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=By= Nancy A. Youseff

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the U.S. military is notably short on soldiers, but apparently not on generals.

There are at least 12 U.S. generals in Iraq, a stunningly high number for a war that, if you believe the White House talking points, doesn’t involve American troops in combat. And that number is, if anything, a conservative estimate, not taking into account the flag officers running the U.S. air war, the admirals helping wage the war from the sea, or their superiors back at the Pentagon.

At U.S. headquarters inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, even majors and colonels frequently find themselves saluting superiors at a pace that outranks the Pentagon and certainly any normal military installation. With about 5,000 troops deployed to Iraq and Syria ISIS war, that means there’s a general for every 416 troops, give or take. To compare, there are some captains in the U.S. Army in charge of that many people.

Moreover, many of those generals come with staffs and bureaucracy that some argue slows decision-making against an agile terror group.

The Obama administration has frequently argued that the U.S. maintains a so-called light footprint in Iraq to reassure the American public that its military is not back in Iraq. Indeed, at times, the United States has not acknowledged where it has deployed troops until one of them died.

But if the U.S. footprint is so small, why does the war demand so many generals?

There is the three-star general in charge of the war, Army Gen. Sean MacFarland, and his two deputies, one of whom is in Iraq at any given time. There is the two-star Army general in charge of the ground war, Army Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky, and his two deputies, who also travel between Iraq and Kuwait. There is the two-star general in charge of security cooperation—things like military sales—and his deputy.

Then there are the one-star generals in charge of intelligence, operations, future operations, targeting, and theater support.

There also are an untold number of Special Forces commanders in the battlefield whom the military does not speak publicly about; the dozen figure presumes at least one one-star Special Forces general.

And that is just the beginning of the top-heavy war fight. That figure doesn’t include the bevy of generals stationed in places like Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar to support the mission. Nor does it count the three-star Air Force general and his two-star deputy in charge of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, which is headquartered at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina. Then there is a three-star Marine in charge of Marine Corps Forces Central Command, based out of MacDill Air Force, Florida, and his deputy and their Navy counterparts. All three commands are responsible for the Middle East.

Finally, there are a number of generals from the other roughly 60 coalition countries. The Daily Beast knows of three who support the U.S. generals—from Australia and the United Kingdom.

Once all those additional generals are included, there are at least 21 flag officers in Iraq, a number even military officials concede is conservative, as there likely are other coalition generals and possibly other Special Forces commanders.

Officially, there are only 3,870 U.S. troops, or the equivalent of a heavy brigade, which is usually led by a colonel. One colonel.

As The Daily Beast first reported, however, there are actually more than 5,000 troops, still far short of a footprint that would usually demand a score of generals.

Defense officials defended the deployment of so many generals to The Daily Beast. In a war where there are so many different types of fighters, these officials said, you need generals to coordinate. Today’s warfighter is more lethal, thanks to improved technology, and therefore needs a commander with the appropriate authority to sign off authority on the use of that power. The intelligence reaching the front lines is so complex, it demands the talents of a one-star general, defense officials argued to The Daily Beast.

(Of course, it’s odd to brag about such lethality when the Defense Department has said repeatedly that American troops were “not in an active combat mission” in Iraq.)

These officials also say it is only fitting that Iraqi military leaders engage with a U.S. counterpart of the same rank.

“When you look at what they do and what they are in command of and how they provide support, I think it is justifiable,” one defense official explained to The Daily Beast.

Some defenders offer a more simplistic answer—the U.S. military has always used this structure to deploy generals to places like Iraq.

There are as a rule two types of generals in the U.S. military—those who command troops and those who support the fight. The military argues that in Iraq, the U.S. needs far more of the latter than the former. The Iraqi troops, led by Iraqi generals, should shape the front lines, they said.

But critics argue that such dependency on U.S. generals in areas outside the battlefield not only suggests a lack of Iraqi skills but also obfuscates the U.S. effort.

“Having this many generals and flag officers gives the appearance of commitment without the substance of commitment,” Christopher Harmer, a naval analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, explained to The Daily Beast.

After World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, the U.S. military downsized its rank and file troops but did not shrink the size of its general and flag officer corps proportionally. The result is a long-standing criticism of a top-heavy military that some argue is costly and not as effective.

A May 2013 U.S. Government Accountability Office report, for example, concluded that “mission and headquarters support-costs at the combatant commands more than doubled from fiscal years 2007 through 2012, to about $1.1 billion.”

