Report demands massive expansion of military-industrial complex to maintain global ‘access to resources’.
In the first of a
series, we report on stunning new evidence that the U.S. Department of Defense
is waking up to the collapse of American primacy, and the rapid unraveling of
the international order created by U.S. power after the Second World War.
But the Pentagon’s
emerging vision of what comes next hardly inspires confidence. We breakdown
both the insights and cognitive flaws in this vision. In future pieces we will
ask the questions: What is really driving the end of the American empire? And
based on that more accurate diagnosis of the problem, what is the real
solution?
An extraordinary new Pentagon study has concluded that the U.S.-backed
international order established after World War 2 is “fraying” and may even be
“collapsing”, leading the United States to lose its position of “primacy” in
world affairs.
The solution proposed to
protect U.S. power in this new “post-primacy” environment is, however, more of
the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of
perceptions”) and more military expansionism.
The document concludes
that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase of transformation in which
U.S. power is in decline, international order is unravelling, and the authority
of governments everywhere is crumbling.
Having lost its past
status of “pre-eminence”, the U.S. now inhabits a dangerous, unpredictable
“post-primacy” world, whose defining feature is “resistance to authority”.
Danger comes not just
from great power rivals like Russia and China, both portrayed as rapidly
growing threats to American interests, but also from the increasing risk of
“Arab Spring”-style events. These will erupt not just in the Middle East, but
all over the world, potentially undermining trust in incumbent governments for
the foreseeable future.
The report, based on a
year-long intensive research process involving consultation with key agencies
across the Department of Defense and U.S. Army, calls for the U.S. government
to invest in more surveillance, better propaganda through “strategic
manipulation” of public opinion, and a “wider and more flexible” U.S. military.
The report was published
in June by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute to evaluate
the DoD’s approach to risk assessment at all levels of Pentagon policy
planning. The study was supported and sponsored by the U.S. Army’s Strategic
Plans and Policy Directorate; the Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch);
the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Develop-ment;
and the Army Study Program Management Office.
Collapse
“While the United States
remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys
an unassailable position versus state competitors,” the report laments.
“In brief,
the sta-tus quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World
War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely
fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing.”
The study describes the
essentially imperial nature of this order as being underpinned by American
dominance, with the U.S. and its allies literally “dictating” its terms to
further their own interests:
“The order
and its constituent parts, first emerged from World War II, were transformed to
a unipolar sys-tem with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and have by-and-large
been dominated by the United States and its major Western and Asian allies
since. Status quo forces collectively are comfortable with their dominant role
in dictating the terms of international security outcomes and resist the
emergence of rival centers of power and authority.”
But this era when the
U.S. and its allies could simply get their way is over. Observing that U.S.
officials “naturally feel an obligation to preserve the U.S. global position
within a favorable international order,” the report concludes that this
“rules-based global order that the United States built and sustained for 7
decades is under enormous stress.”
The report provides a
detailed breakdown of how the DoD perceives this order to be rapidly
unravelling, with the Pentagon being increasingly outpaced by world events.
Warning that “global events will happen faster than DoD is currently equipped
to handle”, the study concludes that the U.S. “can no longer count on the
unassailable position of dominance, supremacy, or pre-eminence it enjoyed for
the 20-plus years after the fall of the Soviet Union.”
So weakened is U.S.
power, that it can no longer even “automatically generate consistent and
sustained local military superiority at range.”
It’s not just U.S. power
that is in decline. The U.S. Army War College study concludes that:
“[A]ll
states and traditional political authority structures are under increasing
pressure from endogenous and exogenous forces… The fracturing of the post-Cold
War global system is accompanied by the in-ternal fraying in the political,
social, and economic fabric of practically all states.”
But, the document says,
this should not be seen as defeatism, but rather a “wakeup call”. If nothing is
done to adapt to this “post-primacy” environment, the complexity and speed of
world events will “increasingly defy [DoD’s] current strategy, planning, and
risk assessment conventions and biases.”
Defending the
“status quo”
Top on the list of
forces that have knocked the U.S. off its position of global “pre-eminence”,
says the report, are the role of competing powers — major
rivals like Russia and China, as well as smaller players like Iran and North
Korea.
The document is particularly
candid in setting out why the U.S. sees these countries as threats — not so much because of tangible military or security
issues, but mainly because their pursuit of their own legitimate national
interests is, in itself, seen as undermining American dominance.
Russia and China are
described as “revisionist forces” who benefit from the U.S.-dominated
international order, but who dare to “seek a new distribution of power and
authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance.”
Russia and China, the analysts say, “are engaged in a deliberate program to
demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, will, reach, influence, and impact.”
The premise of this
conclusion is that the U.S.-backed “status quo” international order is
fundamentally “favorable” for the interests of the U.S. and its allies. Any
effort to make global order also work “favorably” for anyone else is
automatically seen as a threat to U.S. power and interests.
