by\u00a0Tom Engelhardt<\/a>, Tom Dispatch In terms of pure projectable power, there\u2019s never been anything like it.\u00a0 Its military has divided the world — the whole planet — into six \u201ccommands.\u201d\u00a0 Its fleet, with\u00a011<\/a>\u00a0aircraft carrier battle groups, rules the seas and has done so largely unchallenged for almost seven decades.\u00a0 Its Air Force has ruled the global skies, and despite being almost continuously in action for years,hasn\u2019t faced<\/a>\u00a0an enemy plane since 1991 or been seriously challenged anywhere since the early 1970s.\u00a0 Its fleet of drone aircraft has proven itself capable of\u00a0targeting<\/a>\u00a0and killing suspected enemies in the backlands of the planet from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia with little regard for national boundaries, and none at all for the possibility of being shot down.\u00a0 It funds and trains\u00a0proxy armies<\/a>\u00a0on several continents and has complex aid and training relationships with militaries across the planet.\u00a0 On hundreds of bases, some tiny and others the size of American towns, its soldiers\u00a0garrison the globe<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Italy<\/a>\u00a0to Australia, Honduras to Afghanistan, and on islands from Okinawa in the Pacific Ocean to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.\u00a0 Its weapons makers are the most advanced on Earth and\u00a0dominate<\/a>\u00a0the global arms market.\u00a0 Its nuclear weaponry in silos, on bombers, and on its fleet of submarines would be capable of destroying several planets the size of Earth.\u00a0 Its system of spy satellites is unsurpassed and unchallenged.\u00a0 Its intelligence services can\u00a0listen in<\/a>\u00a0on the phone calls or read the emails of almost anyone in the world from\u00a0top foreign leaders<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0obscure insurgents<\/a>.\u00a0 The CIA and its expanding paramilitary forces are capable of\u00a0kidnapping<\/a>\u00a0people of interest just about anywhere from\u00a0rural Macedonia<\/a>\u00a0to the streets of\u00a0Rome<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Tripoli<\/a>.\u00a0 For its many prisoners, it has set up (and dismantled)\u00a0secret jails<\/a>\u00a0across the planet and on its\u00a0naval vessels<\/a>.\u00a0 It spends more on its military than the next most powerful 13 states\u00a0combined<\/a>.\u00a0 Add in the\u00a0spending<\/a>\u00a0for its full national security state and it towers over any conceivable group of other nations.<\/p>\n In terms of advanced and unchallenged military power, there has been nothing like the U.S. armed forces since the Mongols swept across Eurasia.\u00a0 No wonder American presidents now regularly\u00a0use<\/a>\u00a0phrases like \u201cthe finest fighting force the world has ever known\u201d to describe it.\u00a0 By the logic of the situation, the planet should be a pushover for it.\u00a0 Lesser nations with far lesser forces have, in the past, controlled vast territories.\u00a0 And despite much discussion of American decline and the waning of its power in a \u201cmulti-polar\u201d world, its ability to pulverize and destroy, kill and maim, blow up and kick down has only grown in this new century.<\/p>\n No other nation’s military comes within a country mile of it.\u00a0 None has more than a handful of foreign bases.\u00a0 None\u00a0has<\/a>\u00a0more than two aircraft carrier battle groups.\u00a0 No potential enemy has such a fleet of robotic planes.\u00a0 None has more than\u00a060,000<\/a>\u00a0special operations forces.\u00a0 Country by country, it\u2019s a hands-down no-contest. The Russian (once \u201cRed\u201d) army is a shadow of its former self.\u00a0 The Europeans have not rearmed significantly.\u00a0 Japan\u2019s \u201cself-defense\u201d forces are powerful and slowly growing, but under the U.S. nuclear \u201cumbrella.\u201d\u00a0 Although China, regularly identified as the next rising imperial state, is involved in a much-ballyhooed military build-up, with its one aircraft carrier (a retread from the days of the Soviet Union), it still remains only a regional power.<\/p>\n Despite this stunning global power equation, for more than a decade we have been given a lesson in what a military, no matter how overwhelming, can and (mostly) can\u2019t do in the twenty-first century, in what a military, no matter how staggeringly advanced, does and (mostly) does not translate into on the current version of planet Earth.<\/p>\n A Destabilization Machine<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with what the U.S. can do.\u00a0 On this, the recent record is clear: it can destroy and destabilize.\u00a0 In fact, wherever U.S. military power has been applied in recent years, if there has been any lasting effect at all, it has been to destabilize whole regions.<\/p>\n Back in 2004, almost a year and a half after American troops had rolled into a Baghdad looted and in flames, Amr Mussa, the head of the Arab League,\u00a0commented<\/a>\u00a0ominously, \u201cThe gates of hell are open in Iraq.