Don't Know Much About History
Commentary: The Pentagon looks back to four great empires for tips on how to rule the world.
August 4, 2008
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In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA) published an 85-page monograph called "Military Advantage in History". Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's "futurist in chief," the study looks back to the past—way back. It examines four empires, or "pivotal hegemonic powers in history," to draw lessons about how the United States "should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Though unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to some of history's most powerful empires.
The study looks a little like a high school text book, devoting chapters to Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France and citing texts by Sun Tzu, Livy, and Jared Diamond. It attempts to break down exactly how historic empires sustained their military might across continents and even centuries. The study posits that the historical examples offer "insights into what drives U.S. military advantage," as well as "where U.S. vulnerabilities may lie, and how the United States should think about maintaining its military advantage in the future." There is no one secret to world domination, however. The Mongols' military advantage was rooted in their "tactical and operational superiority"; the Macedonians' in the "exceptional leadership" of and "cult of personality" surrounding Alexander the Great; Napoleon's in "innovative operational concepts" and "information superiority"; and the Romans' in "robust tactical doctrine" and "strong domestic institutions" which were "designed to incorporate conquered peoples as the empire grew." In an extraordinary passage, the study cites the Roman experience—from over a millennium ago—as a precedent for America's long-term dominance: "The Roman model suggests that it is possible for the United States to maintain its military advantage for centuries if it remains capable of transforming its forces before an opponent can develop counter-capabilities. Transformation coupled with strong strategic institutions is a powerful combination for an adversary to overcome."
The report's language is jargon laden and opaque—a lance used by Macedonian horsemen is referred to as a "primary weapon system." That may be due to the methodology of "net assessment," a fancy term for the ONA's approach to analyzing complicated real-world situations that is rooted in systems analysis and game theory. Military author James Dunnigan compares it to engineering. "You take apart historical events, reassemble them as a simulation, and then tinker with the simulation until you can recreate the historical event accurately," he explains. "What that allows you to do is play out 'what if?' situations: What if Napoleon did this? What if Ghengis Khan did that?"
While the study was produced under the auspices of the ONA, its five authors work for government intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, and they wrote the study as part of a contract for the Defense Department's Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center. Booz Allen won a 10-year, $200 million cost-plus contract to establish and "host" that center in 1998. (In May, the Carlyle Group announced it will be taking over Booz Allen's government services arm.)
The original idea for the study predates the Bush administration. Mark Herman, the Booz Allen vice president and war-game designer who is the study's lead author, recalls being asked to give a presentation on historical empires at one of Andrew Marshall's famous "summer studies" at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1999. At that annual retreat, experts from government, academia, and beyond are invited to contemplate a big-picture question. Newt Gingrich, for example, participated in the 1999 program, according to Herman. He says that the ONA "liked the presentation so much they felt it should be written down" and expanded. A earlier version of the report, titled "Sustaining Military Dominance: Examples From Ancient History," was presented at the 2001 summer study and was later cited in a Maureen Dowd column. The current version was published a year later.
Coming out of the Office of Net Assessment, the study's theme of military transformation is not surprising. Described by the Washington Post as "an obscure but highly influential unit," the ONA was established as an in-house think tank in 1973. Its founding director was Marshall, a strategist who achieved demigod status in the press after years of colorful profiles portraying him as a visionary. (A 2002 article in the New York Times Magazine named Marshall the "Yoda of the Rumsfeld Defense Department"; William Safire dubbed him "the freshest mind in the Puzzle Palace.") ONA specializes in trend spotting and forecasting military threats. The office spent the 1980s exhaustively studying the US-Soviet balance; recently, it has turned to topics as diverse as neuropharmacology, Islamic warfare, and the national security implications of climate change.
Now in his 80s, Marshall has been a chief proponent of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, a cause also championed by Donald Rumsfeld that emphasizes speed and increased use of precision weapons and advanced communications technology. In 2001, Marshall was given a high-profile assignment by Rumsfeld to conduct an extensive review of the military and the possibilities of military transformation.
Most striking is how the study conceives of the United States in imperial terms. "You'll see some neoconservatives at the beginning of the Bush administration crowing that 'we do have an empire, let's just come out of the closet and say we do,'" said Ivan Eland, the author of a book on America's "informal empire" and the director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute, on hearing a description of the study. "But the administration never did that because empire doesn't sell well with the public." After reviewing the study at Mother Jones' request, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, said he was struck by its "arrogance and immorality." "The presumption that the United States should rule the world, sword at the ready, for the foreseeable future is an unacceptable basis for a just, even-handed foreign policy."