Several past defense secretaries have tried to cut the number of generals. Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel tried to reduce the number of general officers and civilians by 20 percent but wasn’t on the job long enough to make it happen. Robert Gates, the defense secretary during the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, proposed eliminating 50 generals and admirals.

If Gates’s efforts succeeded, it is not obvious in today’s military. In addition to all those generals in the Middle East, there are dozens of others at U.S. Central Command in Tampa, which is in charge of the Middle East, and at the Pentagon who also support the U.S. effort in Iraq and Syria—so many that it is impossible to say just how many generals are part of the U.S. war effort.

On Wednesday, two of the leading four-star generals of the war stateside took new command positions. Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the outgoing special operations commander, became the new head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees the Middle East. Army Gen. Raymond “Tony” Thomas is Votel’s special operations replacement.

Soon, they’ll be visiting the front lines in Iraq—and adding to the number of American generals on the ground in the ISIS war.

 

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=By= Robert C. Koehler

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he pols cry glory and revenge. They cry security. They cry greatness.

Then they stick in the needle, or the missile or the rifle shell, or the nuclear bomb. Or at least they imagine doing so. This will fix the world. And they approve more funding for war.

U.S. militarism, and the funding — and the fearmongering — that sustain it are out of control . . . in the same way, perhaps, that stage 4 cancer is out of control.

We talk about “the Pentagon” as though it were a rational entity, hierarchically in control of what it does, dispensable as needed to trouble spots around the world: a tool of America’s commander in chief and, therefore, of the American people. The reality, undiscussed on the evening news or the presidential debates, is something a little different. The American military is an unceasing hemorrhage of cash and aggression, committed — perhaps only at the unconscious level — to nothing more than its own perpetuation, which is to say, endless war.

As Ralph Nader has noted recently: “. . . the military — this huge expanse of bureaucracy, which owns 25 million acres (over seven times the size of Connecticut) and owns over 500,000 buildings in the U.S. and around the world — is beyond anybody’s control, including that of the secretaries of defense, their own internal auditors, the president, tons of GAO audits publically available, and the Congress. How can this be?”

The Department of Defense, which consumes over half the nation’s annual discretionary funding, has never been audited. The money disappears into a black hole and much of it is simply never heard from again. The situation is so outrageous that a congressional coalition of progressives and conservatives have launched an initiative, H.R. 5126, called the Audit the Pentagon Act of 2014.

According to the legislation’s sponsors: “The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 requires every federal agency to pass a routine financial audit each year. The Pentagon is the only cabinet agency that is ‘unauditable,’ according to the non-partisan Government Accountability Office. In the last dozen years, the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when DoD would pass an audit. Meanwhile, Congress doubled Pentagon spending.”

But this is only a small part of the hemorrhaging, metastasizing mess. We need to heal ourselves from, not simply audit, U.S. militarism.

“And no, the military doesn’t win wars anymore. It hasn’t won one of note in 70 years.” Gregory Foster, a West Point graduate and professor at National Defense University in Washington, D.C., wrote recently at TomDipatch. “The dirty wars in the shadows it now regularly fights are intrinsically unwinnable, especially given our preferred American Way of War: killing people and breaking things as lethally, destructively, and overwhelmingly as possible. . . .

“Instead of a strategically effective military,” he adds, “what we have is quite the opposite: heavy, disproportionately destructive, indiscriminately lethal, single-mindedly combat-oriented, technology-dominant, exorbitantly expensive, unsustainably consumptive, and increasingly alienated from the rest of society. Just as important, wherever it goes, it provokes and antagonizes where it should reassure and thereby invariably fathers the mirror image of itself in others.”

No, this is not the military the presidential candidates invoke so recklessly, but this is the military we have. And it is not stagnant. It’s growing, growing, growing — eating up the American budget and most members of Congress and most of the media, which at most are tepidly critical of the excesses of military spending ($640 toilet seats, $137 million F-35 Joint Strike Fighters) and the occasional moral lapses that reach public attention (rape, murder, Marines urinating on enemy corpses).

Despite the lost wars and the endless consumption of money, despite the failures of security and horrific growth of global terrorism since the U.S. began its war on terror, the country continues to militarize, both internationally and domestically.

Indeed, every outbreak of terror feeds the cancer, e.g.: “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized,” presidential candidate Ted Cruz declared in the wake of this week’s Brussels bombings, stoking the fears of his potential supporters and heedlessly tossing them a scapegoat.

