The Defense Blind Spot
The article below from Common Dreams gives you a hint of what the term "militarism" refers to.
The rhetoric in Washington D.C. right now is that the American government and economy are potentially careening towards destruction, and so cuts and sacrifices have to be made. Armageddon in just in a few weeks and so there are both offers of compromises and rhetoric of righteous obstinacy from all sides. In a moment like this, where supposedly everything is being placed upon the table whereby the people aboard the plane which is surely going to crash unless the collective load can be lightened, make the decision as to what is chucked, you can see the ideological blindspots of people based on what they refuse to put out in the open, what they keep hidden behind their backs as they make angry suggestions about what is already on the table and should be thrown away for the good of the many.
It is intriguing how the most massive, overbloated, corrupt and inefficient part of the United States government, the Department of Defense, can remain exempt from the discussions about cutting budgets and saving money. Most on Guam might consider our local government to be the worst part of the United States and its empire when it comes to things such as oversight or money, but the vice of Guam's government is minor in so many ways compared to the constant and obvious theft which takes place in broad daylight through the Department of Defense each day.
This comparison is not meant to excuse corruption on Guam, but rather to place it in a better context. The hiring of a relative or a poorly qualified but politically related person is not good, but the level at which Guam's government corrupts life on Guam is so insignificant compared to the amount of graft and sheer mind-numbing incompetence at the Pentagon. The corruption there reaches global proportions, since the amount of money which is wasted dwarfs thousands of times over the entire budget of the Government of Guam, and could make up the economy of a large country. This is important because when people on Guam give an identity to the military and to the Department of Defense they tend to do it in positively skewed ways, pining for its garbage free roadsides or cheaper gas prices and seeing it as something which practices no nepotism but acts only based on merit. The Government of Guam on the other hand is something which is always skewed negatively, something which can be assumed to be unable to handle even simple tasks, something which you can always assume to screw things up, make them worse or just be absolutely inefficient. You see the military positively through proud serving men and women, and the Government of Guam negatively through a crowd of orange vested men seemingly doing nothing at a construction site or a bus driver sleeping in his vehicle while waiting for his next shift.
For Guam's peculiar way of conducting island business people here developed the term OOG or "only on Guam." Much of what came to be associated with this term was negative, or how only certain instances of public waste, corruption or incompetence could only be found on Guam. In those terms however, every local instance of public corruption must seem petty and almost silly when compared to that of the Department of Defense. The amount of money which is loses each year is somewhere in the billions, the amount of money it spends on things it never uses is enough to give any sensible person nightmares. So much of DOD's money is tied into projects which are welfare for defense contractors, making weapons that will never be used and generally don't function anyways. Since the level of waste at the Department of Defense far exceeds that of Guam and can be considered on the level of the most inept dictatorial regimes of postcolonial Africa, I am constantly surprised that the global lexicon hasn't adopted the phrase OAP "only at the Pentagon."
It is always surprising to see then the gap between the reality of an institution such as DOD and the daily sense impressions of people. That gap is precisely what makes the level of waste possible at the DOD. In the case of something like the Government of Guam, there is always a feeling of it needing to be better watched and monitored, and that is why even if it means that the island has failed itself, people can celebrate when GovGuam agencies are put in receivership. In the case of the DOD there is a feeling that one can let it do whatever it wants and everything should be ok. For Guam, this feeling of trust stems from personal feelings of the regimented order of military life, the nostalgia of the racist and paternal control from the Navy in pre-World War II Guam, and the perceptions of DOD as having endless coffers of cash from which it can draw from to constantly improve itself and take care of its problems. It is interesting then how this fantasy then clashes with reality over things such as the military buildup. So long as the buildup appeared to be in DOD's hands and was critiqued in very minute or limited ways, it appeared to be an economic dream come true. The natural faith that people have in the DOD being able to keep promises, do the impossible and ensure order seeped into the buildup, and so the more that others became involved in the process, activists, local leaders, the Governments of Japan and the United States, the more it seemed to fall apart. Even if the interventions of others were necessary or did important things in improving the buildup or calling into question things that needed to be questioned, there was still a tension amongst those who are ideologically predisposed to believe the fantasies of DOD supremacy, that something horrible had been done by daring to question whether or not DOD has the interests of Guam and its people at heart.