Even coming from an office vaunted for its intellectual seriousness, "Military Advantage in History" often reads like it was meant as window dressing for the Revolution in Military Affairs agenda—sometimes at the expense of historical fact. (Herman says that the theme of transformation emerged naturally from his research.) After reviewing a section that identifies five discrete "transformations" of the Roman military over a period of 1,000 years, Lee Brice of Western Illinois University, president of the Society of Ancient Military Historians, described it as "so completely incorrect as to be useless." In general, Brice noted, "it is inappropriate to apply modern concepts of systems theory, doctrine, and strategy to ancient armies. That required a level of planning and centralization that simply did not exist."
Eland speculates that a study like this would "get warped by the military-industrial-congressional complex into more money for weapons." Furthermore, he says, it ignores the economic implications of military expansion. "The Office of Net Assessment is doing this to show, 'Well, gee, these other empires transformed themselves, they were successful, we need to do the same thing,'" Eland says. "Well that's going to cost big bucks, and that will cause economic overstretch. People say it can't happen to us since we have such a big economy, but every empire has said that." It is unclear how the study has been used; the Office of Net Assessment declined a request for an interview. Herman says only that "a whole bunch of [copies] went out to the government."
The idea that contemporary society can or should try to find direct guidance in the past has been assailed by some historians. The American historian Bernard Bailyn wrote of "an obvious kind of presentism, which at its worst becomes indoctrination by historical example." But the ONA study charges ahead, plumbing the past for contemporary lessons. An extraordinary color-coded table in the study's conclusion attempts to literally "map" the historical findings to the United States with an eye toward "enduring dominance." (See image above.)
Several historians who reviewed the study differed on its quality and meaning. Walter Scheidel, a Stanford professor of classics and the coauthor of a forthcoming survey of ancient empires, called it "a successful distillation of relevant information and scholarship complemented by very interesting systematic analysis." Others found the scholarship to be shoddy and superficial. Pamela Crossley, a Dartmouth historian who teaches on the Mongols, described the chapter on Genghis Khan as mostly "an accumulation of popularly transmitted misconceptions." She also noted the study's "amazingly strange spelling 'Chengis.'" Brice, the ancient military historian, said the text suffered from "an intense, myopic habit of wanting to make the ancient world fit into modern stereotypes." He compares it with "much lower-undergraduate-level work."
Justin Elliott, a former senior fellow at Mother Jones, is news editor at Talking Points Memo.
"All glory is fleeting."--Roman slave
I refuse to call it a war. It was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation followed by an unwelcome occupation.
Read Clifford Ando on Provincial loyalty and Anthony Kaldellis' latest book on Hellenism in Byzantium. Both books demonstrate the effectiveness of these mechanisms of consensus building.
Does the "Kill Machine" aka the Pentagon know that?!
One item is glaringly lacking in the cursory and self-serving report from the Pentagon's hired history hacks. Those stooges fronting for empire seemed to have completely forgotten the object lesson that history teaches us and one our founders recognized and repeatedly warned us about; empires are lethal to republics!
Cicero and other Roman statesmen tried to warn their countrymen of this danger (read Erik Hildinger's Swords Against the Senate) but as Chalmers Johnson and others have described the militaristic demands of empire consumed that great republic.
Jefferson, Madison and Washington passed the same concerns to American posterity but it was a general much closer to our time than theirs, Eisenhower, who warned us of the toxic threat of militarism and power to the health and longevity of democratic republicanism.
You can have empire and you can have republic...but you can't have both.
Sic semper imperium!!
We in Iran understood that when the country that was suppose to defend the right of the people against vested (monarchial) interest deposed our prime-minister and imposed their own will on our people (the shah). Every nation on the face of the earth has its own story of how they ware cheated by the western powers.
Now the question is my brethrens is this. Will you be willing to stand –up your big fat asses and fight?????
Or, are you just a lying cheating twofaced blabber moth like your governments.
I know the answer.
Those who wish to find justifications for diverting humankind's wealth from developmental investment to debilitating spending could read "The Three Pigs" and find more and quicker ways to slaughter the wolf. They would get the pigs to pay for it, and sacrifice their piglets to do the dirty, wet-work of it. They would propagandize to get the surviving pigs to tolerate the injustice to the innocents in the wolf's community caught in the crossfire and backlash.
