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The Pentagon spends shocking
amounts on outdated tanks and aircraft. Why? Because securing votes counts
for more than military need. Paul Isaacs reports
It is
best, some people would suggest, to think of the Pentagon as a dangerously
obese man. He should not be allowed to gorge further; he should be taken
away from the table. As for President Bush's five-year, $2.1trn defence
spending deal, it may only force-feed the patient until he
explodes.
"Too much money has enabled the Pentagon to avoid reform
and transformation," says John Isaacs, defence analyst for the Washington
think-tank Council for a Livable World. "What it really needs is a
ten-year diet."
The standard objection on the European left to
Bush's bonanza budget can be summarised thus: money for development =
good; $48bn increase in defence spending = bad, very bad. Although many
liberal critics in America think the same, some have a further complaint:
namely, that the new budget is not just throwing a huge amount of money
away on weaponry, but is throwing a huge amount away on the wrong kind of
weaponry.
So how exactly does the world's only remaining
superpower use $2.1trn in defence expenditure? What next for a country
whose military budget was already six times larger than those of all the
"axis of evil" countries combined - plus Cuba, Sudan and Syria thrown in
for good measure? A weather machine?
What most critics agree on is
the preponderance of heavy cold-war weaponry on the bill, at the expense
of the Pentagon's proposed "transformation" - a strategy to reshape the
army as a lighter, more deployable force.
The lion's share of this
year's proposed $396.1bn defence budget will pay for controversial
cold-war white elephants such as United Defense's Crusader howitzer, a
tank-like vehicle designed to repel a Soviet invasion of
Europe.
"The recent military build-up seems to have little to do
with the actual threat," wrote the economist Paul Krugman in the New
York Times, "unless you think al-Qaeda's next move will be a frontal
assault by several heavily armoured vehicles."
Leaving obese men to
one side, there is no better real-life metaphor for military waste than
the Fort Hood army base in central Texas. "It's the Grand Canyon of armour
power," wrote the journalist William Greider in his 1998 investigation of
military economics, Fortress America: the American military and the
consequences of peace.
Tucked in among Fort Hood's gentle
prairie creeks and hills is one of the largest, deadliest and costliest
displays of firepower on earth. Row upon row of tanks, trucks, missiles,
helicopters and howitzers stretch in their hundreds, thousands, then tens
of thousands, each pointing their way westwards into New Mexico, then
infinity. "It's exhausting to behold," noted Greider, "but there's nothing
else like it in the world."
Greider, a celebrated muckraker who has
worked at Rolling Stone and the Nation, wasn't just
writing copy for the US army, package holiday division. His interest in
Fort Hood was not in the capability that rests there - more than 40 per
cent of US army forces - but in how, for most of the time, and at a cost
of millions, that was all it was doing: resting. In effect, Fort Hood's
magnificent vistas represent nothing more than a dumping ground for the
world's most advanced fighting technology. And if critics are correct
about the waste in Bush's budget, those vistas will be getting wider and
more magnificent as the years go on.
The base's thousands of M-1
Abrams tanks, for example - "Cadillacs with guns", the soldiers call them
- were used to devastating effect during the Gulf war against Saddam
Hussein's much inferior forces, but there is little place for them in this
era of Afghanistan-style in-and-out bombings.
In fact, so
devastating is this newer form of air warfare that it is little wonder the
Bush administration is feeling so cocky about downing Saddam's regime
right now. Following the Soviet crash in 1991, no state in the world has
the same capacity for military research and design as the United States.
Since the cold war, Pentagon spending has always been
based on the premise that it is better to be safe than sorry. Why build
1,000 nuclear warheads - enough to bring about a nuclear winter - when you
can build 6,000? The city of Los Angeles may have 1.4 million
"food-insecure" (Californian for "hungry") people in 2002, but the army
still gets to spend $48bn this year on the Commanche, a modernised version
of a helicopter that hasn't been useful since the Korean war.
In
the air, the only way the US could come up against an enemy with a plane
as powerful as the F-16 would be by selling it to them. But this hasn't
stopped Bush approving $12bn for three further jets - the Joint Strike
Fighter, the F-18 Super Hornet and the F-22 Raptor - and for a redesign of
the F-16. And that's only this year's costs; in the next half-decade,
spending on the four fighters will increase to hundreds of
billions.
