“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Most of you know the basics. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1940s and 1950s. Olympic greatness. Sonny Liston. Draft dodger. Muslim. One of the most dramatic comebacks in sports history.

Social activist. Global icon. The Greatest.

And for one working class white kid growing up in the North Carolina outback, his very first African-American role model.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

No Viet Cong ever called Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali a nigger, but a lot of people I grew up with (including very close family members, I’m ashamed to say) sure did. Ali was everything that terrified the white South. He was physically dominating (with all the undercurrents that implies). He was “uppity” incarnate. He was unAmerican for refusing to go to Vietnam. He was the devil for converting to Islam. And deep down, the part that scared them the worst was this: they understood, I think, that he was smarter than they were, too.

The problem was, I never believed that I was supposed to hate him. Maybe it was my age – I wasn’t quite old enough to take offense at the Vietnam thing. All I really knew about the war was what I saw on television, and every night they’d show the number of boys killed that day in the fighting. I don’t recall thinking about this in anything like deep, philosophical terms, but if I had I imagine I might have figured Vietnam was well worth dodging.

As for the Islam thing, well, all us crackers were afraid of blacks. Especially crowds of them demanding stuff. But … even if I was young and ignorant and irrationally afraid of blacks, I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t seem to asking for anything unreasonable and he wasn’t hurting anybody. Maybe I thought that if we met he’d like me, too.

But I was just a kid. All I really knew was what I saw: Ali was brilliant. He was objectively the best fighter alive and he was also fun. His charisma didn’t just fill the room, it overwhelmed the entire world. You could feel it, almost tangibly, even through the little 13″ black and white TV in our living room in Wallburg, NC. He said he was the greatest and it was obviously so, especially for a smart-aleck kid from the “it ain’t bragging if it’s true” school of thought.

At home I am a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know. Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far.

Today Muhammad Ali, the most famous man in the world, turns 70, and we as a nation, as a species, are better for knowing him. It’s even more certain that I’m a better person because of the courage and verve with which he lived his life.

A life that I hope is nowhere near over. Happy Birthday, Champ.

I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.

Reading Terry Tempest Williams’ Finding Beauty in a Broken World following David Gessner’s My Green Manifesto proved to be a fortuitous coincidence. The two books work well in conversation with one another because both authors come to realize the importance of thinking local as an approach toward solving larger problems.

Williams sums it up best for herself in a quote from Mother Theresa: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Whereas Gessner comes to his revelation during a trip down the Charles River, Williams comes to hers by visiting several places and then pieces together her experiences into a literary mosaic—a key conceit that affects both the structure and content of her book. “A mosaic,” she says, “is a conversation between what is broken.”

Williams takes a bold risk in Finding Beauty: structures the book as a series of small and large fragments. Rather than paragraphs, the book has section breaks. Some fragments appear as a single sentence, or a single quote, on a page. Longer narrative sections have section breaks rather than paragraph breaks, separated from other narrative sections by a double section break. She includes transcripts of letters, snippets from poems, sections of journals.

Together, the many fragments form a whole memoir that explores the relationship between beauty and place.

She begins the book, or nearly so, in Ravenna, Italy, where she learns the art of mosaic making. There, she also explains the aesthetic sense that will inform the book. “I believe in the beauty of all things common,” she declares. “I believe in the beauty of all things broken.”

This is especially important to her because, in the wake of 9-11, she “was desperate to retrieve the poetry I had lost.” She also understands that American society, on the whole, was already broken apart even before the terrorist attacks. “Fragmentation and breaking up is indeed the essence of the twentieth century,” she writes.

Mosaic-making is a way to begin to reconstruct beauty from fragmentation. “We create the future through a rearrangement of forms, what we have learned from the past,” she says.

In the next segment of the book, she spends time with a group of researchers observing a colony of endangered Utah prairie dogs. Technically, Utah prairie dogs are “threatened,” not “endangered,” because political pressure prevents their full protection even though the species sits on the brink of extinction. “The manipulation of extinction is done most efficiently through bureaucracies,” she says—a statement that will have haunting resonance later in the book when she visits Rwanda.

Too many moneyed interests consider prairie dogs to be pests even though scientists have come to understand the central role prairie dogs play in prairie ecology—so central, in fact, that without prairie dogs it’s essentially impossible to have healthy prairie.

“The issues circling the Utah prairie dog are the same issues shaping politics and culture in the American West. How do we view progress?” Williams asks.

