Given his erratic behavior, from daily Twitter eruptions to upping his tally of lies by the hour, itâs hard to think of Donald Trump as a man with a plan. But in at least one area — reshaping the economy to serve the needs of the military-industrial complex — he's (gasp!) a socialist in the making.
His plan is now visibly taking shape — one we can see and assess thanks to a Pentagon-led study with a distinctly tongue-twisting title: âAssessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States.â The analysis is the brainchild of Trumpâs adviser for trade and manufacturing policy, Peter Navarro, who happens to also be the key architect of the presidentâs trade wars.
Navarro, however, can hardly take sole credit for the administrationâs latest economic plan, since the lead agency for developing it was also the most interested of all in the project, the Pentagon itself, in particular its Office of Defense Industrial Policy. In addition, those producing the report did so in coordination with an alphabet soup of other agencies from the Department of Commerce to the Director of National Intelligence. And even thatâs not all. Itâs also the product of an âinteragency task forceâ made up of 16 working groups and 300 âsubject matterâ experts, supplemented by over a dozen industry âlistening sessionsâ with outfits like the National Defense Industrial Association, an advocacy organization that represents 1,600 companies in the defense sector.
Before jumping into its substance and implications for the American economy and national defense, let me pause a moment to mention two other small matters.
First, were you aware that the Pentagon even had an Office of Defense Industrial Policy? It sounds suspiciously like the kind of government organization that engages in economic planning, a practice anathema not just to Republicans but to many Democrats as well. The only reason itâs not a national scandal — complete with Fox News banner headlines about the end of the American way of life as we know it and the coming of creeping socialism — is because itâs part of the one institution that has always been exempt from the dictates of the âfree marketâ: the Department of Defense.
Second, how about those 300 subject matter experts? Since when does Donald Trump consult subject matter experts? Certainly not on climate change, the most urgent issue facing humanity and one where expert opinion is remarkably unified. The Pentagon and its contractors should, however, be thought of as the ultimate special interest group and with that status comes special treatment. And if that means consulting 300 such experts to make sure their âneedsâ are met, so be it. (...)
Nah, it's never just one (there are multiple people on that vehicle). Also, the fact being that "it is understood that further images of the flag in Afghanistan have also been circulated among Australian soldiers."
Two separate Defence sources have identified a particular soldier as the individual who took the flag to Afghanistan.
The ABC has seen a second photograph of the flag, and it is understood that further images of the flag in Afghanistan have also been circulated among Australian soldiers.
One Defence source who was aware of the flag being flown in Afghanistan in 2007 said it was a "twisted joke", rather than evidence or an expression of genuine neo-Nazism.
The source claimed the flag was up for a "prolonged period".
In response to questions from the ABC, a Defence spokesperson said: "Defence and the ADF reject as abhorrent everything this flag represents. Neither the flag nor its use are in line with Defence values.
"The flag was briefly raised above an Australian Army vehicle in Afghanistan in 2007.
"The commander took immediate action to have the offensive flag taken down. (...)
Two separate Defence sources have identified a particular soldier as the individual who took the flag to Afghanistan.
The ABC has seen a second photograph of the flag, and it is understood that further images of the flag in Afghanistan have also been circulated among Australian soldiers.
One Defence source who was aware of the flag being flown in Afghanistan in 2007 said it was a "twisted joke", rather than evidence or an expression of genuine neo-Nazism.
The source claimed the flag was up for a "prolonged period".
In response to questions from the ABC, a Defence spokesperson said: "Defence and the ADF reject as abhorrent everything this flag represents. Neither the flag nor its use are in line with Defence values.
"The flag was briefly raised above an Australian Army vehicle in Afghanistan in 2007.
"The commander took immediate action to have the offensive flag taken down. (...)
(...) Normally, the presentation of the Medal of Honor is a solemn and meaningful recognition of bravery and heroism. But the announcement of the award for Britt Slabinski — and the concurrent decision to give the same award to John Chapman, a deceased Air Force combat controller — came after a yearslong campaign to recognize disputed events 16 years ago on a remote mountain in Afghanistan. The awards have exposed a rift in the special operations community, a long-running argument pitting the Air Force against the Navy SEALs. More significantly, the decision to award a Medal of Honor to Slabinski represents the enduring failure of the SEALs, the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House to reckon with the dark history of SEAL Team 6 in the post-9/11 wars. All these authorities have refused to conduct any meaningful or robust oversight of a group of elite commandos who have committed war crimes abroad and gone to great lengths to cover them up. (...)
Nearly half of the airmen were convicted of using or distributing LSD — which the Pentagon has stopped screening for in drug tests, the AP reported Thursday. Citing records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the news service reports that the drug ring operated at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, just outside of Cheyenne, Wyo.
