Meet the Real Vladimir Putin

 Pundits spend much time staring at Vladimir Putin, studying his expressions, analyzing his words (translated words), and evaluating his actions in an attempt to deduce his intentions.  Recently added to these deliberations is the question as to whether or not he is showing signs of diminished cognitive functioning.  Most such exercises use similar data sets to arrive at rather similar conclusions.  One that does not is provided by Timothy Snyder in his book The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.  It is easy to begin an analysis of Putin with his role as a KGB agent in the Soviet Union.  Is he trying to recreate the conditions of the past by reasserting control over former nations of the Soviet Union?  In Snyder’s view he is trying to regain control of those states, but his view of the past extends to way before the Soviet Union.  In fact, he seems to be most influenced by people who view the communist revolution in Russia as a disastrous mistake, one foisted on his people by the West.  The ideal form of government for them is not socialism, it is fascism.  To them, Hitler got it right: a supreme leader of a special people who knows that the Jews are the cause of all problems is the natural order of things.

Since his initial rise to power, Putin seems to have changed.  Is the transformation merely a revelation of long hidden goals, or does it indicate the beginning of a descent into madness? 

“Putin offered NATO Russia’s support after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  In 2002, he spoke favorably of ‘European culture’ and avoided portraying NATO as an adversary.  In 2004, Putin spoke in favor of European Union membership for Ukraine, saying that such an outcome would be in Russia’s economic interest.  He spoke of the enlargement of the European Union as extending a zone of peace and prosperity to Russia’s borders.  In 2008, he attended a NATO summit.” 

Somewhere along the way Putin was captured by the writings of an obscure (to westerners) philosopher named Ivan Ilyin.  Ilyin began as a typical young man interested in a just and law-abiding Russian nation but would assume darker views after the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution. 

“…Ilyin became a counterrevolutionary, an advocate of violent methods against revolution, and with time the author of a Christian fascism meant to overcome Bolshevism.  In 1922, a few months before the Soviet Union was founded, he was exiled from his homeland.  Writing in Berlin, he offered a program to the opponents of the new Soviet Union, known as the Whites.  These were men who had fought against the Bolsheviks’ Red Army in the long and bloody Russian Civil War, and then made their way, like Ilyin, into political emigration in Europe.  Ilyin later formulated his writings as guidance for Russian leaders who would come to power after the end of the Soviet Union.  He died in 1954.”

“After a new Russian Federation emerged from the defunct Soviet Union in 1991, Ilyin’s short book Our Tasks began to circulate in new Russian editions, his collected works were published, and his ideas gained powerful supporters.  He had died forgotten in Switzerland; Putin organized a reburial in Moscow in 2005.  Ilyin’s personal papers had found their way to Michigan State University; Putin sent an emissary to reclaim them in 2006.  By then Putin was citing Ilyin in his annual presidential addresses to the general assembly of the Russian parliament.  These were important speeches composed by Putin himself.  In the 2010s, Putin relied on Ilyin’s authority to explain why Russia had to undermine the European Union and invade Ukraine.”

That Ilyin’s ideas became popular with Putin and Russia’s leaders is deeply troubling.  One must consider Putin and his nation as at least as great a threat to civilization as Hitler and Nazi Germany.  Before going into details about Ilyin’s Christian fascism, we should remind ourselves what fascism entails.  Wikipedia provides this definition. 

“Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.”

Snyder probes the depths of this new Russian darkness.

“Ilyin regarded fascism as the politics of the world to come.  In exile in the 1920s, he was troubled that Italians had arrived at fascism before Russians.  He consoled himself with the idea that the Russian Whites were the inspiration for Mussolini’s coup: ‘the White movement as such is deeper and broader than [Italian] fascism.’  The depth and breadth, Ilyin explained, came from the embrace of the sort of Christianity that demanded the blood sacrifice of God’s enemies.”

“Ilyin was similarly impressed by Adolph Hitler.  Although he visited Italy and vacationed in Switzerland, Ilyin’s home between 1922 and 1938 was Berlin, where he worked for a government-sponsored scholarly institute…Ilyin saw Hitler as a defender of civilization from Bolshevism: the Führer, he wrote, had ‘performed an enormous service for all of Europe’ by preventing further revolutions on the Russian model.  Ilyin noted with approval that Hitler’s antisemitism was derivative of the ideology of the Russian Whites.  He bemoaned that ‘Europe does not understand the National Socialist movement.’  Nazism was above all a ’Spirit’ of which Russians must partake.”