She watches the prairie dog colony closely and documents the literal moment-by-moment movement of the “P Dogs” under her watch. This section of the book was least successful because it gets boring, fast. Even Williams gets bored. “Five more hours. Damn,” she admits.

She includes the tedious details because, over time, she begins to notice small things about the prairie dogs that give her a new appreciation for them. “I had no idea. I had no idea of the power of prairie dogs,” she realizes. “I am beginning to see prairie dogs differently, being stretched by all I am seeing, learning, perceiving.”

She attempts, through her approach, to allow readers to have the same kind of discovery for themselves. One must be a patient, willing reader to stick with Williams through this stretch of the book, however. At one point, I said to a friend, “Oh God, she jumped the shark with these damn prairie dogs.”

She then goes to a museum to look at their prairie dog holdings, and goes specimen by specimen through the collection. More tedium. While I’m hardly anyone to second-guess a writer/naturalist like Williams, I thought this stretch of the book could’ve been executed more effectively because I nearly gave up on her, despite the beauty of some of her writing and despite the interesting insights she was beginning to have and connections she was beginning to make.

For instance, her father owns an excavation company that some of her brothers work for. They dig very much as prairie dogs do. “The men in my family are responsible for seeing that the circulatory system of our communities works,” she writes. She compares the results-oriented work of the diggers with the less concrete work she does as a writer. “Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job like laying pipe,” she writes, quoting John Gregory Dunne. “I wonder. As a writer, you never know if your work has standing or has any practical value in the world.”

Williams’ attention shifts to family for a while when her brother Steve dies of cancer—the latest of several family members to be struck down that way. The individual tragedy is then juxtaposed against the massive scale of death she comes face to face with when she visits Rwanda to help with a public art project to commemorate victims of the 1994 genocide.

In Rwanda, “the sadness…can be felt like humidity as it seeps into our skin,” she says. The country is so broken that “[t]ime, here, does not seem like a horizontal line but rather a circle drawn tight around Rwanda that contracts and expands like traumatized lungs.”

The scope of the genocide—upwards of a million deaths, most of them violent and horrific, with even more rapes, beatings, and atrocities heaped on top of them—pushed Williams to the brink of an emotional breakdown. She wondered how a single public art project could do anything to help the country heal.

“It is not in our psychology as human beings to respond to the grand abstractions of catastrophe,” Williams says. “We turn away. But we can respond to the suffering of another human being.” Keeping her focus on the project, then, helped keep her from being overwhelmed by tragic weight of the genocide.

The village where they worked, Rugerero, along the Congolese border, embraces the project in a way that redefines the entire community in surprising ways. Beauty doesn’t just blossom, it erupts. As the scribe for the group, Williams comes to understand her role in much the way Gessner saw writers: they needed to tell success stories and share them far and wide as positive examples for others to follow. Share successes as a way to inspire.

Throughout, Williams remains deeply grounded in place as a way to tell her stories and make connections between her mosaic pieces. For instance: “Dirt—the prairie dog mounds, the graves of genocide, the grave of my brother—who can fathom the meaning of holding a fistful of dirt?”

Finding Beauty does just that. The process is sometimes slow, and it sometimes seems hopeless—but Williams believes everything broken has an inherent beauty waiting to be found. “There is a way of being in the world that calls us beyond hope,” she says. “Mosaic is not simply an art form but a form of integration, a way of not only seeing the world but responding to it.”

Williams would challenge us to concentrate on the pieces. As we snap them into place, the whole they create will come into being, come into shape, come into focus. The world may be in pieces, yet it still can be beautiful—and we can help make it so.

On this sad anniversary of John Lennon’s passing, I’m refusing to mourn. Instead, I’m remembering why his insistence that we stop our mad rush to kill each other was a good idea.  Imagine…

War may be hell, but it produces terrific literature, and “When We Walked Above the Clouds” by H. Lee Barnes is a cracker of a book.

In the mid sixties, the author was adrift and jobless in West Texas, a kid far too bright and talented to be in the circumstances he was in and too damaged and young to have figured a way out of it. To beat the draft, he enlisted in the army, and during training signed up for Special Forces, eventually ending up in Viet Nam in a mountainous outpost named Tra Bong.

Barnes tells this story straightforwardly, in pristine, laconic prose free of emotion or literary embellishments. I loved the late Hunter S. Thompson for his savage humor. But I also read him for his clean sentences—words used in a way that harnessed their full power and created a rhythm that held the reader locked in paragraph to paragraph, page to page. Barnes is not the good doctor, but he’s excellent. There is some awful good writing in here–clean and powerful.