Fear consumes intelligence. And militarism is all about simplistic solutions: Identify an enemy and kill him. Problem solved!

The more people militarize their thinking, the stupider they get.

But the world is extraordinarily complex. Simon Jenkins, writing this week in the Guardian, talked about “seeking to alleviate, or not aggravate, the rage that gives rise to acts of terror,” which can only happen by seriously de-escalating our own aggression.

Maybe, as Foster put it, our only alternative is to “reconsider the very purpose and function of the military and to reorient it accordingly. That would mean transforming a cumbersome, stagnant, obsolescent, irrelevant warfighting force — with its own inbuilt self-corrupting qualities — into a peacekeeping, nation-building, humanitarian-assistance, disaster-response force far more attuned to a future it helps shape and far more strategically effective than what we now have.

“. . . this would mean seeking to demilitarize the military.”

I call this trans-military thinking: a take on personal and national security that is not centered on aggression and dominance, but on diplomacy and, my God, understanding. Is such a level of social reorganization impossible? Only if we concede that we have no future.

 

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Robert C. Koehler, is an award winning journalist who once worked for Lerner Newspapers, but who has become a “Peace Journalist.” “Peace journalism is when editors and reporters make choices — about what to report, and how to report it — that create opportunities for society at large to consider and to value nonviolent responses to conflict.” — Jake Lynch. His writing appears across the web, but its origin can be found at his site Common Wonders.

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=By= Allen Ruff Interviews Henry A. Giroux

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]llen Ruff interviews Henry A. Giroux on the manifestations and mechanisms of the addiction to violence in the United States. Dr. Giroux responds in his typical sweeping style integrating everything from disentitlement and the capitalist system, to the concentration of wealth and the politics of fear. He also veers off into state terrorism and how that plays into the addiction to violence.

 

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Contributing Editor Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post, and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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Past in Present Tense with Murray Polner

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[dropcap]I[/dropcap] used to commute to work by rail with a neighbor. One day I learned that we were both veterans, me a Korean War draftee and he an officer in the Vietnam War. One of his military jobs was, to say the least, a bit unusual. For a time he was assigned to visit families of the dead to inform them their husband, son, grandson, nephew had been killed in the war.
I was stunned. I wondered how it affected him then and now. Does he still hear their cries? Did he ever try to contact some of them?  I remember turning to him, asking for more, please. “No, I’m sorry I told you, forget it,” he said, not unkindly. But not before he added a final word. He’d never allow his two sons to join the military.

I remember others too who died in war. In our earlier “Good War,” Irving Starr, whose family owned the delicatessen in the house adjoining our four-family apartment, was killed during a raid over Romania’s Ploesti oil fields. Buddy, his younger brother, told me that insofar as he knew, Irving’s body was never recovered.

I learned about Phil Drazin’s death while playing punch ball on the street next to his father’s grocery store. When his father received the news I watched in fear as his father ran out of his store on Straus Street and Lott Avenue, crying, yes, crying, and I thought I had never seen a grown man cry in public. “Maybe it’s a mistake, maybe it’s a mistake,” he kept shouting.

I wish I could remember the name or face of the 18 or 19 year old boy whose family had recently moved into an adjoining apartment just before he received his draft notice. I do remember that on one especially humid, hot summer weekday afternoon I watched from our second floor window as his father stumbled toward an apartment bench and began sobbing. My mother, who was standing next to me, was very good about such things. She ran down to the street and embraced the father while he was still wailing. She then gently led this heartbroken stranger whom none of us knew to his equally devastated wife. My mother then returned to our apartment, her eyes wet with tears at what she had just witnessed, and told me she was glad I was still too young to go to war.

My boyhood pal Porky was drafted and never returned from the Korean War. The laconic and pleasant Trinchintella boy, who worked at his family’s neighborhood gas station, was trained as a Vietnam War helicopter gunner. Gravely wounded, he died in a military hospital in Japan, his traumatized parents seated helplessly in an empty corridor, waiting. An uncle told me that the family would never again speak about their son’s death.

I remember an African American former student, Ronald Boston, shy, unathletic, a kid who tried hard to earn good grades and was drafted during Vietnam. Ironically, his mother worked in the nursing home in which my mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s disease, resided and where she tended her. One day she told me about a dream in which Ronald had been killed in Vietnam. Poor Mrs. Boston. Poor Ronald. He never did make it home except in a flag-covered casket. Years later I received an email from Cathy R. Boston, Ronald’s sister, telling me her niece had found my recollection of Ronald on the Internet. She wrote me: “So I decided to write you a short email to say thank you for writing and remembering. My mom and Dad never recovered, in fact the family never recovered from Ronnie’s death. The subsequent ‘wars’ have been protested in this household and will continue to be protested, Please do not give up the fight as I have not.”

