The Pentagon Achieves Its Ancient Aim

Those who try to understand military policy often confuse themselves by focusing on minor matters such as strategy, tactics, logistics, and armament. Here they err. For years the central goal of the military, the brass ring, has been independence from control by civilians. It has been achieved.

In time of war, the first concern of thecommand is to limit the flow of information to their publics. The actions of the enemy are an important but secondary consideration. Thus militaries strive  to prevent the dissemination of photos of mutilated soldiers or, as in Washington today, of governmentally tortured prisoners. In the United States, which characteristically fights wars unrelated to the safety of the country, the Pentagon must also keep soldiers from being told that they are being sacrifice for the benefit of arms manufacturers and imperialist ambitions. In wars before Vietnam, this was adroitly effected. You could go to jail for criticizing a war.

point was to keep the rubes from knowing what the shrapnel cone of an RPG does the head of Jimmy Jack Perkins of Memphis.

However, the damage was controllable. Not to Jimmy Jack’s head, but to the Army’s PR persona.  That was what the Army cared about. Yet…things were not quite perfect. An awful lot of kids were coming back from obscure wars with TBI–Traumatic Brain Injury, which is what happens when seventy–five pounds of C4 in an IED  blows. It turns said kid’s brain into the equivalent of a pudding stirred by an enthusiastic but poorly trained chef. For the next fifty years he stumbles, mumbles, drools, shuffles, and has the IQ of a duckbill platypus.

This was not a serious difficulty. The corporate media were in line, so there was no danger that CBS would do a hostile expose. Besides, with luck the creep would die early. But it was still a potential source of political blowback.

A solution appeared: Drones. They were wonderful, serving several purposes at once. They cost not as much as fighter planes, but enough to funnel lots of loot to contractors. No body bags ever came back and so didn’t need to be hidden. Drones could be flown by wet-lipped sociopaths in air-conditioned comfort in Colorado. They couldn’t win a war, but neither could they lose one. This was ideal, since either winning or losing would slow the award of contracts.

The remaining bump in the road to full emancipation was the military budget. This matter was neutralized by the major media, which had become for practical purposes minor federal departments. In Mein Kampf, der Fuehrer pointed out that the masses would eventually believe any idea repeated often enough. A corollary was that the masses would ignore any idea mentioned only once or twice. Hiding financial grotesquery was not necessary. It sufficed to mention it briefly in paragraph seventeen or, on the tube, in passing in tones usually used in  reporting uneventful weather. Done.

Close. Very close. There was no longer a single columnist in the major media who actually knew the technology, bureaucracy, and tactics of the military, or had been near a rifle. The networks could therefore hire retired colonels to explain that the military was dedicated to truth, justice, and the American way. The final condom in this chain of chastity was the president asserting that America was a city on a hill and a beam of light for darkened mankind, who to reach heaven needed only to give us their oil fields.

In sum, the foregoing measures constituted the greatest military victory since Waterloo. Neither Congress or the goddam public could any longer meddle where it had no business meddling. Fewer and fewer troops actually went to war, so the unpatriotic bastards couldn’t disrupt the war effort by coming home in body bags.  The Pentagon had achieved its long-sought emancipation. It looked forward to killing any peasants who struck its fancy with the insouciant independence of a trust-fund baby in the fleshpots of the Orient.

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