Thus, Russia and China
“seek to reorder their position in the existing status quo in ways that — at a minimum — create
more favorable circumstances for pursuit of their core objectives.” At first glance there seems nothing particularly
wrong about this. So the analysts emphasize that “a more maximalist perspective sees them pursuing advantage at the direct
expense of the United States and its principal Western and Asian allies.”
Most conspicuous of all,
there is little substantiation in the document of how Russia and China pose a
meaningful threat to American national security.
The chief challenge is
that they “are bent on revising the contemporary status quo” through the use of
“gray zone” techniques, involving “means and methods falling far short of
unambiguous or open provocation and conflict”.
Such “murkier, less
obvious forms of state-based aggression”, despite falling short of actual
violence, are condemned — but
then, losing any sense of moral high-ground, the Pentagon study advocates that
the U.S. itself should “go gray
or go home” to ensure U.S. influence.
The document also sets
out the real reasons that the U.S. is hostile to “revolutionary forces” like
Iran and North Korea: they pose fundamental obstacles to U.S. imperial
influence in those regions. They are:
“… neither
the products of, nor are they satisfied with, the contemporary order… At a
minimum, they intend to destroy the reach of the U.S.-led order into what they
perceive to be their legitimate sphere of influence. They are also resolved to
replace that order locally with a new rule set dictated by them.”
Far from insisting, as
the U.S. government does officially, that Iran and North Korea pose as nuclear
threats, the document instead insists they are considered problematic for the
expansion of the “U.S.-led order.”
Losing the propaganda
war
Amidst the challenge
posed by these competing powers, the Pentagon study emphasizes the threat from
non-state forces undermining the “U.S.-led order” in different ways, primarily
through information.
The “hyper-connectivity
and weaponization of information, disinformation, and dis-affection”, the study
team observes, is leading to the uncontrolled spread of information. The upshot
is that the Pentagon faces the “inevitable elimination of secrecy and
operational security”.
“Wide
uncontrolled access to technology that most now take for granted is rapidly
undermining prior advantages of discrete, secret, or covert intentions,
actions, or operations… In the end, senior defense leaders should assume that
all defense-related activity from minor tactical movements to major military
operations would occur completely in the open from this point forward.”
This information
revolution, in turn, is leading to the “generalized disintegra-tion of
traditional authority structures… fueled, and/or accelerated by hyperconnectivity
and the obvious decay and potential failure of the post-Cold War status quo.”
Civil unrest
Highlighting the threat
posed by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, the study also points to “leaderless
instability (e.g., Arab Spring)” as a major driver of “a generalized erosion or
dissolution of traditional authority structures.”
The document hints that
such populist civil unrest is likely to become prominent in Western homelands,
including inside the United States.
“To date,
U.S. strategists have been fixated on this trend in the greater Middle East.
However, the same forces at work there are similarly eroding the reach and
authority of governments worldwide… it would be unwise not to recognize that
they will mutate, metastasize, and manifest differently over time.”
The U.S. homeland is
flagged-up as being especially vulnerable to the breakdown of “traditional
authority structures”:
“The United
States and its population are increasingly exposed to substantial harm and an
erosion of security from individuals and small groups of motivated actors,
leveraging the conflu-ence of hyperconnectivity, fear, and increased vulner-ability
to sow disorder and uncertainty. This intensely disorienting and dislocating
form of resistance to author-ity arrives via physical, virtual, and
psychological vio-lence and can create effects that appear substantially out of
proportion to the origin and physical size or scale of the proximate hazard or
threat.”
There is little
reflection, however, on the role of the US government itself in fomenting such
endemic distrust, through its own policies.
Bad facts
Among the most dangerous
drivers of this risk of civil unrest and mass destabilization, the document
asserts, are different categories of fact. Apart from the obvious “fact-free”,
defined as information that undermines “objective truth”, the other categories
include actual truths that, however, are damaging to America’s
global reputation.
“Fact-inconvenient” information
consists of the exposure of “details that, by implication, un-dermine
legitimate authority and erode the relationships between governments and the
governed” — facts, for instance, that reveal how government
policy is corrupt, incompetent or undemocratic.
“Fact-perilous”
information refers basically to national security leaks from whistleblowers
such as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, “exposing highly clas-sified,
sensitive, or proprietary information that can be used to accelerate a real
loss of tactical, operational, or strategic advantage.”
“Fact-toxic” information
pertains to actual truths which, the document complains, are “exposed in the
absence of context”, and therefore poison “important political discourse.” Such
information is seen as being most potent in triggering outbreaks of civil
unrest, because it:
“… fatally
weakens foundational security at an international, regional, national, or
personal level. Indeed, fact-toxicexposures are those likeliest to trigger
viral or contagious insecurity across or within borders and between or among
peoples.”