\u201d\u00a0 Although for the Bush administration, the situation in that country was already devolving, to the extent that anyone paid attention to Mussa\u2019s description, it seemed over the top, even outrageous, as applied to American-occupied Iraq.\u00a0 Today, with the latest scientific estimate of invasion- and war-caused Iraqi deaths at a staggering\u00a0461,000<\/a>, thousands more a year still\u00a0dying<\/a>\u00a0there, and with Syria in flames, it seems something of an understatement.<\/p>\n It\u2019s now clear that George W. Bush and his top officials,\u00a0fervent fundamentalists<\/a>\u00a0when it came to the power of U.S. military to alter, control, and dominate the Greater Middle East (and possibly the planet), did launch the radical transformation of the region.\u00a0 Their invasion of Iraq punched a hole through the heart of the Middle East, sparking a Sunni-Shiite civil war that has now spread catastrophically to Syria, taking more than\u00a0100,000<\/a>\u00a0lives there.\u00a0 They helped turn the region into a\u00a0churning sea<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0refugees<\/a>, gave life and meaning to a previously nonexistent al-Qaeda in Iraq (and now a Syrian version of the same), and left the country drifting in a\u00a0sea<\/a>\u00a0of roadside bombs and suicide bombers, and threatened, like other countries in the region, with the possibility of\u00a0splitting apart<\/a>.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s just a thumbnail sketch.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t matter whether you\u2019re talking about destabilization in Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have been on the ground for almost 12 years and counting; Pakistan, where a CIA-run drone air campaign in its tribal borderlands has gone on for years as the country grew ever shakier and more violent; Yemen (ditto), as an outfit called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula grew ever stronger; or Somalia, where Washington repeatedly backed proxy armies it had trained and financed, and\u00a0supported<\/a>\u00a0outside incursions as an already destabilized country came apart at the seams and the influence of al-Shabab, an increasingly radical and violent insurgent Islamic group, began to seep across regional borders.\u00a0 The results have always been the same: destabilization.<\/p>\n Consider Libya where, no longer enamored with boots-on-the-ground interventions, President Obama sent in the Air Force and the drones in 2011 in a bloodless intervention (unless, of course, you\u00a0were<\/em>\u00a0on the ground) that helped topple Muammar Qaddafi, the local autocrat and his secret-police-and-prisons regime, and launched a vigorous young democracy… oh, wait a moment, not quite.\u00a0 In fact, the result, which, unbelievably enough, came as a surprise to Washington, was an increasingly damaged country with a desperately weak central government, a territory controlled by a range of militias — some Islamic extremist in nature — an insurgency and war across the border in neighboring Mali (thanks to an influx of weaponry looted from Qaddafi\u2019s vast arsenals), a dead American ambassador, a country almost incapable of exporting its oil, and so on.<\/p>\n Libya was, in fact, so thoroughly destabilized, so lacking in central authority that Washington recently felt free to\u00a0dispatch<\/a>U.S. Special Operations forces onto the streets of its capital in broad daylight in an operation to snatch up a long-sought terrorist suspect, an act which was as \u201csuccessful\u201d as the toppling of the Qaddafi regime and, in a similar manner,\u00a0further destabilized<\/a>\u00a0a government that Washington still theoretically backed. (Almost immediately afterward, the prime minister\u00a0found himself<\/a>\u00a0briefly kidnapped by a militia unit as part of what might have been a coup attempt.)<\/p>\n Wonders of the Modern World\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n If the overwhelming military power at the command of Washington can destabilize whole regions of the planet, what, then, can\u2019t such military power do?\u00a0 On this, the record is no less clear and just as decisive.\u00a0 As every significant U.S. military action of this new century has indicated, the application of military force, no matter in what form, has proven incapable of achieving even Washington\u2019s most minimal goals of the moment.<\/p>\n Consider this one of the wonders of the modern world: pile up the military technology, pour money into your armed forces, outpace the rest of the world, and none of it adds up to a pile of beans when it comes to making that world act as you wish.\u00a0 Yes, in Iraq, to take an example, Saddam Hussein\u2019s regime was quickly \u201cdecapitated,\u201d thanks to an overwhelming display of power and muscle by the invading Americans.\u00a0 His state bureaucracy was dismantled, his army dismissed, an occupying authority established backed by foreign troops, soon ensconced on huge multibillion-dollar military bases meant to be\u00a0garrisoned<\/a>\u00a0for generations, and a suitably \u201cfriendly\u201d local government installed.