I think I get it, all of a sudden, in a blinding flash of desper-inspiration!!!
Our Commander in Chief has learned something about the US military establishment. And something else about the CIA and the rest of the state security apparatus we are paying for the privilege of living under.
Maybe that’s why (along with the inevitable local empire building and internecine warfare that goes along with every state-security apparatus that ever existed) the Prez and his NatSec people are turning more and more to the smaller, nominally more nimble paramilitarized CIA establishment, using attached Special Ops troops, and drones, and destabilizer professionals, and all the rest from that Great Game gang, to try to implant the flag of US Hegemony across the planet. All in the name of “protecting us” and what they are telling us is "our National Interest." A term they decline ever to define. Just like those other undefined terms, "Freedom!" and "Liberty!" and of course that thing we are all just morally sure "they" will deliver to us, those of us who are not dumb or desperate enough to go be "Army Strong!" or one of "The Few, The Proud, The Marines," "Victory!" even though except for maybe a client dictator here, there or in Panama, or some little Grenadine resort island, or look! Finally, after many tries, you got to watch The CinC watch those guys in Pakistan offing ObL! there ain't no such thing ever been delivered to the rest of us.
Our Leader of the Free World (whatever that means, you tell me) has learned, via recent episodes exposing the shenanigans of various of our incompetent generals and other officers, http://www.theatlantic.com/... and exposure to the budgeting and procurement processes, with all their fraud and corruption and institutionalized incompetence, http://www.nysscpa.org/... (see also Iraq, as in “going off to asymmetric unwinnable war on false pretences with the Army you have, not the one you unknown-unknown wish you had and disappearing billions in cash into hyperspace or somewhere,” the Surge fraud that’s finally getting some critical attention, of course the invasion of Notagainistan and doing asymmetric war with people who are not at war with us or some tiny bunch of “terroristmilitantUnlawfulEnemaCombatants” who pose huge imagination-inflation-pumped threats to “US interests” and in the real world are most often regulated and deterred by good old cheap gumshoe POLICE activities, and once again coming up inevitably empty in the “successvictorywin” column,) he’s learned that “the military” is a huge, untamable, insatiable, clumsy, Brobdingnagian bureaucracy dedicated to turning the whole planet and all its resource into one Grand Interoperable Network-Centricked Battlespace That Will Observe And Control Everything, http://www.boeing.com/... (and on the profit side, http://www.boeing.com/...).
From the link just above, in 2003, per Roger Roberts, Senior Vice President, Space & Intelligence Systems, Boeing IDS, here’s the kind of sugar plum fairies that the civilians planning the Grand Future have dancing in their heads (this is only a tiny, tiny selection of a really huge, scary, disgusting literature of Forever Warfare):
Since September 11, the world has learned to appreciate more than ever the uncertainty and vulnerability that people feel when threatened by terrorists. [I, personally, feel much more threatened byand vulnerable to the people who claim to be protecting me and my family, by bankrupting my country, picking fights with everyone in the world, and creating weapons and doctrines that are Frankenstein monsters out of control, from the threats of “terrorism” – a word you hardly see any more in MilBabble or OfficialSpeak, since it’s become so inapt and meaningless: it’s now “militants,” or something similar.]
Clearly, access to information will play a major role in giving our military and civil authorities the timely information they need to make the decisions necessary to defeat emerging threats to our way of life.
Today, I've spoken about the challenges we face in making the Intergated Battlespace a reality, and about some of the technologies and cultural changes that, when made, will help develop a capability that preserves the peace.
I am very optimistic that those of us in this room can help create the future that I have described.
I base that belief on what our industry has already achieved, on what we are doing together now, and what we can achieve in the years ahead through partnership and cooperation.
What if --- network-centric operations could be incorporated into the very heart of our operating concepts, our technology development, and our decision process?
What if --- we were, through network centric operations, better equipped to protect the peace and defend our nations?
What if --- peace and the pursuit of happiness were once again the freedoms enjoyed by people everywhere?
So, what will tomorrow bring?
I believe that if we harness today's network technologies in new and different ways, that we can create a safer and better world for our children and our children's children.
That's why I am highly optimistic. And I hope you share my enthusiasm for the future.
