Why US Officers Believe Pentagon Officials Take Them for a Fool
Why US Officers Believe Pentagon Officials Take Them for a Fool
Serious tensions are simmering between “interventionists” and “America Firsters” in the US Army, American author Justin Raimondo warns.
While the Pentagon and NATO officials are playing the game called “Chicken-Little, sky-is-falling,” in claiming that Russia is harboring plans to invade Europe, other US military officers urge their counterparts “to stop waving the bloody red shirt,” American journalist and the editorial director of Antiwar.com Justin Raimondo writes in his article.
Predictably, the whole “Russians-are-coming” fuss is all about the money, he stresses.
“In early April, a battalion of senior military officials appeared before a Senate panel and testified that the US Army is ‘outranged and outgunned,’ particularly in any future conflict with Russia. Arguing for a much bigger budget for the Army, they claimed that, absent a substantial increase in funding, the Russians would overtake us and, even scarier, ‘the army of the future will be too small to secure the nation’,” Raimondo narrates, referring to Lieutenant General Herbert R. McMaster, Jr.’s testimony at the US Senate Committee on Armed Service.
In a similar vein the US influential think tank RAND Corporation claimed in February 2016 that Russian military forces could overrun NATO’s Baltic footholds in 60 hours.
Then, in late March, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter warned American lawmakersagainst sequestering the US defense budget.
“Ash justified all the needless spending by telling the Senators that there are five ‘security challenges’ confronting the United States — terrorism, North Korea, China, Russia and Iran — before lapsing into Pentagon-speak about why more money is always better than less money,” noted Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Case Officer and Army Intelligence Officer, in his April Op-Edfor the Unz Review.
It is worth mentioning that the US defense budget has skyrocketed by almost $315 billion since 2001.
“And of course the [US] hawks are eager to seize on any excuse to expand an already bloated US military budget — one that exceeds Russian military expenditures by seven-fold,” Raimondo remarks.
It would be a mistake to think that all US military officers are planning to dig up the hatchet.
The American author refers to anarticle by Mark Perry for Politico.com which is entitled “The US Army’s War Over Russia.” Perry cites senior US military figures, throwing “a rhetorical hand grenade” into the camp of American interventionists.
“This is the ‘Chicken-Little, sky-is-falling’ set in the Army. These guys want us to believe the Russians are 10 feet tall. There’s a simpler explanation: The Army is looking for a purpose, and a bigger chunk of the budget. And the best way to get that is to paint the Russians as being able to land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. What a crock,” a senior Pentagon official told Perry.
“A growing group of dissenters both in and out of uniform think that McMaster’s grim warnings about Army capabilities dodges the real issue — of whether the Army is willing to change the way it fights wars,” Perry stressed.
The journalists call attention to the fact that American interventionism is steadily bankrupting the United States.
“You know, which would you rather have — a high-speed rail system, or another brigade in Poland? Because that’s what this is really all about,” a Pentagon officer said, as cited by Perry.
Raimondo warns that “a civil war within the US military is raging.”
“The anti-Russian propaganda campaign has been ongoing for years: the military-industrial complex and their neoconservative allies (and beneficiaries) need a new enemy now that the ‘war on terrorism’ is wearing a little threadbare,” he underscores.
The question of who will prevail, US interventionists or “America Firsters,” remains open.
Read more: http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160518/1039841937/us-army-dissent-pentagon.html