Ilyin died in Switzerland in 1954.  During his time there he continued lecturing about a brighter future for the Russian people.

“The essence of these lectures, as a Swiss scholar noted, was that Russia should be understood not as a present communist danger but as a future Christian salvation.  According to Ilyin, communism had been inflicted upon innocent Russia by the decadent West.  One day Russia would liberate itself and others with the help of Christian fascism.  A Swiss reviewer characterized his books as ‘national in the sense of opposing the entire West.”

Hitler merely had his own charisma and concepts of human nature at his disposal, Ilyin and his concept of Christian fascism provided the Russian population and its leader, its “redeemer,” the assistance of God.  In his self-serving version of theology, God foolishly created a world that was inherently evil, but Russia and Russian people were somehow spared this fate.

“For Ilyin, our human world of facts and passions is senseless.  Ilyin found it immoral that a fact might be grasped in its historical setting: ‘the world of empirical existence cannot be theologically justified.’  Passions are evil.  God erred in his creation by releasing the ‘evil nature of the sensual.’  God yielded to a ‘romantic’ impulse by making beings, ourselves, who are moved by sex.  And so ‘the romantic content of the world overcomes the rational form of thought, and thought cedes its place to unthinking purpose,’ physical love.  God left us amidst ‘spiritual and moral relativism’.”

Ilyin created a theology to his liking, that allowed him to decide all the consequences such as who is evil and who is not, who is to be punished and who is not, and how God is to be served.  Russia thus becomes God’s chosen people who are innocent and thus a permanent target for attack by others who are invariably evil.  This recognition by God of eternal innocence suggests that Russia and the Russian people can do no wrong.

“As Ilyin saw matters, ‘the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.’  Russia does no wrong; wrong can only be done to Russia.  Facts do not matter and responsibility vanishes.”

“So long as the world is fractured, loving God means a constant struggle ‘against the enemies of divine order on earth.’  To do anything but to join this war was to enact evil: ‘He who opposes the chivalrous struggle against the devil is himself the devil.’  Faith meant war…”

Christian fascism needs a fascist leader.  Putin would see himself as exactly what this religion predicted.

“’Power,’ Ilyin imagined, ‘comes all by itself to the strong man.’  A man would appear from nowhere, and Russians would recognize their redeemer: ‘We will accept our freedom and our laws from the Russian patriot who leads Russia to salvation.’  Emerging from fiction, the redeemer disregards the facts of the world and creates a myth around himself.  By taking on the burden of Russians’ passions, he channels ‘the evil nature of the sensual’ into a grand unity.” 

Putin would use his name to acquire a level of greatness for himself and begin to think of himself as the redeemer.

“In his first address to the Russian parliament as president in 2012, Putin described his own place in the Russian timescape as a fulfillment of an eternal cycle: as the return of an ancient lord of Kyiv whom Russians called Vladimir…Putin’s first such point was the year 988, when his namesake, an early medieval warlord known in his time as Volodymyr or Valdemar, converted to Christianity.  In Putin’s myth of the past, Volodymyr/Valdemar was a Russian whose conversion linked forever the lands of today’s Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.”

Putin and his allies confirm Ilyin’s claims by countering the evils of sexuality and supporting traditional values. 

“A confident of Putin, Vladimir Yakunin…published in a long article in November 2012, Russia was eternally confronted with a conspiracy of enemies, which has controlled the course of history since time began.  This global group had released homosexual propaganda around the world to reduce birth rates in Russia and thereby preserve the power of the West.  The spread of gay rights was a deliberate policy intended to turn Russians into a ‘herd’ easily manipulated by the masters of capitalism.”

“The attempt to put heterosexuality within Russia and homosexuality beyond was factually ludicrous, but the facts were beside the point.  The purpose of the anti-gay campaign was to transform demands for democracy into a nebulous threat to Russian innocence: voting = West = sodomy.  Russia had to be innocent, and all problems had to be the responsibility of others.”

By the time of his 2012 reelection to the presidency, Putin appeared to have settled on a new foreign politics, one closely tied to the logic of Ilyin.  He promoted the concept of Eurasia in which all of Europe should be merged into what would be an expanded Russian empire. 

