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Fri Feb 24 11:55:10 PST 2006

This is undoubtedly what happens when you have an administration that considers the Pentagon the answer to all our problems and gives it a <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060206/pl_afp/usmilitarybudget">$439.3 billion budget</a> to play with -- and that's exclusive of actual war-fighting money (which, for Iraq and Afghanistan, at an estimated <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11145948/">$120 billion</a> for the year, will come in supplemental requests to Congress). And remember as well that the fiscal 2007 Pentagon budget does not include the $9.3 billion the Department of Energy will put into nuclear weapons or a host of veterans-care benefits, all of which bring the budget at least close to the $600 billion range. Analyzing the 2006 budget, economist Robert Higgs estimated that all military-related outlays -- that is, the real Pentagon budget -- totaled closer to <a href="http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1464">$840 billion dollars</a>. 


Even taken at face value, the 2007 budget accounts for more than half of the $873 billion in federal discretionary spending -- the funds that the President and Congress decide to spend each year. For 2007, education, the second largest discretionary budget item, amounts to just over $50 billion, a piddling sum by comparison. But there is probably no way to put any version of the Pentagon's finances into perspective. Militarily speaking, it throws other military spending on the planet into the deepest shadow. As Frida Berrigan, senior research associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center and co-author of <a href="http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/wawjune2005.html">Weapons at War 2005</a>, points out, "The Pentagon accounts for about half the world's total military expenditures of $1.04 trillion, spending alone what the 32 next most powerful nations spend together."


The United States is also by far the planet's largest exporter of weapons and military hardware. An annual Congressional Research Service report found that, in 2004, global weapons deliveries totaled nearly $37 billion -- with the United States responsible for more than 33% of them, or $12.4 billion, and it hasn't gotten better since. 


No other country puts anything like such effort, planning, and dreaming into the idea of projecting planet-spanning military power, caught so grimly in that phrase, "full spectrum dominance." To Pentagon minds this seems to mean: from 20,000 leagues down to 20 miles up (and everything that creeps, crawls, swims, or flies in between). The phrase first gained attention with the release in 2000 of the Air Force's Joint Vision 2020 statement -- a supposed look into a future world of American war-making. It's one of those terms that sticks with you -- and not just because of the full-spectrum weaponry that's now on the drawing boards, ranging from hypervelocity rod bundles meant to penetrate underground bunkers from outer space (ominously nicknamed <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0531-26.htm">"rods from god"</a>) to the Common Aero Vehicle (CAV), "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38272-2005Mar15?language=printer">an unmanned</a> maneuverable spac!
 ecraft that [by 2010] would travel at five times the speed of sound and could carry 1,000 pounds of munitions, intelligence sensors or other payloads" anywhere on the planet within two hours, or that <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70303-0.html">permanent base</a> on the moon the Bush administration has called for by 2020 (and the array of Star Wars-style space-based weaponry that would ring it). 


Full-spectrum dominance turns out to include even the United States where, in 2002, the Bush administration established the United States Northern Command or Northcom whose <a href="http://www.northcom.mil/">website</a> at present has the following from a visit by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul McHale as its reassuring quote of the week: "I'm leaving with a clear sense of confidence in the vision and planning of NORTHCOM to deal with any emerging threat, whether an occurrence of pandemic flu, a 2006 hurricane ... or a terrorist attack still being planned by our adversaries." 


While the Pentagon quietly begins to take over tasks that once were delegated to civilian agencies, its blue-sky weapons planning extends into the distant future. Take, for instance, the <a href="http://cndyorks.gn.apc.org/yspace/articles/usaf_war_game.htm">Air Force Futures Game 05</a>, held for several days last October in the Dulles, Virginia office of consultants Booz Allen Hamilton. The exercise was dedicated to "looking at scenarios for the year 2025," especially one in which a nuclear weapon is loose in a "Middle Eastern country" and a major war is in the offing. Like many other Pentagon war-gaming exercises, this one was largely committed to confirming the usefulness of as yet nonexistent or hardly existent weaponry, especially in the areas of "space access" and "electronic warfare." According to Col. Gail Wojtowicz, Air Force division director of future concepts and transformation, the gamers were "also looking at one of the trickiest issues the Air Force or anot!
 her service may have to face: what the Pentagon can do on American soil." Indeed.


Military analyst William Arkin wrote about these particular Air Force games, meant to boost "laser, high-powered microwaves, and acoustic weapons," at his <a href="http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2005/10/busier_than_par.html">Washington Post Early Warning blog</a>. Such blue-sky exercises, he explained, advance new weapons systems (and their corporate sponsors) "along the familiar development path of boosters and patrons feeding information to war gamers who feed study participants who feed researchers who feed manufacturers. At the end of the day, it is hard to tell whether high powered microwaves and laser came into being because someone conceived it out of need or because its existence in the laboratory created the need."


To support letting inventive minds roam free outside normal frameworks is in itself an inspired idea. But I bet there's no DARPA-like agency elsewhere in the government funding the equivalent for education 2025 or health 2025 or even energy independence 2025. To have this happen, I'm afraid, you would have to transform them into Northcom war games. 


Now it's true that much blue-skying may never come to be. Those U.S. Navy stealth sharks may not patrol our coasts and a good, swift enemy kick to some unexpected spot on BigDog's anatomy may fell the "creature," if budgetary or high-tech wrinkles don't do the trick first -- just as an unexpected series of low-tech blows to our full-spectrum military has left the Pentagon desperate and the Army unraveling in Iraq. 


Wouldn't it be nice, though, if official blue-sky thinking didn't always mean mobilizing finances, scientists, corporations, and even the animal kingdom in the service of global death. Wouldn't it be nice to blue sky just a tad about life? 


[Note: Special thanks for Pentagon facts and figures in this piece go to Frida Berrigan of the World Policy Institute's invaluable <a href="http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/">Arms Trade Resource Center</a>. To keep up with the latest Pentagon full-spectrum dominance projects, be sure to check out Noah Shachtman's entertaining as well as useful <a href="http://www.defensetech.org/">DefenseTech website</a>, heavily mined for this piece, and William Arkin's <a href="http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/">Washington Post Early Warning</a> blog.] 


Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of <a href="http://www.americanempireproject.com/">the American Empire Project</a> and the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558491333/nationbooks08">The End of Victory Culture</a>, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558495061/nationbooks08">The Last Days of Publishing</a>, has recently come out in paperback.


Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt