he is continuing his predecessors' war-centric foreign policy. At the
same time, he is being pressured to reduce the rapidly increasing
federal deficit, caused in part by the rising defense budget but also
by an ill-advised bank bailout and the cyclical effects of the worst
recession since the end of World War II. Moreover, the president
initially promised to place the Pentagon off-limits, while he sought
reductions in discretionary spending for social programs and only
reluctantly put defense spending "on the table" when he convened
a bipartisan panel to seek a comprehensive path to a balanced
budget. Lurking in the background, hanging over the American
people like a guillotine, lies the menacing possibility of cutting
social security and Medicare. In short, Obama may have promised
change, but he is continuing the establishment's business-as-usual
practices, including the grotesque diversion of scarce resources to
a bloated defense budget that is leading the United States into ruin.
Whether Obama's defense policy is a question of his free will is
quite beside the point.
The salient question is: How did the American political system
maneuver itself into such a destructive straitjacket?
This paper discusses not just the insatiable demands for ever larger
defense budgets, but also the directly resulting damage to America's
defenses and to the integrity of its politics. And, most important, the
paper's purpose is to provoke thought on reversing that pervasive
damage.1
Follow the Money Trail
One source of the pressure for more defense spending is that our
two relatively small wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both much smaller
than the Korean or Vietnam war, have stretched our military to the
breaking point. These wars are small in terms of scale and tempo of
operations. Bear in mind that the Korean and Vietnam wars took place
against a backdrop of cold war commitments. Today, the United States
is spending more than it did in 1969, when we had 550,000 troops in
Vietnam. But the cold war meant that we also maintained hundreds
of thousands of troops in Western Europe and East Asia, a huge rotation
base at home to support these forward deployments, a large Navy
fleet of 679 ships (compared with 287 today) to control the seas, and
thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert in airborne bombers,
missile silos, and submarines. Nevertheless, according to a report
issued by the Congressional Research Service, the cumulative costs
of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq have made the response to
September 11 the second-most-expensive war, adjusted for inflation,
in U.S. history, exceeded only by World War II.
Despite the expenditures, the day-to-day combat that our troops
face is no less grueling. On the contrary, our troops are stressed out
and exhausted, and many are traumatized by the intensity of their
experiences-all worsened by the endless troop rotations caused by a
military manpower base that is too small to sustain even these small
wars. Moreover, despite the doubling of the defense budget since
1998, equipment and weapons are being worn out and not replaced,
something that did not happen in either Vietnam or Korea. For example,
during the Vietnam War, the Air Force modernized its inventory
of F-100s and F-105s with considerably more expensive F-4s,
A-7s, and F-111s. Today, inventories of weapons and equipment in all
three military services are aging rapidly, and modernization is going
down the tubes because the new weapons the military services buy
are many times more expensive than their predecessors. Therefore,
the Pentagon cannot possibly buy enough new weapons to replace
existing weapons one for one-even with a defense budget that has
almost doubled since 1998.
This current-war problem is the product of a subtle web of dysfunctional
bureaucratic modes of conduct taking the form of a systemic
pattern of behavior that evolved gradually over the forty years of
cold war. This behavior co-evolved with a pattern of military belief
systems and distorted financial incentives that also built up slowly
and imperceptibly over those forty years. These bureaucratic belief
systems slowly insinuated themselves deeply and almost invisibly
into a domestic political economy that nurtures financial-political
factions of the Military-Industrial-
The result is a voracious appetite for money that is sustained by a selfserving
flood of ideological propaganda, cloaked by a stifling climate
of excessive secrecy. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us to
guard against the corrosive danger of exactly this in his 1961 farewell
address.2 He was ignored, and today, fifty years later, the domestic
political imperative to steadily increase the money flowing into the
MICC reaches into every corner of our society. It distorts and debases
our economy, our politics, our universities and schools, our media,
our think tanks, and our research labs, just as Eisenhower predicted
it would. So, even without the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to hype
the money flow, Obama could not have escaped massive pressures to
increase defense spending.
In retrospect, it is clear that the cold war served as a domestic political
engine to keep the money flowing into the MICC. Many believed-
erroneously, as it turned out-that the end of the cold war would
produce a "peace dividend" that would shut down the MICC and return
the United States to being a normal country engaged primarily in
peaceful business, not war. This view did not reflect the reality of the
MICC's political economy.3 By the time the cold war ended in 1991, a
true peace dividend would have collapsed the defense industry and its
powerful political dependents. To survive and flourish, the factions of
the MICC badly needed to evolve a subtle, pervasive shift in strategy,
a subliminal mutation in the MICC's political DNA. It is now clear
that this mutation has taken a frightening form: namely, the need to
foment an enduring voter-terrifying threat and unending small wars
to justify the money flow needed for the MICC's survival.
Without that never-ending succession of little wars (Somalia, Bosnia,
Kosovo, the first and second gulf wars, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan,
the war on terror, etc.) keeping the political system lathered up, the
MICC's political-economic house of cards would collapse. A little reflection
reveals that this mutation actually started in earnest as early
as 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Clearly September
11 did not create this mutation, but it certainly proved a windfall for
expanding the scale and cost of our small wars.
