Military-4

Panel blasts Fort Hood leaders and Army after murder of female soldier

An independent investigation into tragedies at Fort Hood, Texas, including the bludgeoning murder of 20-year-old Spc. Vanessa Guillen, found that leadership at the Army’s largest base created a “permissive environment” that let sexual harassment and assault and other crimes occur with little consequence. The report, released December 8, represents a scathing indictment of a dysfunctional Army culture and called for changes in staffing and programs to protect soldiers from assault. It found systemic failures starting with Army leaders who failed to address known problems with sexual assault and crime to under-staffed and under-resourced programs to investigate crimes and aid victims.

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said 14 Army leaders at Fort Hood had been fired or suspended as a result of the report. Among those relieved of command was Maj. Gen. Scott Efflandt, deputy commanding general for III Corps. McCarthy also suspended Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Broadwater, pending the outcome of an investigation. “This report, without a doubt, will cause the Army to change our culture,” he said.

Guillen’s murder in April — and the failure to find her remains for nearly three months — focused attention and investigations on life at the sprawling post. The Army also announced that it would change its procedures to search for soldiers soon after they are reported missing instead of assuming they’ve deserted their posts or gone absent without leave.

Besides Guillen, Pvt. Mejhor Morta and Sgt. Elder Fernandes also vanished from the base and were discovered dead. Morta had drowned, and Fernandes died by suicide.

Produced by an independent panel of five experts led by Chris Swecker, a lawyer and former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, the report singled out post commanders for failing to protect their soldiers. “The Commander of a military installation possesses a wide variety of options to proactively address and mitigate the spectrum of crime incidents,” the report says. “Despite having the capability, very few tools were employed at Fort Hood to do so.”

The panel found that the Army’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention program was ineffective at Fort Hood. “During the review period, no Commanding General or subordinate echelon commander chose to intervene proactively and mitigate known risks of high crime, sexual assault and sexual harassment,” their report says.

That failure led to underreporting of sex crimes on the base. Victims had little confidence that their complaints would be addressed and, worse, feared retaliation. One-third of soldiers surveyed there said they’d been sexually harassed. Rates of other crimes at Fort Hood outpaced other installations as well.

“Without intervention from the NCOs and officers entrusted with their health and safety, victims feared the inevitable consequences of reporting: ostracism, shunning and shaming, harsh treatment, and indelible damage to their career,” the report says. “Many have left the Army or plan to do so at the earliest opportunity.”

Soldiers, in interviews with the panel, had some of the most damning criticism. Most focus groups told investigators that they worried about their own safety and that of their families, both on and off the post. “One group of soldiers compared Fort Hood to deployment in war zones,” the report states. “Several soldiers stated they felt ‘safer in Afghanistan than at Fort Hood.’ ”

– edited from USA Today, December 8, 2020
PeaceMeal, January/February 2021

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Austin makes history as first African American to lead Pentagon

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Lloyd Austin on January 22 took over as the first black Pentagon chief shortly after being confirmed 93-2 by the Senate. Austin was greeted outside the Pentagon with an elbow bump by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley before heading inside to be sworn in and begin his first day as defense secretary, leading a military that is now nearly 17 percent African American.

After being confirmed by the Senate, Austin was administratively sworn by Tom Muir, acting director of the Washington Headquarters Services. Earlier in the day, President Joe Biden signed a waiver approved by Congress allowing Austin to take the job even though it’s been fewer than seven years since he retired in 2016.

The rule for former military leaders taking over at the Pentagon was instituted to address concerns about keeping civilian control of the military and worries someone recently retired might be too wedded to policies and to people he or she worked with during their time in the military. A similar waiver was granted in 2017 for President Donald Trump’s first defense secretary, retired U.S. Marine Gen. Jim Mattis.

“If you confirm me, I am prepared to serve now — as a civilian — fully acknowledging the importance of this distinction,” Austin said at his January 19 confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I understand and respect the reservations some of you have expressed about having another recently retired general at the head of the Department of Defense,” he said. “The safety and security of our democracy demands competent civilian control of our armed forces, the subordination of military power to the civil.”

