The secrecy extends to the CIA’s budget. In the ten years after the 9/11 attacks, the civilian spy budget doubled, but we taxpayers aren’t allowed to know what the various spy agencies are doing with our ever-more-generous contributions. We are told, after the fact, that the federal government spends around $55 billion a year on civilian intelligence (that’s not counting $27 billion for military intelligence), but what do we spend that on? Dunno. We’ve only been allowed to know the total dollar figure for the US intelligence so-called black budget since 2007. The idea that they’ll ever let us know its line items seems laughable; the 2007 press release noting with some resentment that the overall budget number would now be public also made clear that this was all we were getting: “Beyond the disclosure of the top-line figure, there will be no other disclosures.”
That attitude works for specific operations as well as it works for the overall enterprise. When pressed in 2009 by Pakistani reporters about “relentless” drone strikes in the Waziristans killing civilian bystanders, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demonstrated the political benefit of using the CIA as trigger pullers. She just stonewalled. “I’m not going to comment on any particular tactic or technology.”
The CIA is obligated to brief the handful of souls on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees about their actions, but the briefees are legally required to keep their traps shut about anything they hear inside the closed-door sessions in ultrasecure rooms S-407 and HVC-304. They can’t even share it with fellow senators or House members. This can sometimes lead to an almost comic pantomime of what oversight is supposed to be. In 2010, two senators on the Intelligence Committee decided they were so upset by something they’d been briefed on that they had to alert the public. Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall did send up the alarm that they’d been briefed on something very disturbing; they just couldn’t say what it was. The press tried to report on their concerns, but it was difficult. The New York Times gamely described the senators’ worries about “some other kind of activity” and “some kind of unspecified domestic surveillance,” but they couldn’t explain further. “Unspecified” and “other” aren’t exactly the kinds of details that get the public’s heart pounding. Those senators may have been trying to ring alarm bells by going to the press, but those bells were pretty muffled. Our intel agencies are now well and truly integrated into how we wage war, but intel agencies don’t kowtow to lowly congressmen. You can know it, Mr. Wyden, but you can’t say a word. Sleep tight.
Of course, even that meager level of pseudo-sharing makes many a senior spook uncomfortable. So thank goodness for private contractors. Outfits like the She formerly known as Blackwater are not legally required to show up at HVC-304 and S-407 and tell how many Hellfire missiles they loaded on drones today, or where they did it. In 2011, the New York Times reported that private contractors accounted for about a quarter of the US
intelligence jobs. And if you don’t trust the Times, here’s what the director of national intelligence had to say in October of that year. The director wasn’t against lowering the number of contractors, but he insisted that private contractors would remain an integral and crucial part of our national spy game. “If all the contractors failed to come to work tomorrow,” he said, “the intelligence community would stop.”
Oh, and hey, if private contracts don’t provide sufficient insulation from public oversight, if the White House is queasy about turning over to Congress the civilian-to-bad-guy casualty-ratio algorithms used by the CIA and its for-profit civilian augmentees, not a problem! The executive branch has a work-around for that, too. For operations the White House deems too sensitive or too politically combustible for congressional ears, there is always Joint Special Operations Command.
JSOC was created out of the embarrassments of post-Vietnam military operations: the botched attempt to rescue the Iran hostages, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and the unholy operational mess of the invasion of Grenada. We needed some elite badass soldiers in every branch, it was decided, whose various talents could be brought to bear, in concert, on difficult problems. JSOC has the use of elite, secretive units from all branches of the military, including the celebrated Navy SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and the Air Force’s Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC squads are sort of like Hasbro’s old Vietnam-era G.I. Joe Adventure Team come to life. (“Five rugged men with lifelike hair, outfitted for action, they’ll dare anything, and risk everything!”) Remember, the Adventure Team had the “flocked” hair, the beards, the Kung Fu Grip, the too-racy-for-regulation uniforms, the “Devil of the Deep” fantail watercraft, the “secret mission to Spy Island.” These were no regular Joes. They were clearly not bound by convention. They made their own rules.
By 2001, JSOC had run occasional and secret and daring operations at real-life Spy Islands in the Persian Gulf, Panama, Kuwait, El Salvador, Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. But the George W. Bush White House was the first to realize the full potential of Special Ops. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney made them the equivalent of Reagan’s private-war-on-Nicaragua NSC—a thousand Ollie Norths (only more skilled and much more governable) at the ready. As Jeremy Scahill reported in The Nation at the end of 2009, “Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House.”
Unlike the Reagan White House, Team Bush didn’t wait around until after the fact to provide a justification for this move. The Bush lawyers (lots of them had worked for Meese) wrote up all the legal findings before the White House started sending Special Ops off with secret orders in their pockets. Essentially, the Bush administration claimed the Special Ops guys could do most anything they wanted in the War on Terror, anywhere the president chose to send them, and without telling anyone.
