13 Tasks and 3 Maxims for a Very Different Pentagon.

Ret. Lt Col. William Astore / TomDispatch Sept 27, 2023 READ

A progressive Pentagon? Talk about an oxymoron! The Pentagon continues to grow and surge with ever larger budgets, ever more expansive missions (for example, a Space Force to dominate the heavens and yet more bases in the Pacific to encircle China), and ever greater ambitions to dominate everywhere, including if necessary through global thermonuclear warfare. No wonder it’s so hard, to the point of absurdity, to imagine a Pentagon that would humbly and faithfully serve only the interests of “national defense.”

Yet, as a thought experiment, why not imagine it? What would a progressive Pentagon look like? I’m not talking about a “woke” Pentagon that touts and celebrates its “diversity,” including its belated acceptance of LGBTQ+ members. I’m glad the Pentagon is arguably more diverse and tolerant now than when I served in the Air Force beginning in the early 1980s. Yet, as a popular meme has it, painting “Black Lives Matter” and rainbow flags on B-52 bombers doesn’t make the bombs dropped any less destructive. To be specific: Was it really a progressive milestone that the combat aircraft in last year’s Super Bowl flyover were operated and maintained entirely by female crews? Put differently, are the bullets and bombs of trans Black G.I. Jane somehow more tolerant and less deadly than cis White G.I. Joe’s?

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Intro from TomDispatch ~>

In September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore emailed me out of the blue. He’d been reading TomDispatch articles on this country’s Global War on Terror, especially the invasion of, and never-ending conflict in, Iraq. And as a former military man, something struck him: the staggering rows of medals and ribbons our military commanders then leading this country in its disastrous wars displayed on their uniforms, unbelievably more than our victorious generals wore in World War II. He commented on how those bemedaled losers reminded him of the bemedaled Russian generals in the years before the Soviet Union went down in a heap. I instantly wrote back urging him to consider doing a piece for TD on the subject and he promptly did so, beginning it this way: “It’s time to save the military from itself” — a phrase, as he suggests today, that’s no less appropriate in 2023 than it was in 2007.

He asked a question then that was too seldom considered in the American mainstream media of that moment: “Why are we spilling blood and treasure with such reckless abandon?” And he was struck by this strange reality as well, considering how poorly America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were then going: “In a country founded on civilian control of the military, it’s disturbing indeed that, as a New York Times/CBS poll indicated recently, Americans trust their generals three times as much as Congress and 13 times as much as the President. Indeed, ribbons have proliferated like nuclear missiles during the Cold War. I counted nine rows on [Iraq war commander General David] Petraeus’ left breast during his Congressional hearings. If they were a valid metric across time, he would be roughly thrice as capable and valorous as George C. Marshall, perhaps America’s greatest soldier-statesman, who somehow ran and won a world war while wearing only three rows of ribbons.”

And so it’s gone in these disastrous years of the never-ending Global War on Terror. And now, 16 years and 102 TomDispatch pieces later, Astore returns to ask, in essence, what a Pentagon and a military that hadn’t run off the rails — almost literally every rail in sight — might look like. Tom