Austin pledged to surround himself with experienced civilians whom he said he would empower to “enable healthy civil-military relations, grounded in meaningful oversight.”

After his confirmation, Austin sent out a day-one message to the forces: “The way I see it, my job as Secretary of Defense is to make you more effective at doing yours. That means ensuring you have the tools, technology, weapons, and training to deter and defeat our enemies. It means establishing sound policy and strategy and assigning you clear missions. It means putting a premium on cooperation with our allies and partners. And it means living up to our core values, the same ones our fellow citizens expect of us.”

Austin said he planned to include the under secretary of defense for policy in top decision-making meetings, “ensuring strategic and operational decisions are informed by policy.”

A top priority, Austin said, would be to ensure Defense Department employees have “a working environment free of discrimination, hate and harassment. If confirmed, I will fight hard to stamp out sexual assault, to rid our ranks of racists and extremists, and to create a climate where everyone fit and willing has the opportunity to serve this country with dignity. The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies. But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.

A native of Mobile, Alabama, the 67-year-old Austin retired after more than 40 years of military service, culminating as commander of U.S. Central Command — with jurisdiction over military activities in the Middle East, including a stint leading U.S. forces in Iraq and the campaign against the Islamic State.

– edited from ABC News, January 22, 2021
PeaceMeal, January/February 2021

Recent history of militarism in the United States

Nick Mele

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned of “the military-industrial” complex. According to some accounts, Eisenhower wanted to insert “congressional” into that phrase but was dissuaded by his political advisors. Almost 60 years later, his warning has not been heeded, and the military-industrial-congressional complex has grown to include the entertainment industry and many other elements of U.S. society.

Consider, for example, the most profitable films, almost all depicting futuristic weapons, conflict and mass destruction; the popularity of “shoot-em-up” video games; or the widespread availability of automatic weapons originally designed for use on battlefields. Consider the well-documented militarization of police departments around the country, fostered by federal grants of surplus military equipment.

After the end of World War II, U.S. factories that had produced planes, tanks and other war materiel reverted to producing con-sumer products. A few years later, those factories again switched to manufacturing weapons. After the active combat in the Korean War ended, the same factories kept on making weapons, fueled by the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.

Older Americans remember the climate of fear promoted by politicians and hawkish military leaders, such as debates about the missile gap. Hawks claimed the missile gap put the United States at a numerical disadvantage. In fact, the U.S.S.R. had far fewer missiles than claimed, and the gap was actually in America’s favor. Meanwhile, our nuclear arsenal grew into the nuclear triad of bombs delivered by airplanes, ground-based missiles in silos, and submarine-launched missiles.

During the Cold War, the U.S. developed a permanent defense industry at the urging of politicians and some military officers who wanted the latest technology to fight hypothetical wars. Often hawks cited the “containment policy” proposed by George Kennan, a leading Russian expert and senior diplomat. Kennan became convinced that the Soviet Union was expansionist and recommended vigorous efforts to contain it, such as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe. Most government, military and opinion leaders, however, saw containment primarily as a military strategy. Over time, the need to contain the Soviet Union through integration with other nations’ armed forces created a new profit sector — the overseas arms trade — which further strengthened coordination and cooperation among the military, Congress and weapons manufacturers.

Defense industries were encouraged by congressional allies and military officers and soon spread their facilities across the country. For several decades now, at least one defense industry establishment has been operating in every single congressional district. Members of Congress, no matter what their personal views of military spending, are under pressure throughout the election cycle to maintain and expand defense contracts that provide jobs and a measure of economic security to voters in their districts. In parallel, military bases large and small popped up or expanded across the country and the world, and this expansion generated more demand for weapons and other military equip-ment. Although there was some reduction of U.S. forces overseas after the Cold War ended, the war on terrorism added bases in other areas of the world, like Central Asia and Africa, and new kinds of bases for high-tech weapons, like drones.