This is the sort of executive prerogative presidents in general appreciate, and President Obama has not been the exception to that rule. JSOC reportedly runs its own terrorist-targeting and drone-flying operations, with the help of contractors. “Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don’t care,” an intelligence source told Scahill. “If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That’s the mentality.… They’re not accountable to anybody and they know that.”
While America has been fighting two of its longest-ever boots-on-the-ground wars in the decade following 9/11, and fighting them simultaneously, less than one percent of the adult US population has been called upon to strap on those boots. “Not since the peacetime years between World War I and World War II,” according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study, “has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.” Half of the American public says it has not been even marginally affected by ten years of constant war. We’ve never in our long history been further from the ideal of the citizen-soldier, from the idea that America would find it impossible to go to war without disrupting domestic civilian life.
The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter. Their great advice was that we should structure ourselves as a country in a way that deliberately raised the price of admission to any war. With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians’ control, the idea was for us to feel it—uncomfortably—every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us—of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it’s happening—war making
has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.
The war in Afghanistan was an all but foregone conclusion after 9/11. The Taliban overthrow was engineered by CIA operatives, Special Forces, and a smallish contingent of US troops. It took a few weeks, but then we decided we should stay on and save Afghanistan from itself. Starting the war in Iraq took deceit and trickery on the part of the Bush administration (and severe chickenshittery on the part of the Congress). But once we had both those wars under way, what’s more telling—what’s less about specific politicians and temporal politics and more about us as a country—is how freaking long it’s taken to end them. Regardless of the culpability of the Paul Wolfowitzes and Donald Rumsfelds and Dick Cheneys in starting the Iraq War, there’s a national culpability for the fact that we have, without any real debate or thought, settled into a way of waging war that ensures minimal political pushback.
No matter how long the troops slog through the muck, no matter how many deployments they endure, the American public can no longer really be touched by war. Need twenty thousand more soldiers for the surge in Iraq? Military commanders simply extended the combat tours from twelve months to fifteen, no guarantee about how long a rest you’d get between deployments—and this in spite of what the military bosses already knew about the toll on the minuscule slice of American society that would shoulder this burden. “We’ve done these mental-health assessment team studies for six years now—between nine and twelve [months] is where a lot of the stress problems really manifest themselves, where the family problems really manifest themselves,” former Army chief of staff George Casey said recently. “The human mind and body weren’t made to do repeated combat deployments without substantial time to recover.” The suicide rate among active-duty servicemen doubled in the first five years of the Afghanistan War and then kept rising. In the past decade, the US Army lost more soldiers to suicide than to enemy fire in Afghanistan.
Civilian life has rolled on virtually uninterrupted. If you’re not in a military family, you’ve barely even felt it. The country has perfected the art of frictionless war. America’s wars thrum away like Muzak in the background here in the United States, kind of annoying when you tune in, but easy enough to tune out. Three years? Five? Ten? What’s the difference? And where are we fighting, anyway? We’re shooting missiles into Pakistan all the time. Does that count? Are we allowed to know?
In a statement on the House floor in February 2007, arguing against a reduction in US troop levels in Iraq, Congressman Phil Gingrey of Georgia said, “What indeed are we going to save our troops for? Working the rope lines at Fourth of July parades? Helping senior citizens across the street?” The rhetorical answer to his rhetorical question is of course that America should not save the troops for any such peaceable nonsense—they’re there to be used, in combat.
And not just the full-on active-duty military, mind you. We’d found a way to do smaller missions like Rwanda, Haiti, and Somalia without reserve troops—even the Balkans, with some help from our friends at DynCorp and Halliburton. But the Iraq War (and the Iraq War at the same time as the Afghanistan War) was of a different magnitude. The administration had hoped it wouldn’t be. Bush’s war council had hopefully supposed that Iraq would be quick work. “It could last six days, six weeks,” Rumsfeld said the month before the invasion. “I doubt six months.” Yeah, no.
As the war dragged on, the initial Bush administration decision to leave the reserves at home became untenable. So they deployed them—and how. In the third year of the war, at one point in 2005 more than half the soldiers in Iraq were from the National Guard. This was a first in American history, but it was a necessity. Thanks to the good old Abrams Doctrine, it remains true that we can’t do big wars with active-duty forces alone: two-thirds or more of our military’s transportation, engineer, medical, military police, and logistics corps is in the Reserves. But a funny thing about the Reserves now, and about the Abrams Doctrine: through ten years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the connection’s gone bad in the whole idea of the citizen-soldier. That hyphen’s doing way more work than it used to. The Guardsmen and reservists have been called to duty so often in the last ten years that it’s hard to distinguish between regular and reserve forces. Maybe our neighbors in the Guard and Reserves were having their lives turned upside down in the last ten years, maybe they were wounded and killed in staggering numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we got used to it.