In short, the U.S. Army
War College study team believe that the spread of ‘facts’ challenging the
legitimacy of American empire is a major driver of its decline: not the actual
behavior of the empire which such facts point to.
Mass surveillance and
psychological warfare
The Pentagon study
therefore comes up with two solutions to the information threat.
The first is to make
better use of U.S. mass surveillance capabilities, which are described as “the
largest and most sophisticated and inte-grated intelligence complex in world.”
The U.S. can “generate insight faster and more reliably than its competitors
can, if it chooses to do so”. Combined with its “military forward presence and
power projection”, the U.S. is in “an enviable position of strength.”
Supposedly, though, the
problem is that the U.S. does not make full use of this potential strength:
“That
strength, however, is only as durable as the United States’ willingness to see
and employ it to its advantage. To the extent that the United States and its
defense enterprise are seen to lead, others will follow…”
The document also
criticizes U.S. strategies for focusing too much on trying to defend against
foreign efforts to penetrate or disrupt U.S. intelligence, at the expense of
“the purposeful exploitation of the same architecture for the strategic
manipulation of perceptions and its attendant influence on political and
security outcomes.”
Pentagon officials need
to simply accept, therefore, that:
“… the U.S.
homeland, individual American citizens, and U.S. public opinion and perceptions
will increasingly become battlefields.”
Military supremacy
Having mourned the loss
of U.S. primacy, the Pentagon report sees expanding the U.S. military as the
only option.
The bipartisan consensus
on military supremacism, however, is not enough. The document demands a
military force so powerful it can preserve “maximum freedom of action”, and
allow the U.S. to “dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international
disputes.”
One would be
hard-pressed to find a clearer statement of imperial intent in any U.S. Army
document:
“While as a
rule, U.S. leaders of both political parties have consistently committed to the
maintenance of U.S. military superiority over all potential state rivals, the
post-primacy reality demands a wider and more flexible military force that can
generate ad-vantage and options across the broadest possible range of military
demands. To U.S. political leadership, maintenance of military advantage
preserves maximum freedom of action… Finally, it allows U.S. decision-makers
the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in
international disputes in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability
and the implied promise of unac-ceptable consequences in the event that
capability is unleashed.”
Once again,
military power is essentially depicted as a tool for the U.S. to force,
threaten and cajole other countries into submission to U.S. demands.
The very
concept of ‘defence’ is thus re-framed as the capacity to use overwhelming
military might to get one’s way—anything which undermines this capacity ends up automatically appearing
as a threat that deserves to be attacked.
Empire
of capital
Accordingly,
a core goal of this military expansionism is ensuring that the United States
and its international partners have “unimpeded access to air, sea, space,
cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to underwrite their
security and prosperity”.
This also
means that the U.S. must retain the ability to physically access any region it
wants, whenever it wants:
“Failure of
or limitations on the ability of the United States to enter and operate within
key regions of the world, for example, undermine both U.S. and partner
security.”
The U.S.
thus must try to minimize any “purposeful, malevolent, or incidental
interruption of access to the commons, as well as critical regions, resources,
and markets.”
Without ever
referring directly to ‘capitalism’, the document eliminates any ambiguity about
how the Pentagon sees this new era of “Persistent Conflict 2.0”:
“… some are
fighting globalization and globalization is also actively fighting back.
Combined, all of these forces are rending at the fabric of security and stable
governance that all states aspire to and rely on for survival.”
This is a war, then,
between US-led capitalist globalization, and anyone who resists it.
And to win it, the
document puts forward a combination of strategies: consolidating the U.S.
intelligence complex and using it more ruthlessly; intensifying mass
surveillance and propaganda to manipulate popular opinion; expanding U.S.
military clout to ensure access to “strategic regions, markets, and resources”.
Even so, the overarching
goal is somewhat more modest — to
prevent the U.S.-led order from collapsing further:
“…. while
the favorable U.S.-dominated status quo is under significant internal and
external pressure, adapted American power can help to forestall or even reverse
outright failure in the most critical regions”.
The hope is that the
U.S. will be able to fashion “a remodeled but nonetheless still favorable
post-primacy international order.”
Narcissism
Like all U.S. Army War College publications, the
document states that it does not necessarily represent the official position of
the U.S. Army or DoD. While this caveat means that its findings cannot be taken
to formally represent the U.S. government, the document does also admit that it
represents “the collective wisdom” of the numerous officials consulted.
In that sense, the document is a uniquely
insightful window into the mind of the Pentagon, and how embarrassingly limited
its cognitive scope really is.
And this in turn reveals not only why the
Pentagon’s approach is bound to make things worse, but also what an alternative
more productive approach might look like.
