will…. [The Iraqis] have an educated population. They have oil wealth. They have water. They have some of the most fertile land that I’ve ever seen. In a decade or so this will be a remarkable country—if we stick with it. It’s imminently doable.” A decade or so… if we stick with it? At that point we were already four years in. This should be a fourteen-year war?
“It would be fine with me,” Sen. John McCain said while campaigning for president not long after the counterinsurgency doctrine–inspired surge began, if the US military stayed in Iraq a hundred years. Or maybe a thousand, he said, or even a million, as long as the Iraqi government wanted us there, and as long as there were no casualties, which would prove the Iraqis really liked us. The million-year-war proposal didn’t persuade the American public to back Senator McCain. He lost badly to Illinois senator Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. But even for President Obama, a man who made a name for himself as an avowed opponent of the Iraq War, getting out was not easy. In year nine of the war, Obama finally got the Iraqi government to provide the fig leaf of insisting upon our departure.
A few days after we agreed to leave, the Pentagon announced it would be stationing as-yet-undetermined thousands of troops in Kuwait, just across the border, where we could jump into Iraq in case the security situation deteriorated in our absence. Don’t forget to make room for the Predator and Reaper drones in there too. And don’t forget the thousands of private American contractors who could stick around inside Iraq and help out with US foreign policy by proxy, without fear of congressional interference.
The Guard and Reserves were ready at a moment’s notice too. “We’re in a situation now where the soldiers we have recruited… want to serve, and if we don’t continue to challenge them and maintain that combat edge, we think we’re going to see soldiers leave us because what we recruited them for and what we promised them, we weren’t able to deliver on,” the acting director of the National Guard said in 2011. “This country made a huge investment [in the reserve component] to this point, and we think they’ll get short-changed if we don’t take advantage of this operational reserve.”
The military commissioned a study in 2011 of the Guard and Reserve in the post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan era. The lead author told the
With the World’s Greatest Privately Augmented Standing Army in place, we are, as Jefferson feared, constantly scanning the horizon for “a speck of war.” When Gen. George Casey returned from his job as the honcho of the Iraq War in 2007 to take over as Army chief of staff, one of the first things he did was send his transition team out to take a wide-angle view of the world his Army faced. Then he shared the findings with the national press. “I said, ‘Go talk to people who think about the future. Ask them what they think the world is going to look like in 2020.’ And they did. They went to universities. They went to think tanks. They went around to the intelligence agencies. They went around the government. And they came back and they said, ‘You know, we’re surprised at the almost unanimity that the next decades that we face here will be ones of what they call persistent conflict.’ ” The Army was going to have to grow, he said.
In his farewell-to-the-Army speech in 2011, when he was moving over to the CIA, David Petraeus implored the nation to keep hold of the can-do-everything counterinsurgency doctrine. “We will need to maintain the full- spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere,” the general said. “But again I know that that fact is widely recognized.”
In 2011, new secretary of defense Leon Panetta was running around Capitol Hill with his hair on fire saying cuts in the annual increase of the Pentagon budget would “hollow out” the military. “This is not as if we’ve come out of a major war and everything is fine,” Panetta said, lamenting “rising powers… rapidly modernizing their militaries and investing in capabilities to deny our forces freedom of movement in vital regions.” He’s right. But the reason those foreign powers were rising in the first place is not necessarily because of their military strength but because of their economies—something this country had largely neglected in our decade of hot war.
However much blood and treasure we shoveled into the Hindu Kush and the deserts of Al Anbar Province after 9/11, we can look back at that expenditure now from a position of grave, grave weakness. Unless three-ton V-hulled armored MRAP trucks and pilotless flying killer robots are going to provide the basis of America’s new manufacturing base for the twenty-first century, we’ve built ourselves—to the exclusion of all other priorities—a military superstructure we can’t use for anything other than war and that we can no longer afford. And it’s going to be really hard to take this thing apart. Even the manifestly hilariously dangerously stupid parts of it we can’t take apart. Have you heard the one about the wing fungus?
CHAPTER 9
An $8 Trillion Fungus Among Us
SAY YOU’RE A HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR IN 2007. WE’RE FOUR YEARS into Iraq, and six years into Afghanistan. If you’re feeling a call to patriotic duty, a sense of adventure, thinking about the training opportunities offered by a career in the US Armed Forces, where do you tell that recruiter that you’d like to end up? Probably not in a missile silo in Minot, North Dakota. In the post-9/11 era, who’d want the job of sitting through the nuclear winter on the high plains, running maintenance on the thirty-five B-52s, guarding the “silos” that housed 150 giant and largely untested intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), babysitting the hundreds of smaller nuclear warheads stored in sod-topped bunkers like canned fruit shelved in a tornado shelter? The munitions maintenance team and the weapons handlers and the tow crews in Minot could call those bunkers “igloos,” but giving stuff funny names didn’t make life there any more fun.
“Our younger airmen, once they’ve reached that decision point, if they have been stationed in one of our northern bases where the environment’s a little bit tougher, they tend to leave the service,” an Air Force general told the Senate. Those who didn’t leave the service didn’t stick around the tending-the-nukes life for long. In 2007, an Airman assigned to a nuclear bomber wing could look around and note that more than eight in ten members of her wing’s security force were rookies. One senior officer in the Air Force’s nuclear enterprise admitted that standing alert duty in missile silos is not considered “deployed,” and “if you are not a ‘deployer,’ you do not get promoted.”
The Air Force pleaded for more missileers, but “deployments in support of regional conventional operations [i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan] decrease manpower available to the nuclear mission.” But even without Iraq and Afghanistan siphoning off military talent, would anyone expect that ambitious young airmen would be clamoring for silo duty?
“We need a nuclear career field,” concluded a Pentagon blue-ribbon task force on the nation’s nuclear mission in 2008. Sixty years into America’s nuclear superpower age, sixty years as the only nation to have ever used a nuclear weapon against an enemy in wartime, sixty years of hair-trigger nuclear alert, and we don’t have a nuclear career field? We used to have one, but it’s been eclipsed by changing times, changing wars.
That Pentagon report noted that “many Airmen were skeptical of hearing repeated pronouncements that the nuclear mission is ‘number one’… No one explains to junior Air Force personnel why ICBMs are important.” But no matter what they might figure out to say about ICBMs being important, the Air Force’s actions spoke louder. Ask the staff sergeant who got written up for failing a Storage Access and Missile Safe Status Check inspection but still retained his position as a nuclear weapons handler. Status check? The airmen handling weapons capable of unleashing Armageddon were stuck on low.
So was the whole nuclear enterprise. It wasn’t just the personnel; it was the aging hardware, too. Consider page thirteen of a recently declassified 2007 report on the care and feeding of our nation’s nuclear weapons at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana:
RECOMMENDED IMPROVEMENT AREAS:
• Numerous air launched cruise missiles had fungus on leading edge of wings
• Forward missile antenna sealant delaminated
• Corrosion on numerous H1388 storage and shipping containers