Continuous small wars (or the threat thereof) are essential for the
corporate component of the MICC; these companies have no alternative
means to survive. Although they now make up a very substantial
part of America's much diminished industrial base, they cannot convert
to civilian production. Many of them tried and failed; they simply
do not have the marketing, managing, engineering, and manufacturing
skills to compete successfully in global commercial markets. By
1990, the industrial leaders in the MICC fully understood this central
economic fact of the MICC's political economy-namely that, in the
prophetic words of William Anders, CEO of General Dynamics in
1991, "most [weapons manufacturers] don't bring a competitive advantage
to non-defense business," and "Frankly, sword makers don't
make good and affordable plowshares."4
Anders made this statement in a keynote address to the twelfth
annual conference sponsored by Defense Week, then a very influential
newsletter in the MICC. His intent was to explain why General
Dynamics was not going to diversify its business into the nondefense
sector, given the end of the cold war. Instead, Anders proposed to undertake
a takeover strategy to increase market share in a (temporarily,
as it turned out) shrinking market. Anders's speech was a precursor
to the "Pac-Man" consolidation strategy promoted by President Bill
Clinton's then deputy secretary of defense, William Perry, at a 1993
meeting with the defense titans, a meeting dubbed the "Last Supper."5
Perry's strategy led to a rash of industry-wide mergers in the early
to mid-1990s. Significantly, when the defense budget began to grow
rapidly after 1998, there was no undoing of the consolidation. Thus,
today the defense industry is dominated by three giant all-purpose
weapons manufacturers-two of which now have their headquarters
in the Washington, DC, area, and the third (Boeing) with a major
government relations office in the DC area as well-to more closely
supervise their most important corporate activity: the lobbying efforts
that influence the money flow out of the Pentagon, Congress,
and the White House.
Turning Clausewitz on His Head
It is easy to throw rocks at President Obama, but he did not create
the defense mess nor did his predecessor-though George W. Bush's
reckless spending, coupled with incompetent management in the
Defense Department under the stewardship of Donald Rumsfeld and
the domestic politics of the war-centric foreign and domestic policies
that metastasized in the wake of September 11, certainly worsened the
crisis and accelerated the Pentagon's day of reckoning.
In fact, Obama inherited a Defense Department that was in the
terminal stages of a meltdown first ignited as far back as the mid-
1950s, when the unit costs of weapons started to grow substantially
faster than the defense budgets.6 The deliberate explosion of military
electronics spending-radar and other sensors, automation, communications,
and then digitization in the late 1960s-greatly accelerated
this cost growth and widened the mismatch further. That huge cost
growth was (and still is) justified with a myopic argument, entirely
tautological, that rising cost and technical complexity were a necessary
consequence of our advantages in technology-and it was this
technology that was the source of our strength.
The dogmatic belief that greater weapons-system complexity and,
even worse, greater organizational complexity enhance combat effectiveness
is at the epicenter of the belief system sustaining the MICC. As
American strategist Colonel John Boyd explained in his monumental
study of war, Patterns of Conflict, "Complexity (technical, organizational,
operational, etc.) causes commanders and subordinates alike
to be captured by their own internal dynamics or interactions-hence
they cannot adapt to rapidly changing external (or even internal) circumstances."7
In truth, not only has the out-of-control complexity of
our weapon and command systems fed the MICC by driving up costs,8
Boyd showed how it has also shackled our forces in the field, making
them rigid, predictable, and highly vulnerable to faster-thinking,
more creative, and more adaptive enemies using far simpler weapons
and systems of command-an outcome that is becoming increasingly
clear in nine years of war in Afghanistan.
In fact, the MICC's drive toward ever-increasing complexity makes a
mockery of the hard-learned lessons of history going back thousands
of years.
Most readers have heard of the KISS principle, distilled by World
War II GIs out of their hard-won combat experience: Keep It Simple,
Stupid. KISS and its antithesis, complexity, were hardly new concepts
in the 1940s. They are, for example, at the heart of Carl von Clausewitz's
200-year-old theory of friction in combat-encapsulated in his
famous statement "Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing
is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind
of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war."9
Clausewitz considered friction the pervasive atmosphere of war or
the fog of war; his musings on the proper conduct of war emphasized
simplicity to reduce this friction.
According to Clausewitz : (1) each adversary possesses an independent
will and therefore can act and react unpredictably; (2) uncertainty
of information acts as an impediment to vigorous activity (i.e.,
friction); (3) a variety of psychological and moral forces can impede
or stimulate vigorous activity; and (4) military genius can overcome
friction, simplifying the myriad difficulties of war. These ideas are
timeless but, as Boyd has shown, Clausewitz overemphasized the importance
of reducing your own friction while greatly underestimating
the importance of amplifying your adversary's friction.10 This critique
is central because the ideology of the American military-and its
academies-purports to be grounded in Clausewitzian thinking. Yet,
for at least the past forty years, military service doctrine, headquarters
briefings, and defense contractor brochures and propaganda have continuously
asserted that increasing the complexity of our technology
and organizations is the key to lifting the fog of war-that is, that it
would reduce our friction.
The complexity dogma becomes ever more deeply ingrained, notwithstanding
our painful combat lessons on the ineffectiveness of
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