The bloated Pentagon

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Not only has the United States failed to win a war in recent years, not only is it inefficient and over- staffed – it hides up the facts.

Recently the Pentagon buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste. The study found that almost a quarter of the defense budget is spent on “business operations”, meaning admin, and $580 billion on overhead in general – accounting, human resources, logistics and property management. It pays no less than 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel to fill back- office jobs far from any front line. Military contractors number 199,661, according to McKinsey, thus exceeding the combined civil workforce of 7 other Federal departments. The purchasing function alone employs 207,000 people; property employs 192,000 and human resources 84,000 people.

The top people at the Pengagon have claimed for years that the armed forces are starved of funds, which is  nonsense – there is no incentive to be efficient. The warriors in Congress can usually be relied on to keep shoveling money in their direction, regardless of the poor performance. But recently, with these revelations, the top brass are worried that Congress, which holds the purse- strings will now make cuts. They rely on the new Trump people to stew up the fear of terrorism to ensure that no cuts are made.

In any case, the internal study was hidden up and the data that proved the waste was made secret. A 77 page summary report on the scandal was removed from the Pentagon website.  If you want to hide up your incompetence you have reports stamped “classified”, which is what happened to most of the report last year into CIA torture.  Mind you, this is what most governments do  – the British are masters of this sort of thing.

The US Defense Department is the “world’s largest corporate enterprise”, and is notable for not analysing its own efficieny. The technique has been, when faced with inquiries, to wait out the studies with a “this too will pass” attitude. McKinsey estimated that the overhead cost between 15 and 20% of the Pentagon operation, but basically threw their hands up and admitted they really had no idea.

Spending gigantic sums of money on sophisticated weaponry does not prevent terrorism.  What you need to do is have human spies (“assets”) with their ears and eyes wide open.  Mass electronic spying on everyone in sight has proved ineffectual.  My wife and I met a recently retired secret service officer who told us precisely this years ago.   The truth, also, is that the Pentagon is not there just to prosecute never-ending war – it is there to plan for and pay for the development of weaponry that can be sold to countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Living in the past

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In the November edition of (the British) Prospect magazine a Dutch author, Joris Luyendijk, wrote an article on the inflated sense of self-worth that pervades a small section of the political Right in Britain.  He writes that many English people have a superiority complex that prevents them being realistic about their country’s place in the world, a sort of collective clinical narcissism.  This rather disagreeable British attitude manifested itself most obviously in the Brexit campaign.  Some Remain advocates  argued that the UK should remain so that it could “run the EU”.  In the Economist Edward Lucas argued that “Britain’s size, experience and friends make us the continent’s natural leader”.  In the Spectator Toby Young opined that, once out of the EU Britain would become “the world’s third economy”.  Being special, other nations would rush to make deals with Britain, which needs the EU far less than the EU needs it.
These grandiose fools, encouraged by the tabloids and approximately two generations out of date, were, or should have been, put in their place by a recent State of the Union speech by Jean-Paul Junker: “Today Europeans make up 8% of the world population – and will represent only 5% in 2050 . By then you will not see a single EU country among the top world economies.  All the bluster and the  appeals to old people who recall the Empire and the red all over the map, do not conceal the fact that the whole EU, including the UK, are becoming irrelevant (Trump, who knows nothing, recognised that when he was dismissive of the British Prime Minister on the phone).
The case for the EU rests on the simple fact that, as Luyendijk writes, that seen from China or Brazil the difference between the UK and Belgium is a rounding error- 0.87% of the world population versus 0.15%.  The only hope for the UK would have been to stay in the EU and try to be constructive and positive, try and change the things that don’t work well, stop the crazy EU expansion policies and moderate, perhaps, some of the regulation-making. Tthe pity is that Labour and the Liberal Democrats have little hope of power, and this leaves the country in the hands of people who have a sense of bravado, who cannot accept criticism and whose quaint sense of “British greatness” is totally unrealistic and, by the way, offensive to others. No wonder Continentals have no wish to offer Brexit-Britain any special favours.