The Pagat lawsuit is a perfect example of this. While I have the feeling that many people support the lawsuit which attempts to protect Pagat by arguing that DOD did not follow the law when they selected the site for their five firing ranges, I also get the feeling, and one of the leaders of Para Hita Todu has even come out implying this, that the lawsuit is something wrong and bad because it gives a negative impression to DOD that Guam doesn't support them or want them. The problem with this logic is that it can't be right unless you believe that DOD is exceptional and should be given more freedom and autonomy than anyone else and should not be required to follow the law. Part of the frustration but also power of the Pagat lawsuit was how it was not couched in radical terms, and did not openly condemn colonialism and militarism, but rather asserted a very small legal challenge, which it appears will be successful. It did not attack DOD in the terms in which some activists assault the institution, which is something not shared by many and thus tends to be dismissed without any serious consideration. The attack just asked that DOD follow the law, which is powerful because DOD, while representatives of it may claim otherwise, generally gets to skirt the law and be made exempt from it. Due to its size and importance the DOD often gets the laws changed to suit its needs and not the other way around, and so given this context where DOD threw together a massive 11,000 page document of which so much cannot be taken seriously, you can see how they most likely expected the leeway they usually receive.
**********************
Published on Tuesday
July 12, 2011 by On the Commons
Why is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Not Part of the Deficit Discussion?
Republicans ignore incompetence, bloat and corruption at the Pentagon
by David Morris
In all the talk about the federal deficit, why is the single largest culprit left out of the conversation? Why is the one part of government that best epitomizes everything conservatives say they hate about government—- waste, incompetence, and corruption—all but exempt from conservative criticism?
Of course, I’m talking about the Pentagon. Any serious battle plan to reduce the deficit must take on the Pentagon. In 2011 military spending accounted for more than 58 percent of all federal discretionary spending and even more if the interest on the federal debt that is related to military spending were added. In the last ten years we have spent more than $7.6 trillion on military and homeland security according to the National Priorities Project.
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In the last decade military spending has soared from $300 billion to $700 billion.
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When debt ceilings and deficits seem to be the only two items on Washington’s agenda, it is both revealing and tragic that both parties give a free pass to military spending. Representative Paul Ryan’s much discussed Tea Party budget accepted Obama’s proposal for a pathetic $78 billion reduction in military spending over 5 years, a recommendation that would only modestly slow the rate of growth of military spending.
Indeed, the Republican government battering ram appears to have stopped at the Pentagon door. This was evident early on. As soon as they took over the House of Representatives, Republicans changed the rules so that military spending does not have to be offset by reduced spending somewhere else, unlike any other kind of government spending. It is the only activity of government they believe does not have to be paid for. Which brings to mind a bit of wisdom from one of their heroes, Adam Smith. “Were the expense of war to be defrayed always by revenue raised within the year … wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken.”
The Tea Party revolution has only strengthened the Republican Party’s resolve that the Pentagon’s budget is untouchable. An analysis by the Heritage Foundation of Republican votes on defense spending found that Tea Party freshmen were even more likely than their Republican elders to vote against cutting any part of the military budget.
What makes the hypocrisy even more revealing is that the Pentagon turns out to be the poster child for government waste and incompetence.
In 2009 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found “staggering” cost overruns of almost $300 billion in nearly 70 percent of the Pentagon’s 96 major weapons. What’s more, the programs were running, on average, 21 months behind schedule. And when they were completed, they provided less than they promised.
The Defense Logistics Agency had no use for parts worth more than half of the $13.7 billion in equipment stacked up in DOD warehouses in 2006 to 2008.
And these are only the tips of the military’s misspending iceberg. We really don’t know how much the Pentagon wastes because, believe it or not, there hasn’t been a complete audit of the Pentagon in more than 15 years.