Military commanders frequently cite the adage attributed to psychologist Abraham Maslow, “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Increasingly, our only tool is a hammer — military force. As “defense” spending has increased, resources have been diverted away from diplomacy and development efforts, as well as from domestic programs The Fiscal Year 2020 Discretionary Budget from the Trump admin-istration requested a five percent increase in U.S. military spending — already higher than the combined defense budgets of the next seven nations with large military budgets — and a nine percent decrease in non-defense spending, which includes domestic programs and diplomatic funding. Diplomacy has also been weakened since President Trump took office due to his withdrawal from arms-limitation treaties, criticism of allies, and firing of senior career diplomats.

In an October session with the anti-nuclear weapon Plough-shares Fund, Washington Rep. Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, acknowledged that our military budget is funding the development of weapons that we do not need, like low-yield nuclear weapons, because of pressure from the weapons manufacturers. Rep. Smith said: “...the message that is driven: more is better, spend more money, be tougher, be stronger, have more — that message is compelling to a lot of people who are nervous and just want to be reassured. But that message is driven in large part by contractors who want them to believe that, so that then they will give them money.” Stated differently, our elected officials are complicit in the growth of the military-industrial complex, which now consumes more than half of all federal discretionary spending.

All the arguments for increased military spending ignore the cost to human beings at home and abroad. To quote President Eisenhower once more: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”We see this in the reductions in domestic spending on education, healthcare, support for needy families, infrastructure and more. We see this whenever another country purchases expensive weapons systems from U.S. companies, using money that it could have spent on its own people’s welfare. Then there is the toll in human lives in conflicts where U.S.-produced weapons enable the deaths of innocent civilians and the plague of gun violence in our country.

We all can counter these dismal trends through advocacy, citizen diplomacy efforts, and support for movements and organizations committed to nonviolent means to address conflict. Some of these are as simple as writing to a pen pal in a different country, while others require more effort — like developing a relationship with our members of Congress.

Recent work by academics offers empirical evidence of the effectiveness of nonviolence. Statements by faith leaders like Pope Francis supply moral urgency to disarmament efforts as well as nonviolence. We are co-creating the biblical Peaceable Kingdom whenever we mobilize public opinion, lobby elected officials to reduce military spending, or promote nonviolent methods like diplomacy or arbitration to resolve conflicts.

Nick Mele, a retired diplomat, works internationally to prevent war. His article is edited from A Matter of Spirit, Winter 2020, a publication of the Intercommunity Peace & Justice Center, Seattle, and was reprinted in PeaceMeal, March/April 2020.

U.S. Army’s tweet prompts stories of harmful effects of military service

It was meant to be part of a social media tribute on Memorial Day weekend. On May 25, the United States Army posted a video on Twitter featuring a scout in fatigues who said his service gave him the opportunity to fight for something greater than himself, making him a better man.

In its next tweet, the Army opened the floor and asked: “How has serving impacted you?” The post was shared widely and received thousands of responses. But many were probably not what the Army was looking for.

Instead, the call-out provided what some felt was a rare platform to spotlight the darker consequences of military service for soldiers and their families, as tweet after tweet described lifelong health complications, grief over loved ones lost, sexual assaults gone unpunished, and struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

“The public just doesn’t hear about it,” said Brandon Neely, 38, a former Army specialist who posted about his PTSD. “They don’t hear about the guys, these veterans, that don’t sleep, have night sweats, are irritated. Some guys get really bad anxiety, depression.”

In one tweet replying to the Army, a man who said he was a Navy veteran described how he had suicidal thoughts everyday.

Another read: “I was assaulted by one of my superiors. When I reported him, with witnesses to corroborate my story, nothing happened to him. Nothing. A year later, he stole a laptop and was then demoted. I’m worth less than a laptop.”

In a series of follow-up tweets, the Army thanked people for sharing their stories. “Your stories are real, they matter, and they may help others in similar situations. The Army is committed to the health, safety and well-being of our Soldiers. ... We are mindful of the fact that we have to take care of those who came back home with scars we can’t see.”

Briley Kazy, 19, who replied to the Army’s tweet, was disheartened by the response. “They were like, this is very important to us, made it seem like they are doing as much as they can,” she said. “But they’re not.”