The Crusader howitzer, which got a $475.2m payout this
year, is one of the most contentious weapons in the budget, and a good
example of what's wrong with it. The system consists of two parts: the
howitzer weapon itself, a cannon-like barrel that fires between ten and 12
rounds a minute over a distance of 40km; and the resupply vehicle, which
carries it across the battlefield. Both weigh a svelte 40 tons, making
Crusader one of the deadliest - but also heaviest and slowest - mobile
artillery weapons in existence.
But does anyone need it? On current
evidence, future conflicts will provide scant openings for a slowcoach
like Crusader. The Pentagon says battles are more likely to be dispersed
over a large area, using unmanned vehicles and swift bombing raids (or
"drive-by shootings", as the army calls them). Speed is all nowadays: just
imagine how long it would take Crusader to get to Baghdad - more than
7,000 miles from the US - and that depends on finding a plane big enough
to carry it. At the moment, the only jets capable of doing the job are the
C-5 and the mammoth C-15 (aka "the flying truck"), and neither is in
plentiful supply.
"To call Crusader a white elephant is an insult
to white elephants," says Conn Hallinan, a columnist on military affairs
for the San Francisco Examiner. "You can't fit it in a plane, it
breaks any bridge it crosses, and you couldn't get it to Afghanistan on a
dare."
So how does an obsolete weapon like Crusader get approved,
let alone built and deployed? Because it creates jobs and security for
thousands of people - not least defence companies and congressmen. When
Oklahoma Representative J C Watts said he was "obviously sold" on Crusader
last year, it wasn't just because he felt the howitzer was a really decent
idea. A factory in Elgin, in Watts's district, will build parts for
Crusader, ensuring his constituents hundreds of jobs - and his campaign
thousands of votes. And in 2000, Watts was given $6,250 in contributions
by United Defense's parent company, the Carlyle Group.
In the past
year alone, United Defense has donated $62,750 to Congress. That might be
small beer compared to Lockheed Martin ($900,000) or Philip Morris ($1m),
but as far as political bribes go, it's enough to get things moving.
Scratch wherever there's a factory making Crusader parts, and you'll
almost certainly find a donation to the local congressperson from either
Carlyle or United Defense, even if it's a measly thousand
bucks.
The trick is to spread weapons sub-contractors out into as
many congressional districts across the US as possible; that way, if the
contract for a weapon of ambiguous use is questioned in Congress, it helps
no end if thousands of congressmen's constituents are building different
parts of it.
No defence company will willingly cancel its own
contract. So the decision as to whether a weapon should be kept rests with
the Pentagon accounting offices. For a bureau that regularly "misplaces"
hundreds of billions of dollars, this is rarely helpful.
A study
of the Crusader is instructive. Two years ago, George W Bush claimed
Crusader was "too heavy" and "not lethal enough", in effect rejecting the
programme in favour of the transformation. In April 2001, an advisory
panel appointed by the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, actually
recommended that Congress cancel Crusader and a host of others like it. At
that point, it appeared, nothing would save the system, not even the
presence in the Carlyle Group of George Bush Sr.
All that changed
after 11 September. No one wanted to be seen as anything so wimpish as a
dove any more, so the Pentagon dutifully renewed almost all of its weapons
contracts, including Crusader. With the new funding taken into account,
government spending on the howitzer amounts to $1.8bn since 1994. That's a
phenomenal price for a weapon that even the president doesn't want.
Unfortunately, it's not the only one (see box).
"The aftermath of
the 11th has compounded all the problems in military spending," Greider
told the NS. "The Bush team decided the window provided by a
'wartime presidency' was too good to pass up. By creating a high state of
national alarm over an open-ended threat, it justifies not only endless
armaments, but also a newly empowered national-security
state."
That isn't just fighting terrorism, Greider speculates -
"It's empire building."
Five programmes the Pentagon could cut
Amount indicates
2003 spending only
1. V-22 Osprey ($26bn): This vertical take-off
aircraft has killed 30 soldiers just in the testing phase.
2.
DDG-51 Destroyer ($2.7bn): Designed during the cold war to fight the
Soviet navy. Where are they now?
3. B-61 "Bunker Busting" Nuclear
Bomb (undisclosed sum): Because what the world really needs now is a new
nuclear weapon.
4. Anti-Ballistic Missile Defence ($11bn): More
than 20 years in the making and it still won't work.