Yeah! Fuckin’ A Right, big fella! Boeing's Softwar and Hardwar stuff, and their What-if Vision! That’s what it takes to Ensure The Peace -- or is it to ensure your personal and growing piece of the ever-growing Pentagram Pie? Because all that shit you are peddling is fucking OFFENSIVE, POWER-PROJECTION WEAPONRY, AND THE CONTROL STRUCTURE TO "IMPLEMENT" IT.
Who knows if the Prez is all "1884" baffled and buffalo'd by all the bullshit about “preserving the peace” by putting everything and everyone on a war footing in a huge Matrix-space? Who knows whether all that power has gone to his head? Or if he has reason to fear a coup, or the other thing? Or whether he has gone down the path that innumerable imperial overlord would-be’s suddenly coming into suzerainty to a huge Establishment have stumbled down before? That’s between him and Michelle and The Judgment of History.
All we got is body counts, occasional acts of actual journalism, serenipitous and personally immensely costly leaks of Inherent-Stupidity-Proving Memos, millions of pages of procurement publications and policy papers and doctrine documents and ridiculous ,regulations all self-referencing and reinforcing each other in a huge Narrative Feedback Loop, and vetted by enough people to hide misdeeds on a grand scale and diffuse all responsibility for cause and effect, and proofs by the trillion dollars' worth in the sour puddings that are the “Missions Accomplished” in Iraq and Notagainistan and soon to be Iran, ooh, and Vietnam?, it seems, where that great clumsy oaf of a Juggernaut, bristling with “invisible, invincible weapons” of all sorts, http://www.popsci.com/... each and every one of which is the.Ultimate.game.changer.that.assures.Victory, each of which proves incompetent and vulnerable and oversold and grotesquely overpriced (even the Reds think so, http://www.washingtontimes.com/... on the bipartisan inability to stick a harpoon in the “white whale” exemplar of the best of procurement programs -- let alone even REDUCE THE FUCKING RATE OF GROWTH OF THE PENTAGRAM BUBBLE).
Look to the Israelis – now THERE’s a flexible, aggressive, agile, nimble force structure for you. http://www.guardian.co.uk/... Can’t hardly wait to see how this latest set of actions plays out. Nor can all those Red “Christians” who are waiting out under the open skies for that Rapture to come down for them, after the rest of the world starts burning. None of them worrying about the niceties of Rules of Engagement or Rule of Law or anything other than that easy abstract, "justice," that can so easily be wrapped like a flag around every kind of fucking horror and real terror.
So no wonder it appears that Our President, sort of like what late Roman Emperors and other autocrats have done with various Praetorian and Palace Guards, is turning more and more to the much smaller, more hierarchical, better disciplined CIA and related agencies as the way to more effectively (however you want to measure “effectiveness,” body counts and fear induced in “the wogs” being one metric) project US imperial power and enforce US will in favor of US BUSINESS interests (most of which businesses and their C-Suiters are post-national and could not give a shit about America except as they get rich off our resources and productivity) all across the planet. And how disconcerting it must be to have a Big Ego CIA Director (Gen., Ret.) pull some stupid shit like serial assignations with a woman not his wife, when he should be out plotting serial assassinations of anyone who dares to oppose whatever it is that the powers that be decree is that often-mumbled, never-defined personification/reification/hypostatization, “the US interests.”
Of course I am sure that this is just all Wild Imaginings of a fevered Vietvet brain, who made the mistake of studying history and going to law school with the completely Pollyanna belief that there was such a thing as a Bright and Shining City on a Hill, directed by the thoughts of wise Solons and under a strange and wonderful doctrine called the “Rule of Law,” a place where there was a government not of men but of laws.
And for the Keepers of the Flame, YES, I VOTED FOR OBAMA/BIDEN, pretty much a straight Democratic ticket actually. But that does not mean I was required to check my Mantle of Citizenship and recollection of the words of guys like T. Jefferson at the polling place door, not to be resumed after exercising the franchise… And since I ENLISTED in the Army in 1966, kind of believing that shit about keeping the Commies off the Boardwalk in Venice, CA, that shows actually how not-smart I really am. (Any idea how many of our New All-Volunteer Military Troops are coming to the conclusion that they were sent on something between a fool's errand and a suicide mission?)
Maybe, us little ordinary real-wealth-creating people, we have a chance to shape the world a little, other than by blowing up pieces of it and enriching the already-too-big-and-too-rich.
Maybe.