Like many, Ms. Kazy posted not about her personal experience, but about someone close to her: a co-worker and friend who has PTSD after serving in the Army in Iraq.

To Mr. Neely, these types of stories are commonly shared among former service members. He said he joined the Army in 2000 and served five years in the military police. He was deployed to Egypt in 2001, to Guant�namo Bay in 2002, and Iraq in 2003. He was discharged in 2005 with the rank of specialist. He has been a vocal critic of military operations at Guant�namo Bay.

Mr. Neely said he has worked in law enforcement in Houston since he returned, but his life is far from settled. “I don’t like to go out to places,” he said. “I don’t like to be around a lot of people. When my kids have stuff at school, I’m usually sitting in the back. I don’t want people behind me.”

He said the federal government does not do enough to take care of soldiers after they return from their tour of duty. “I know more people that have committed suicide in my unit than have been killed when we were deployed,” he said. “The Army is a good place, the military is a great place. The training — it gets you ready for war, but they don’t get you ready for coming home.”

– edited from The New York Times, May 26, 2019
PeaceMeal, July/August 2019

Senior military officers rebel against Trump plan to pardon troops accused of war crimes

Current and former military officers urged the White House not to pardon service members and security contractors implicated in war crimes, warning that forgiving their offenses would send a dangerous signal to U.S. troops and potential adversaries.

Aides to President Trump have been examining high-profile war crimes cases from Iraq and Afghanistan, preparing paperwork so Trump could issue pardons during Memorial Day commem-orations, according to two senior U.S. officials. But that possibility has brought a flood of opposition from current and former high-ranking officers, who say it would encourage misconduct by showing that violations of laws prohibiting attacks on civilians and prisoners of war will be treated with leniency.

“Absent evidence of innocence or injustice, the wholesale pardon of U.S. service members accused of war crimes signals our troops and allies that we don’t take the law of armed conflict seriously,” retired Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. He added: “Bad message. Bad precedent. Abdication of moral responsibility. Risk to us.”

Cases being examined by the White House include those of Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who is charged with killing an unarmed Afghan in 2010; three Marine snipers prosecuted for urinating on the corpse of a dead Afghan fighter in 2011; and a former security guard for Blackwater who was convicted of murder in December for killing unarmed Iraqis in 2007.

Other officers warned that if U.S. personnel accused of such crimes escaped punishment, civilians on foreign battlefields would be less inclined to cooperate with U.S. forces, and U.S. service members taken prisoners would be more likely to be mistreated or even killed when taken captive.

“If President Trump issues indiscriminate pardons of individuals accused or convicted by their fellow service members of war crimes, he relinquishes the United States’ moral high ground and undermines the good order and discipline critical to winning on the battlefield,” said retired Gen. Charles Krulak, a former commandant of the Marine Corps.

Many senior officers who have not spoken out publicly are privately outraged, according to one currently serving at the Pentagon. “I think a lot of us would see it in the same way — that it’s just awful,” he said.

The possibility of that reaction inside the military could cause President Trump not to go ahead with the pardons, but he has ignored top military officers before. He has repeatedly bypassed normal procedures for issuing pardons and granting clemency, seizing on cases mentioned on Fox News or that resonate with his supporters. This month, he pardoned Army Lt. Michael Behenna, who was convicted of killing an Iraqi during questioning in 2008.

“We are talking about some of the most despicable war crimes. To even contemplate pardons in such cases is disgusting and dishonorable,” said Raha Wala, a lawyer at Human Rights First. “It’s no wonder that some of our most respected military leaders are speaking out against this, as they should.”

– edited from Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2019
PeaceMeal, May/June 2019

Sen. Martha McSally pushes to criminalize sexual harassment in military

Senator Martha McSally, who was sexually assaulted while serving in the Air Force, will push legislation on criminalizing sexual harassment in the ranks and ensure that each military base has a lawyer who advocates for victims.

McSally, an Arizona Republican on the Armed Services Committee and retired Air Force attack plane pilot, also said she stands by the commanders’ traditional role as the arbiter of prosecutions for sexual assault. That stance puts her on the same page as Pentagon leadership.

