Bush's budget allocations for fiscal year 2005 came as a surprise--not because we didn't think he was capable of beefing up the military at the expense of core domestic programs, but because he told us he wasn't going to. In his State of the Union speech, the compassion our president campaigned on appeared to turn to the social health of our nation. But it was not to be.
The proposed 2005 budget racks up the U.S. military allocation to the grand total of $401 billion, a sum larger than the combined defense budgets of the 15 next biggest countries. It is also larger than what we're going to spend all the other departments combined. The next largest department we're spending on is the Department of Education, to which we're allotting a measly $55 billion.
Desperate times, desperate measures? Perhaps, but in beefing up our national security, the Pentagon has neglected to streamline and modernize old military structures, instead commissioning more of the outdated, Cold War weapon systems that analysts believe should be shredded from the drawing board. The hefty purchases on our security bill are for conventional hardware like fighter planes, helicopters and Navy destroyers, rather than for flexible, high-stealth, counter-terrorism weaponry.
"Most of stuff they're buying is for conventional kinds of foes," reported an analyst for the Center of Strategy and Budgetary Assessments in a New York Times article. "It's not geared to classic, anti-terrorist activities." What we have is the buildup of a military juggernaut that still works best in deterrence and other conventional war scenarios. This top-heavy structure lacks the precision and flexibility to efficiently penetrate terrorist cells, and hardly encourages the low scale, more humane objective-setting demanded by these morally clouded times. In short, it is force without intelligence.
Why would Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld create the wrong military for a new war? The answer is not to look at force as a means to achieving a strategic end, but changes that have made force as a self-justifying tool of power.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh recently reported in The New Yorker that the Pentagon has created the Office of Special Plans, a group of analysts whose job has been to review intelligence for the Defense Department. Despite Tenet's public confession, the CIA had little to do with the intelligence that spurred war on Saddam Hussein. As a former intelligence officer told Hersh, "They didn't like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff ... They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with -- to the point of being bizarre." In controlling the intelligence, the Pentagon has effectively sidelined the CIA and gained power over the political agenda.
But the Pentagon's control over intelligence is hardly an isolated development. Vietnam rang loud warning bells that internal structures needed to be revamped for greater control. The result is that the Army has moved away from the conscription model to an all-professional one, in which the soldier pursues a career in this institution and is likely to develop strong ideological commitments to it. "Using professional soldiers has insulated the military from the rest of civil society," noted Professor Matthew Crenson of the Hopkins Political Science department. Professor Benjamin Ginsberg agrees: "The army has become a warrior caste, not just a state within a state but a society within a society," he said.
This insulated institution increasingly dominates the media, intelligence and policy-making organs. It's hardly a coincidence that the ideology dominating our foreign policy has its foothold in the Department of Defense. Two of the most militant devotees of neo-conservatism, the philosophy that America in a post-Cold War world should pursue unrivalled power and immunity from all possible threats, are Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
There can be no question that the military leviathan, with its special relationships and corporate contractors, has become a self-justifying institution. The budget allotments silence any disagreement on this. This makes war self-justifying too. War becomes a great abstraction, an unspoken necessity to maintain this overfed leviathan, rather than "a continuation of policy by other means." Already we're fighting a global war on terror, a murky conflict that promises an unlimited supply of enemies and avoids the discomfort of a conclusive end.
The bottom line is, it's 2004, we're going into a superpower overdrive that will redirect resources from civil development to defense and Orwell looks wiser than ever.
Zainab Cheema's column appears every two weeks.
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