Of course they could read "Alice In Wonderland" too and find someone or something to designate as 'the wolf' and use the same ways and means preconceived for destruction to assault it too, and all on the back of the designated 'pigs.'
Another proverb: "When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." When war is your heritage, and you don't really know your true heritage, just the glorified version, 'sanitized' of the bloody truth, war looks like a pretty good idea. "Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself."
Can you imagine where humankind could be had the Nazis not won WWII? Their influence in 'the west' and 'the east' kept a 'Cold War' going for half a century. Not just any half-century, but one where humankind made great strides in developmental aspects of every stripe. But their greed is so great every stride became a tool for conquest, for domination, for covert manipulation of commerce, government, education, manufacturing, agriculture, science, religion, culture, music, art, media, writing and publishing fiction and nonfiction, finance, insurance, real estate, military, industry, intelligence, politics and organized crime. This military-industrial- political-intelligence-underworld complex is so greedy, fighting over this ball of mud, misleading the poor to war against each other around the planet, we will probably be engaged in conflict when cosmic circumstances doom us, with too little reaction time, too late to enable survival of the curious little creature, humankind.
It's a shame we can't find leaders to lead us developmentally, to defend representative Constitutional democracy from fascism, entrenched and unapologetic for its misleadership of the human race headlong into hell. War is hell. Not 'like' hell. Hell.
It is no surprise to find the hammers made nails of the data, fitting it to their agenda, and themselves to the description of the enemies of humankind, fascist.
I recently heard that other nations don't consider the U. S. a 'real nation' because it hasn't had its second revolution. I'm not sure the fascists would tolerate revolution. Rather, it would be their excuse to nullify the Constitution, as is done with the secret "Alito Veto," Presidential 'signing statements' that covertly nullify the Congress, arrogating power to the "Unitary Executive."
We are deep in a revolution, but no revolutionary has ever faced an enemy so empowered, with its primary weapon system being data, and the competence of supercomputers to collect, process, and analyze it, as programmed by the hammers, who will find their nails in the net assessment and hammer them down.
As we all know, the W. administration has been deeply scornful of expertise, preferring hack idealogues to do their bidding. Hopefully Obama will help turn this nightmare ship around.
Macedonian/Alexander’s Empire – Alexander was driven by revenge(against Persia’s historic aggression) and desire for grandeur(to surpass the achievements of Philip, his father, and achieve greatness equal of the myth of Hercules). He over extended himself and created an Empire that did not survive past his own death, greed imploded it(his Generals, already rivals during Alexander’s life, became self-imposed Monarchs of their own private kingdoms in constant competition with each other). Alexander could not be defeated by Armies but was defeated by Syphilis.
Roman Empire – Rome’s rise to power is due to several previous Regional Powers. Greek City States and their Colonies, the Etruscan people, Latin people(origin of the language), potential influence of the ancient city of Troy, and the Phoenicians which extended trade and their culture across the Mediterranean and likely helped create written Greek language which expanded that culture’s influence over the region. The Phoenicians likely founded the future city and nation of Carthage which successfully invaded Roman territory under the leadership of Hannibal. It is not surprising Rome is described as the historical predecessor of the US considering the similarities of Colonialism leading to its creation. Worshipping violence(as many Romans did) has rarely had positive results. Sacrifices to the God of War were always common. From brutal blood sports(the Gladiator competitions) to Civil War.
Julius Caesar conquered Gaul not through issuing citizenships but through brutality against the local population leading to massacres and enslavement of 1,000s of people. Garrisons were set up to control the areas afterwards.
The Romans “prepared for war” as the famous quote goes, and frequently turned their Javelins, Spears, Arrows, and Swords on their own people. Before Rome “officially” became an Empire ruled by 1 Emperor it saw years of brutal infighting involving 1 Roman Legion against another Roman Legion. Driven by greed and lust for power Roman leaders(Senators and Provincial Governors and future Triumvirs) saw nothing wrong with sending their men to kill each other, and who was able to mount a better attack or defense survived the “political” struggle. Rome quite frequently would try to bite off more than it could chew. Losing battles to Germanic, Persian, and Hun Armies. Refugees from the North and Nomadic Warriors from Central Asia eventually overwhelmed Rome, and it collapsed under its own weight.
Genghis Khan’s Empire - The Mongol Empire that came from Genghis Khan’s conquests was a result of constant war between Central Asian people, the unified Mongol people, perhaps once numbering in the millions in the region were almost completely devastated and bled dry over 3 centuries of warfare leaving behind small and powerless groups. They may have been fierce warriors but an Empire could not be sustained with their available resources. The Mongol Horde was known for its brutality, something the US should not copy.