And it is a heck of story. The camp he spent the war in, Tra Bong, was a shithole. Barnes was, at that point in his life, somewhere between an insolent punk and the ideal soldier, always in trouble for mouthing-off or fighting, while at the same time taking on the impossible task of rebuilding the camp into a real outpost that could be defended. Instead of spending his days in the rec tent popping open Schlitz cans, he spend his time pouring foundations for bunkers, digging and mapping mine fields and becoming a professional soldier. Eventually his raw talent and doggedness transforms him, turning him into a leader respected and liked by his peers and the Yards (Montagnard fighters,) and respected and despised by the semi-competent officers rotating through Tra Bong to check boxes on their personnel jackets.

Barnes weaves all of this together in a compelling narrative that keeps the reader fully engaged, despite the fact that not very much real fighting occurs. Indeed, in this account, the VC are a faceless foreboding presence, always out there beyond the wire somewhere, lethal and malevolent, but rarely seen or encountered. (The only human enemy with a face is a six year old would-be suicide bomber, whose story will make you skip a breath.) Anyway, the VC are only one enemy among many, ranging from a duplicitous populace to rats the size of terriers to a rotting, disease-ridden climate to fellow soldiers who have stopped caring and are just stumbling through the motions, and perhaps getting others killed with their sloppiness.

The author has chosen to tell the story from the standpoint of what he knew then. That is, he doesn’t add broader perspective or historical detail, or indulge in hindsight. There are no statistical footnotes in this story. Nor does he give us many broad descriptions of the camp or the valley he is in. It is as if we are watching a live feed from the GoPro camera on his helmet. We hear what he heard when he heard it and we see exactly what he saw when he saw it. It’s a narrow slit of a view, almost blinkered, but very effective. This is the Viet Nam war he experienced, and it is a fascinating one.

Despite the Spartan prose and narrow view, this book is rich with detail that resonates with the reader. When I was in Peace Corps, the volunteer in the next village over was a war buff, and after two years I’d read everything on his bookshelf. One book was about a German SS brigade drafted into the French Foreign Legion and sent to fight in Indochine after World War II. The only part of the book I remember is a six page discussion on the importance of clean, dry feet. Of course, part of the reason it stuck is because it is so….German. But it is also an example of the telling detail, the one little bit of added description that makes something jump off the page and adds verisimilitude. That is what makes books like this come alive.

The experiences Barnes writes about are for the most part far outside our personal experience base. When Mike Connelly writes about riding on the LA freeway, many of us have been there and can picture the exit he’s writing about. But less than 1% of Americans served in Viet Nam, and less than half of those in combat. We don’t have personal experience to draw on. This book is full of wonderful details that bring the story to life—some of it grotesque like gigantic beetles and the smell of burning latrines and some of it beautiful, like descriptions of the treks through the jungle.

This is a terrific book, but not a perfect one. Barnes’ laconic prose is, on occasion, too laconic. There are times when his descriptions are so Joe Friday that it is necessary to re-read the page a time or two, as in the section where he is to be assigned to a camp named A Shau, but then is re-routed to Tra Bong with the rest of his unit. And there are other times, such when a mortar round goes off beside his ear, when re-reading doesn’t help, and the reader has to work backwards from the result to piece the story together. Still other times, such as when his unit is assigned Swedish machine guns in the Dominican Republic, I never quite figured out what was going on. Another sentence or two here and there would have helped the reader along without interrupting the narrative.

But it’s hard to pound the author too much for this, because this is one of those books that more words could have ruined. Indeed, Barnes himself shows us that in the prologue, an annoying mush that reads like an afterthought dreamed up by a clueless editor. George Eliot said “Beginnings are always troublesome” and describes one introduction as “the worst bit of writing in the book.” She would not have liked this prologue. However, that is, in the grand scheme of things, a minor complaint.

I am putting this book in the mail to my friend.  I suspect vets will love this book, but those of us with a more general interest will like it as well. Net, net, it’s not perfect, but it’s within mortar range of perfect.

That’s Lt. John Pike of the UC-Davis Police Department, and his moment in the sun probably isn’t going as he might have hoped. Not only that, his 15 minutes have stretched into hours and days and interminable weeks, and unfortunately for him there’s every reason to believe that he’s going to famous for a long, long time to come. In an age of ubiquitous Photoshop, it starts here…

…and there’s no telling where it ends. Or if it ends.