In March, McSally revealed during a Senate hearing that she had been raped by a superior officer and that she felt re-victimized by Air Force officials who questioned her about it. She has gone on to push the military to establish a task force charged with recommending substantive changes to the way the military combats sexual assault. The time was ripe: just a week earlier, the Pentagon announced an estimated 20,500 troops had been sexually assaulted in 2018, a 38% increase compared with 2016.

In an op-ed in USA TODAY on May 9, Elizabeth Van Winkle, who oversees the Pentagon's sexual assault prevention and response efforts, wrote that commanders make those decisions on the advice of lawyers and cannot overrule them without review by superior officers. McSally advocates maintaining that authority and ensuring commanders have the best prosecutors and investigators advising them.

She also plans to propose legislation that would criminalize sexual harassment. Troops can be prosecuted for sexual harassment under the part of military law that governs good order and discipline. The recommendation to make it a specific crime is one of the top recommendations of the task force. The risk of assault increases when sexual harassment is tolerated.

“It’s a great idea to separate and specifically criminalize sexual harassment,” McSally said. “It shows commitment to saying we’re not going to tolerate this. It also allows us to track those who have had any kind of punishment related to sexual harassment, potentially the early sign of somebody who has behavior that’s on what they call the continuum of harm.”

Another recommendation to be included in her legislation would assign lawyers known as special victims counsels to every military base. Those lawyers advocate on the victims’ behalf, she said, and having one at each installation would allow the lawyer to be on hand as soon as a report is made.

– edited from USA Today, May 11, 2019
PeaceMeal, May/June 2019

Young women on military bases and sailors on ships at greatest risk for sexual assault

Young women troops at training bases and sailors assigned to ships faced the highest risk of sexual assault in the military, according to a report released September 21 by the Pentagon. The release of the report had been delayed for months as the nonpartisan RAND Corp., which had been commissioned to do the study, and the Pentagon sparred over its findings and how to present them. RAND relied on data from fiscal year 2014, including responses from 170,000 active-duty troops to its survey questions; more than half a million were requested.

The report estimated the risk of sexual assault for troops assigned to each of the military’s installations based on reported attacks. The assaults may have occurred off the base, and the assailant may have been a member of the military or a civilian. The report notes that the data do not necessarily represent the risk for troops today.

Nonetheless, the report found commonalities among victims and where they are assigned by the military that continue today. For example, the factors that put victims at high risk of sexual assault — youth, not being married, and having lower rank — correspond to their assignment to large training bases and ships. Those assignments and living conditions have not changed greatly since 2014.

Reports of assaults, which range from unwanted touching to rape, clustered at a relatively few large installations for each of the services, according to the report. The Pentagon did not release details about each base studied by RAND.

An advocate for victims of sexual assault in the military blasted the Pentagon for not sharing the report sooner and not divulging more. Don Christensen, president of Protect Our Defenders and the former top prosecutor for the Air Force, said, “It’s extremely disappointing the Pentagon would delay releasing this report. The report contains never-before-seen risk estimates by installation.”

At the Navy’s highest-risk installation for women, Naval Support Activity Charleston, RAND researchers found thatwomen there faced a 17 percent risk of sexual assault in 2014. “That is, our model estimates that more than one in six women assigned to duty at that installation were sexually assaulted in FY 2014.”

The RAND report found that “ships dominate the highest-risk installations. Of the 15 highest-risk installations for Navy women, 13 are ships or clusters of ships, including eight of the ten aircraft carriers.”

The Army’s highest-risk posts for women included Ft. Huachuca in Arizona, Osan in South Korea, and Ft. Drum in New York, where the risk of being assaulted was about 5 percent to 10 percent.

For the Marine Corps, women faced the highest risk at Yuma Air Station in Arizona, 29 Palms Combat Center in California, and Beaufort Air Station in South Carolina. The risk at those bases was between 10 percent and 15 percent.

The average sexual assault risk to women across the Air Force was low compared with the other services, RAND found. The top three bases focused on undergraduate pilot training: Vance in Oklahoma, Laughlin in Texas, and Altus in Oklahoma. The risk there was about 5 percent.