5. F-22 Raptor
($5.2bn): Little improvement on the F-16 - which has no peer in the world
- and said to be less effective than the in-production F-18.
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Book Reviews - The
skinhead
Book Reviews
Nigel Jones
Monday 25th March
2002 |
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Mussolini
R J B Bosworth
Arnold, 584pp, �25
ISBN 0340731443
The clenched jaw
swells. The eyes bulge, rolling in their sockets. The close-cropped
hair bristles on the shaven skull. The Italian prime minister's
acolytes tremble, awaiting the breaking storm. Yes, Silvio
Berlusconi is about to make another of his undiplomatic
outbursts.
R J B Bosworth classes Mussolini as the least of
all the great dictators who made the European weather in the 1930s
and 1940s. He estimates that 2,000 people died violently at the
hands of Mussolini's fascist goons during the new movement's
amazingly rapid rise to power between its foundation in 1919 and
Mussolini's "March on Rome" (actually a train ride) in October 1922.
A further million, Bosworth suggests, were victim to Mussolini's
increasingly ill-advised and ill-starred foreign adventures: his
annexation of Libya; his brutal aggression against Ethiopia; his
intervention on Franco's side in the Spanish civil war (much more
extensive than Hitler's notorious bombing of Guernica); and, as
readers of Louis de Bernieres's Captain Corelli's Mandolin
will know, his farcical attack on Albania and calamitous tangle
with Greece undertaken out of envious pique at Hitler's effortless
territorial acquisitions. All this culminated in the disastrous -
and domestically unpopular - "me-tooism" of Italy's entry into
Hitler's war, which was a military catastrophe from the outset, and
swiftly dragged both Mussolini and his regime to their
doom.
At least part of the reason why Mussolini escaped the
obloquy heaped on Hitler, Stalin, and even little Franco, is that he
was perceived as guiltless of the really big crimes. Aside from the
2,000 socialists and communists shot, bludgeoned and choked on
castor oil, the million deaths caused by his foreign policies can be
put down, at a pinch, in the "casualties of war" column. Despite his
pretensions at reviving the Roman empire, Mussolini never had any
real interest in Hitler's racial delirium. Thousands of Italian Jews
were deported to the death camps, but this was at the behest of the
Nazis, and at the war's last gasp. However, there is no evidence
that Mussolini had any regard for their lives - or, indeed, for any
human life. After all, he ignored his daughter's tearful pleas and
had his own son-in-law, Count Ciano, shot for daring to vote to
depose him.
Mussolini's crimes were characteristic of the
small-town gangster sort: for all his vaunted hostility to the
Mafia, he made a good goodfella capo. In 1924, his infant regime was
fundamentally shaken by the bungled abduction and murder of Giacomo
Matteotti, a fearless socialist with inside dope on fascism's
financial corruption. Similar gangster crimes included the
assassination in Marseilles in 1934 of King Alexander of
Yugo-slavia, carried out by Croatian fascists acting on Italian
orders, and the elimination in 1938 of the Rosselli brothers,
anti-fascist exiles, by French fascists, again acting on Italian
orders. These crimes, as Bosworth points out, were indicative of the
petty cowardice that characterised the regime, a sort of tawdry
shittiness of soul. Mussolini's strutting and posturing, his
grandiose architecture and jutting jawline, could never powder away
the five o'clock shadow that darkened his regime, and they make all
the more surprising the early indulgence of his many foreign
admirers - including Churchill, who said that, had he been Italian,
he would have donned the black shirt.
Mussolini is
more of an impressionistic canvas than a formal life - a bewildering
chronological hotchpotch, and ill organised at that, with a
selection of sources more impressive in its breadth than its depth.
Hobbled with obligatory nods in politically correct directions and
such irrelevancies as the state of the author's arteries, the whole
is couched in a lumpy style as indigestible as cold tortellini.
However, it is impossible to quarrel with Bosworth's central
conclusion that, although fascism may have been the ruling idea of
the 20th century, it is now - Italian nostalgia aside - as dead as
pre-Raphaelitism. The right often sneers at the ideological death of
socialism, but what is less often noted, as Boswell remarks, is that
fascism is even deader. What price now Mussolini's dynamic
nationalism, his "autarchy", his corporate state? It is the detested
plutocratic globalisation that has conquered.
Nigel Jones
is assistant editor of BBC History Magazine. He is working on
a short biography of Oswald
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