It’s easy enough and obvious enough to conclude that Lt. Pike (now on paid administrative leave) is a bad guy, especially once you learn that the university had to cough up nearly a quarter million dollars to settle a discrimination suit against him a few years back. But there is now a conversation afoot – predictably, perhaps – that considers Pike’s actions less in terms of the “individual bad actor” motif and more in terms of systemic, institutional dynamics.

Writing at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal details the “strategic incapacitation” paradigm being employed by police agencies in the increasingly securitized post-911/post WTO United States.

Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let’s not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

Madrigal’s take is detailed and devastating. If it feels like the tone of police response to civil disobedience in America – even relentlessly peaceful disobedience of the sort that typifies the Occupy movement – you’re not imagining things, and Madrigal’s article explains why. However, he comes in for a bit of critique from Marc Bousquet at the Chronicle of Higher Education. While acknowledging the validity of institutional analyses, Bousquet accuses of Madrigal of over-servicing his readership’s smugness and its need to feel innocent. In short, he lets “us” off the hook.

We are Eichmann. Arendt wasn’t trying to get us to “feel bad for” Eichmann, but to see his evil in our ordinary selves, recoil, and change. The discovery that Lt. John Pike is a nice fellow to watch the game with and a good scratcher of puppy ears isn’t meant to lift his moral responsibility—or ours. His and our failure to refuse the system is the system.

Madrigal’s note erases personal, moral agency on both margins of his caricature. The lieutenant—and a few tens of million like him—have not resisted the inner Eichmann. They have chosen obedience and the warm praise of their masters, and the material rewards of their complicity.

By contrast the objects of Pike and his masters’ brutality have chosen the brave, difficult, path of refusal.

I get both arguments. I’m certainly glad that the institutional frame was raised. I also appreciate the tenacity of the Bousquet rebuttal, which very neatly examines the institutional frame that drove Madrigal’s institutional frame in the first place. There is much to think about here, and the debate arrives at a time when we as culture need to be thinking deeply about who we have become and who we want to be.

In 1992 Body Count released a song called “Cop Killer.” Before we continue, take a few moments to watch the video (live at Lollapalooza). If you’re having trouble following along, here are the lyrics.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you were around, you recall the Category 5 shitstorm that “Cop Killer” touched off. If you weren’t around, well, it was everything you might imagine and then some. The “establishment,” if I might use the term, was indignant that a gangsta thug was inciting blacks everywhere to round up some caps and then find themselves a cop to bust them up into. At a glance, this might be how it looks from a certain white, suburban, middle-class perspective. But in truth, that’s not what was going on at all. As Ice T says in the intro to the video above, “Cop Killer” isn’t about all cops. Instead, it’s what we would have recognized, in another day and age, as a dramatis personae.

I saw Body Count on that tour, at Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem, NC. Sweet hell, you want to talk about a town wound tighter than a banjo string as black-clad Armageddon advanced up I-40 toward the city limits? Winston had its share of racial tensions surrounding the police force already and talk radio, not an engine of progress to start with, certainly didn’t see any profit in trying to calm down the jittery white folk.

The show was freakin’ awesome, end to end. But the moment that everybody came for didn’t go off like some might have expected. Let me paraphrase T’s preface as best I can.

This next song is not about all cops. We all know there are some crazy motherfuckers out there and the cops risk their lives trying to deal with them. Every hand in the air right now: peace to the cops! [Every hand, every fist in the building was in the air, along with Ice T's, saluting the police.]

But we also know that there are some power trippers. Little motherfuckers that nobody has ever respected who use the badge to abuse those they’re supposed to be protecting. This song is about a man who’s been beat down one time too many because of the color of his skin and he’s about to snap.

Yes, that’s right. Ice T, the man who enraged America with “Cop Killer,” led the crowd in praise of the police and recognition of the dangerous job they have to do.

I couldn’t help remembering a night a few years earlier when I found myself sitting across a table from a cop who was clearly the sort that “Cop Killer” was about. (And yes, I’m working my way around to a relevant point. Stay with me.) I worked for the Wake Forest University campus police when I was in school. The department employed a number of students at jobs like foot patrols, desk duty, dispatch, etc. I was even the student supervisor for a couple of years. During that time I got to know some of the officers pretty well (including the two who later went to prison for using their access to steal school property). Especially on third shift the students would sometimes ride with the officers on patrols and we’d frequently take middle-of-the-night coffee breaks with them at this little greasy spoon just off campus. City police officers took breaks at the same place sometimes.

One night we wandered into the diner and a Winston-Salem cop (whose name I remember, but won’t use here) was sitting at a table near the door. The officer I was riding with knew him and we sat down. Ordered a glass of tea and a slice of pie, as I recall.

