Just as the leaders of US national security thinking led America into the war in Iraq based on the false premise of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and reckless, but politically powerful, rhetoric, Washington's elite are now circling the wagons around the defense budget. They are using the same disingenuous tactics and the same kind of rhetorical gibberish. While they have successfully intimidated the rest of the political system, they are also making huge fools of themselves.
I express my views on this and some defense budget facts you have not heard from these people in a commentary. Titled “The Stench of Elitism in Defense Spending,” it is available at the Politics page of the Huffington Post. Under the better mannered title “Elites Are Wrong,” an edit is also available at AOL Defense.
NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 27: Over 700 hundred Continental and United pilots, joined by additional pilots from other Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) carriers, demonstrate in front of Wall Street on September 27, 2011 in New York City. The pilots want to draw attention to the lack of progress on negotiations of the pilots' joint collective bargaining agreement ahead of the one-year anniversary of the corporate merger close date of United and Continental airlines.
Joshua Foust – Joshua Foust is a fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net.
The Atlantic, 20 September 2011
This morning I testified at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs' Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia (a mouthful, I know) about how we can better manage and administer contractors within the intelligence community. I'm pasting a brief excerpt of my written testimony below, followed by a link to the full text of my remarks.
Every contract the government issues for a company to perform work is defined by the Statement of Work (SOW). This is a document that defines the parameters of the work the contractor will perform, including a description of the project, expected duties the contractor must fulfill, and the outputs and metrics by which performance will be measured. These are often poorly written, kept intentionally vague, and wind up not actually addressing the stated intent of the contracts.
As one example, every SOW I've had to either administer, edit, review, or write has stated as a basic metric of performance the number of employees the contractor should hire. That is, the basic means by which the government measures the contractor's performance is based first and foremost on the number of people hired to work on the contract. This has two serious consequences that affect the contracting environment: it removes the distinction between employees that would make work products better, and it confuses the number of employees with contract performance.
The frankly bizarre system of hiring intelligence contractors is born from several interdependent processes: getting a security clearance, getting hired, and getting “read on” to work at a government site. The system of getting a clearance is structured such that those with clearances are given preference above those without clearance, regardless of the relevant experience of either employee. In other words, if two candidates are competing for a job with a contractor, and one has deep relevant experience but no clearance, she will most likely lose to a candidate with less relevant experience but a current and active security clearance.
There is a great deal more to this, and I would suggest anyone interested in this topic to download both my own testimony (At SCRIBD, or PDF here), and checking out the Hearing page, which includes written remarks from Daniel Gordon from the Office of Management and Budget, DHS Chief of Intelligence Charles E. Allen, Scott Amey from the Project on Government Oversight, and Dr. Mark Lowenthal.
I've been driving the 1964 MGB (my last remaining possession, it needs $5,000 of underbody work to survive the winter) around New England and am in New York now. I've been following the US Day of Rage plans (they were also announced here) but have been surprised to find a number of normally intelligent middle-class men I have met along the way to be timid about the US Day of Rage movement. They cannot get past the name and of course never get to the part about non-violent demands for electoral reform and integrity.
So here is my short brief on US Day of Rage, perhaps it can help get past these perceptual barriers. I do recommend that US Day of Rage create an alternative web site, American for Electoral Integrity–kind of like the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference also calls itself the THINK Conference for the green eyeshade types without a clue. I'll be attending this year, 4-6 November in San Francisco area.
MEMORANDUM
Subject: US Day of Rage for the USA—Who, Why, What, When, Where, How
Date: 17 September 2011
IMPORTANCE: Understanding the US Day of Rage is vital to understanding the deeper mood of the public.
1. Who. US Day of Rage is an informal, social network based movement that started as a protest against Wall Street with a planned occupation today, and rapidly morphed into a cross-country network of mini-demonstrations. The “US Day of Rage” is being supported by internet groups who oppose corruption in the government such as Adbusters, Culture Jammers, and Anonymous. The original call to occupy Wall Street was put out by Adbusters, and the US Day of Rage and NYC General Assembly have since joined.
2. Why. Their capital demand is fair and free elections to overcome the special interest takeover of Congress and the Executive. Please note that there is real convergence and resonance between the Day of Rage network and the Tea Party/Sarah Palin remonstrations against “crony capitalism.”
Not only is the Super Committee headed straight for failure, the “automatic” cuts that would happen in the Pentagon budget are not going to occur. To “save” the Pentagon budget from further cuts, it's doomsday for budget restraint in the short term. The only thing to be elevated for the longer term and foreseeable future is our political and governmental dysfunction.
Congress has taken a hostage that no one wants to shoot
EXTRACT:
It is not going to happen that way.
First, the supercommittee is bound to fail; it will reach no meaningful budget agreement.
Second, when the committee fails, the defense cuts envisioned by the supposedly automatic trigger mechanism will not occur. That will be for the simple reason that almost no one wants that to happen. While they are quite mistaken about the consequences, almost everyone on Capitol Hill (and in the Pentagon) thinks that those defense reductions will be “devastating,” “disastrous,” “doomsday” and any other apocalyptic term you can think of.
In short, the debt deal took a hostage that no one wants to shoot.
. . . . .
That “frozen” 2011 level will be more than twice the combined defense budgets of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Somalia. It will be more than $80 billion more than we spent, on average, during the Cold War when we faced a threatening and heavily armed Soviet Union and a hostile, dogmatically communist China. In the absence of these two huge threats, we are now being told we need to spend more.
Seeking to whip up public support for what’s expected to be a hard-fought budget battle in Congress, a group of defense contractors launched a lobbying campaign urging an end to cuts in military spending.
The campaign, named Second to None, was introduced by the Aerospace Industries Assn. trade group Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington. The group, which represents manufacturers and suppliers of aircraft, space systems and engines, warned of potential job losses and national security risks.
“While we do have a fancy logo, this campaign will not be your typical, glitzy, short term inside the Beltway blitz of advertising followed by deafening silence after one piece of legislation or another is finalized,” said Marion Blakey, chief executive of the association. “This will be a sustained effort, in states, cities and towns, as well as in Washington, to caution the American people and our leaders of risks associated with cutting defense further.”
According to the association, aerospace and defense supports 1 million direct jobs in the U.S. and affects another 2.9 million indirect jobs.
Phi Beta Iota: The defense contractors are not being honest. As Winslow Wheeler and others have documented, most of the defense dollars go into overhead and out-sourcing. Just as it is costing us $50 million per Taliban in a body bag, here these maliciously deception people are suggesting that the $1 trillion a year for defense and homeland “security” will protect one million jobs. Do the math–at a time when 22% of workers are unemployed, with more on the way once the federal government starts taking cuts, this is not just idiocy, it is treason. We NEED to cut defense, homeland “security,” and secret intelligence SHARPLY–while providing all those cut with a year's termination pay–to achieve the savings necessary to “reset” the economy including full salary training for every unemployed person in America.
Thousands of people from across the country are planning to converge on Wall Street this Saturday to protest America’s “corrupt democratic process” and the use of corporate moneyin American elections.
The day has already seen support from hactivist group Anti Sec, which wrote on Twitter Thursday: “Americans it is now our time. The Tunisians did it, then the Egyptians. It is OUR time. It is OUR America.” Anti-consumerist magazine AdBusters asked on its site: “Is American ripe for a Tahrir moment?”
Phi Beta Iota: There isn't a single politician out there that “gets” this, with one possible exception we will identify if and when he makes reference to the connection between the USA Day of Rage, his campaign, and the need for Electoral Reform–there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed relatively quickly and simply via the restoration of the integrity of our electoral process and our government.