The airmen took the drugs — which also included ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana — during their off-duty time, but at least one airman acknowledged that while under the influence of LSD, he wouldn't have been able to respond properly if he had been suddenly called to duty.
Evidence in the airmen's cases showed that they did the drugs at state parks or at parties in Denver, where a group went longboarding on the streets after taking LSD, according to the AP. It also includes quotes from some service members who recalled having "bad trips," and others who said their experiences had been positive.
"Minutes felt like hours, colors seemed more vibrant and clear," Airman Kyle S. Morrison is quoted as saying. "In general, I felt more alive."
But Air Force prosecutors had a different view, saying that taking the hallucinogenic drug can produce "paranoia, fear and panic, unwanted and overwhelming feelings, unwanted life-changing spiritual experiences, and flashbacks."
But while some Republicans and military leaders have been thinking a lot about child care and military service lately, that’s not what they have in mind. Instead, they’re wondering if different state pre-K and early childhood programs could be used to bolster military recruitment. The American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., organizedan event this week with the provocative title, “Military readiness and early childhood: What is the link?”
The link, it turns out, is that the Department of Defense estimates that 71 percent of the 34 million 17- to 24-year-olds in the United States — the military’s target recruitment population — are ineligible to enlist in the Armed Forces. And Mission: Readiness, a group of retired military leaders, has endorsed a novel solution to bring those numbers up:more high-quality child care.
(...) At its core, the problem is that military criminal investigative organizations have too frequently, for too long, failed to comply with rules for reporting service members’ criminal history data to the FBI.
As recently as February 2015, the Pentagon inspector general reported that hundreds of convicted offenders’ fingerprints were not submitted to the FBI’s criminal history database. The report found about a 30 percent failure rate for submitting fingerprints and criminal case outcomes. It did not determine the reasons for the lapses.
In February this year, the inspector general’s office launched a new review to assess compliance with updated reporting requirements. A spokesman, Bruce Anderson, said that review is ongoing.
The problem has persisted much longer.
A February 1997 report by the Pentagon inspector general found widespread lapses. Fingerprint cards were not submitted to the FBI criminal history files in more than 80 percent of cases in the Army and Navy, and 38 percent in the Air Force.
Failure to report the outcome of criminal cases was 79 percent in the Army and 50 percent in the Air Force, the report said. In the Navy, it was 94 percent. (...)
(...) Alienated as they were from the land and its peoples, U.S. troops were also alienated from their own leaders, who committed them to a war that, according to the proclamations of those same leaders, wasn’t theirs to win. They were then rewarded for producing high body counts. And when atrocities followed, massacres such as My Lai, U.S. leaders like Richard Nixon conspired to cover them up.
In short, atrocities were not aberrational. They were driven by the policy; they were a product of a war fought under false pretenses. This is not tragedy. It’s criminal.
Failing to face fully the horrific results of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia is the fatal flaw of the Burns/Novick series. To that I would add one other major flaw*: the failure to investigate war profiteering by the military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower famously warned the American people about as he left office in 1961. Burns/Novick choose not to discuss which corporations profited from the war, even as they show how the U.S. created a massive “false” economy in Saigon, riven with corruption, crime, and profiteering.
As the U.S. pursued Vietnamization under Nixon, a policy known as “yellowing the bodies” by their French predecessors, the U.S. provided an enormous amount of weaponry to South Vietnam, including tanks, artillery pieces, APCs, and aircraft. Yet, as the series notes in passing, ARVN (the South Vietnamese army) didn’t have enough bullets and artillery shells to use their American-provided weaponry effectively, nor could they fly many of the planes provided by U.S. aid. Who profited from all these weapons deals? Burns/Novick remain silent on this question—and silent on the issue of war profiteering and the business side of war.
The Vietnam War, as Tim O’Brien notes in the series, was “senseless, purposeless, and without direction.” U.S. troops fought and died to take hills that were then quickly abandoned. They died in a war that JKF, Johnson, and Nixon admitted couldn’t be won. They were the losers, but they weren’t the biggest ones. Consider the words of North Vietnamese soldier, Bao Ninh, who says in the series that the real tragedy of the war was that the Vietnamese people killed each other. American intervention aggravated a brutal struggle for independence, one that could have been resolved way back in the 1950s after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
But U.S. leaders chose to intervene, raining destruction on Southeast Asia for another twenty years, leading to a murderous death toll of at least three million. That was and is something more than a tragedy.
America’s Long History of Warfare Americans like to view their country as a force for peace in the world when the historical reality is almost the opposite, a reality ignored by the PBS Vietnam War documentary
Got any dead ancestors or had any wounded relatives?
America’s Long History of Warfare Americans like to view their country as a force for peace in the world when the historical reality is almost the opposite, a reality ignored by the PBS Vietnam War documentary