Napoleonic France – To analyze Napoleon’s long term planning one must only analyze Napoleon’s not so successful invasion of Russia which cost him 80% of his Army. Having suffered defeat he was never able to recover what he had lost and France has not had any significant military victories since Napoleon was defeated.
I am surprised China is not mentioned. China has had several cycles of decline and growth and occupation, but it has only grown stronger since its creation. None of the above Empires has survived as long as China.
There are some things worse than war. Try losing one.
You've done well to pick out some real nobodies when it comes to assessing this study. Wm Hartung? When did this amateur become an 'expert'?
Seriously, next time get some real experienced and knowledgeable 'experts'. Lazy friggin' journalism, you really missed the boat on this one.
In other words if you make 100,000 dollars a year and you're 65,000 in debt that ain't really to bad. And that is the debt ratio we have.
The sky is falling, but it's not the National Debt that's doing it.
Thanks for the huge tome, I bet you're a real treat at parties.
observation that u.s. politics is like u.s. high school. so is u.s. foreign politics; and the u.s. adversarial system like football.
stupid, primitive, but effective and worthless. pragmatism run haywire.
I've read some of this sort of stuff. Shallow, vapid, stupid scholarship. A few citations from Sun Tzu, a reference to ancient Rome and Bob's your uncle.
Since 1989 the USA and its European franchise have found themselves with the' wrong kind' of forces. The difficulty lies in trying to decide what kind of world we think we are currently in and what armed forces are required to match against need. In fact, as the think tanks are demonstrating, no one knows. But what a lucrative field in which to find oneself. How I wish someone would pay me oodles of dosh to day dream. I suppose they could always ask Mr Steven Spielberg or Mr George Lucas for their thoughts, though I sense the Pentagon already gets lots inspiration for gadgets - and all their political thinking - watching their productions as things are.
That aside the article was thought provoking.
I doubt the U.S. is prepared to order, for example, the crucifixion of the entire population of the Sunni Triangle (that'll learn 'em!), or the transportation of the residual population of Pashtun Afghanistan to New Mexico, there to labour as slaves until totally assimilated.
George W. has his moments, too, but I've never heard that he thought himself a god, or that there was a movement afoot to make him one. For what its worth, if we are looking for a pretext for mass crucifixtion that would work -- make him a god, set up statues of him in the streets of Kandahar and Baghdad and expect the locals to get on their knees.
Like it or not, there is really only one comparison for the U.S. 'empire' -- inhibited in the same fashion, faced by similar challenges, impelled by the same motives. Its the British Empire, stupid.
Still it strikes me that there is a place for such books, sometimes they are even interesting. Books that choose to see the development of some key aspect of society are quite good—like say Naval Power, or the interesting book, “The Prize” which looks at the history of the late 19th century and the entire history of the twentieth century through the eyes of the oil business is a great book or as an antithesis consider Joseph Nye's Why Military Power isn't enough—a very excellent book. One can view history through the veil of religions or philosophy or invention or politics or cultures or art or a synthesis of these, like say the subject matter embodied in the history of ideas. That this one is “military” doesn't seem particularly damning just so long as the reader is capable of keeping an open mind that this “military” aspect is but a perspective. Still if this book really is academically flawed it will simply fail and no matter how much flap-jawing the Pentagon does will not make the book a good one if it fails the test of academic acceptance.
Each military power whose dominance is built upon military force succumbs to decay because its world view is not a human one but rather one of master-slave. One would have hoped that the harsh reality of WWII would have served as a reminder of war's insanity, especially the horrid meaning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but today we have a man in the White House who parades around exclaiming with childlike joy, “I'm a war president”. Obviously history means little in terms of teaching us lessons because had we examined Vietnam and the consequences of it we would not have answered the 9/11 terrorist assault with war but rather we would have locked down certain aspects of our society—airports, harbors, trains, buses, transport of dangerous materials, our power plants and nuclear power plants etc. and then gone to our friends and allies and trading partners and the UN and accumulated data in regards to who might be funding these individuals behind the attacks and to then proceed to take these individuals out in a very public manner via a world court. If the reaction to this court proved to be too negative (because it turned out that 9/11 was “popular” then it might be best to drop the court and to take out these individuals the old fashion silent—accidental way—like Mr. X died today. Apparently he broke his neck while drinking his tea—he must have gotten a tough crumpet.