The military has made progress in fighting sexual assault, according to the Pentagon. Sexual-assault rates for active-duty men and women in 2016 decreased significantly from rates last measured in 2014. They are at the lowest levels since 2006.

For the year ending Sept. 30, 2017, the military recorded 6,769 reports of sexual assault, an increase of nearly 10 percent from 2016, when there were 6,172.

The military has long struggled with addressing sexual assault among troops. Following a spike in sexual assaults from 2010 to 2012, Congress legislated changes in how the military prosecutes sex crimes and cares for victims.

– edited from USA Today, September 21, 2018
PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2018

Pentagon gets huge raise in new spending plan

WASHINGTON – The budget bill that President Donald Trump signed on February 9 includes huge spending increases for the military. The Pentagon will get $94 billion more this budget year than last — a 15.5 percent jump. It’s the biggest budget the Pentagon has ever seen: $700 billion. That’s more than twice the combined defense spending of America’s two nearest competitors, China and Russia. And next year it will rise to $716 billion.

The two-year deal provides what Defense Secretary James Mattis says is needed to pull the military out of a slump in combat readiness at a time of renewed focus on the stalemated conflict in Afghanistan and the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula. It’s the biggest year-over-year increase for the Pentagon since the budget soared by 26.6 percent in 2002, when the nation was fighting in Afghanistan, invading Iraq and expanding national defense after the 9/11 attacks.

The extra money is not targeted at countering a new enemy or a singular threat like al-Qaida extremists or the former Soviet Union. Instead it is being sold as a fix for a broader set of prob-lems, including a deficit of training, a purported need for more high-tech missile defenses, and the start of a complete moderniza-tion of U.S. nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Since 2011, when Congress passed a law setting firm limits on military and domestic spending, every secretary of defense has complained that the spending caps were squeezing the military so hard that troops were not getting enough training, the number of combat-ready units was dwindling, and aging equipment was stacking up. Yet even with the spending caps, the defense budget of recent years has been robust by historical standards.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget specialist at the Center for Security and International Studies, said military funding has been near the inflation-adjusted peak levels of the armed forces buildup during the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan — the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history. The problem, Harrison said, is that the budgets have been stretched by rising personnel costs, more expensive technology investments and other factors, compounded by the cumulative effects of the unending years of combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

“We are stretched too thin,” Harrison said. “"We are trying to do too much with the size force that we have all around the world. Money doesn’t necessarily fix that.”

The U.S. has far fewer troops in Iraq than it did 10 years ago, and the roughly 15,000 troops in Afghanistan today compare with a peak of 100,000 in 2010-11, but the trend is leaning in the opposite direction under President Trump, including stepped-up counterterrorism operations in Somalia and Yemen. Trump has added several thousand troops in Afghanistan. Also, the prospect of war against North Korea looms large as Trump insists on compelling the North to give up its nuclear weapons.

The increases in defense spending even go beyond what Trump asked for. Of the $700 million in spending for the 2018 budget year that started October 1, about $629 billion is for core Pentagon operations and nearly $71 billion is for the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Trump had requested a 2018 military budget of $603 billion for basic functions and $65 billion for war missions.

The biggest winners in the military buildup are the country’s largest defense contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and General Dynamics, that spend millions of dollars each year lobbying Congress.

The legislation that Trump signed is expected to translate to billions more for one of the Pentagon’s highest priorities: ballistic missile defense. The bill included money for as many as 28 additional Ground-Based Interceptors in underground silos in Alaska — anti-missile missiles that, after decades of development, still don’t work.

– edited from The Associated Press, February 9, 2018
PeaceMeal, March/April 2018

Lies we tell ourselves about the military

Maj. Danny Sjursen.jpg (3541 bytes) Maj. Danny Sjursen, U.S. Army

Seven of my soldiers are dead. Two committed suicide. Bombs got the others in Iraq and Afghanistan. One young man lost three limbs. Another is paralyzed. I entered West Point a couple of months before 9/11. Eight of my classmates died “over there.”

