The Deep State (12 page)

The national security state's project to maintain an overseas military empire, however it may disguise or rebrand itself, has been discredited, but that has not dulled its ambitions. Although it has temporarily cut its losses in Iraq, and is still attempting to do so in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has continued to roll out ambitious new military policies to force the president's hand.

The so-called Pivot to Asia, which calls for a buildup of military forces on the periphery of China, is the Pentagon's attempt to reverse any perceived contraction of empire. The strategy was publicly previewed in an article in
Foreign Policy
by then–secretary of state Clinton in October 2011, titled “America's Pacific Century,” but the driving force behind it was Dr. Andrew Marshall, director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment.
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The DOD was looking for a successor strategy to the war on
terrorism, which after a dozen years of futility had become tedious to all concerned. The Pivot to Asia was a slightly more ambiguous version of the old cold war strategy of militarily containing the Soviet Union by encircling it with a chain of U.S. allies who provided basing rights for our troops at great expense.

The Pivot was supposed to provide “reassurance” to America's East Asian allies, although what threat they are supposed to be reassured about is left somewhat vague, because it is diplomatically awkward for the United States to refer to China, its biggest sovereign creditor, as a military threat. The actual meat of the Pivot was what Marshall's Net Assessment Office calls Air-Sea Battle, a military doctrine that requires buying more expensive combat ships and long-range aircraft, which are of minimal use in the war on terrorism but maximize the money flow to defense contractors.
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What did Obama do when this new strategy bubbled up from the bureaucracy? Did he force an extended debate on its advisability and demand alternative strategies? No, he dutifully trekked to East and Southeast Asia with draft agreements for the opening of U.S. bases in the region. After his trip, the military-industrial complex gradually began soft-pedaling the Pivot to Asia, possibly because overt hostility to China would endanger too many American investments, and maybe also because Vladimir Putin makes a more pleasing bad guy than Xi Jinping. Nevertheless, Obama formally committed himself to Containment 2.0—and the future spending it entails—without satisfying either the war hawks of the permanent state or his disillusioned voting base.

A similar example of the Pentagon engineering a fait accompli in contravention of Obama's previously stated positions can be found in U.S. strategic nuclear policy toward Europe. Throughout the quarter century after the dissolution of the NATO–Warsaw Pact rivalry, the United States and its NATO clients foresaw the possibility of using nuclear weapons in a European war. Until the 2014 annexation of Crimea, such a contingency would have been so remote as to seem absurd, but after the crisis in Ukraine it is at least conceivable as the result of a gradual escalation leading to a fatal miscalculation.

The Obama administration could have officially jettisoned the old cold war doctrine of Flexible Response (a euphemism meaning the potential first use of nuclear weapons) in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, a quadrennial policy statement on the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. strategy. Obama's 2009 speech in Prague, where the president held out the idealistic hope of a nuclear-weapon-free world, raised expectations of sweeping changes in nuclear policy. Instead, a largely Pentagon-driven interagency process dictated that the nuclear policy review recommend the retention of forward-deployed nuclear weapons in Europe. Pouring old wine into new bottles, the bureaucrats christened the doctrine (which was basically the same as Flexible Response) Extended Deterrence.

As always, there was big money in play: concocting a rationale for the operational use of nuclear weapons would necessarily require the hardware to carry out the doctrine. That, in turn, meant that America's aging arsenal of nuclear warheads would have to be modernized. The thirty-year cost of modernizing the weapons and the systems to deliver them—missiles, bombers, and submarines—comes to approximately $1 trillion.
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Once again, Obama agreed to this policy, an express repudiation of the principles of his Prague speech. Yet the Wise Men of the Pentagon are still unconvinced that he is tough enough to deal with Putin.

The puzzle of the Obama presidency is that he keeps going through the motions of conducting military interventions and covert operations, as well as signing off on ambitious strategy reviews, while not appearing to have his heart in it. There is a small degree of validity to the Republican criticism that Obama doesn't have the will to win foreign conflicts—he would have been much better off politically had he never given anyone the impression that the United States would militarily intervene in Syria in 2013. Likewise, the scalding rhetoric that came out of the White House over Russia's annexations in Ukraine: the president conveyed the immanent likelihood of draconian actions, which were never actually on the table. His ambivalence has alienated his progressive voting base, who thought they were electing a peace candidate (although they were insufficiently attentive to his carefully constructed campaign rhetoric), while at
the same time failing to satisfy Robert Gates, the
Washington Post
editorial board, and all the serious grown-ups at the Council on Foreign Relations that he has the stuff to “show leadership.”