Over the next few minutes I heard the word “nigger” more times than you probably get at the average Klan rally. Now, I certainly knew the word. I grew up in the 19th century and had my own embarrassing past. But I was working diligently to become a civilized kid. And the world I lived in at that point had no room for the N-word or any other words like it. I was absolutely shell-shocked by what I was hearing.

My whole life, it seemed, I had heard African-Americans complaining about how they were treated by the police. Stories from faraway cities like Philadelphia were in the paper all the time, but I grew up in a society that made clear what those complaints were: criminal blacks bitching because they got caught.

But here I am, sitting across the table from a city cop (who I fear was actually a distant relative), and every word out of his mouth was evidence that all those blacks with all those complaints about all those cops were telling the stone cold truth.

So, smart-assed kid that I was, I looked across that table and said something to the effect that “you know, you almost sound kind of racist.” I’ll never forget the reply, if I live to be 1,000: “Hell yeah, I’m racist. Ain’t you?”

I don’t honestly remember what I said to that, but I’m certain it was insufficient. I do recall the next time I heard anything about that officer, though. A few years later he had been put in charge of the drug enforcement unit in the city’s most heavily black (and poor) neighborhood.

Back to the debate about Lt. Pike. I don’t want our considerations of the role institutions play in creating thugs with badges to miss out on an important point. It seems to me that a couple of things are true here.

• Yes, Lt. Pike is a bad actor. Whatever dynamics might be at work in the UC-Davis PD or with police philosophy generally, he acted appallingly and others in the same system or the same kinds of systems daily resist the impulse to unprovoked violence against peaceful protesters.
• Yes, the system is a serious problem. It encourages those who work in it to behave in egregious ways that are antithetical to the function of a working democracy.

However, one more thing is also true, and it goes to the lesson of “Cop Killer” and my own late-night coffee break experience in the early 1980s. And that is that bad people seek out systems that empower their personal evil. Ice T’s homicidal maniac wasn’t after a cop who’d been created by the LAPD. His target had been a pencil-dicked punk his whole life and had sought out the badge because it would allow him to inflict his own pathological rage on the world, making people he hated feel his own powerlessness. And the Winston-Salem city cop across the table from me was a racist a long time before he became a cop. The force, though, provided him with a legitimizing platform to do something about all those dirty, thieving, drug-addled niggers in his precinct.

I don’t know Lt. John Pike. But I can’t help making some guesses based on his behavior. I make some assumptions based on the casual, matter-of-fact tone with which he pepper-sprays those students. I don’t know how he feels about blacks, Mexicans or Arabs, although that lawsuit suggests something about how he regards gays. All of the evidence before me makes me believe that he’s a type I have known before, a man frustrated by his powerlessness in the face of social change that he feels threatens his place in society.

I think he’s probably the kind of cop who, had he been working 400 miles to the south 20 years ago, might have inspired a controversial song about a man who’d been beaten down one time too many.

But, still, there are things to be grateful for.

We left on the Monday before Thanksgiving, so the security lines were short.  On Wednesday, a lot more of the 99% will get the 1% treatment.  And many will probably not maintain their sense of humor about it.

I’m grateful to have not had to deal with the TSA agent that I have come to think of as “John Wayne, Jr.” who objects to the mini bottle of hand sanitizer that lives in my purse.

I’m glad the digital strip search is now just a generic outline.

It only took three bins to hold my purse, boots, scarf, coat, sweater and backpack. I packed my belt.

Speaking of packing, I’ve learned to pack for two weeks in a carry-on. I ran into a friend while waiting in line at security–she’s going on a cruise with her aunt. A cruise makes me think of steamer trunks. Now there’s an anachronism. That smacks of the 1%, albeit a very different 1%. The discussions about the 1% vs. the 99% usually focus on how most of us do with less–and accept it–so that a few can have more. There’s even, perhaps, a bit of envy in the discussions.

But, today, getting treated as if I might be a member of the 1%, makes me long for the days when the 99% were treated as the majority. Of course that other 1%, the one so much in the news with its private planes, gets to not be treated like the 1% that the rest of us do.

So I guess that make us common travelers the 98%.

To all of that majority I wish a safe journey, good adventures, uneventful security screenings, and a great Thanksgiving.

These Washington rules — America shall protect and, more importantly, project American values because they are derived from American exceptionalism — require great military expense born by you and me, the taxpayers. That expense now faces a congressionally mandated deficit reduction process.