What I find most interesting of all is the exclusion of the most apposite empire for study by the US military - the British Empire. Lots to learn on how to run an empire successfully on the cheap for so long.
Maybe this is because the US was so dedicated for so long to dismantling the British Empire and when finally given the perfect opportunity in 1940 eviscerated Great Britain financially. So when 1945 rolled around the UK could no longer even afford the illusion of continuing the Empire so started to dismantle it forthwith.
As the US has discovered the hard way it's not that easy running an empire. Whether its a formal one or an informal one.
Pedantic criticism.
Honorable? You mean honorable like:
Aggressive war (the worst war crime according to the Nuremberg Principles)?
Bush's contempt for the international laws the U.S. worked so hard to craft since World War II?
The rape of Falluja replete with the criminal use of white phosphorus?
The hideous outrages at Abu Ghraib?
The massive slaughter of civilians?
The millions of exiles?
The anger and deep disappointment of the rest of the world including many allies?
The shameful pillage of Mesopotamian antiquity while U.S. troops guarded the Iraq oil ministry building?
Honorable?
Since the beginning of civilization the record of human activity we call history tells us of the injustice, carnage, pain, and wanton destruction brought about by the proclaimed "honorable" intentions of empire after bloody empire.
The empire our military futurists aspire to will be no different. HISTORY teaches that.
The world would be a much safer and just place with a little less of the "honorable" intentions of those think the United States can or should be nation building or policing the globe.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5688.htm
tgemberl: I don't disagree. In the end, the British Empire packed it in as a bad job. It wasn't beaten by an external challenger, or an internal threat. Brits just gave it up as a bad job & thankless task and went home. I expect that will be the ultimate fate of the American empire too.
I think that one of the more dangerous aspects of empire is that the focus shifts to external threats, and little attention is left over for the cultivation of the domestic garden. You end up doing wonderful things abroad, and then wake up one day to realise that your schools suck, your industrialists have transmorgified into rentiers, collecting profits from abroad, you've lost all sense of self and what once provide the root of your power, and on that day your realise that imperium was . . . a bad job and a thankless task.
Another thing to keep in mind is that imperialism isn't all bad. I think usually, empires grow at least partly because of the strengths and virtues of the imperial power. Rome grew largely because people in different parts of the Mediterranean world came to the Romans and said, "we're being oppressed. Would you help us?" Europe and Japan after WW II are probably wonderful examples of the beneficent effects of American imperialism for a time. We helped rebuild those areas. But eventually, empire undermines the governmental institutions of the imperial power. Certain individuals and groups benefit mostly from it, and the average citizen suffers. It tends to turn authoritarian eventually. I'm glad Brock brought up the British example, which shows that a people can give up empire relatively peacefully. Empires don't have to end in decline and destruction.
His first name would not Dick by any chance?
Well, Mr. Hartung, the fact is that SOME country is going to rule the world, sword at the ready, so I'd just as soon it be my country.
I agree with all those here who have pointed to the very eccentric choices as models for the study of how empires breakdown. Perhaps the British are not a good example in another sense; they gave theirs away.
I like Balfour writing about the Empire toward the end. He figured that all Empires built on force will ultimately collapse. Force only gets you so far, and you cannot make people love you, or emulate you by force. He believed that the British Empire would survive as a cultural reality long after the last outpost had been abandoned. Who can say he's wrong, particularly given that its only one generation since the last of the legions went home? The dust hasn't settled yet; a final judgement not possible. Rather unfair to compare the British, in this sense (standing at about A.D. 440) with the Romans at A.D 0).
China has a long tradition of religious freedom within a secular state. And the traditional Chinese state was the example par excellence of the ascendancy of secular power. Any religious organization that purports to challenge the authority of the secular state would be labelled as heterodox and heterodoxy was/is outlawed. There was/is no absolute religious freedom within the Chinese secular state; this is not the same as saying that there is no religious freedom in China. Many different religions are practised in China: Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and each of these have their own collections of sects as well.
Heterodoxy is defined by the state as any religious organization that oversteps religious boundaries into the political domain. Many political uprising in the past were organized by such heterodox religious bodies, and heterodox bodies, because they were outlawed, had to go underground and hence their underground network became convenient for underground political organization as well.
In the aftermath of September 11, one may perhaps suggest that a similar stance has been adopted by the Bush Administration, overtly and covertly. There is a clash between secular and heterodox religious power. Orthodox religions continue to enjoy full freedom, of course, for the definition of orthodoxy is that such religious bodies do not challenge the political status quo, do not challenge the state, do not challenge the secular state.
