Customer Reviews

Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace

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As a recent refugee from a career spent as a civilian `foot soldier' in the midst of the military's war against itself that Greider describes in this book, it is interesting and surprising that someone so singularly uninvolved with this country's long-term weapon acquisition system can catch so precisely the malady that confronts us. Greider's analysis captures the horns on which the dilemma is caught quite well, although I must admit to being disappointed to notice he downplays the way in which rampant military careerism plays into this disastrous recent history of misappropriation and wasting of billions of dollars in military funding.

Officers are so intent on practicing self-advancement that they confuse personal success with accomplishing the mission. Thus, when forced to decide between making difficult decisions regarding allowing troubled acquisition programs to proceed, they invariably choose to paper over the problems so as to substantially enhance their own chances of getting promoted and moved to their next assignment before the deck of cards fall for their successor. The sucessor must then ask the contractor to help him rebuild the deck of cards, which means the military inevitably become ethically and legally compromised fellow-travelers in the nonperformance and endless technical shortcomings the contractor incurs. In short, they lose thier effective management by unwitting or unethical collusion with contractors who deliberately underbid for contracts knowing they will never have to produce a contract meeting the stated competitive requirements because of the insidious and self-defeating corruption within the professional military acquisition corps.

Also, Greider's take on the way in which short-term tactical thinking is endangering the long-term force readiness is illuminating. The truth of the matter is that one does much better assuming the reasons we buy certain weapon systems in various numbers has more to do with Congressional prerogatives and rampant corruption than it does with any sort of objective force structure analysis. Contractors bypass the military by influencing Congressional representatives and their staffers. Thus, even if a military program manager does attempt to steer the straight and narrow course by trying to force the contractor to conform to contract requirements, he often finds himself outgunned and outmaneuvered by Contractors influencing his superiors and other federal officials.

Another way in which the current crisis manifests itself is through the militarization of civil service responsibilities, under which hundreds of thousands of Department of Defense civilians (most citizens do not realize that over ninety percent of all federal downsizing since 1990 has been accomplished within the several services comprising the DOD) have been laid off or forced out in favor of contracting the work out to contractors (read retiring military officers here) who will conform to do the bidding of their military employers without ever raising the kinds of knowing and informed ethical and legal objections a professionally-trained civilian acquisition corps does.

Since it is certainly a commonplace observation that military preparedness and internal corruption are historically found to be an endemic problem for peacetime professional military forces in all industrial deomocracies, there may in fect be no useful way to constrain the negative influence careerism has on our country's force readiness. But there is much we can do to limit the negative influence the military has on weapon system acquisition and wiser use of federal tax dollars in support of national defense policy. We must remove the exclusive program management prerogative we have given them in favor of enpowering a resurgent professional civilian acquisition corps. Yet Greider's analysis is a start in the right direction in terms of initiating a more vigorous national debate regarding how that money is allocated and subsequently obligated and spent by the several branches of the military. I recommend this book to anyone interested in how those several trillion dollars are spent over the next ten years.

As I write this, we are at war in the Balkans. The cost of air strikes and further military actions there will all have to come from extra billions of our tax money--the Pentagon budget already goes to the gigantic weapon systems that Grieder's book pictures so effectively. The U.S. public has little awareness of how our Cold War level defense budgets robs our society of social programs such as good schools and health care. "Fortress America" is a rare inside look at how a handful of corporations keep their stranglehold on our society in peace as well as war.

Congress must be made to know that this vast military spendingmust be hewn down. The current "defense" spending is notabout making us a secure nation but about keeping the corporate welfare hogs...LockMartin, Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, and others pacified and happy. Mr. Greider shows us the overall picture of this collision of corporate-military-legislative arena in FORTRESS AMERICA. Is there anyone else out there who feels that $300 billion dollars can be spent somewhere else?

The book is ahead of its time. The problems that the book identifies are (somewhat) being addressed by the Army Transformation toward new technology and new types of weapons.

If this book reads like the tabloids, then please tell me which newspaper. I'd like to read related facts.

A puzzle still remains: How to keep weapon production ready for war without overproducing? Some old weapons are being upgraded or retrofit. However, obsolescence remains a major issue. Parts are really hard to replace when the vendor no longer exists, etc....

-Nomadder

This book contains useful facts and analysis, but I doubt it's moved many people to action. (Of course the policies it advocates have not been adopted by the Bush II regime.)

People like me who would like to see our military drastically reduced and who have little faith in the good intentions of anyone involved in it are likely to be turned off by Greider's more middle of the road views and what appears to be his reluctance to express some of the anti-military views he does hold.

People who long for an ever bigger military are unlikely to be converted by this book.