Launched in June 2016 and completed in April 2017,
the U.S. Army War College research project involved extensive consultation with
officials across the Pentagon, including representatives of the joint and
service staffs, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), U.S. Central
Command (USCENTCOM), U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), U.S. Northern Command
(USNORTHCOM), U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM); U.S. Forces, Japan
(USFJ), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Intelligence
Council, U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), and U.S. Army Pacific [US-ARPAC]
and Pacific Fleet [PACFLT]).
The study team also consulted with a handful of
American think-tanks of a somewhat neoconservative persuasion: the American
Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies
(CSIS), the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for the Study of War.
No wonder, then, that its findings are so myopic.
But what else would you expect from a research
process so deeply narcissistic, that it involves little more than talking to
yourself? Is it any wonder that the solutions offered represent an echo chamber
calling to amplify precisely the same policies that have contributed to the
destabilization of U.S. power?
The research methodology manages to systematically
ignore the most critical evidence surrounding the drivers undermining U.S.
primacy: such as, the biophysical
processes of climate, energy and food disruption behind the Arab
Spring; the confluence of military violence, fossil fuel interests and
geopolitical alliances behind the rise of ISIS; or the fundamental
grievances that have driven a breakdown in trust with governments since the
2008 financial collapse and the ensuing ongoing period of neoliberal economic failure.
A large body of data demonstrates that the
escalating risks to U.S. power have come not from outside U.S. power, but from
the very manner in which U.S. power has operated. The breakdown of the U.S.-led
international order, from this perspective, is happening as a direct
consequence of deep-seated flaws in the structure, values and vision of that
order.
In this context, the study’s conclusions are less
a reflection of the actual state of the world, than of the way the Pentagon
sees itself and the world.
Indeed, most telling of all is the document’s
utter inability to recognize the role of the Pentagon itself in systematically
pursuing a wide range of policies over the last several decades which have
contributed directly to the very instability it now wants to defend against.
The Pentagon frames itself as existing outside the
Hobbesian turmoil that it conveniently projects onto the world — the
result is a monumental and convenient rejection of any sense of responsibility
for what happens in the world.
In this sense, the document is a powerful
illustration of the self-limiting failure of conventional risk-assessment
approaches. What is needed instead is a systems-oriented approach based on
evaluating not just the Pentagon’s internal beliefs about the drivers of risk — but
engaging with independent scientific evidence about those drivers to test the
extent to which those beliefs withstand rigorous scrutiny.
Such an approach could
open the door to a very different scenario to the one recommended by this
document — one based on a willingness to actually look in the
mirror. And that in turn might open up the opportunity for Pentagon officials
to imagine alternative policies with a real chance of actually working, rather
than reinforcing the same stale failed strategies of the past.
It is no surprise then that even the Pentagon’s
apparent conviction in the inexorable decline of U.S. power could well be
overblown.
According to Dr Sean Starrs of MIT’s Center for
International Studies, a true picture of U.S. power cannot be determined solely
from national accounts. We have to look at the accounts of transnational
corporations.
Starrs shows that American transnational corporations are
vastly more powerful than their competitors. His data suggests that American
economic supremacism remains at an all-time high, and still unchallenged even
by an economic powerhouse like China.
This does not necessarily discredit the Pentagon’s
emerging recognition that U.S. imperial power faces a new era of decline and
unprecedented volatility.
But it does suggest that the Pentagon’s sense of
U.S. global pre-eminence is very much bound up with its capacity to project
American capitalism globally.
As geopolitical rivals agitate against U.S.
economic reach, and as new movements emerge hoping to undermine American
“unimpeded access” to global resources and markets, what’s clear is that DoD
officials see anything which competes with or undermines American capitalism as
a clear and present danger.
But nothing put forward in this document will
actually contribute to slowing the decline of U.S. power.
On the contrary, the Pentagon study’s
recommendations call for an intensification of the very imperial policies that
futurist Professor Johan Galtung, who accurately forecasted the demise of the
USSR, predicts will accelerate the “collapse of the U.S.
empire” by around 2020.
As we move deeper into the “post-primacy” era, the
more meaningful question for people, governments, civil society and industry is
this: as the empire falls, lashing out in its death throes, what comes after?.
*More:
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/pentagon-study-declares-american-empire-is-collapsing-746754cdaebf
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*****Dr. Nafeez Ahmed
is an award-winning 16-year investigative journalist and creator of INSURGE
intelligence, a crowdfunded public interest investigative journalism project.
He is ‘System Shift’ columnist at VICE’s Motherboard.
His work has been
published in The Guardian, VICE, Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The
Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz,
New York Observer, The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, Raw Story,
New Internationalist, Huffington Post UK, Al-Arabiya English, AlterNet, The
Ecologist, and Asia Times, among other places.
Nafeez has twice been
featured in the Evening Standard’s ‘Top 1,000’ list of most influential people
in London. His
latest book, Failing States,
Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer, 2017) is a scientific study
of how climate, energy, food and economic crises are driving state failures
around the world.