Come the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 23, six Democrats and six Republicans must identify at least $1.5 trillion in cuts in federal spending over the next decade. If they do, then Congress must vote yea or nay by Dec. 23. If they do not, the Budget Control Act triggers automatic cuts totaling $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, slashing, among others, military spending. (Note that some folks are trying to detrigger the trigger.)

The so-called super committee, formally known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, exists because Congress demonstrated neither the political will nor moral courage to tackle deficit reduction in a rational, non-confrontational, non-ideological way. None of its members has the stomach to cut military spending; the political cost would be, they think, unbearably high.

Advocates of cutting military spending would become, in a word, electoral collateral damage, labeled as isolationist and unpatriotic foes opposing American security.

Instead of examining the debatable merit of America’s global military presence balanced against its high cost, the joint select committee is decidedly silent in the face of so many voices demanding defense spending not only remain untouched but also have earlier cuts restored.

Already, chieftains of the military and the intellectual and corporate enterprises the military budget supports have, akin to Chicken Little, argued these cuts would devastate the armed forces.

“Do the right thing,” said Leon Panetta, defense secretary: Look elsewhere to cut spending. Rep. Buck McKeon, Republican of California, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who heads the Senate counterpart, wrote the cuts “will compound deep reductions Congress has already imposed and critically compromise national security.” The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in a joint effort with the American Enterprise Institute and Foreign Policy Initiative, posted a report titled “Defending Defense: Warning: Hollow Force Ahead!”

House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, argued the Pentagon budget was cut more than enough in the debt accord reached this past summer by President Barack Obama and Republican leaders. “I would argue that they’ve taken more than their fair share of the hits,” Boehner said.

That accord calls for cuts of $350 billion in projected spending over 10 years, although Pentagon planners believe it will be $450 billion. The joint select committee’s cuts will be in addition to those assumed in the summer debt accord.

What does America spend on its military?

Given the claims of devastation to America’s military if further cuts are triggered, how has defense spending fared in the past decade? What’s the materiel condition of America’s military?

Obviously, many answers from many sources — all with different ideological or financial motivations — confront that question. Let’s look at one: A report by the Stimson Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington, provides a detailed compilation of procurement spending by the armed forces over the past decade.

Begin with overall defense spending from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2010: That’s about $6.4 trillion in visible spending, including war funding. (Visible is applicable here. In 2008, USA Today reported that black, or secret, military spending had “increased by nearly 48% since 9/11 — from $18.2 billion in fiscal 2002 to $26.9 billion this year [2008] — according to figures compiled by the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.”)

The Stimson report, written by center co-director Russell Rumbaugh, focuses on visible procurement spending — what the military bought, what it paid for it, and the consequences of procurement spending patterns by each service branch. In sum, taxpayers’ money bought at least $1 trillion worth of military materiel from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2010. And that’s with two wars (and assorted dustups) driving American foreign policy and military planning.

Rumbaugh’s executive summary concludes that modernization of the American military — a principal goal of procurement over the past decade — was accomplished:

• Procurement funding grew dramatically — from $62.6B in FY01 to $135.8B in FY10.
• Supplemental war funding significantly enhanced the resources available for procurement, making up 22 percent of all procurement funding.
• Most procurement programs already have been almost completely funded.
• The Army had its next-generation acquisition programs cancelled, but that freed resources — enhanced by significant supplemental war funding — to expand and upgrade its primary combat vehicles and supporting capabilities, giving it a fully modernized force.
• The Air Force modernized its force by fielding the next-generation systems of the F-22 and C-17, and also introduced an entirely new capability — unmanned aircraft. The Air Force bought fewer fighters than it projected because it made a conscious choice to pursue high-end and expensive next-generation systems.
• The Navy achieved the modernized force it projected at the start of the decade, and relied on the dramatic expansion of procurement funding to achieve that force.

Reading the details of military procurement is fascinating, especially the spending decisions made by some branches that favored advanced technological capabilities against amounts of materiel sought. For example, the Air Force bought the F-22, the most advanced air-to-air fighter in the world. But that extraordinary capability is expensive — so the Air Force bought only 260 fighters over the past decade. It had bought 2,063 fighters from 1981 to 1990 — and even those F-15s and F-16s have demonstrated they can defeat any other nation’s combat aircraft.

Here are the report’s summaries of each branch’s procurement spending and its impacts.