The Abrams Doctrine only functions as a constraint on war making to the extent that we’re shocked by Americans being called away from their regular lives to join combat. Through sheer repetition, sheer volume, though, those call-ups eventually just stopped being shocking. The post-9/11 deployment pace has put Guardsmen and reservists and their families squarely on the soldier side of the citizen-soldier ideal. Calling them up no longer ensures a big national debate about the merits of a given war. The Abrams Doctrine still forces us to use the reserves if we want to fight a big war, but that’s ceased to be a check against wars the American public doesn’t want to fight.
We’re using everybody in uniform, right up to the limit, and price has been no object. In this past decade, the United States took what was already the world’s most robust military budget and supersized it (and also funded a slew of permanent and highly operational intelligence agencies, and special adventure teams and privately owned contract-warrior companies). By 2011, the total federal R&D budget for alternative energy sources—derided by the right as a huge Obama-era boondoggle—was about $3 billion a year. Meanwhile, the defense R&D budget was $77 billion a year—derided by no one, ever. If you added up what every other country spent on its military in 2001, the US military budget was about half that total; by 2005, those two numbers were equal. In other words, the United States spent as much on national defense as every other country in the world combined. And the Pentagon can now spend those dollars in a way that insulates the decision makers from the political consequences of making life uncomfortable for the voting public.
When the Pentagon farms out soldiers’ work to contractors, it not only puts extra bodies in the field, it puts a different type of body in the field; the American public doesn’t mourn contractor deaths the way we do the deaths of our soldiers. We rarely even hear about them. Private companies are under no obligation to report when their employees are killed while, say, providing armed security to tractor-trailer convoys running supplies into Iraq. In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States employed one private contract worker for every one hundred American soldiers on the ground; in the Clinton-era Balkans, it neared one to one—about 20,000 privateers tops. In early 2011, there were 45,000 US soldiers stationed inside Iraq, and 65,000 private contract workers there.
Thanks to the skyrocketing use of privateers, and thanks to our new quasi-military institutions empowered to make war while keeping the details of that war making (and often even the simple fact of that war making) hidden from us, and thanks to public relations triumphs like the Bush administration sparing us the sight of the flag-draped caskets of dead American soldiers deplaning week after week at Dover Air Force Base, thanks to all that and more, the American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars. While a tiny fraction of men and women fighting our wars are deploying again and again, civilian life remains pretty much isolated in cost-free complacency.
And about those costs …
In June 2001, George W. Bush signed into law a massive, budget-busting tax cut that would add about $2 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Three months later, the 9/11 attacks happened. US troops (and the CIA) were at war in Afghanistan within weeks, but we decided to keep the tax cuts in place anyway. Less than two years later we’d shipped troops off to a second and simultaneous war, in Iraq. Weeks after that invasion, Bush signed another huge round of tax cuts. We also started massively scaling up on the secret intel side of things. Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, in their seminal
2010 investigative series, detailed more than three thousand government organizations and private companies in ten thousand separate locations at work on counterterrorism. In just less than ten years, the US federal government had deputized 854,000 people with top secret security clearances, invented or reorganized nearly three hundred government agencies, and built office space equivalent to twenty-two US Capitols to create what Priest and Arkin call Top Secret America. The country never debated the need for this vast new superstructure, and still doesn’t, mostly because we’ve never been asked to cover the massive new expense. We just added the cost to the growing deficit, like we have the trillion or two in recent war spending.
This deferred-payment plan has been one of the few bipartisan points of agreement in the last decade. After Bush’s pre-Afghanistan War tax cuts, and the second round after the Iraq invasion, his successor followed suit. In 2010, President Obama added thirty thousand more soldiers to Afghanistan, extended the military stay there until 2014, ordered up a few hundred more drones for the CIA, and then—yes—extended those Bush tax cuts.
When civilians are not asked to pay any price, it’s easy to be at war—not just to intervene in a foreign land in the first place, but to keep on fighting there. The justifications for staying at war don’t have to be particularly rational or cogently argued when so few Americans are making the sacrifice that it takes to stay. When we invaded Iraq in 2003, the first official justification from the White House was that we had to secure Saddam’s dangerous piles of weapons of mass destruction. (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” was the Bush administration line.) There was plenty of evidence at the time that this threat was bullpucky, and that was proven as soon as we got there. So then we decided we were really there to get rid of Saddam. It took three weeks for Baghdad to fall, and he was caught in his hidey-hole by December.
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power Page 20