I think Greider wanted to avoid preaching to a choir, but walking down the middle, or pretending to, has found him fewer readers than his information and ideas deserve. He ought to have passionately argued a case (a moral case, not a strategic or economic one) for radical change. Those inclined to agree would have been more likely to get their hands on the book, and those inclined to disagree would have ended up picking it up too in order to know their opponent. Some would have been persuaded.

On page 10, Greider predicts a decrease in military ("defense") spending because this is what the public wants. On page 172 Greider points out a yawning chasm between what the public wants and what happens. This is illustrative of a gradual shift. The book starts out sounding like an article in the Washington Post and concludes sounding like one in the Nation.

The corruption analyzed along the way is not terribly new to readers of the Nation, but it's useful to have these facts and anecdotes in one place. The fact that a single aircraft carrier costs $5 billion, the same price as a proposed National Housing Trust Fund, is the sort of thing that cannot be restated enough.

What we could have used much more than this book was a plan for tying opposition to military waste into campaigns for positive public spending. We have for too long desperately needed to transform tax-and-spend proposals into axe-the-military-and-spend proposals.

We NEED to work out the politics of proposing and fighting a grassroots campaign for specific public school or Medicaid improvements tied to specific eliminations of military pork.

And quit calling it "defense" for godsake!

Interesting 1998 book discussing the U.S. military's inability to deal with post-Cold War realities. Greider argues that, determined to maintain all its Cold War capabilities as well as the capacity and profitability of the defense industry, the military failed to adjust staffing, procurement, and strategic planning to the `new world order.' Most of his conclusions hold up well post-9/11: an emphasis on high-tech weaponry at the expense of appropriate staffing levels has led to near-disaster in occupied Iraq, and the vast ramping-up in the defense budget hasn't helped retrieve the situation--though, ironically, it has helped shore up defense industry profits and avoid the downsizing of that sector that Greider predicted. As for the peace dividend, it is long gone.

In 200 startling pages, William Gireder tells America how our insatiable appetite for all things military has led us into a national dilemma, the economic and global implications of which are frightening.

Grieder's 'wake up call' details a bloated military industrial machine which has consumed much of our national wealth, and now has nowhere to direct its massive inventories.

Greider examines the political, social and economic effects from the perspectives of generals, line workers and politicians alike. The book has an excellent read, which will hold your interest through every paragraph. You will not be tempted to sigh and page ahead.

Grieder tells us how we got here, and offers a thesis to explain the current administration's obsession with finding a new boogey man to justify the continued propping up of a military industrial complex whose utlity expired along with the threat it geared up to face for decades - the Soviet Union.

As a recent refugee from a career spent as a civilian `foot soldier' in the midst of the military's war against itself that Greider describes in this book, it is interesting and surprising that someone so singularly uninvolved with this country's long-term weapon acquisition system can catch so precisely the malady that confronts us. Greider's analysis captures the horns on which the dilemma is caught quite well, although I must admit to being disappointed to notice he downplays the way in which rampant military careerism plays into this disastrous recent history of misappropriation and wasting of billions of dollars in military funding.

Officers are so intent on practicing self-advancement that they confuse personal success with accomplishing the mission. Thus, when forced to decide between making difficult decisions regarding allowing troubled acquisition programs to proceed, they invariably choose to paper over the problems so as to substantially enhance their own chances of getting promoted and moved to their next assignment before the deck of cards fall for their successor. The successor must then ask the contractor to help him rebuild the deck of cards, which means the military inevitably become ethically and legally compromised fellow-travelers in the nonperformance and endless technical shortcomings the contractor incurs. In short, they lose their effective management by unwitting or unethical collusion with contractors who deliberately underbid for contracts knowing they will never have to produce a contract meeting the stated competitive requirements because of the insidious and self-defeating corruption within the professional military acquisition corps.

Also, Greider's take on the way in which short-term tactical thinking is endangering the long-term force readiness is illuminating. The truth of the matter is that one does much better assuming the reasons we buy certain weapon systems in various numbers has more to do with Congressional prerogatives and rampant corruption than it does with any sort of objective force structure analysis. Contractors bypass the military by influencing Congressional representatives and their staffers. Thus, even if a military program manager does attempt to steer the straight and narrow course by trying to force the contractor to conform to contract requirements, he often finds himself outgunned and outmaneuvered by Contractors influencing his superiors and other federal officials.

Another way in which the current crisis manifests itself is through the militarization of civil service responsibilities, under which hundreds of thousands of Department of Defense civilians (most citizens do not realize that over ninety percent of all federal downsizing since 1990 has been accomplished within the several services comprising the DOD) have been laid off or forced out in favor of contracting the work out to contractors (read retiring military officers here) who will conform to do the bidding of their military employers without ever raising the kinds of knowing and informed ethical and legal objections a professionally-trained civilian acquisition corps does.