The current government in Beijing does not forbid the practice of Qigong, but it does outlaw the Falungang as a herodox religious body with ulterior political motives. The US does not outlaw the Islamic faith, but it would not tolerate the practice of Islamic extremism (terrorism) as it challenged the secular authority of the United States.
When speaking of democratic rights, one should bear in mind that the Chinese secular state is ruled by "teachers" and their patron saints include Confucius and Karl Marx. Within the Chinese political elite, there is a move towards more liberalization, more opportunities for expressing "loyal" political views. (Compare this to the British expression of "the loyal opposition") Since the death of Mao, legal protection for members of the elite has strengthened to the point where top leaders can retire from political life without the fear of being killed by their successors. This, to the Chinese political elite, is a giant step forward toward a more liberal political regime. In this limited sense, there is official promotion of human rights, mainly for the political elite. While political opposition is not tolerated, loyal political "advice" is sometimes listened to, and there is also the practice of sharing some centralized power with regional/local bodies, provided they all profess the basic political principles preached by the "teachers", and these political principles transmit into a common political culture down to the village and family levels. Within this qualified atmosphere, there is freedom of political expression and, in order to feel safe in giving political expression, one needs to learn and acculturate to the dominant political culture -- whose nuances do change with the changing of the guards at the top level. For ordinary mortals, since they are mostly quite ignorant of the nuances of the political culture of the secular state at any one time, they keep wise counsel to themselves by refraining from talking about "national affairs" (butan guoxi).
So we should note the curious phenonmenon that in China there is an ongoing political discourse going on at all levels, there is "freedom of political expression", and that participation rate in this political discourse is very low. Political expression is free for the political elite; anyone who participates in political discourse has aspiration to be part of the political elite; political expressions are therefore by definition not intended to be against the secular state; should some political expressions be outside of this perimeter, those who make such expressions would be held accountable and required to recant, acknowledge irroneous thinking, or worse -- be put in jail.
Such niceties are beyond the army of foreign reporters descending into Beijing right now. After all they are not talking to the Chinese populace within the Chinese secular state, they are talking to the global community elsewhere who have established prejudices and partialities toward China. As protected foreign reporters, they are not answerable to the Chinese secular state, and, as long as their views can be quarantined from the Chinese populace, the Chinese secular state has little need to deal harshly with them irrespective of what harsh views they may or may not have about China. One Australian reporter (on TV) for example, referred to the pollution in Beijing as "at least five times worse than any Australian city". This was an irresponsible and unfounded comment and he was not an isolated case. Is this China Bashing? This is ignorance rather than China Bashing and such irresponsible comments would only add to the ignorance of his viewers, who, after all, are not all that interested in his comments and far more interested in viewing the Opening Ceremony tonight and the many competitions at the 2008 Olympics. China just happens to be the site where the Olympic Games are held, and the viewers/readers will benefit from some degree of exposure to present day China. Would this not make them just a little bit better informed about China? Let the ignorant practice their ignorance on their audiences, while their audiences are getting wiser seeing contemporary China on screen and in print during the Olympic Games.
Our military, or 'defen$e', as it's also known, has grown to gargantuan proportions. Stop by your recruiting office TODAY to find out if you might qualify for big college tuition and bonuses! And, end up in Iraf, which sure seems to be as good an example of military colonialism as you could think of. Meanwhile, back home, people get put out of their homes. One of the cool reasons for getting people involved in politics, and standing for public office, is that maybe, someday, we'll end up with some better choices and less of a stockyard-type process for choosing the next Occupant. The Iraf war was about oil, and money, no, make that A LOT OF MONEY, like, more money than would fit in your whole house, and people will do lots of interesting things for money, including kill other people. Having lots of money, a la Bill Gates et. al., tends to make a person Most Powerful. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I'm pretty much absolutely disgusted with the whole milidustriacomplexerer in all its' promissory glory. Promissories, promissories, all in the name of defen$e of course, and for all the millions and billions and tens of billions, they let the borders go to hell, apparently deliberately, and everyone's willing to go along with the offshore stuff as long as they get a piece of the action, and it really makes you wonder just what kind of governing ethic is being observed/adhered to in dear ol' D.C., these days. Plenty of room for improvement, in my estimationer, and plenty of room for budget cuts, too.