Military service, war, sacrifice: When I was 17, I felt sure this would bring me meaning, adulation, even glory. It went another way. Sixteen years later, my generation of soldiers is still ensnared in an indecisive, unfulfilling series of losing wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Niger — who even keeps count anymore? Sometimes, I wonder what it’s all been for.

I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who sees it, but you hear few dissenting voices among the veterans of the “global war on terror.” See, soldiers are all “professionals” now, at least since Richard Nixon ditched the draft in 1973. Mostly the troops — especially the officers — uphold an unwritten code, speak in esoteric vernacular and hide behind a veil of reticence.

Maybe it’s necessary to keep the machine running. I used to believe that. Sometimes, though, we tell you lies. We tell them to each other and ourselves as well. Consider just three:

1. Soldiers don’t fight (or die) for king, country or apple pie. They do it for each other, for teammates and friends. Think Henry V’s “band of brothers.” In that sense, the troops can never be said to die for nothing.

No disrespect to the fallen, but this framework is a slippery- slope formula for forever war. Imagine the dangerous inverse of this logic: If no soldiers’ lives can be wasted, no matter how ill-advised the war, then the mere presence of U.S. “warriors” and deaths of American troops justifies any war, all war. But two things can be true at once: American servicemen can die for no good reason and may well have fought hard and honorably with/for their mates. The one does not preclude the other.

Unfortunately, it seems Americans are in for (at least) three more years of this increasingly bellicose — and perilous — rhetoric. We saw it when Sean Spicer, President Trump’s former press secretary, had the gall to declare that questioning the success of a botched January raid in Yemen “does a disservice” to the Navy SEAL killed in the firefight. It got worse from there. Trump tweeted that a certain senator — Vietnam veteran John McCain, of all people — who talked about “the success or failure of the mission” to the media had “emboldened the enemy.” According to this fabled logic, Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens died for his brothers-in-arms, and thus to even ponder the “what-for” is tantamount to abetting the enemy.

2. We have to fight “them”—terrorists, Arabs, Muslims, whomever—“over there” so we don’t end up fighting them “over here.”

In fact, the opposite is likely true. Detailed State Department statistics demonstrate that international terrorist attacks numbered just 346 in 2001 versus 11,072 worldwide in 2016. That’s a cool 3,100 percent increase. Sure, the vast majority of those attacks occurred overseas, mostly suffered by civilians across the Mideast.

Domestic attacks also have risen since the U.S. launched its “war on terror.” From 1996 to 2000 (pre-9/11), an average of 5.6 people were killed annually in terror attacks within the United States. Now fast-forward 15 years. From 2012 to 2016, an average of 32.2 people died at the hands of terrorists here in the U.S. Since 2001, lethal attacks on the U.S. homeland have proliferated.

Furthermore, from 2005 to 2015, 66 percent of terrorism fatalities in the U.S. were not perpetrated by Islamist groups. Besides, domestic mass shootings (in this case defined as four or more victims killed or wounded in a single event) are far more dangerous, with 1,072 incidents from 2013 to 2015. No doubt we’d hear more about these attacks if the culprits were a bit browner and named Ali or Abdullah.

It appears that U.S. military action may even be making matters worse. Take Africa, for instance. Prior to 9/11, few American troops patrolled that continent, and there were few recognized anti-U.S. threat groups in the region. Nonetheless, President George W. Bush (and later Barack Obama) soon sent more and more U.S. special forces to “advise and assist” across Africa. By 2017, al-Qaida and Islamic State-linked factions had multiplied and were killing American troops. It all seems counterproductive.

Let’s review: The threat from terrorism is minuscule, is not even majority “Islamic,” pales in comparison with domestic mass shooting deaths, and has not measurably decreased since 9/11. Remind me again how fighting “them there” saves soldiers from having to fight “them here?”

3. Americans are obliged to honor the troops. They fight for our freedom. Actively opposing the war(s) dishonors their sacrifice.