In 1994, the Government Management Reform Act required the Inspector General of each federal agency to audit and publish the financial statements of their agency. The Department of Defense was the only agency that has been unable to comply. In fiscal 1998 the Department of Defense used $1.7 trillion of undocumentable adjustments to balance the books. In 2002 the situation was even worse. CBS News reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted, “we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”
Imagine that a school district were to reveal that it didn’t know where it spent its money. Now imagine the Republican response. Perhaps, “Off with their desktops!”
How did Congress’ respond to DOD’s delinquency? It gave it absolution and allowed it to opt out of its legal requirement. But as a sop to outraged public opinion Congress required DOD to set a date when it would have its book sufficiently in order to be audited. Which the Pentagon dutiful did, and missed every one of the target dates. The latest is 2017 and DOD has already announced it will be unable to meet that deadline.
Adding insult to injury, last September, the GAO found that the new computer systems intended to improve the Pentagon’s financial oversight are themselves nearly 100 percent or $7 billion over budget and as much as 12 years behind schedule!
The Pentagon is not just incompetent. It is corrupt. In November 2009 the Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the federal watchdog responsible for auditing oversight of military contractors, raised the question of criminal wrongdoing when it found that the audits that did occur were riddled with serious breaches of auditor independence. One Pentagon auditor admitted he did not perform detailed tests because, “The contractor would not appreciate it.”
Why would the Pentagon allow its contractors to get away with fraud? To answer that question we need to understand the incestuous relationship between the Pentagon and its contractors that has been going on for years, and is getting worse. From 2004 to 2008, 80 percent of retiring three and four star officers went to work as consultants or defense industry executives. Thirty-four out of 39 three- and four-star generals and admirals who retired in 2007 are now working in defense industry roles — nearly 90 percent.
Generals are recruited for private sector jobs well before they retire. Once employed by the military contractor the general maintains a Pentagon advisory role.
“In almost any other realm it would seem a clear conflict of interest. But this is the Pentagon where…such apparent conflicts are a routine fact of life”, an in-depth investigation by the Boston Globe concluded.
U.S. military spending now exceeds the spending of all other countries combined. Knowledge military experts argue that we can cut at least $1 trillion from the Pentagon budget without changing its currently expressed mission. But a growing number believe that the mission itself is suspect. Economic competitors like India and China certainly approve of our willingness to undermine our economic competitiveness by diverting trillions of dollars into war and weapons production. Some argue that all this spending has made us more secure but all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Certainly our $2 trillion and counting military adventures in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan have won us few friends and multiplied our enemies.
Defense experts Gordon Adams and Matthew Leatherman, writing in the Washington Post offer another argument against unrestrained military spending.
For tens of millions of Americans real security comes not from fighting wars on foreign soil but from not having to worry losing their house or their job or their medical care. As Joshua Holland, columnist for Alternet points out 46 states faced combined budget shortfalls this year of $130 billion, leading them to fire tens of thousands of workers and cut off assistance to millions of families. Just the supplemental requests for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan this year were $170 billion.
What is perhaps most astonishing of all is that cutting the military budget is wildly popular. Even back in 1995, when military spending was only a fraction of its present size, a poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes reported that 42 percent of the US public feeling that defense spending is too high and a majority of Americans were convinced that defense spending “has weakened the US economy and given some allies an economic edge.”
This March Reuters released a new poll that found the majority of Americans support reducing defense spending.
The next time you hear Republicans insist they want to ferret out government waste and reduce spending and stamp out incompetence ask them why the one part of government that exemplifies everything they say is wrong with government is the one part of government they embrace most heartily.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
David Morris is Vice President of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, based in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., which focuses on local economic and social development.