S.H.A.P.E. 2nd Signal Brigade
2nd Infantry Division
3rd US Infantry
TRADOC
For my English 101 class in college I wrote a paper discussing the United States similarities to the Roman Empire and I predicted the fall of our own success. Again, this was a starry-eyed freshman discussing the unsustainable political methods the United States employs. Now, I am 'privileged' to witness my 'prediction' come to fruition.
we have freedom of speech - not freedom of action.
Ummm... that would actually be $100 Trillion, when you take away all the smoke and mirrors... About $330,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. HOW, you ask...? Well, if you ask Bernanke or Paulson, they'll just say "print more MONEY!" (((sigh)))
It's frankly kind of scary to read your defense of authoritarian rule. Though of course I recognize that authoritarian rule can contain relatively "humane" or pluralistic elements. The Romans also tolerated diverse ideas as long as they didn't appear to endanger the social order.
I just wonder how long China's citizens will be satisfied to live in a society that provides them with material goods but doesn't allow them to speak freely. Internet filtering will not keep the Chinese from knowing people in other parts of the world can. India is another megacountry with economic growth that is a lot freer.
The US has done it by the book and some.
American prescription for empire:
1)de-industrialize and lose your source of wealth. Allow flight of capital.
2)Allow your financial system along with the political system become completely corrupt and paralyzed.
3)De-fund and privatize your public institutions so that they become dysfunctional and picked into pieces.
4)Turn against your own people via civil rights abuses, power grabs and blatant unconstitutional behavior.
5)Spread yourself militarily as thin as possible and become entangled in many conflicts for a long time to thoroughly exhaust your reserves.
6)Turn the world opinion against you and crate enemy from the majority of the injured parties subject to economic and military conquest.
7)Finance your institutions with capital from your potential enemies. Depend on debt.
8)Destroy your own wealth and purchasing power by devaluing your currency and create runaway inflation to kill your remaining economy and tax base.
9)Go bankrupt due to military industrial complex bottomless expenditures without any oversight.
More??
Posted by: billy August 5, 2008"
No Billy, it's not you who should ever feel shame. It's the fascist NeoCons who cooked up the lies to get their hands on the Iraq oil fields and the war profiteers who are continuing to make billions if not trillions from keeping this "war" (which is really an occupation) alive. Why else would they want to stay in Iraq another 100 years. Guess they want their grandchildren to wallow in the spoils.
Be proud Billy because you did everything a good soldier does. You did your duty and accomplished the mission. Because of you and your fellow soldiers the war in Iraq was won in May 2003. The shame belongs to the NeoCons and never on your shoulders. Thank you for your service and thank you for having a conscious. Pity the NeoCons can't experience shame but then it takes a conscious to be able to do that.
I agree with you. But to simplify it a little bit, the collapse of the Roman empire was really caused by 3 main-factors, all of which we are also we are doing ourselves:
1. An over-extended military. Trying to police the world, and not for any noble reasons, either.
2. Devalued currency. Our currency is a fiat currency. It's back by nothing except our military might, and OPEC's agreement (which might not last much longer) to only accept dollars for oil. This is blatantly un-Constitutional (as well as just stupid). Everyone who has tried fiat currencies always exploit the (the exception being the short use of Colonial Script in our early days of formation as a nation)system, which causes economic collapse, and the currency is eventually destroyed.
Rome started devaluing it's currency by simply putting less actual gold into their coins, to make a long story short.
And 3.-A belief in their own moral superiority and a failure to understand other cultures..a blindness caused by too much power, which corrupts all but the wisest of men.
We are heading down the same path. Our path also resembles what happened in Germany with the rise of Hitler to a large degree also. He staged a false-flag terrorist event--the Reichstag Fire;insiders within our government assisted in a false-flag terrorsist event, in that they knew it was going to happen, and created these war games that essentially paralyzed any military response. Soon after the Reichstag Fire, which was of course set by direction of Hitler, he began to start passing laws that destroyed basic Civil Liberties, all in the pretense of "keeping people safe" from their etrrorist enemies. Yes, they were called terrorists. We blame the Muslims, Hitler blamed the Jews. As time
passed, Hitler did away with more and more of people's rights, exactly as the Bush regime has done to us by eviserating the Bill of Rights and our Constitution. Some people say, well the
Constitution is out of date, etc, etc..Well, That's why it's been amended.