Puzzling ambivalence has also been evident in his domestic policy. For six years running, Obama sought bipartisan compromise with the deluded persistence of Captain Ahab, despite abundant evidence that the GOP was in no mood for it. If we are to believe Bob Woodward's ticktock account of the 2011 negotiations over the debt limit, Obama surrounded himself with people like Tim Geithner who advised him to cave to most of the Republican demands in order to get the debt-limit extension. So much time was wasted on the assumption that the GOP could be bought off with reasonable concessions that the clock almost ran out (Standard & Poor's still issued a debt downgrade, despite the fact that default was averted). He finally pacified the Republicans with sequestration (meaning across-the-board cuts) of all government accounts. It is almost certain he did not have to do that, as in manufactured crises like government shutdowns and debt-limit breaches, the side initiating the crisis always loses politically and must eventually fold its hand.

After frittering away those six years when he had at least one house of Congress in Democratic hands, Obama emerged from the 2014 midterm debacle with an epiphany: now was the time to display the populist president that his supporters thought they had elected in 2008. He proposed increases in the minimum wage, paid worker's leave, infrastructure spending, and free tuition for community college. There was only one problem: how was a lame duck president going to get this agenda through the most numerically dominant Republican Congress since 1929?
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That absurd dilemma sums up the reality of his presidency.

Obama's personality is more impenetrable than that of any other president in recent history. Yet he may be, like Napoleon III, a sphinx without a riddle: merely an ambitious politician who tested well with focus groups, and who arrived at the right moment, promising hope and change as a pretext to administer an entrenched system without any conviction. Throughout his presidency, he has been whipsawed by
bureaucratic interests that have reduced his stated agenda to mush. His behavior has unleashed predictable rage on the Right, but also despondency among many on the Left.

It is surprising how much fear his timid policies have generated among the big-money boys. There are no rational grounds for the hyperthyroid reactions of hedge fund bosses like Steven Schwarzman when Obama is largely a champion of the status quo who raises much of his money among Schwarzman's colleagues. Nevertheless, the neoliberal mandarins at the venerable
Economist
say Obama has an image as one “who is hostile to business.”
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It is one thing to shake our heads at the behavior of gun nuts who fear Obama will take away their firearms and send them to a FEMA concentration camp in Montana and quite another to consider that many canny Wall Street operatives, whose business model is based on a reptilian calculation of their own material interests, have succumbed to the irrational idea that totalitarian socialism is just around the corner and that Obama is going to usher it in, when he is only a more hesitant version of his predecessor.

That such a weak reed, who has acceded time and again to the entrenched interests of the permanent state, should incite so much negative passion among so many in the billionaire class suggests they are displacing their fears of the simmering discontent among the 99 percent onto a convenient political symbol. Their touchy defensiveness reveals the contradictions within the political system they dominate. President Obama, who appears to administer that system without enthusiasm or belief, has dissatisfied key constituencies of the Deep State even as he has alarmed the traditionalists who defend the remnants of the constitutional state.

Perhaps the most telling example of the relationship between President Obama and the Deep State comes from a March 2015 interview of John Brennan, his frequently embattled CIA director. Obama has shown Brennan great loyalty through two presidential terms. How did Brennan repay that loyalty—with a humble demonstration of gratitude and respect, perhaps? Obama, he said, did “not have an appreciation” of
national security when he came into office, but with tutelage by himself and other experts “he has gone to school and understands the complexities.” The tone of headmasterly condescension is unmistakable, giving the listener ample grounds to wonder who is really in charge, the president or his national security complex. It is the inner workings of that national security complex that we shall turn to next.

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. . . . No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

—James Madison, in “Political Observations,” 1795 (
Letters and Other Writings of James Madison,
1865, vol. IV)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

—H. L. Mencken,
In Defense of Women
, 1918

Meet Comrade Frolov

From time to time in the course of my career in government, the FBI or Congress's own security offices would warn congressional staff members with security clearances that foreign intelligence agencies were targeting Capitol Hill. In 2000, when I was working at the House Budget Committee, I had a chance to experience this firsthand. I was invited to attend a downtown conference on the Balkans, then an important topic because the United States had intervened militarily in Serbia the previous year and the region was still unstable. Once the conference was over, a member of the audience accosted me, presumably because I had asked a question during the session and had identified my place of business, a formality
required at such meetings. He introduced himself and gave me his business card—Vladimir Frolov of the press section of the Russian embassy. After some perfunctory small talk ending with his invocation of stock Washington etiquette (“We should have lunch sometime”), I pocketed his card and headed back to the Hill.

Patriotism, logic, and self-preservation all dictated that the first thing I did when I got back to my desk was phone my friend Rob Walsh, a recently retired FBI agent. He set the wheels in motion, and soon I was invited to meet with Bureau representatives in the office of the House sergeant at arms. I handed over Frolov's card, and the agents proceeded to tell me that he was already on their radar screen. He might attempt to cultivate me, they explained; how far was I willing to string him along? I wasn't much inclined, as method acting was not my forte, and in any case I had more than enough of my own professional business to attend to. I told them, though, that I'd keep them apprised of any further contacts.