This is illogical and another surefire way to justify perpetual war. Like the recent NFL national anthem debate, such rhetoric serves mostly as a distraction. First off, it’s abstract and absurd to argue that U.S. troops engaged in the sprawling “war on terror” are dying to secure American freedom. After all, these are wars of choice, “away-games” conducted offensively in distant lands, with dubious allies and motives. All this fighting, killing and dying receives scant public debate and is legally “sanctioned” by a 16-year-old congressional authorization.

All this “don’t dishonor the troops” nonsense is as old as war itself. These sorts of “stab-in-the-back” myths were heard in post-Vietnam America. You know the shtick: The soldiers could’ve won, should’ve won, if only they hadn’t been stabbed in the back by politicians, and so on.

Let’s not forget, however, that the First Amendment sanctifies the citizenry’s right to dissent. Those who claim peaceful protest dishonors or undermines “the soldiers” don’t want an engaged populace. Those folks prefer obedient automatons, replete with “thanks for your service” platitudes and yellow ribbons plastered on car bumpers. As for me, I’ll take an engaged, thoughtful electorate over free Veterans Day meals at the local Texas Roadhouse any day.

The half-truths, comfortable fictions and outright lies are more than a little dangerous. They are affecting the next generation of young Americans. For instance, a full decade and two wars after I graduated, I taught history at West Point. Best job I ever had. My first crop of freshman cadets will graduate in May. They’re impressive young men and women. They’re mostly believers (for that, I envy them), ready to kick ass and wipe the floor with Islamic State or whomever. No one really tells them of the quagmires and disappointments that lie ahead. A few of us try, but we’re the outliers. Most cadets are unreachable. It has always been this way.

Truthfully, I surmise, it wouldn’t matter anyway. There’s a romance to it. I felt the tug once, too. Some of my students will excel, and 10 years from now, they’ll come back to West Point and mentor cadets en route to the same ugly places, the same never-ending wars. Those kids, mind you, will have been born a decade after 9/11. Thinking on this near certainty, I want to throw up. But make no mistake: It will be so.

A system of this sort — one that produces and exalts generations of hopeless soldiers — requires millions of individual lies and necessitates discarding inconvenient truths.

Maj. Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. His article is edited from Truthdig, November 15, 2017.

Breaking the militarism mindset: The Pentagon budget

Friends Committee on National Legislation

Militarism is embedded deeply in our country and culture. The size of the Pentagon budget is just one manifestation of that mindset and the problems it causes.

Today, U.S. taxpayers are giving as much money to the military as they did during the height of the Vietnam War. The Pentagon budget rivals military spending in the last years of the Cold War, and members of Congress are going to give the Pentagon even more, unless we can change their minds.

President Trump is expected to ask for $716 billion in defense spending when he unveils his 2019 budget in February — an increase of more than 7 percent over the 2018 budget. The proposed budget would be about $50 billion more than 2017.

These budget increases reflect a militaristic mindset in the federal government. Any time a new national security challenge arises, the default instinct of far too many in Washington D.C. has been to mindlessly reach first for military power to respond.

Members of Congress and their staffs hear practically every day from all manner of Pentagon officials and from the legions of defense contractor lobbyists who swarm Capitol Hill. They hear a lot of stories about why Pentagon spending needs to keep growing, regardless of the fact that U.S. military spending already exceeds that of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea combined.

Congressional members and staff will claim that taxpayer spending on the military is a key source of jobs in their districts and states. In fact, dollar-for-dollar, military spending is less effective at creating jobs than spending on education, health care or clean energy, according to a study by Brown University.

The truth is that the Pentagon wastes much of what taxpayers give it. Misuse of Pentagon funds is so rampant that, when the Pentagon itself conducted an internal study, it identified $125 billion in potential savings over five years.

So long as we keep funding military strategies at the expense of other approaches, the military strategies will seem like the only option. Taking on militarism requires cutting off the taxpayer dollars that enable it to flourish. That’s why Congress and the president need to hear from all of us. If we aren’t out there reminding our elected representatives of some of these facts, then we really can’t count on anyone else to say them either.

– edited from the FCNL Washington Newsletter, Dec. 2017
PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2018