I’ve forgotten the source but I also remember reading a small item about a mother in New York State mourning her soldier son’s death in Iraq. What’s it about, she asked? “Is it about oil? I don’t know what this war is for. We don’t want anyone else to die in this useless stupid war.”

It’s hard to keep an accurate count of all the wars large and small this

country has fought and lost since 1945. Convincing parents to send their young men and women to war is a relatively simple matter. Flags will wave, bumper stickers will urge us to “support our troops,” stay-at-home pundits will approve, and support in polls will rise, at least until the dead and badly wounded start trickling home.  Herman Goering was among the worst of the worse, but he came pretty close to understanding how governments manipulate people. “It is always a simple matter to drag people along,” he said while awaiting his trial in Nuremberg. “All you have to do is tell them that they’re being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Even war lovers like Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling changed their tunes once their sons died in WWI. Kipling tried to assuage his guilt and grief in this shattering couplet:

“If any question why we died

Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

Too late, Rudyard — and Teddy too.

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Contributing Editor, Murray Polner wrote “No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran“; “When Can I Come Home,” about draft evaders during the Vietnam era; co-authored with Jim O’Grady, “Disarmed and Dangerous,” a dual biography of Dan and Phil Berrigan; and most recently, with Thomas Woods,Jr., ” We Who Dared to Say No to War.” He is the senior book review editor for the History News Network.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

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=By= Claire Burnish

Connecticut — Police are now voicing their concerns about domestic drone use — specifically, they want the option to be able to employ weaponized drones in the future, should the need arise.

As if police brutality and aggression weren’t already an epidemic in the United States, police departments in Connecticut oppose a bill to outlaw the weaponization of drones. The bill also address unmanned aerial vehicles fitted with cameras, and their potential to violate the privacy rights of individuals. But law enforcement departments in the state appear far more concerned with being deprived of the possibility of arming them with weapons, rather than cameras.

As FOX 61 reported, bills currently being considered would both restrict drone use and classify arming them with any weapons — such as firearms or flamethrowers — as a Class C felony. Employing drones to set off explosives, deadly weapons, tear gas, and the like would be punishable by ten years in prison — and at the moment, that would include law enforcement. As written, the bill would require law enforcement to procure a warrant prior to using a drone for any reason.

Connecticut legislators seem to be taking practically the opposite route of those in North Dakota.

In 2015, North Dakota passed a law granting police the right to arm drones with “less than lethal” weaponry. Quietly slipping under the radar of the public and the media, the bill as originally written by its sponsor, Representative Rick Becker, banned all weapons on police drones — until a powerful police lobby had its way with the original draft.

“Bruce Burkett of the North Dakota Peace Officer’s Association was allowed by the state house committee to amend HB 1328 and limit the prohibition only to lethal weapons. ‘Less than lethal’ weapons like rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, sound cannons, and Tasers are therefore permitted on police drones,” Justin Glawe reported for The Daily Beast in August.

Of course, ‘less than lethal’ is quite a misnomer. Besides maiming and seriously injuring people, many of those options can also be fatal — particularly Tasers.

“This is not one I’m in full agreement with. I wish it was any weapon,” Becker rued at a hearing in March. “In my opinion, there should be a nice, red line: Drones should not be weaponized. Period.”

He noted the potential for police to mimic U.S. use of drones abroad, as in fighting ISIL — particularly because, he added, “When you’re on the ground, and you’re making decisions, you’re sort of separate. Depersonalized.”

North Dakota may have succumbed to Big Drone’s wishes — as the Daily Beast described the booming industry and its lobbyists — but it’s almost inevitable privacy rights groups, legislators, concerned citizens, and law enforcement will point to its and Connecticut’s laws as reference precedents. Depending on which turn the bills before the Connecticut legislature take, that state could be added to what will likely be a growing list of laws for how to deal with weaponized drones.

Joining the battle to prevent police spying by drone, the ACLU was slated to testify about the Connecticut bill on Tuesday.

For now, the prospect of law enforcement arming drones remains a legal gray area — at least, in most areas of the U.S.

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This article (So It Begins: American Police Start Pushing to Weaponize Domestic Drones) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Claire Bernish and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

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