The Defense Department under Dick Cheney’s leadership used several justifications for maintaining the U.S. military on a war footing after the Cold War ended. One of them was to counter drug trafficking. This was mentioned 11 times in the 1993 planning document that Cheney released in 1993 titled “Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy”.
In actuality, taking Cheney at his word, this and other justifications have proven to be entirely unrealistic. Cheney’s defense planning and strategy showed a degree of incompetence that is astounding, but which is, in my judgment, typical of the federal government’s departments in general and certainly characterizes Defense. In the case of drugs, one need only look at Afghanistan before and after the U.S. invasion to see that the U.S. has produced exactly the opposite of what Cheney so glowingly depicted. The rise in opium production since the U.S. occupation is now an accepted fact.
Not taking Cheney at his word, we observe that the defense planning document mentions drugs with respect to regions that girdle the globe. This provides an excuse or rationale for the intervention of the U.S. military everywhere on the planet. It, like anti-terrorism, is a perfect Pavlovian bell to ring whenever the government wants to get involved in some foreign country. There is a laundry list of such excuses and bells that make the public and media salivate: “…efforts to counter terrorism, drug trafficking, and other threats to internal democratic order, assistance to peacekeeping efforts; the provision of humanitarian and security assistance; limits on the spread of militarily significant technology, particularly the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction along with the means to deliver them; and the use of defense-to-defense contacts to assist in strengthening civil-military institutions and encourage reductions in the economic burden of military spending.”
The federal government’s departments have bureaucracies that are continually producing garbage plans like this that result in monumental foul-ups while simultaneously protecting the turf of the bureaucrats. The degree of public questioning of these plans by Congress, critics, academics and the media is incredibly low by comparison. The institutional means of monitoring and controlling these plans and their implementation are exceedingly weak. This is how government stays out of control.
The government bureaus and departments do not intend to be incompetent and to produce unintended consequences, such as in creating chaos in Iraq or causing increased opium production in Afghanistan. They don’t intend to produce ever more virulent strains of terrorists and blowback. The planners do not intend to make monumental blunders. But they do, and that’s because of the system of government itself. The public doesn’t adequately monitor and control those whom it elects and still less does it control the bureaucracies and agencies that those elected set up. The elected officials do not adequately monitor and control the departments and agencies they set up. This inadequate monitoring is built into the system due to perverse and weak incentives. Government lacks prices and markets for what it does. Voting provides next to no control. Media are entertainment vehicles, not set up to monitor government. Government buys off media too. Bureaucracies insulate themselves. The government fights for its secrecy tooth and nail. Outside interests capture government agencies. Government powers are used for private interests and against any notion of the common good. One could hardly design a worse system.
7:55 am on October 29, 2014