A couple of months later, he called. It was obvious he was speaking from a cell phone, and quite surprisingly the number was not blocked when I looked at my caller ID. The bureau was duly appreciative of the phone number I retrieved, and that was the last I heard from Frolov, as he evidently had bigger fish to fry.

How big I only found out several months later, in March 2001, when the Bush administration expelled fifty-one Russian embassy personnel as “persona non grata,” diplomatic-speak for “spies.” Frolov was not among them, as he had abruptly bolted for Russia just prior to the expulsion order. If the U.S. government intelligence sources who leaked additional details to the press were correct, Frolov was the handler of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who had spied first for the Soviets and then for the Russian Federation for twenty-two years. The Justice Department described the Hanssen case as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.”
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I still don't know whether my infinitesimal contribution to the FBI added another tile to the intelligence mosaic or not, but the conclusion of this tale shows just how the worm can turn: back in Mother Russia, Frolov
became a legitimate journalist, and he has lately been quite critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

These days, I suspect that cloak-and-dagger activity in the manner of a Robert Ludlum novel, while still practiced, is receding in importance compared to cyberespionage. In my last few years on the Hill, Capitol security personnel emphasized that all electronic communications were under regular assault from foreign sources, China most prominent among them.

For many years, the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland Security, and U.S. businesses have been subject to a perpetual torrent of cyberintrusions and cyberattacks from foreign countries. This is an advanced method of waging war that is both covert and stays beneath the traditional legal threshold of state-to-state warfare. No longer does a country need to take the trouble to invade another country militarily in order to plunder its resources (and no longer does the main source of wealth reside in mineral deposits or agricultural bounty or even factories, but in intellectual property and research know-how). Nor does a country need to conduct bombing campaigns in order to disrupt business operations or normal life in the territory it targets.

The hacking of Target in late 2013, when 40 million customer credit cards were compromised, gave us a small taste of the potential economic disruption that we may face in the future. The NSA, whose self-aggrandizing and totalitarian description of its so-called collection posture is to “collect it all, exploit it all, partner it all, sniff it all, know it all,” and which scours Facebook posts both for biographical data and photographs for its facial-recognition data banks, neither averted the Target hack nor shut it down as it continued for several weeks. In January 2015, we learned that as early as 2010 the NSA had covertly inserted spyware into the computers of North Korean government-sponsored hackers, allowing the agency to know what the North Koreans were targeting. How, then, did the North Korean regime succeed in hacking Sony? Likewise, the inexcusable breach of the personnel files of the Office of Personnel Management, which exposed detailed records of 22 million current and
former employees. Why are American government, businesses, and individuals so vulnerable if the NSA possesses such comprehensive investigative tools?

These basic deficiencies plague the other intelligence agencies as well. Has the CIA's analysis of foreign events improved since the weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle in Iraq, when the CIA's director declared the presence of WMDs there to be such a certainty as to constitute a “slam dunk”? Did the CIA's analysts provide the White House with an accurate assessment of Vladimir Putin's likely moves as the United States attempted in early 2014 to edge Ukraine toward association with the European Union and possible membership in NATO? Putin had clearly telegraphed his intentions back in 2008, when he struck out at Georgia under nearly identical circumstances. While the bulk of responsibility for the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine lies with the Kremlin, Washington bears considerable blame for its accessory role in stoking the unrest in Kiev that led to the coup. Later in the book, I shall describe some of the professional operatives involved in that project. That the CIA was either professionally incapable of seeing where their caper could lead, or suspected but did not tell the White House, is shocking. These glaring deficiencies in the basic functioning of the NSA and the CIA urgently need to be rectified.

The Pentagon: Sparing No Expense Not to Defend Us

The United States needs a defense establishment and an intelligence apparatus; only a hopeless idealist or an ostrich would deny that. In some ways, however, our huge national security establishment has been lagging in its role of defending the country from the newer forms of espionage and warfare. That said, providing for a military and intelligence establishment that protects the country and keeps our leaders adequately informed about world developments is not to be confused with maintaining, at crushing expense, a globe-girdling military colossus. Figures vary according to how one defines a military base, but, according to the
Department of Defense Base Structure Report for Fiscal Year 2013,
the Pentagon has
598 overseas bases in forty foreign countries. There were 193,111 U.S. military personnel deployed overseas, exclusive of those in Afghanistan. During 2014, U.S. Special Operations Forces deployed to 133 countries for a variety of liaison, training, and covert missions.
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Paying for these and related military activities together constitutes by some estimates the largest single category of the federal budget. For 2014, Congress enacted a defense budget of $587 billion. While this sum is smaller than annual spending for Social Security, there is much more to the national security state than the Pentagon's far-from-modest budget.