“Writing in the newspaper Izvestiia on October 3, 2011, Putin announced the grand project of Eurasia.  Russia would bring together states that had not proven to be plausible members of the European Union (and implicitly, in the future, states that exited a collapsing European Union).  This meant present and future dictatorships.  In Nazavisimaia Gazeta on January 23, 2012, Putin claimed, citing Ilyin, that integration was not about common achievement, as the Europeans thought, but about what Putin called ‘civilization.’  On Putin’s logic, the rule of law ceased to be a general aspiration and became an aspect of foreign Western civilization.  Integration in Putin’s sense was not about working with others but about praising oneself; not about doing but being.  There was no need to do anything to make Russia more like Europe.  Europe should be more like Russia.”

“In a third article, in Moskovskie Novosti on February 27, 2012…Russia could never become a member of the EU because of ‘the unique place of Russia on the world political map, its role in history and in the development of civilization.’  Eurasia would therefore ‘integrate’ its future members with Russia without any of the troubling burdens associated with the EU.  No dictator would have to step down; no free elections would have to be held; no laws would have to be upheld…In the long run, Putin explained, Eurasia would overwhelm the EU in a larger ‘Union of Europe,’ a ‘space’ between the Atlantic and Pacific, ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok.’  Not to join Eurasia, Putin said, would be ‘to promote separatism in the broadest sense of the word’.”

This is a good point at which to stop and ask ourselves whether Putin is a clever politician who jumped on a bizarre religious notion and took advantage of it to his great benefit, or is his belief in this nonsense an indication of diminished cognitive powers?  Before finally deciding, it might be useful to consider the collection of people who contribute to Putin’s worldview.

One of the people Putin indicates in referencing Eurasia is Lev Gumilev (1912-1992) who promoted the notion in the 1970s and 1980s.

Gumilev’s contribution to Eurasianism was his theory of ethnogenesis: an explanation of how nations arise.  It began from a specific understanding of astrophysics and human biology.  Gumilev maintained that human sociability was generated by cosmic rays.  Some human organisms were more capable than others of absorbing space energy and retransmitting it to others.  These special leaders…were the founders of ethnic groups.  According to Gumilev, the genesis of each nation could therefore be traced to a burst of cosmic energy which began a cycle that lasted for more than a thousand years.  The cosmic rays that enlivened Western nations had been emitted in the distant past, and so the West was dead.  The Russian nation arose from cosmic emissions on September 13, 1380, and was therefore young and vibrant.”

“Gumilev also added a specific form of antisemitism to the Eurasian tradition…Healthy nations, such as the Russian, warned Gumilev, must beware ‘chimerical’ groups that draw life not from cosmic rays but from other groups.  He meant the Jews…Gumilev therefore advanced three basic elements of modern antisemitism: the Jew as the soulless trader, the Jew as the drinker of Christian blood, and the Jew as the agent of an alien civilization.”

And then there is Alexander Dugin.

“To speak of Eurasia in the Russia of the 2010s was to refer to two distinct currents of thought that overlapped at two points: the corruption of the West and the evil of the Jews.  The Eurasianism of the 2010s was a rough mixture of a Russian tradition developed by Gumilev with Nazi ideas mediated by the younger fascist Alexander Dugin (b. 1962).  Dugin was not a follower of the original Eurasianists nor a student of Gumilev.  He simply used the terms ‘Eurasia’ and ‘Eurasianism’ to make Nazi ideas sound more Russian.  Dugin, born half a century after Gumilev, was an antiestablishment kid of the Soviet 1970s and 1980s, playing his guitar and singing about killing millions of people in ovens.  His life’s work was to bring fascism to Russia.”

These are just two of the alarming collection of characters who Snyder describes as contributors to Putin’s world.

If believing in nonsense was sufficient to demonstrate failing cognitive powers, a large segment of the population of just about any country would be deemed in some state of dementia.  The important point about Putin’s beliefs is that he is putting them into action and they allow him to be as brutal as the Nazis his friends seem to so love.  And even if he is not the man he once was, he is still a formidable foe.  In any event, his avowed goal to create Eurasia should convince us that Ukraine is just the beginning of a war that will engulf all of Europe if he has his way. 

Just as Hitler, he must be defeated!

 

Forming New World Orders: What World War Three Might Look Like

Michael Beckley is a political scientist at Tufts University.  He wrote a very interesting and informative article for Foreign Affairs titled Enemies of My Enemy: How Fear of China Is Forging a New World Order.  His effort is marred by poor luck in timing.  It arrived in my mailbox within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Nevertheless, it provides the background for some prognostication. 

Beckley’s main point is that the period of international order we have been experiencing for several decades is coming unraveled.  The reason for this devolution is the disappearance of the common enemy that generated the need for collaboration in the first place.  He argues that international orders are not formed to propagate lofty ideals, but to counter a feared enemy.