But as far as our basic rights, and We
the people being the controllers, NOT
the Government (the Constitution was
written to set and limit the powers of the government, so that what they had
witnessed in the U.K wouldn't happen
again here.) Anyway, as I was saying, they got our basic rights, which are contained in the Bill of Rights, which
are the 1st 10 amendments to the Constitution, are what has protected us
in the past from, say, the police just being able, for no reason, to come into
your home, go thru all your stuff, may-
be rape your wife or daughter while they're at it. Bush has set about destroying all these protections. Under
the Patriot Act, government agents can
break in your home, download all your
business and personal information from
your computer, or whatever you have
stored it within, search your home, take
anything they want, and never even tell
you they did it.
Now, that law is in direct and extreme
contraction to our 4th amendment right
to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure. It's all done in the name of
terrorism, but actually, your chances
are greater getting struck by lightening
than being involved in a terrorist attack, and more people die from car accidents, just in the US alone, than die from ALL international terrorism combined.
But the lie that was 9/11 MUST be exposed. There's no way those planes could have flown around our skies, without being shot down unless they were paralyzed-and they were, by these war games. They knew it was going to happen, it was their "New Pearl Harbor."
are condemned to repeat it.i think the
us should realise its past [battle
with germany , japan] , is prologue to
a possible future battle [
not necessarily military; battle over
markets; trade; technological superiority etc..]..
Look at the Academic credentials of the authors. If this was going to be an Official Military history then it would have been done at the Center for Military History; this was not, it was done by contract consultants that are not historians by training.
Never the less, What I find discomfitting is that military advantage in the 21st century is more than the few variables and lessons they mention. There is short shrift in information operations and how these lessons really apply to the "long-war".
It seems to me that the military is reverting back to a conventional approach in teaching the lessons of war.
What the military really needs is a better grounding in a myriad of soft subjects that are not traditional to Military Studies, such as; cultural, finance and business studies if they want a better grasp of the war's of the 21st Century.
Alexander the great too was a perfect example of a mind ruled solely by the ego. In the Roman empire it was endemic the power of the ego for its leaders were considered gods. How convenient and accommodating, Nero found this empire. Reducing Rome to ashes while its citizens slept oblivious to the great fire, in order to pursue his egoistic grandiose dreams of a new city, and then blaming the Christians for the deed. Self aggrandizement is characteristic of ego slaves, and Genghis Khan was another willing servant. The race for empire came once again from the East under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and the banner of religion.
The world has seen very little of periods of peace for through out history the ego-empire scourge springs up once more after the terror of the French Revolution. From the chaos, rises another beast, Napoleon Bonaparte, another ignorant butcher who crowned himself emperor and like Hitler wanted the world under a single government.
The global stage has been always the ultimate prize, for the idea of empire was endemic among the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English Monarchies. Marching the road of butchery without scruples and exterminating the indigenous peoples of the New World who had welcomed them with open arms, was to Columbo the only solution. Later in order to expand this empire more slaves were brought from Africa, packed in ships like sardines in filthy, deplorable conditions. When human slaves were not enough the Europeans turned to Africa's natural resources, in which the Belgians occupied the Congo to start a monopoly in the Ivory trade. The slaughter of elephants in the hundreds of thousands was carried out with the same appalling cruelty in which they enslaved the natives. The legacy of the ego-empire is still visible today in the dark continent. "The Hearts of Darkness" of the colonialists was the vision congolese men inherited for the horror continues in the raping of their women and children. The enslavement of young women, and children, for the empire of the sex trade is representative of men who worship Beelzebub's ego.
The Industrial revolution brought the boundless greed of the Corporate Cartels which stop at nothing to realize their empire state ego buildings and the world is not enough to placate their materialistic desires, consuming, and polluting relentlessly crucial, natural ecosystems without which the planet is unable to maintain its balance and continue to sustain life.
Although this in itself should send alarm bells in the collective conscience and prompt the need to create a new way of thinking to live in harmony and stop the mindset of empire, the Pentagon, that resembles more a pentagram, finds the intimidation game intoxicating, and playing the ego-empire game even at the cost of nuclear holocaust a feasible reality.by the empire power players of China, Russia, and the United States of America. The later one lacking ever more wisdom in the hands of the ignorant, but deceitful Bush Administration that not only stole the elections but engaged the country in a war to steal the natural resources of another. This is what gave the opportunity for Russia to start trouble once again by invading Georgia, for it sees that the US is wasting its resources and is totally engaged in an ill conceived war. This should be a matter for reflection but the Pentagon which is also part of the same establishment of the Kingpin of egoism is not detered by the show of force from Russia or China for it possess technology far more advanced than the rest of them, and is willing to obey to the empire of the ego, no matter if the world is incinerated in radioactivity.