Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military—and its military adventure in Afghanistan—when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it. In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating miscalculation. They mistook military power for power on this planet. Armed to the teeth and possessing a nuclear force capable of destroying the Earth many times over, the Soviets nonetheless remained the vastly poorer, weaker, and (except when it came to the arms race) far less technologically innovative of the two superpowers.
In December 1979, perhaps taking the bait of the Carter administration, whose national security adviser was eager to see the Soviets bloodied by a “Vietnam” of their own, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan to support a weak Communist government in Kabul. When resistance in the countryside, led by Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and backed by the other superpower, only grew, the Soviets sent in more troops, launched major offensives, called in air power, and fought on brutally and futilely for a decade until, in 1989, long after they had been whipped, they withdrew in defeat.
Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist. For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.” If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t.
If you don’t already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the United States, you should.
In Washington, the Bush administration—G. H. W.’s, not G. W.’s—declared victory and then left the much ballyhooed “peace dividend” in the nearest ditch. Caught off guard by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington’s consensus policy makers drew no meaningful lessons from it, just as they had drawn few that mattered from their Vietnam defeat sixteen years earlier.
Quite the opposite: successive administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin. They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to global power was still the care and feeding of the U.S. military and the military-industrial complex that went with it. As the years passed, that military would be sent regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet.
This urge, delusional in retrospect, seemed to reach its ultimate expression in the second Bush administration, whose infamous “unilateralism” rested on a belief that no country or even bloc of countries should ever again be allowed to come close to matching United States military power. (As its National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter—and it couldn’t have been blunter on the subject—the United States was to “build and maintain” its military power “beyond challenge.”) Bush’s military fundamentalists firmly believed that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force around, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of U.S. power, and friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel. After all, as the president said in front of a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”
In this way, far more than the Soviets, the top officials of the Bush administration mistook military power for power, a gargantuan misreading of the economic position of the United States in the world.
Boundless Military Ambitions
The attacks of September 11, 2001, that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” clinched the deal. In the space the Soviet Union had deserted, which had been occupied for years by minor outlaw states like North Korea, there was now a new shape-shifting enemy, al-Qaeda (also known as Islamic extremism or the new “totalitarianism”), which could be just as big as you wanted to make it. Suddenly, we were in what the Bush administration dubbed “the Global War on Terror”—and this time there would be nothing “cold” about it.
Bush administration officials promptly suggested that they were prepared to use a newly agile American military to “drain the swamp” of global terrorism. (“While we’ll try to find every snake in the swamp, the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp,” insisted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz two weeks after 9/11.) They were prepared, they made clear, to undertake these draining operations against Islamic “terrorist networks” in no less than sixty countries around the planet.
Their military ambitions, in other words, knew no bounds; nor, it seemed, did the money and resources that began to flow into the Pentagon, the weapons industries, the country’s increasingly militarized intelligence services, mercenary companies like Blackwater and KBR that grew fat on a privatizing administration’s war plans and the multi-billion-dollar no-bid contracts it was eager to proffer, the new Department of Homeland Security, and a ramped-up, ever more powerful national security state.
As the Pentagon expanded, taking on ever newer roles, the numbers would prove staggering. By the end of the Bush years, Washington was doling out almost twice what the next nine nations combined were spending on their militaries, while total U.S. military expenditures came to just under half the world’s total. Similarly, by 2008, the United States controlled almost 70 percent of the global arms market. It also had eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups capable of patrolling the world’s seas and oceans at a time when no power that could faintly be considered a possible future enemy had more than one.
By then, private contractors had built for the Pentagon almost three hundred military bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny combat outposts to massive “American towns” holding tens of thousands of troops and private contractors. They were in the process of doing the same in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in the Persian Gulf region generally. This, too, represented a massive investment in what looked like a permanent occupation of the oil heartlands of the planet. As right-wing pundit Max Boot put it after a flying tour of America’s global garrisons, the United States possessed military bases that add up to “a virtual American empire of Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses, and gyms.”
Depending on just what you counted, there were anywhere from seven hundred to twelve hundred or more of those bases, micro to macro, acknowledged and unacknowledged, around the globe. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was pouring money into the wildest blue-skies thinking at its advanced research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose budget grew by 50 percent.
Through DARPA, well-funded scientists experimented with various ways to fight wars in the near and distant future (at a moment when no one was ready to put significant government money into blue-skies thinking about, for instance, how to improve education). The Pentagon was also pioneering a new form of air power, drone warfare, in which “we” wouldn’t be anywhere near the battlefield, and the battlefield would no longer necessarily be in a country with which we were at war.
It was additionally embroiled in two disastrous, potentially trillion-dollar wars (and various global skirmishes), all this at top dollar at a time when next to no money was being invested in bridges, tunnels, waterworks, and the like that made up an aging American infrastructure. Except when it came to victory, the military stood ever taller, while its many missions expanded exponentially, even as the domestic economy was spinning out of control.