The United States Army

At the start of the decade, the Army planned on devoting its procurement funding to the next-generation systems it intended to field. When these programs were cancelled because they were underdeveloped and already unaffordable, the Army instead spent the increased procurement funding it received on modernizing its existing forces. Programs that were originally slated to received only limited funding instead received significant funding, especially from the $124B in unexpected supplemental war funding, resulting in nearly the Army’s entire inventory being modernized. Its combat vehicle fleet has been expanded and upgraded with state of the art technology, including digital situational awareness and communications suites. It also expanded the fielding of its supporting vehicles and small arms. Whatever its future needs and plans, the Army today is better positioned with modern equipment than any other army, due largely to its procurement investments. In the past decade, the Army almost unintentionally acquired a fully modernized force. [emphasis added]

The United States Air Force

In contrast to the Army, the Air Force consciously pursued the procurement of expensive, next-generation aircraft. Having made that choice, the Air Force today has already fielded its next-generation systems in two of its primary areas: fighters and airlift. For fighters, that choice has meant the Air Force has less than it projected despite the dramatic increases in procurement funding it received. But the Air Force offset some of that smaller quantity by buying unmanned aircraft in significant numbers. Here, too, the Air Force chose to pursue the next-generation system. The Air Force chose to use the past decade’s procurement funding to modernize its forces and field those next-generation systems. [emphasis added]

The United States Navy

Like the other services, the Navy ended the decade with a modernized force. Unlike the other services, it did so largely by achieving its original plan. Although it expanded its modernization plan when procurement funding began increasing, it also reduced that expansion when its new plans became unaffordable. The Navy relied on the increased procurement funding of the last decade to execute its plan; nevertheless, today it has a force that has achieved the capabilities it projected it would need. The Marine Corps had a mix of modernization; fielding one high-end, next-generation system but also capitalizing on supplemental war funding to upgrade its vehicle fleets.

Rumbaugh’s analysis concludes that the American military remains the most advanced — and modernized — in the world. He recognizes that what to buy and how much to buy for America’s armed forces remain a source of contentious debate. His report does not address that issue. Rather, he focuses on what has been accomplished through procurement:

At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, US military capabilities and technology are the most advanced in the world. Although much of the US military strength is rooted in the professionalism and dedication of the people in the services, they are also outfitted with the best equipment in existence. The Army has higher quality and more modern tanks, fighting vehicles, supply trucks, small arms, helicopters, and support equipment than it had at the start of the decade. The Air Force has better fighter, airlift, and unmanned aircraft. And the Navy and Marines have better ships, aircraft, and support equipment. Even as the debate of what we should buy rightfully continues, we should not dismiss what we have already bought. [emphasis added]

The Stimson report provides astonishing detail about what each service branch bought, right down to the Army’s 228,377 M249 squad automatic weapons and M240 medium machine gun (more than 1.5 times the intended buy); the Air Force’s 352 Predator and Reaper drone aircraft; the Navy’s two aircraft carriers ($16.8 billion), 10 attack submarines ($28 billion), and 18 destroyers ($28.9 billion); and the Marines’ 155 V-22 Osprey vertical takeoff and landing aircraft ($14 billion). The taxpayers bought a helluva lot of top-notch stuff for the American military in the past decade. The study has other tidbits as well, such as this: The Army has spent at least $1 billion a year since 1996 on canceled weapons systems.

Cui bono?

Given its findings, the Stimson report should inaugurate a discussion about the appropriate level of American military spending — and the incentives driving it — over the next decade. But such discussion is unlikely.

First, as Bacevich argues, the Washington rules about American power are deeply embedded in the national consciousness. The public accepts the status quo, in part because it believes it does not need to question the projection of military power by the United States or the reasons proferred for it.

Second, an intricate network of intertwined ideological, economic, military, and political institutions populated by elites would collapse if the Washington rules were publicly discussed and ultimately discarded. Writes Bacevich:

Who benefits from the Washington rules? The answer to that question helps explain why the national security consensus exists.

The answer, needless to say, is that Washington itself benefits. The Washington rules deliver profit, power, and privilege to a long list of beneficiaries: elected and appointed officials, corporate executives and corporate lobbyists, admirals and generals, functionaries staffing the national security apparatus, media personalities, and policy intellectuals from universities and research organizations.

Each year the Pentagon expends hundreds of billions of dollars to raise and support U.S. military forces. This money lubricates American politics, filling campaign coffers and providing a source of largesse — jobs and contracts — for distribution to constituents. It provides lucrative “second careers” for retired U.S. military officers hired by weapons manufacturers or by consulting firms appropriately known as “Beltway Bandits.” It funds the activities of think tanks that relentlessly advocate for policies to fend off challenges to established conventions. “Military-industrial complex” no longer suffices to describe the congeries of interests profiting from and committed to preserving the national security status quo.

An overpowering narrative

The Washington rules as articulated by Bacevich have no single author. Rather, the narrative has been constructed by many architects since World War II. America’s self-assumed image of its exceptional place in the world fostered a mythical but militaristic ethos of global power projection. That ethos — the rest of the world should mirror the American enterprise of democracy and its definition of freedom — has survived revision and revolution in military technology and tactics, strategic planning, sensibilities in the officers corps, political leadership, voter attitudes, and narrative management.

The Defense Department’s $691 billion budget request for fiscal 2012 continues to underwrite the narrative of American power projection as global arbiter and definer of proper “international order.” In one breath, the DoD budget overview pins the American mission on its presumed historical mandate and “successful Cold War strategy,” granting it a central role in the maintenance of global order. From the DoD overview:

NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY
America’s national security strategy calls for comprehensive global engagement aimed at underpinning a just and sustainable international order. This strategic approach has its roots in the central role the United States played in the years following World War II – creating an architecture of international institutions, organizations, and standards establishing certain rights and responsibilities for all nations. This international architecture was a critical enabler of America’s successful Cold War strategy against an ideological adversary, and it remains central to the maintenance of international order today.

But in the next paragraph, the DoD pays lip service to the “norms and values of the international community.”

America’s ability to lead stems from the timeless resolve to support liberty, freedom, and open access to markets and ideas. The United States can only lead when others trust it to carry forward their best interests, to listen to their concerns, and to conduct itself in line with the norms and values of the international community.

Is the magnitude of American military power lodged overseas “in line with the norms and values of the international community”? Bacevich details what “comprehensive global engagement” actually means. According to Bacevich in his book “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War“:

The United States currently has approximately 300,000 troops stationed abroad, again more than the rest of the world combined (a total that does not include another 90,000 sailors and marines who are at sea); as of 2008, according to the Department of Defense, these troops occupied or used some 761 “sites” in 39 foreign countries, although this tally neglected to include many dozens of bases in Iraq or Afghanistan; no other country comes even remotely close to replicated this “empire of bases” — or to matching the access that the Pentagon has negotiated to airfields and seaports around the world.

Make that 762 “sites” in other countries if President Obama’s promise to place 250 marines in Australia (eventually increasing to 2,500 personnel) represents a new site for power projection. It appears the tiresome wars in the Mideast are giving way to shouldering aside a presumed Chinese threat to traditional trade routes with good, old-fashioned saber rattling.

Global military spending in 2010 hit $1665 billion; the United States accounted for $636 billion, or nearly 40 percent of the global total. Is this level of military spending “in line with the norms and values of the international community”?

This post does not argue for specific levels of American military spending. Nor does it argue the joint select committee ought to dramatically reduce military spending. It calls for, instead, far more introspection about the American global mission by far more Americans. It asks for plain talk about the Washington rules articulated by Bacevich. It suggests academics do far more research on American exceptionalism and its connection to American global power projection. It asks that America’s civilian elected leaders — yep, those folks on the Hill with the dismal approval rating — reconsider how taxpayers’ dollars are spent at a time when 30 million Americans want jobs, and now.

Reconsider how best to project American values. If Americans believe that they can outcompete anyone, then they should demand that American foreign policy be based on the projection of economic power. Frankly, China has our number. America is addicted to its low-cost wares. The money we pay to China for cheap electronic goods has helped the most populous nation on Earth increase its military spending and begin to annoy its neighbors around the South China Sea.

A dialogue over the Washington rules and their hold on maintaining high levels of military spending will not happen. When a member of the Senate, the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” threatens to quit the joint select committee if it argues for cuts in military spending, a desperately needed deliberation ends, let alone begins. That’s what Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, did. And Lindsay Graham, Republican of South Carolina, backed him up:

This pisses me off beyond belief that our party would subject the Department of Defense not just to more cuts, but to the end of the finest force ever created in the history of the world. This budget deal is a philosophical shift that I will have no part of.

The United States is continually at war. We need to consider why — and the discussion cannot begin and end solely with fears of terrorism. Being continually at war reflects who we are. That’s how the world reacts to us — as a nation at war.

If our elected leaders follow the refusal of Kyl and Graham to even discuss how and why we spend so much of our money on our military, we’ll never reach a national consensus on what relationships America ought to have with the other nearly 200 nations on the planet.