“The history of international order, however, provides little reason for confidence in top-down, cooperative solutions. The strongest orders in modern history—from Westphalia in the seventeenth century to the liberal international order in the twentieth—were not inclusive organizations working for the greater good of humanity. Rather, they were alliances built by great powers to wage security competition against their main rivals. Fear and loathing of a shared enemy, not enlightened calls to make the world a better place, brought these orders together. Progress on transnational issues, when achieved, emerged largely as a byproduct of hardheaded security cooperation. That cooperation usually lasted only as long as a common threat remained both present and manageable. When that threat dissipated or grew too large, the orders collapsed.”

When the Soviet Union existed, it was clear who was the enemy and why.  The battle was between liberal capitalism (or free-market democracy) and Soviet socialism. 

“For decades, the United States and its allies knew what they stood for and who the enemy was. But then the Soviet Union collapsed, and a single overarching threat gave way to a kaleidoscope of minor ones. In the new and uncertain post–Cold War environment, the Western allies sought refuge in past sources of success. Instead of building a new order, they doubled down on the existing one. Their enemy may have disintegrated, but their mission, they believed, remained the same: to enlarge the community of free-market democracies. For the next three decades, they worked to expand the Western liberal order into a global one. NATO membership nearly doubled. The European Community morphed into the EU, a full-blown economic union with more than twice as many member countries. The Gatt was transformed into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and welcomed dozens of new members, unleashing an unprecedented period of hyperglobalization.”

Beckley argues that over the enemy-less decades long suppressed differences between the nations that composed the order began to emerge.  

“The liberal order is, in fact, deeply exclusionary. By promoting free markets, open borders, democracy, supranational institutions, and the use of reason to solve problems, the order challenges traditional beliefs and institutions that have united communities for centuries: state sovereignty, nationalism, religion, race, tribe, family. These enduring ties to blood and soil were bottled up during the Cold War, when the United States and its allies had to maintain a united front to contain the Soviet Union. But they have reemerged over the course of the post–Cold War era…By slaying its main adversary, the liberal order unleashed all sorts of nationalist, populist, religious, and authoritarian opposition.”

The rise of China and its recent turn to more aggressive and threatening postures has provided the old liberal order with a need to coalesce and face a new enemy with a new strategy.

“There has never been any doubt about what China wants, because Chinese leaders have declared the same objectives for decades: to keep the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in power, reabsorb Taiwan, control the East China and South China Seas, and return China to its rightful place as the dominant power in Asia and the most powerful country in the world. For most of the past four decades, the country took a relatively patient and peaceful approach to achieving these aims.”

“In recent years, however, China has expanded aggressively on multiple fronts. ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy has replaced friendship diplomacy. Perceived slights from foreigners, no matter how small, are met with North Korean–style condemnation. A combative attitude has seeped into every part of China’s foreign policy, and it is confronting many countries with their gravest threat in generations.” 

Beckley sees this coalescence already forming as the nations feeling threatened get organized.  But China is not the Soviet Union, and it is too firmly embedded in free-market capitalism to use the same rallying cry.  Instead, those who need to contend with China have chosen its trappings of autocracy as a fatal flaw when compared to democracy.

“The United States and its allies have awoken to the danger: the liberal order and, in particular, the globalized economy at its heart are empowering a dangerous adversary. In response, they are trying to build a new order that excludes China by making democracy a requirement for full membership. When U.S. President Joe Biden gave his first press conference, in March 2021, and described the U.S.-Chinese rivalry as part of a broader competition between democracy and autocracy, it wasn’t a rhetorical flourish. He was drawing a battle line based on a widely shared belief that authoritarian capitalism poses a mortal threat to the democratic world, one that can’t be contained by the liberal order. Instead of reforming existing rules, rich democracies are starting to impose new ones by banding together, adopting progressive standards and practices, and threatening to exclude countries that don’t follow them. Democracies aren’t merely balancing against China—increasing their defense spending and forming military alliances—they are also reordering the world around it.”

There are numerous instances where nations have begun working together to counter the rising might of China.  The goals are to cap its dreams of dominance through its economic and military might.

“The architecture of the new order remains a work in progress. Yet two key features are already discernible. The first is a loose economic bloc anchored by the G-7, the group of democratic allies that controls more than half of the world’s wealth. These leading powers, along with a rotating cast of like-minded states, are collaborating to prevent China from monopolizing the global economy. History has shown that whichever power dominates the strategic goods and services of an era dominates that era.”