Since it is certainly a commonplace observation that military preparedness and internal corruption are historically found to be an endemic problem for peacetime professional military forces in all industrial democracies, there may in fact be no useful way to constrain the negative influence careerism has on our country's force readiness. But there is much we can do to limit the negative influence the military has on weapon system acquisition and wiser use of federal tax dollars in support of national defense policy. We must remove the exclusive program management prerogative we have given them in favor of empowering a resurgent professional civilian acquisition corps. Yet Greider's analysis is a start in the right direction in terms of initiating a more vigorous national debate regarding how that money is allocated and subsequently obligated and spent by the several branches of the military. I recommend this book to anyone interested in how those several trillion dollars are spent over the next ten years.

Eye opening look into the vicious cycle caused by the Military~Industrial Complex and why America has to spend so much money towards military spending. Good Read! Had to write a book review on it and ended up Loving it!

Fortress America was published in 1998. At the time of the publishing of this book the Berlin Wall was gone and the U.S.S.R. had collapsed. With the disappearance of Russia as Public Enemy # 1 for the U.S., America was now in a quandary. The Cold War was over. What do we do about our massive military? Our Cold War enemy was gone. The Russian threat to our security was gone. Should we dismantle our military? Reorganize? Downsize? How do we do it?

Fortress America is a book that analyzed the problem in store for the U.S. in downsizing its military capacities.

I'm sure it was not Mr. Greider's intention to present an apology on the impossibility of downsizing our military and the necessity for America to seek new enemies and unnecessary but available wars but this book, in my opinion, is the explanation for just such a scenario.
Mr. Greider in his thought provoking manner, his exhaustive research and his presentation of the facts and figures, makes our present state of affairs obvious.
"If the world is at peace, why should America now have to remobilize? There are no persuasive answers at present.
"To justify the significant budget increases that might rescue the military from its dilemma of competing obligations, political leaders will first have to find convincing dangers - a rising threat of actual war, and on a very large scale. Until they can do so, military leaders must keep hacking away at their own institution ... People in the armed services know this...
"The political base that always supported the Cold War defense structure endures, too, without a strategy for the future except to change as little as possible from the past."
Mr. Greider goes on to talk about our "Military Socialism" and our basic socialized military industrial complex. He then explains the scope of this book.
"In short, our tour of Fortress America is about more than defense spending in an era of general peace. It's about national vision and the limits of empire, about whether Americans really wish to govern the world with U.S. military power ...
"This is a new world order that will require much more than the accumulation of weaponry, and it might even be subverted by a new global arms race." (My italics)

Now let me point out, I haven't left the introduction to this book yet; we have yet to hit page one.

The book begins with a tour of the massive weapons storage facilities at Fort Hood, Texas - Bradley fighting vehicles, Dragon missiles, M-1 Abrams main battle tanks, Humvees, HEMTTs, HETS, and more than two hundred Apache and Kiowa helicopters. There are forty-eight separate equipment yards at Fort Hood - miles and miles of parking spaces with multimillion dollar units in every parking space.

"The Cold War is over, but not really, not yet ...Too many tanks with nowhere to send them ... Defense spending, as one strategic analyst put it, has become `the new third rail of American politics.' Most politicians are afraid to touch it."

Then we come to the panic of peace.

"The Pentagon has been dumping old tanks like an army-navy surplus store conducting frantic `going out of business' sales. Giving them away to friendly nations. Selling them at deep discounts. Offering them free to local museums. It dumped one hundred old Sherman M-60s into Mobile Bay off the Alabama coast to form artificial reefs for fish in the Gulf of Mexico. Several hundred more are being sunk along other coastlines for the same purpose. One year it gave forty-five tanks free to Bosnia and another fifty to Jordan. It shipped ninety-one tanks to Brazil under a no cost, five year lease, and thirty to Bahrain on the same terms. Another 160 were sold to Taiwan for $130,000 each, priced at ten cents on the dollar. Egypt got seven hundred free by picking up transportation costs ... One way or another the Army has disposed of nearly six thousand older (1980 models) tanks during the last six years."

To actually train men on all our fancy fighting equipment is too costly "It takes two thousand dollars an hour to operate a single M-12 tank in the field." Instead we pay to build simulators. We have 25 million in video games sitting in one of our military video arcades.
Well, why don't we mothball everything and then pull it out when we need it?
Unfortunately we can't mothball very much in our new high-tech military. The electronics deteriorate; the crews take years to train, not weeks; things must be upgraded to stay on top or ahead of the competition. And in many cases we seem to be our own competition. Our independent "capitalist" arms merchants are selling to the highest bidder in the free market global arms race. Of course, we get dibs on the latest, most modern stuff - as long as we subsidize our arms manufactures with their storage costs, their labor costs and their research and development costs - cost plus contracts are nice too. And the fact that all American National arms merchants are basically one big interlocking network, doesn't hurt the bottom line either.