The rhetoric in Washington D.C. right now is that the American government and economy are potentially careening towards destruction, and so cuts and sacrifices have to be made. Armageddon in just in a few weeks and so there are both offers of compromises and rhetoric of righteous obstinacy from all sides. In a moment like this, where supposedly everything is being placed upon the table whereby the people aboard the plane which is surely going to crash unless the collective load can be lightened, make the decision as to what is chucked, you can see the ideological blindspots of people based on what they refuse to put out in the open, what they keep hidden behind their backs as they make angry suggestions about what is already on the table and should be thrown away for the good of the many.
It is intriguing how the most massive, overbloated, corrupt and inefficient part of the United States government, the Department of Defense, can remain exempt from the discussions about cutting budgets and saving money. Most on Guam might consider our local government to be the worst part of the United States and its empire when it comes to things such as oversight or money, but the vice of Guam's government is minor in so many ways compared to the constant and obvious theft which takes place in broad daylight through the Department of Defense each day.
This comparison is not meant to excuse corruption on Guam, but rather to place it in a better context. The hiring of a relative or a poorly qualified but politically related person is not good, but the level at which Guam's government corrupts life on Guam is so insignificant compared to the amount of graft and sheer mind-numbing incompetence at the Pentagon. The corruption there reaches global proportions, since the amount of money which is wasted dwarfs thousands of times over the entire budget of the Government of Guam, and could make up the economy of a large country. This is important because when people on Guam give an identity to the military and to the Department of Defense they tend to do it in positively skewed ways, pining for its garbage free roadsides or cheaper gas prices and seeing it as something which practices no nepotism but acts only based on merit. The Government of Guam on the other hand is something which is always skewed negatively, something which can be assumed to be unable to handle even simple tasks, something which you can always assume to screw things up, make them worse or just be absolutely inefficient. You see the military positively through proud serving men and women, and the Government of Guam negatively through a crowd of orange vested men seemingly doing nothing at a construction site or a bus driver sleeping in his vehicle while waiting for his next shift.
For Guam's peculiar way of conducting island business people here developed the term OOG or "only on Guam." Much of what came to be associated with this term was negative, or how only certain instances of public waste, corruption or incompetence could only be found on Guam. In those terms however, every local instance of public corruption must seem petty and almost silly when compared to that of the Department of Defense. The amount of money which is loses each year is somewhere in the billions, the amount of money it spends on things it never uses is enough to give any sensible person nightmares. So much of DOD's money is tied into projects which are welfare for defense contractors, making weapons that will never be used and generally don't function anyways. Since the level of waste at the Department of Defense far exceeds that of Guam and can be considered on the level of the most inept dictatorial regimes of postcolonial Africa, I am constantly surprised that the global lexicon hasn't adopted the phrase OAP "only at the Pentagon."
It is always surprising to see then the gap between the reality of an institution such as DOD and the daily sense impressions of people. That gap is precisely what makes the level of waste possible at the DOD. In the case of something like the Government of Guam, there is always a feeling of it needing to be better watched and monitored, and that is why even if it means that the island has failed itself, people can celebrate when GovGuam agencies are put in receivership. In the case of the DOD there is a feeling that one can let it do whatever it wants and everything should be ok. For Guam, this feeling of trust stems from personal feelings of the regimented order of military life, the nostalgia of the racist and paternal control from the Navy in pre-World War II Guam, and the perceptions of DOD as having endless coffers of cash from which it can draw from to constantly improve itself and take care of its problems. It is interesting then how this fantasy then clashes with reality over things such as the military buildup. So long as the buildup appeared to be in DOD's hands and was critiqued in very minute or limited ways, it appeared to be an economic dream come true. The natural faith that people have in the DOD being able to keep promises, do the impossible and ensure order seeped into the buildup, and so the more that others became involved in the process, activists, local leaders, the Governments of Japan and the United States, the more it seemed to fall apart. Even if the interventions of others were necessary or did important things in improving the buildup or calling into question things that needed to be questioned, there was still a tension amongst those who are ideologically predisposed to believe the fantasies of DOD supremacy, that something horrible had been done by daring to question whether or not DOD has the interests of Guam and its people at heart.