“To avoid becoming a cog in a Chinese economic empire, leading democracies have started forming exclusive trade and investment networks designed to speed up their progress in critical sectors and slow down China’s. Some of these collaborations, such as the U.S.-Japan Competitiveness and Resilience Partnership, announced in 2021, create joint R & D projects to help members outpace Chinese innovation. Other schemes focus on blunting China’s economic leverage by developing alternatives to Chinese products and funding. The G-7’s Build Back Better World initiative and the EU’s Global Gateway, for example, will provide poor countries with infrastructure financing as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Australia, India, and Japan joined forces to start the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative, which offers incentives for their companies to move their operations out of China. And at the behest of the United States, countries composing more than 60 percent of the world’s cellular-equipment market have enacted or are considering restrictions against Huawei, China’s main 5G telecommunications provider.”

“Meanwhile, democratic coalitions are constraining China’s access to advanced technologies. The Netherlands, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, for example, have colluded to cut China off from advanced semiconductors and from the machines that make them. New institutions are laying the groundwork for a full-scale multilateral export control regime. The U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council creates common transatlantic standards for screening exports to China and investment there in artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.”

“The second feature of the emerging order is a double military barrier to contain China. The inside layer consists of rivals bordering the East China and South China Seas. Many of them—including Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam—are loading up on mobile missile launchers and mines. The goal is to turn themselves into prickly porcupines capable of denying China sea and air control near their shores. Those efforts are now being bolstered by an outside layer of democratic powers—mainly Australia, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These democracies are providing aid, arms, and intelligence to China’s neighbors; training together so they can conduct long-range missile strikes on Chinese forces and blockade China’s oil imports; and organizing multinational freedom-of-navigation exercises throughout the region, especially near Chinese-held rocks, reefs, and islands in disputed areas.”

Other initiatives that strive to counter China include trade restrictions that can be imposed on countries like China that are unable to demonstrate proper human rights or other attributes.  The explicit message is being sent that the territorial status quo is to be preserved, including an implicit threat that Taiwan will be included in that goal.

If Beckley’s analysis is correct, it demonstrates a remarkable degree of collaboration between a diverse array of nations.  It would appear that the next world war is planned to be an economic one.  China will have noted these developments and will have developed strategies to counter them.

“This clash of systems will define the twenty-first century and divide the world. China will view the emerging democratic order as a containment strategy designed to strangle its economy and topple its regime. In response, it will seek to protect itself by asserting greater military control over its vital sea-lanes, carving out exclusive economic zones for its firms, and propping up autocratic allies as it sows chaos in democracies.”

In discussing the potential response of China to being surrounded by unfriendly nations, Beckley mentions no countries that might be allied with it.  China does business with everybody but has not constrained itself with multiple formal alliances.  It was somewhat startling then that just before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin and Xi met, made a few economic deals, and declared they had a friendship that “has no limits.”  Observers have been trying to understand what that means ever since.

Russia and China are not natural allies, but in the spirit of Beckley’s title, “enemies of my enemies are my friends.”  Russia’s actions seem to have coupled the US and EU tighter than ever, producing a more credible enemy than either country might have expected.  In a time when both feel threatened by an alliance of democratic nations each could help the other avoid the pain of any economic sanctions that might be applied.  Russia might also bring with it potential allies such as Hungary and India—and perhaps a Trump-led Republican Party. 

The US and other NATO countries know that they cannot allow Putin and Russia to defeat Ukraine, yet they claim they will not enter Ukraine with troops as assistance because that would risk World War Three.  It is not obvious that they will be able to maintain that stance.  Combat between NATO and Russia does not have to be a world war, but combat including China as a Russian ally could definitely fall into that category. 

It wasn’t long ago that one could have referred to World War Three as the existential battle of societies against the common threat of climate change.  Now traditional national hostilities raise traditional warfare as a second existential threat.  Having two such potential disasters to deal with virtually insures that at least one will not be avoided.  

Is there something about human evolution that caused a species to be produced that is not designed for a long existence?

 

Has the US Been Rendered Incapable of Fighting Wars by Its Military-Industrial Complex?