Winslow T. Wheeler, a former national security analyst with Congress and the Government Accountability Office, is of the view that the Department of Defense budget leaves out significant related costs and legacy financing: DOD's military retirement costs are carried elsewhere in the federal budget; nuclear weapons are in the Department of Energy's budget; and the cost of caring for veterans is borne by an independent agency. Wheeler believes the State Department's budget should be included as well: since the end of the cold war, State has emphasized so-called coercive diplomacy, and several secretaries of state have been far more eager for military intervention than DOD's military and civilian leaders. Finally, he includes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Some may argue with this choice, as Homeland Security fulfills a domestic function, but I believe Wheeler is right: DHS was created as a direct result of 9/11, when a blowback resulted from repeated U.S. interventions in the Middle East and the arming and training of questionable insurgent groups. The Department of Defense, for all its hundreds of billions of annual spending, was incapable of defending our national territory, or even its own headquarters, the Pentagon. Ironically, the heraldic symbol of the U.S. Army's Military District of Washington is an image of the Washington Monument with a sword placed diagonally across it in a protective manner. The motto is “This we'll defend.” But not anymore—it's now a job for DHS. A former Hill colleague who went on to work at DHS recalled a meeting with personnel from the DOD's Northern Command, which is tasked with giving military support to civilian authorities
in case of a domestic emergency. He said Northern Command was hard-pressed to think of
any
circumstance in which it would employ the DOD's assets. Given the Pentagon's virtual nonstop involvement in foreign interventions and unpreparedness to defend U.S. territory, perhaps it should change its name to the Department of Offense.

Wheeler calculates that all of this national security spending by the various agencies totals around $1 trillion a year.
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To put that in perspective, during the first dozen years of the twenty-first century, the Pentagon alone spent money at an average rate of more than a billion dollars a day—every single day. For twelve years, the United States was spending more on its military than the next ten countries combined.
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Only such staggering largesse could permit the military to incur costs of anywhere from $100 to $600 per
gallon
to deliver motor fuel to the scene of combat in Afghanistan.
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A country that indulges in that kind of extravagance risks imposing severe constraints on the resources available to improve the health, safety, and economic productivity of its citizens.

Throughout 2013 and 2014, press attention focused on budget cuts to the Pentagon arising from the Budget Control Act of 2011. What the media almost always neglected to point out was that military spending, even after reductions mandated by the act, remained well above the average defense budget during the cold war—a time when the United States faced the combined militaries of the Warsaw Pact.

Since the removal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq on December 31, 2011, the American people have been under the impression that the United States has been withdrawing forces and cutting military budgets. Republicans, in particular, have kept up a constant oratory about defense cuts as part of their perennial campaign to make any Democrat occupying the Oval Office look weak on defense. They are clearly intent on depicting the 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was both an Obama campaign promise and a move a majority of Americans approved of, look like some sort of strategic calamity in the making. In the end, the president compromised, maintaining a floor of 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014 with no time limit mandating their withdrawal.

But all of the talk about cuts and retreat creates a misleading impression of what the military is actually doing and, more important, its plans for the future. Military spending is down only slightly from its peak in 2010, and then mostly because of the decline of the exorbitantly expensive combat activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well the mandatory budget sequestration that Republicans themselves insisted upon. Once the drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan were completed—although, as recent events have shown, any sigh of relief at being done with Iraq has been premature—the military-industrial complex immediately set its gaze on new horizons.

The Pentagon Seeks New Theaters of Conflict

Few Americans have heard of AFRICOM, or the U.S. African Command. It did not officially exist before 2008, although planning for it began in 2004. Incongruously, its headquarters are in Stuttgart, Germany, where it will remain for the foreseeable future. It has only one permanent, acknowledged military base in Africa, but it maintains a shadowy and secretive temporary presence in most of the continent's fifty-five nations—including, for example, a surveillance drone operation at a facility called Base Aérienne 101 at the international airport in Niamey, the capital of Niger.

The only base that the Pentagon openly acknowledges is Camp Lemonnier, a former French Foreign Legion facility in Djibouti, in the horn of Africa. It is host to approximately 4,000 military personnel and contractors, and the military has big plans for it. On May 5, 2014, President Obama announced that he had reached an agreement with the president of Djibouti, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, to lease Camp Lemonnier for the next ten years for the substantial sum of $630 million. The annual lease fee is nearly double the $38 million per year that the United States had been paying to that point. In 2024, the United States has the option to renew the lease for a further ten years at a renegotiated rate.
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