The Pagat lawsuit is a perfect example of this. While I have the feeling that many people support the lawsuit which attempts to protect Pagat by arguing that DOD did not follow the law when they selected the site for their five firing ranges, I also get the feeling, and one of the leaders of Para Hita Todu has even come out implying this, that the lawsuit is something wrong and bad because it gives a negative impression to DOD that Guam doesn't support them or want them. The problem with this logic is that it can't be right unless you believe that DOD is exceptional and should be given more freedom and autonomy than anyone else and should not be required to follow the law. Part of the frustration but also power of the Pagat lawsuit was how it was not couched in radical terms, and did not openly condemn colonialism and militarism, but rather asserted a very small legal challenge, which it appears will be successful. It did not attack DOD in the terms in which some activists assault the institution, which is something not shared by many and thus tends to be dismissed without any serious consideration. The attack just asked that DOD follow the law, which is powerful because DOD, while representatives of it may claim otherwise, generally gets to skirt the law and be made exempt from it. Due to its size and importance the DOD often gets the laws changed to suit its needs and not the other way around, and so given this context where DOD threw together a massive 11,000 page document of which so much cannot be taken seriously, you can see how they most likely expected the leeway they usually receive.
**********************
Published on Tuesday
July 12, 2011 by On the Commons
Why is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Not Part of the Deficit Discussion?
Republicans ignore incompetence, bloat and corruption at the Pentagon
by David Morris
In all the talk about the federal deficit, why is the single largest culprit left out of the conversation? Why is the one part of government that best epitomizes everything conservatives say they hate about government—- waste, incompetence, and corruption—all but exempt from conservative criticism?
Of course, I’m talking about the Pentagon. Any serious battle plan to reduce the deficit must take on the Pentagon. In 2011 military spending accounted for more than 58 percent of all federal discretionary spending and even more if the interest on the federal debt that is related to military spending were added. In the last ten years we have spent more than $7.6 trillion on military and homeland security according to the National Priorities Project.
When debt ceilings and deficits seem to be the only two items on Washington’s agenda, it is both revealing and tragic that both parties give a free pass to military spending. Representative Paul Ryan’s much discussed Tea Party budget accepted Obama’s proposal for a pathetic $78 billion reduction in military spending over 5 years, a recommendation that would only modestly slow the rate of growth of military spending.
Indeed, the Republican government battering ram appears to have stopped at the Pentagon door. This was evident early on. As soon as they took over the House of Representatives, Republicans changed the rules so that military spending does not have to be offset by reduced spending somewhere else, unlike any other kind of government spending. It is the only activity of government they believe does not have to be paid for. Which brings to mind a bit of wisdom from one of their heroes, Adam Smith. “Were the expense of war to be defrayed always by revenue raised within the year … wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken.”
The Tea Party revolution has only strengthened the Republican Party’s resolve that the Pentagon’s budget is untouchable. An analysis by the Heritage Foundation of Republican votes on defense spending found that Tea Party freshmen were even more likely than their Republican elders to vote against cutting any part of the military budget.
What makes the hypocrisy even more revealing is that the Pentagon turns out to be the poster child for government waste and incompetence.
In 2009 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found “staggering” cost overruns of almost $300 billion in nearly 70 percent of the Pentagon’s 96 major weapons. What’s more, the programs were running, on average, 21 months behind schedule. And when they were completed, they provided less than they promised.
The Defense Logistics Agency had no use for parts worth more than half of the $13.7 billion in equipment stacked up in DOD warehouses in 2006 to 2008.
And these are only the tips of the military’s misspending iceberg. We really don’t know how much the Pentagon wastes because, believe it or not, there hasn’t been a complete audit of the Pentagon in more than 15 years.
In 1994, the Government Management Reform Act required the Inspector General of each federal agency to audit and publish the financial statements of their agency. The Department of Defense was the only agency that has been unable to comply. In fiscal 1998 the Department of Defense used $1.7 trillion of undocumentable adjustments to balance the books. In 2002 the situation was even worse. CBS News reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted, “we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”
Imagine that a school district were to reveal that it didn’t know where it spent its money. Now imagine the Republican response. Perhaps, “Off with their desktops!”