 This is being written as the war in Ukraine is well into its second month.  The images and commentaries available on the various news feeds remind one of World War II: much death, much destruction, much armament expended.  The tools of war have changed somewhat, with more guided weapons and more long-range rockets, but the improvements have seemed to become more efficient at destroying structures than at killing people.  Can one win a war by merely knocking down buildings?  If a participating nation simply refuses to be defeated, destroying buildings mainly makes them mad at their enemy.  Killing defenseless women, children, and the elderly makes them even madder.  Surely, Russian history should have made that obvious to the Russian leaders.  Instead, Russia seems to have assumed that a bit of “shock and awe” was all that would be needed to gain their goals.  Consequently, Russia showed up with too few people, too few armored vehicles, and too little in the way of supplies.  This conflict will only end when one side is too tired or too low in supplies to continue.

Normally, one would assume the much larger Russia would eventually wear down the smaller and more poorly-armed Ukrainians.  However, the Ukrainians are being supplied with additional weapons by the NATO countries.  That means they can hold out much longer, perhaps even longer than the Russians.  Both the NATO countries and the Russians have spent a long time not fighting the kind of war ongoing in Ukraine.  The Russians seem to have forgotten how.  Could the same thing have happened to the US and other NATO countries?  Armed forces and the industries that support them have for decades been preparing to fight the next war.  Could this have led them astray?

Andrew Cockburn would claim that both Russia and the US have been poorly served by their military-industrial complexes (MICs). He refers to those structures as viruses in an article for Harper’s Magazine: The Military-Industrial Virus.  A successful virus is not one that kills its host, but rather, one that modifies the behavior of the host in order to insure its continued multiplication and propagation.  If the host becomes less healthy in the process, then so be it.

To begin with, we must understand what and who make up the military-industrial complex.  It involves ever fewer, yet ever larger, corporations, the armed services themselves, the academics and analysts who earn a living pondering over the future of warfighting, and the legislators, both local and federal, who benefit from defense spending in their districts.  Cockburn would argue that ignorance on the part of the general public on how the military acquisition system actually works is a big problem.  One might assume that the armed services decide what they need and task the defense contractors to deliver it as quickly and as cheaply as possible.  Unfortunately, what actually happens is more the inverse of that process.  The virus has taught the services that it needs a certain level of income in order to continue providing the products they need.  In addition, the virus has forced the system to accept cost overruns and delays in development to be an ordinary part of the process.  And since the developers and manufacturers determine what can be done (or what the virus wants done), what armed services want is often what they are told by the virus is available.  The virus propagates its influence by demonstrating to military officers, pentagon officials, and legislators that high-paid employment could be available at retirement.

To illustrate the inexorable multiplication of the MIC virus, Cockburn provides the results of a study by Chuck Spinney, a long-time pentagon analyst.

“The analysis that Spinney produced…revealed something intriguing: although the U.S. defense budget clearly increased and decreased over the sixty years following the end of the Korean War, the decreases never dipped below where the budget would have been if it had simply grown at 5 percent per year from 1954 on (with one minor exception in the 1960s).”

This led Spinney to the following conclusion.

“…this behavior even held true for the large budget reductions that occurred after the end of the Vietnam War and, more significantly, after the end of the Cold War. It is as if there is a rising floor of resistance, below which the defense budget does not penetrate.”

Cockburn continues.

“Only during Obama’s second term did it first dip below this level with any degree of significance. Even more interestingly, every single time the growth rate had bumped against that floor, there had been an immediate and forceful reaction in the form of high-­volume public outcry regarding a supposedly imminent military threat. Such bouts of threat inflation invariably induced a prompt remedial increase in budget growth, regardless of whether the proclaimed threat actually existed. As General Douglas ­MacArthur remarked, as far back as 1957: ‘Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters never seem to have happened, never seem to have been quite real’.” 

Cockburn also credits Spinney with the first public observation that the military acquisition process was not strengthening our military posture but weakening it. 

“In 1983, Chuck Spinney, a thirty-seven-year-old analyst in the Pentagon’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, testified to Congress that the cost of the ever-more complex weapons that the military insisted on buying always grew many times faster than the overall defense budget. In consequence, planes, ships, and tanks were never replaced on a one-to-one basis, which in turn ensured that the armed forces got smaller and older. Planes, for instance, were kept in service for longer periods of time and were maintained in poor states of repair owing to their increasing complexity. As to be expected, the high command did not react favorably to these home truths.”

The defense contractors, with captured consumers, relaxed into a sloppy culture that would, in true virus fashion, infect other areas of the economy.

“Once budgets for an optimistically priced new weapon are approved by the Pentagon leadership and Congress, a program schedule is devised so that no single failure to meet a deadline or pass a test can threaten the flow of funding. In addition, the contract, inevitably of crushing complexity, is designed to ensure the contractor gets paid to cover any and all technical and management failures, which generally guarantees another doubling or tripling of the cost beyond the originally inflated estimate.”