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s where the Bush administration\u2019s dreams ended in the rubble created by a set of poorly armed minority insurgencies, terrorism, and a brutal ethnic\/religious civil war.\u00a0 In the end, almost nine years after the invasion and despite the fact that the Obama administration and the Pentagon were\u00a0eager<\/a>\u00a0to keep U.S. troops stationed there in some capacity, a relatively weak central government refused, and they departed, the last representatives of the greatest power on the planet\u00a0slipping away<\/a>\u00a0in the dead of night.\u00a0 Left behind among the ruins of historic ziggurats were the \u201cghost towns<\/a>\u201d and stripped or\u00a0looted<\/a>\u00a0U.S. bases that were to be our monuments in Iraq.<\/p>\n Today, under even more extraordinary circumstances, a similar process seems to be playing itself out in Afghanistan — another spectacle of our moment that should amaze us.\u00a0 After almost 12 years there, finding itself incapable of suppressing a minority insurgency, Washington is slowly withdrawing its combat troops, but wants to leave behind on the giant bases we\u2019ve built perhaps 10,000 \u201ctrainers\u201d for the Afghan military and some Special Operations forces to continue the hunt for al-Qaeda and other terror types.<\/p>\n For the planet\u2019s sole superpower, this, of all things, should be a slam dunk.\u00a0 At least the Iraqi government had a certain strength of its own (and the country\u2019s oil wealth to back it up).\u00a0 If there is a government on Earth that qualifies for the term \u201cpuppet,\u201d it should be the Afghan one of President Hamid Karzai.\u00a0 After all, at least 80% (and possibly\u00a090%<\/a>) of that government\u2019s expenses are covered by the U.S. and its allies, and its security forces are considered\u00a0incapable<\/a>of carrying on the fight against the Taliban and other insurgent outfits without U.S. support and aid.\u00a0 If Washington were to withdraw totally (including its financial support), it\u2019s hard to imagine that any successor to the Karzai government would last long.<\/p>\n How, then, to explain the fact that Karzai has refused to sign a future bilateral security pact long in the process of being hammered out?\u00a0 Instead, he recently\u00a0denounced<\/a>\u00a0U.S. actions in Afghanistan, as he had repeatedly done in the past, claimed that he simply would not ink the agreement, and began bargaining with U.S. officials as if he were the leader of the planet\u2019s other superpower.<\/p>\n A\u00a0frustrated Washington<\/a>\u00a0had to dispatch Secretary of State John Kerry on a sudden mission to Kabul for some top-level face-to-face negotiations.\u00a0 The result, a reported\u00a024-hour marathon<\/a>\u00a0of talks and meetings, was hailed as a success: problem(s) solved.\u00a0 Oops, all but one.\u00a0 As it turned out, it was the very same one on which the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq stumbled — Washington\u2019s\u00a0demand<\/a>\u00a0for legal immunity from local law for its troops.\u00a0 In the end, Kerry flew out\u00a0without an assured agreement<\/a>.<\/p>\n Making Sense of War in the Twenty-First Century<\/strong><\/p>\n Whether the U.S. military does or doesn\u2019t last a few more years in Afghanistan, the blunt fact is this: the president of one of the poorest and weakest countries on the planet, himself relatively powerless, is essentially dictating terms to Washington — and who\u2019s to say that, in the end, as in Iraq, U.S. troops won\u2019t be forced to leave there as well?<\/p>\n Once again, military strength has not carried the day.\u00a0 Yet military power, advanced weaponry, force, and destruction as tools of policy, as ways to create a world in your own image or to your own taste, have worked plenty well in the past.\u00a0 Ask those Mongols, or the European imperial powers from Spain in the sixteenth century to Britain in the nineteenth century, which took their empires by force and successfully maintained them over long periods.<\/p>\n What planet are we now on?\u00a0 Why is it that military power, the mightiest imaginable, can\u2019t overcome, pacify, or simply destroy weak powers, less than impressive insurgency movements, or the ragged groups of (often tribal) peoples we label as \u201cterrorists\u201d? Why is such military power no longer transformative or even reasonably effective?\u00a0 Is it, to reach for an analogy, like antibiotics?\u00a0 If used for too long in too many situations, does a kind of immunity build up against it?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s be clear here: such a military remains a powerful potential instrument of destruction, death, and destabilization.\u00a0 For all we know — it\u2019s not something we\u2019ve seen anything of in these years — it might also be a powerful instrument for genuine defense.