Todd Purdum: One Nation, Under Arms
This is an EXCELLENT article in the January Vanity Fair.
He bases it on the work of George Kennon, whose prophecies along with Eisenhower's have come to pass. with Kennon's reaction to the modern MIC. (It was Kennon who wrote this: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented."
I tried to pick a few representative paragraphs -- he goes into different aspects of what he calls the "national-security state," the United States today. In addition to the sections represented below, he writes about the "two societies" that have been created in the US due to this overwhelming focus on militarization, national security, etc -- one consisting of the right-wing, "military class," Bible-thumpers, etc and a "civilian class" (I thought the two divisions here were the weaker part of the article); and "A Captive Capital," discussing the "stranglehold" the "national-security state" has on Washington, exemplified in even the dramatic physical changes of the city.
He points out that this overwhelming focus on militarization & security has been to the detriment of everything else in the country -- education, infrastructure, healthcare, etc etc -- and as our national greatness has been greatly diminished, the "increase in national chauvinism and bellicosity" has grown in that right-wing class.
<snip>
Amid the profusion of paper, a prominent name in the news catches my eye: Warren Buffett. In 1984, Buffett, a trustee of Grinnell College, in Iowa, had prevailed upon Kennan to deliver a pair of lectures there. They are now preserved in Box 284. In one of them, Kennan reflected on a topic that had become something of an obsession for him by his 80th year: the “extreme militarization not only of our thought but of our lives”—a phenomenon that had had a profoundly distorting effect on the entire economy. Military spending had become a national addiction. “We could not now break ourselves of this habit,” Kennan wrote, “without the most serious of withdrawal symptoms. Millions of people, in addition to those other millions that are in uniform, have become accustomed to deriving their livelihood from the military-industrial complex. Thousands of firms have become dependent on it, not to mention labor unions and communities.”
<snip>
In historic terms, this addiction to military spending—one that dominates the existence of places as diverse as Huntsville and Cedar Rapids, Norfolk and San Diego, El Paso and Colorado Springs—would have been seen as un-American. For generations, the nation’s pattern after each armed conflict was demobilization. In 1918, as World War I ended, France was spending $235 per capita on its military, Great Britain $188, and the U.S. just $68. As late as 1940, on the eve of its entry into World War II, the United States spent just 1.7 percent of gross domestic product on defense. The level today is three times that proportion, on a vastly greater base. American military spending accounts for 43 percent of all defense spending worldwide, 6 times the share of China, 12 times that of Russia. The U.S. Navy is larger than the next 13 navies combined. Overall, defense spending increased about 70 percent under George W. Bush, and it now stands at more than half a trillion dollars annually, roughly $100 billion a year (in inflation-adjusted dollars) above the levels at the height of the Cold War. That does not include what is spent by related agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, or by the myriad intelligence services. Despite the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recent talk in Washington about reining in military spending, the trend shows every evidence of continuing. Last spring, the Pentagon identified some $178 billion in potential savings and efficiencies through fiscal year 2016, but then proposed to keep $100 billion of it and redirect it to other programs.
<snip>
And, of course, it is the twisting of national priorities that is the most pernicious ripple effect of this military spending. It has become all but impossible to close any military base (the chore has repeatedly been farmed out to special commissions, insulated from political pressure), and it is always a heavy lift to cancel any weapon system, because some community (or member of Congress) depends on it, economically or politically. It takes only a glance at National Journalor Politico, filled with full-page color advertisements from Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, from Northrup-Grumman and L3 and KBR, to get some indication of where our priorities lie. Great corporate engines once worked to build the U.S. civilian economy and the infrastructure that underlay it; now they are at the service of military power and its projection abroad.
"The Secrecy Industry"
<snip>
The secret government agencies and scores of private contractors that do some sort of national-security or intelligence work are now so numerous that the officials theoretically in charge of them cannot keep track of their operations. A private company such as S.A.I.C., based in northern Virginia but with personnel worldwide, has its hands in so many secret operations that it is effectively an arm of the government, but without effective oversight. A lengthy investigation by The Washington Post last year found that some 1,300 government organizations and nearly 2,000 private corporations work on some aspect of counterterrorism, homeland security, or foreign intelligence. In the Washington, D.C., area alone, 33 new building complexes related to top-secret intelligence work have been completed since September 11, 2001, or are under construction. In the name of national security, bedrock protections of the American legal system have been eroded, whether through the Bush administration’s refusal to grant habeas corpus rights to suspected terrorist detainees (even if they were American citizens) or through the secret wiretapping by the National Security Agency of Americans and others inside this country without court-ordered warrants. Intrusive new bureaucracies—from the Transportation Security Administration to the Department of Homeland Security itself—have proliferated and expanded. 
Measures undertaken in the fevered climate that followed the 9/11 attacks are now permanent features of American life. No president—Republican or Democrat—willingly gives back new powers once they have been acquired. National security is a ratchet—it turns in one direction only.
I wish I could do it justice with the posting of 4 paragraphs -- I don't think I can. It's well worth going to the link and reading the article.