The MIC virus has the power to guarantee itself the nourishing funds it needs to survive.  Consider the once infamous case of the $640 toilet seat. 

“Three decades ago, revelations that the military was paying $435 for a hammer and $640 for an aircraft toilet seat ignited widespread media coverage and public outrage. But when it emerged in 2018 that the Air Force was now paying $10,000 for a toilet-seat cover alone, the story generated little more than a few scattered news reports and some derisive commentary on blogs and social media. (This was despite a senior Air Force official’s unblushing explanation that the ridiculous price was required to save the manufacturer from ‘losing revenue and profit.’) The Air Force now claims to have the covers 3-D–printed for $300 apiece, still an extravagant sum.”

A culture of easy money no matter how poor the performance is a terrible example for others in the economy.  The virus did spread.  Cockburn highlights the demise of US prominence in the machine-tool industry.

 “Research on the impact of defense spending on the U.S. economy as a whole is rarer still, even though weapons account for about 10 percent of all U.S. factory output. A generation ago, Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia, devoted much of his career to analyzing this very subject. He concluded that defense spending’s impact on the broader economy was wholly harmful, a consequence of the bad habits injected into the bloodstream of American manufacturing management by a defense culture indifferent to cost control and productivity. The U.S. machine-tool industry, for example, had powered postwar U.S. manufacturing dominance thanks to its cost-effective productivity that in turn allowed high wage rates for workers. But, Melman wrote, as more and more of its output shifted to defense contracts, the industry’s relationship with the Pentagon 

became an invitation to discard the old tradition of cost minimizing. It was an invitation to avoid all the hard work . . . that is needed to offset cost increases. For now it was possible to cater to a new client, for whom cost and price increase was acceptable—­even desirable.

In consequence, as Melman detailed, the U.S. machine-tool industry gradually ceased to compete effectively with nations such as Germany and Japan, where cost control still reigned supreme.”

Consider also the sorry example of Boeing as a manufacturer of commercial aircraft.

“The airliners that rolled out of its Seattle plant were well designed, safe, and profitable. Boeing had a huge defense component as well, but senior management reportedly enforced an unwritten rule that managers from the defense side should never be transferred to the civilian arm, lest they infect it with their culture of cost overruns, schedule slippage, and risky or unfeasible technical initiatives.” 

“That began to change in 1997, when Boeing merged with ­McDonnell Douglas, a defense company. In management terms, the merger was in effect a ­McDonnell takeover, with its executives—most importantly CEO Harry Stonecipher—­assuming command of the combined company, bringing their cultural heritage with them. The effects were readily apparent in the first major Boeing airliner initiative under the merged regime, the 787 Dreamliner.”

“Among other features familiar to any student of the defense industry, the program relied heavily on outsourcing subcontracts to foreign countries as a means of locking in foreign buyers. Shipping parts around the world obviously costs time and money. So does the use of novel and potentially risky technologies: in this case, it involved a plastic airframe and all-­electronic controls powered by an extremely large and dangerously flammable battery. All this had foreseeable effects on the plane’s development schedule, and, true to form for a defense program, it entered service three years late. This technology also had a typical impact on cost, which exceeded an initial development estimate of $5 billion by at least $12 billion—­an impressive overrun, even by defense standards. Predictably, the battery did catch fire, resulting in a costly three-month grounding of the Dreamliner fleet while a fix was devised. The plane has yet to show a profit for the corporation, but expects to do so eventually.”

“The two recent crashes of the Boeing 737 Max, which together killed 346 people, were further indications that running civilian programs along defense-­industry lines may not have been the best course for Boeing. The 737 had been a tried and true money-spinner with an impressive safety record since 1967.”

So, what has the MIC virus done to the US warfighting capability?  Cockburn provides numerous examples.