He did say this

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“Some of these (illegal immigrants) are fantastic people.  I’ve been to the border. I was there a few days ago.  I met some people.  These are fantastic people, and they have great reputations within their communities………The bad ones, they’re gone. They never come back.  They’ll never get back into this country. But the good ones, of which there are many, I want to expedite it so they can come back legally.”
And then:
“The dreamers, it’s a tough situation. We’re going to do something…..I would get people out and then have an expedited way of getting them back into the country so they can be legal….A lot of these people are helping us …..I want to move them out.  I want to move them back in and let them be legal.” (Donald Trump)
63% of illegal immigrants would leave under this Trump policy if they were promised a path to citizenship, and 85% would do so if they were promised a path to citizenship.  So it isn’t at all impossible to implement this policy, known as “touchback”.  Indeed, although a similar idea was turned  down in the Senate in 2007, it could be resurrected, maybe successfully.
But this is not what Trump voters wanted when they voted for him.  They wanted Latinos gone.  What will they do when they find that the former illegals are back in the US for good? Of course, Trump will blame someone else, deny he ever said this about the illegals.  But, nonetheless, the Trumpeters will have been betrayed.

The opioid crisis in America

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In 2015 an all-time record of 52,404 people died from drug overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, eclipsing even gun deaths.   80% of these deaths were the result of misuse of opioids: heroin, Fentanyl, Oxycontin and Vicodin. Prescription opioids accounted for 17,536 of these deaths, a majority.  Doctors are advised to prescribe in low doses, after non opioid alternatives have been tried.  They shouldn’t prescribe opioids concurrently with anti-anxiety and antidepressant drugs.  But 36% of patients told a survey conducted by the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation that their doctors had never mentioned alternatives, a similar percentage said no mention was made of addiction.   50% were taking both opioids and antidepressants simultaneously, with the agreement of their doctors.  Many of the drugs are shared with others, and 34% said they often used opioids to get “high”, to relieve stress or to relax. This is a public health emergency.
According to what I heard during yesterday’s Senate hearings on the Rex Tillerson appointment to the State Department,  Fentanyl comes illegally from China and issmuggled into the United States via Mexico.
What is it about our fellow citizens?  Where is the outrage? They shrug at 30,000 gun deaths a year, and seem, in general, indifferent to the 52,000 people who are dying with these painkillers.  I hesitate to bring religion into this, but in view of the the self-proclaimed religiosity of a majority of Americans, perhaps they could take a long, hard look at their moral compasses and get up in arms about this loss of life.  Or is there something about modern christianity I don’t understand?  Educate me, someone!

Double standards, or seeing us as others see us

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It is hard not to laugh at Americans’ indignation over Russia’s alleged meddling in the US elections. For at least a century, the US has done everything possible to influence the outcomes of other countries’ elections. After WWII, the CIA lavished money on Italy’s Christian Democrats, inventing sex scandals to discredit left-wing leaders. In Iran in 1953, the CIA launched a coup to overthrow the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh. In Chile in 1964, it spent $4m on ‘covert action projects’ to stop Salvador Allende winning an election, and [later] organised a coup to oust him. Americans should be thankful that they are unlikely to suffer a coup because, as the Latin American joke has it, there’s no US embassy in Washington.”
(Peter Wilby in the New Statesman)

He has a point. I would only add that to help to the US Presidency a man who is so manifestly ill-equipped for the job, and whose principal, maybe only,  interest is himself, is particularly galling to those of us who will now have sit and watch Trump make fools of the people who voted for him.

But Obama’s brilliant, stirring oratory during his farewell speech last night should encourage us to have faith in the basic goodness of our fellow citizens and guard and protect our basic freedoms which are fragile, and, if carelessly given away, are irreplaceable.  There is perhaps little this particular writer can do except continue to advocate kindness, consideration and understanding towards all fellow citizens, and moderation in all things.   Younger people can, I hope, be more proactive than he in standing up for our basic rights and freedoms. Epicurus eschewed politics and stayed in his garden.  No! Don’t do that – get involved. We have a crisis on our hands.