How did Congress’ respond to DOD’s delinquency? It gave it absolution and allowed it to opt out of its legal requirement. But as a sop to outraged public opinion Congress required DOD to set a date when it would have its book sufficiently in order to be audited. Which the Pentagon dutiful did, and missed every one of the target dates. The latest is 2017 and DOD has already announced it will be unable to meet that deadline.
Adding insult to injury, last September, the GAO found that the new computer systems intended to improve the Pentagon’s financial oversight are themselves nearly 100 percent or $7 billion over budget and as much as 12 years behind schedule!
The Pentagon is not just incompetent. It is corrupt. In November 2009 the Pentagon’s Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the federal watchdog responsible for auditing oversight of military contractors, raised the question of criminal wrongdoing when it found that the audits that did occur were riddled with serious breaches of auditor independence. One Pentagon auditor admitted he did not perform detailed tests because, “The contractor would not appreciate it.”
Why would the Pentagon allow its contractors to get away with fraud? To answer that question we need to understand the incestuous relationship between the Pentagon and its contractors that has been going on for years, and is getting worse. From 2004 to 2008, 80 percent of retiring three and four star officers went to work as consultants or defense industry executives. Thirty-four out of 39 three- and four-star generals and admirals who retired in 2007 are now working in defense industry roles — nearly 90 percent.
Generals are recruited for private sector jobs well before they retire. Once employed by the military contractor the general maintains a Pentagon advisory role.
“In almost any other realm it would seem a clear conflict of interest. But this is the Pentagon where…such apparent conflicts are a routine fact of life”, an in-depth investigation by the Boston Globe concluded.
U.S. military spending now exceeds the spending of all other countries combined. Knowledge military experts argue that we can cut at least $1 trillion from the Pentagon budget without changing its currently expressed mission. But a growing number believe that the mission itself is suspect. Economic competitors like India and China certainly approve of our willingness to undermine our economic competitiveness by diverting trillions of dollars into war and weapons production. Some argue that all this spending has made us more secure but all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Certainly our $2 trillion and counting military adventures in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan have won us few friends and multiplied our enemies.
Defense experts Gordon Adams and Matthew Leatherman, writing in the Washington Post offer another argument against unrestrained military spending.
“Countries feel threatened when rivals ramp up their defenses; this was true in the Cold War, and now it may happen with China. It’s how arms races are born. We spend more, inspiring competitors to do the same — thus inflating defense budgets without making anyone safer. For example, Gates observed in May that no other country has a single ship comparable to our 11 aircraft carriers. Based on the perceived threat that this fleet poses, the Chinese are pursuing an anti-ship ballistic missile program. U.S. military officials have decried this “carrier-killer’‘ effort, and in response we are diversifying our capabilities to strike China, including a new long-range bomber program, and modernizing our carrier fleet at a cost of about $10 billion per ship.”
For tens of millions of Americans real security comes not from fighting wars on foreign soil but from not having to worry losing their house or their job or their medical care. As Joshua Holland, columnist for Alternet points out 46 states faced combined budget shortfalls this year of $130 billion, leading them to fire tens of thousands of workers and cut off assistance to millions of families. Just the supplemental requests for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan this year were $170 billion.
What is perhaps most astonishing of all is that cutting the military budget is wildly popular. Even back in 1995, when military spending was only a fraction of its present size, a poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes reported that 42 percent of the US public feeling that defense spending is too high and a majority of Americans were convinced that defense spending “has weakened the US economy and given some allies an economic edge.”
This March Reuters released a new poll that found the majority of Americans support reducing defense spending.
The next time you hear Republicans insist they want to ferret out government waste and reduce spending and stamp out incompetence ask them why the one part of government that exemplifies everything they say is wrong with government is the one part of government they embrace most heartily.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
David Morris is Vice President of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, based in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., which focuses on local economic and social development.
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