\u00a0 But if recent history is any guide, what it clearly cannot be in the twenty-first century is a policymaking instrument, a means of altering the world to fit a scheme developed in Washington.\u00a0 The planet itself and people just about anywhere on it seem increasingly resistant in ways that take the military off the table as an effective superpower instrument of state.<\/p>\n Washington\u2019s military plans and tactics since 9\/11 have been a spectacular train wreck.\u00a0 When you look back, counterinsurgency doctrine, resuscitated from the ashes of America\u2019s defeat in Vietnam, is once again on the scrap heap of history.\u00a0 (Who today even remembers its key organizing phrase — \u201cclear, hold, and build\u201d — which now looks like the punch line for some malign joke?)\u00a0 \u201cSurges,\u201d once hailed as brilliant military strategy, have already\u00a0disappeared<\/a>\u00a0into the mists.\u00a0 \u201cNation-building,\u201d once a term of tradecraft in Washington, is in the doghouse.\u00a0 \u201cBoots on the ground,\u201d of which the U.S. had enormous numbers and still has\u00a051,000<\/a>\u00a0in Afghanistan, are now a no-no.\u00a0 The American public is, everyone universally agrees, \u201cexhausted\u201d with war.\u00a0 Major American armies arriving to fight anywhere on the Eurasian continent in the foreseeable future?\u00a0 Don\u2019t count on it.<\/p>\n But lessons learned from the collapse of war policy?\u00a0 Don\u2019t count on that, either.\u00a0 It\u2019s clear enough that Washington still can\u2019t fully absorb what\u2019s happened.\u00a0 Its faith in war remains remarkably unbroken in a century in which military power has become the American political equivalent of a state religion.\u00a0 Our leaders are still high on the counterterrorism wars of the future, even as they drown in their military efforts of the present.\u00a0 Their urge is still to rejigger and reimagine what a deliverable military solution would be.<\/p>\n Now the message is: skip those boots en masse — in fact,\u00a0cut down<\/a>\u00a0on their numbers in the age of the sequester — and go for the counterterrorism package.\u00a0 No more spilling of (American) blood.\u00a0 Get the \u201cbad guys,\u201d one or a few at a time, using the president\u2019s\u00a0private army<\/a>, the Special Operations forces, or his\u00a0private air force<\/a>, the CIA\u2019s drones. Build new barebones micro-bases globally.\u00a0 Move those aircraft carrier battle groups off the coast of whatever country you want to intimidate.<\/p>\n It\u2019s clear we\u2019re entering a new period in terms of American war making.\u00a0 Call it the era of tiny wars, or micro-conflicts, especially in the\u00a0tribal backlands<\/a>\u00a0of the planet.<\/p>\n So something is indeed changing in response to military failure, but what\u2019s not changing is Washington’s preference for war as the option of choice, often of first resort.\u00a0 What\u2019s not changing is the thought that, if you can just get your strategy and tactics readjusted correctly, force will work.\u00a0 (Recently, Washington was only saved from plunging into another predictable military disaster in Syria by an offhand comment of Secretary of State John Kerry and the timely intervention of Russian President Vladimir Putin.)<\/p>\n What our leaders don\u2019t get is the most basic, practical fact of our moment: war simply doesn\u2019t work, not big, not micro — not for Washington.\u00a0 A superpower at war in the distant reaches of this planet is no longer a superpower ascendant but one with problems.<\/p>\n The U.S. military may be a destabilization machine.\u00a0 It may be a\u00a0blowback machine<\/a>.\u00a0 What it\u2019s not is a policymaking or enforcement machine.<\/p>\n Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the\u00a0<\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and author of\u00a0<\/em>The United States of Fear<\/a>\u00a0as well as a history of the Cold War<\/em>, The End of Victory Culture<\/a>\u00a0(now also in a\u00a0<\/em>Kindle edition<\/em>), runs the Nation Institute’s\u00a0<\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/em><\/a>. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is\u00a0<\/em>Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Coming Era of Tiny Wars and Micro-Conflicts by\u00a0Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch click here for original article In terms of pure projectable power, there\u2019s never been anything like it.\u00a0 Its military has divided the world — the whole planet — into six \u201ccommands.\u201d\u00a0 Its fleet, with\u00a011\u00a0aircraft carrier battle groups, rules the seas and has done […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2410,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/revisedvictory.jpg?fit=180%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2409"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2412,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409\/revisions\/2412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n