Sometimes fact certainly beats the imaginations of fictions. Reading almost like an academic’s scholarly version of a sinister work of fiction manufactured out of the most macabre recesses of the imaginations Orwell, Huxley, and other visionaries of dystopian totalitarian society,
A just released eerily disturbing Pentagon study foretells collapse of Washington’s world empire, and advocates the authors' very own version of a “Mein Kampf” to restore Washington World dominance through increase and expanded use of military might, furthered total surveillance, and control and manipulation of opinion and perception through information control and disinformation. Without further ado ...
Pentagon War College Study for Saving Collapsing Empire
An extraordinary new Pentagon study has concluded that the U.S.-backed international order established after World War 2 is “fraying” and may even be “collapsing”, leading the United States to lose its position of “primacy” in world affairs. The solution proposed … is, however, more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military expansionism.
The document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase of transformation in which U.S. power is in decline, international order is unravelling, and the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling. Having lost its past status of “pre-eminence”, the U.S. now inhabits a dangerous, unpredictable “post-primacy” world, whose defining feature is “resistance to authority”. … The report, based on a year-long intensive research process involving consultation with key agencies across the Department of Defense and U.S. Army, calls for the U.S. government to invest in more surveillance, better propaganda through “strategic manipulation” of public opinion, and a “wider and more flexible” U.S. military.
The report was published in June by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute … The study was supported and sponsored by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate; the Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch); the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Develop*ment; and the Army Study Program Management Office.
Collapse
“While the United States remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” the report laments.“In brief, the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing.” …
Warning that “global events will happen faster than DoD is currently equipped to handle”, the study concludes that the U.S. “can no longer count on the unassailable position of dominance, supremacy, or pre-eminence it enjoyed for the 20-plus years after the fall of the Soviet Union.” …
[U.S.] can no longer even “automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” …
Defending the “status quo”
The document is particularly candid in setting out why the U.S. sees these countries as threats — not so much because of tangible military or security issues, but mainly because their pursuit of their own legitimate national interests is, in itself, seen as undermining American dominance. Russia and China are described as “revisionist forces” … The premise of this conclusion is that the U.S.-backed “status quo” international order is fundamentally “favorable” … Most conspicuous of all, there is little substantiation in the document of how Russia and China pose a meaningful threat to American national security. … Far from insisting, as the U.S. government does officially, that Iran and North Korea pose as nuclear threats, the document instead insists they are considered problematic for the expansion of the “U.S.-led order.”
Losing the propaganda war
Amidst the challenge posed by these competing powers, the Pentagon study emphasizes the threat from non-state forces undermining the “U.S.-led order” in different ways, primarily through information. … The “hyper-connectivity” … is leading to the uncontrolled spread of information. …“Wide uncontrolled access to technology that most now take for granted is rapidly undermining prior advantages of discrete, secret, or covert intentions, actions, or operations….”
This information revolution, in turn, is leading to the “generalized disintegration of traditional authority structures … fueled, and/or accelerated by hyperconnectivity and the obvious decay and potential failure of the post-Cold War status quo.”
Civil unrest
The document hints that such populist civil unrest is likely to become prominent in Western homelands, including inside the United States. …
“the same forces at work there are similarly eroding the reach and authority of governments worldwide…”
The U.S. homeland is flagged-up as being especially vulnerable to the breakdown of “traditional authority structures” … There is little reflection, however, on the role of the US government itself in fomenting such endemic distrust, through its own policies.
Bad facts
“Fact-inconvenient” information consists of the exposure of “details that, by implication, undermine legitimate authority and erode the relationships between governments and the governed” — facts, for instance, that reveal how government policy is corrupt, incompetent or undemocratic.
“Fact-perilous” information refers basically to national security leaks from whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning, “exposing highly classified, sensitive, or proprietary information that can be used to accelerate a real loss of tactical, operational, or strategic advantage.”
“Fact-toxic” information pertains to actual truths which, the document complains, are “exposed in the absence of context”, and therefore poison “important political discourse.” Such information is seen as being most potent in triggering outbreaks of civil unrest …
In short, the U.S. Army War College study team believe that the spread of ‘facts’ challenging the legitimacy of American empire is a major driver of its decline: not the actual behavior of the empire which such facts point to.
Mass surveillance and psychological warfare
The Pentagon study therefore comes up with two solutions to the information threat.
The first is to make better use of U.S. mass surveillance capabilities, which are described as “the largest and most sophisticated and integrated intelligence complex in world.” …
Pentagon officials need to simply accept, therefore, that: “… the U.S. homeland, individual American citizens, and U.S. public opinion and perceptions will increasingly become battlefields.”
Military supremacy
The Pentagon report sees expanding the U.S. military as the only option. … The document demands a military force so powerful it can preserve “maximum freedom of action”, and allow the U.S. to “dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes.”
One would be hard-pressed to find a clearer statement of imperial intent in any U.S. Army document:
“the post-primacy reality demands a wider and more flexible military force that can generate advantage and options across the broadest possible range of military demands. … maintenance of military advantage preserves maximum freedom of action… Finally, it allows U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unacceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.”
Once again, military power is essentially depicted as a tool for the U.S. to force, threaten and cajole other countries into submission to U.S. demands. The very concept of ‘defense’ is thus re-framed as the capacity to use overwhelming military might to get one’s way — anything which undermines this capacity ends up automatically appearing as a threat that deserves to be attacked.
Narcissism
The document … represents “the collective wisdom” of the numerous officials consulted. In that sense, the document is a uniquely insightful window into the mind of the Pentagon, and how embarrassingly limited its cognitive scope really is. And this in turn reveals not only why the Pentagon’s approach is bound to make things worse, but also what an alternative more productive approach might look like. Launched in June 2016 and completed in April 2017, the U.S. Army War College research project involved extensive consultation with officials across the Pentagon, including representatives of the joint and service staffs, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM), U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM); U.S. Forces, Japan (USFJ), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Intelligence Council, U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), and U.S. Army Pacific [US*ARPAC] and Pacific Fleet [PACFLT]). The study team also consulted with a handful of American think-tanks of a somewhat neoconservative persuasion: the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for the Study of War. No wonder, then, that its findings are so myopic. … it involves little more than talking to yourself? Is it any wonder that the solutions offered represent an echo chamber calling to amplify precisely the same policies that have contributed to the destabilization of U.S. power? …
A large body of data demonstrates that the escalating risks to U.S. power have come not from outside U.S. power, but from the very manner in which U.S. power has operated. The breakdown of the U.S.-led international order, from this perspective, is happening as a direct consequence of deep-seated flaws in the structure, values and vision of that order. In this context, the study’s conclusions are less a reflection of the actual state of the world, than of the way the Pentagon sees itself and the world. … most telling of all is the document’s utter inability to recognize the role of the Pentagon itself in systematically pursuing a wide range of policies over the last several decades which have contributed directly to the very “instability” it now wants to defend against. … the document is a powerful illustration of the self-limiting failure of conventional risk-assessment approaches. …
The Pentagon study’s recommendations call for an intensification of the very imperial policies that futurist Professor Johan Galtung, who accurately forecasted the demise of the USSR, predicts will accelerate the “collapse of the U.S. empire” by around 2020. … as the empire falls, lashing out in its death throes, what comes after?
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Originally Posted by Zippyjuan
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