“The beauty of the system lies in its self-­reinforcing nature. Huge cost overruns on these contracts not only secure a handsome profit for the contractor but also guarantee that the number of weapons acquired always falls short of the number originally requested. For example, the Air Force first planned to buy 750 ­F-22s at a projected cost of $139 million apiece, but rising costs compelled the defense secretary at the time, Robert Gates, to cancel the program in 2009, capping the fleet at 187. With reduced numbers, weapons systems are kept in service longer: the Air Force’s planes average twenty-eight years in service, and some still in use were built well over half a century ago. The ­F-35, for example, costs almost six times more than the ­F-16 it is replacing, while the Navy’s Zumwalt-­class destroyer ($7.5 billion each) costs four times more than the Arleigh Burke destroyers it was supposed to replace. (The Zumwalt’s overruns were so enormous that although the original plan called for thirty-two ships, production was cut to just three.) On occasion, the system reaches the ultimate point of absurdity when gigantic sums are expended with no discernible results. Such was the case with Future Combat Systems, a grandiose Army program to field ground forces of manned vehicles, robots, and assorted weaponry, all linked via electronic networks, and with Boeing as the prime contractor. Twenty billion dollars later, the enterprise was shuttered, an extensive exercise in futility.”

Consider the F-35 which is being imposed on the US armed services.  In order to feed the necessary profits to the defense contractors, it is also being foisted on our allies.

“…we’ve been left with a very poor fighting force for our money. The evidence for this is depressingly clear, starting with our bulging arsenal of weapons systems incapable of performing as advertised and bought at extraordinary cost. Some examples, such as the F-35 Lightning II fighter planes bought by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, have achieved a certain muted notoriety and served as the occasional butt of jokes made by comedians on cable TV. Yet there is little public appreciation of the extent of the disaster. The F-35 first saw combat last year, seventeen years after the program began. The Marines sent just six of them on their first deployment to the Middle East, and over several months only managed to fly, on average, one combat sortie per plane every three days. According to the Pentagon’s former chief testing official, had there been opposition, these ‘fighters’ could not have survived without protection from other planes. The most expensive weapons program in history at a projected cost of $406 billion, the F-35 initially carried a radar whose frequent freezing required the pilot to regularly switch it on and off. While the radar problem was eventually corrected, the Air Force version of the plane still features an unacceptably inaccurate gun that remains to be fixed, though the Air Force claims to be working on it.”

Cockburn identifies the Navy as the service in the worst warfighting shape.

“Mines, to take one striking example, are a potent naval weapon and ubiquitous among our potential enemies. Fear of mines caused the United States to cancel a major amphibious landing during the Korean War, and concerns over possible Iraqi mines prevented a planned seaborne assault on Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War. A single mine (and Iran has thousands of them) in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a third of the world’s oil transported by sea passes every day, would throw markets into total chaos. Yet the Navy currently possesses a mere eleven minesweepers, dilapidated vessels long past retirement age, with just four available for the entirety of the Middle East. Fifteen of the new and failure-­ridden class of Littoral combat ships, known to crews as “little crappy ships,” will supposedly be dedicated to mine-­hunting and minesweeping, but none of their specialized equipment—­designed to detect and disable mines, including underwater drones—has been found to work. A July 2018 report from the Defense Department’s inspector general found that the Navy deployed the relevant systems ‘prior to demonstrating that the systems were effective’.”

Much has been said about an “Asian Pivot,” or of China as our greatest defense problem.  Such a state would put pressure on the Navy’s Seventh Fleet which operates in the western Pacific. 

“…the fleet itself has been progressively deteriorating, as became tragically evident when two destroyers, the U.S.S. Fitzgerald and the U.S.S. ­John S. McCain, collided with merchant vessels in Asian waters in 2017, leaving a total of seventeen sailors dead. The disasters were found to be the direct consequence of incompetent commanders and ill-trained, overworked, shorthanded crews struggling to operate broken-down equipment they did not know how to repair. The failures in leadership, investigations revealed, extended all the way to the top of the chain of command.”

Cockburn presents a picture of a nation wasting enormous sums of money on systems that are too expensive, too unreliable, and too scarce to risk using them in actual combat.  No one seems to care.  The virus has spread so efficiently that just about every congressional district can claim defense money is contributing to local job creation.  What else matters?

Ukraine is fighting valiantly for its freedom against an enemy whose ruthlessness can only be compared to that of Hitler.  Russia may not win because of its armed might, but it could win because it is willing to destroy an entire country and kill as many people as necessary to not lose.  The US and the NATO countries appear frightened by the prospect of making Putin mad.  That is unbecoming at best.  Helping Ukraine too much as the start of World War Three is an issue to be considered.  But the considerations should not be tainted by the possibility that the US and NATO do not have the resources to fight that battle, which frighteningly could be true.  The best case for the US, but not the most honorable, is that we depend on Ukraine to fight for us.  One way or another, the US needs Ukraine to vanquish the Russians so we don’t have to take up that fight directly.  We must give them all the support we can.