The first time I read about this technique of selling to potential enemies was in The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester. When Adolf Hitler demanded the German arms manufacturer, Krupp, to stop selling arms to Germany's enemies, Krupp threatened to take his whole operation, his knowledge and expertise, to Russia. Hitler and Mr. Krupp made a compromise. Krupp agreed to sell only last year's models to Germany's enemies. Hitler acquiesced.

They tried to dismantle Krupp industries after the war but found the task impossible. They denied Krupp the right to practice his "craft" in Germany. Kupp went to China and then to other international sites and became the richest man alive in his day - a great life for a man who should have been executed as a war criminal.

"After the Cold War ended, the government added 2,662 Tomahawks and other missiles to its arsenal. It increased air power capabilities by modernizing 961 night-capable aircraft and 707 precision-guided munitions-capable aircraft.
"The Air Force has so many long range bombers - the old reliable B-52, the troubled B-1, the new stealthy B-2 that costs 2 billion apiece - that it cannot afford to keep them all in the air. Yet, if you can believe its plans, the Air Force intends to increase the operational bomber force 25 percent by 2001."

But there is always hope Mr. Greider explains: "After all there is always the dim hope that somehow the circumstances will change. Maybe North Korea will invade South Korea. Maybe China will turn belligerent. The (our) nation's political and military leaders seem to be searching forlornly for a "they" that can restore purpose to the country's mighty armaments."

If the reader hasn't got the point yet, Mr. Greider takes us to a few more military bases and arms storage facilities. The costs are monumental.

Mr. Greider then takes us for a brief look at the investment side of Arms merchandising.

"A decade ago, fifteen leading contractors accounted for two-thirds of the Pentagon's spending on weapons. By 1995 the list was down to eight. Now, (1998) there are three."

"The companies can't keep boosting stock prices by doing more takeovers since there's nothing much to take over."

"The point people miss," Gansler (an analyst) says, "is not that the defense companies are making huge profits. It's that they're charging huge costs to government to pay for all of this excess capacity that they've got lying around. The government pays for all that. The problem is, if a company becomes a sole-source contractor and there is no competition, then they have no incentive to reduce costs."

Now it is onto the Global marketplace.

"We're serious about being a global company, and that means expanding our workforce outside the United States," says Lockheed Martin.
"LockMartin itself combines seventeen different companies that have collectively eliminated more than one hundred thousand jobs."

"The American motive for expanding NATO is selling weapons." American arms producers are loaning new NATO countries the money to buy their weapons and then moving their factories to these countries."

Now you know why Poland was upset with President Obama and the new Obama European defense strategy. We were rabidly approaching the boom days of the "Merchants of Death" back in the pre-World War I era - sell weapons to anybody, lie, cheat, steal but sell, sell, sell.

"Provoking inadvertent crisis may be profitable for weapons firms, but it does not seem to be in the national interest - or for that matter the world's."

I suggest that you all read "Merchants of Death" by Engelbrecht and Hanighen. You may have to hunt your library for it, but it will be worth your effort if your goal is to understand the present times. You can also read about the life and times of Sir Basil Zaharoff.

But what for the future? Can we bend the Iron Triangle (Pentagon, military, government). Can we design a meaner leaner military? Can we cut, lower costs, contain, or redesign our mammoth military complex?

"Even if futuristic ideas prove to be sound, the pentagon and the arms industry are still reluctant to give up what already exists - their vast arsenal of conventional overkill. They cannot have it both ways, one would think, but so far they are doing their best to accomplish just that, with very little resistance from the political system."

In his conclusion Mr. Greider says that first the American people must "say no to empire."

"The global economic system, led by the United States, governs trade, financial markets, and the rights of capital by imposing complex rules but insists that fundamental human freedoms are not a legitimate basis for global regulation. Raising questions of environmental protection, labor rights, or social equity - not to mention the democratic principles of free speech and freedom of assembly - is described as an intrusion on the trading system, possibly even an impediment to the spread of prosperity. National sovereignty (including America's) is told to yield to the efficiencies of the global enterprise."

Mr. Greider goes on and on with one good suggestion after another on transitioning from a militarist nation to a less militarist nation, but that is now all behind us and this book falls into the category of wasted effort.

In retrospect we see that Mr. Greider had it right in his introduction. Finding new wars to fight and devising a new Cold War was easier and much less demanding than attempting to restructure the Iron Triangle and bring America back to a peace loving, cooperative nation.
So if you are wondering why we have two wars going and military spending through the roof, you might pick up Mr. Greider's book Fortress America for a description of the details. But it appears clear to me - war is easier and more profitable than peace - especially when our system has been set up to deal with it for the last 100 years. We can't afford peace we have too much investment in war. Sadly achieving peace is too costly and too complicated. If you are hoping for an end to this "bully-bully" warmongering mentality it is going to take a lot more than wishful thinking.

Richard Edward Noble - The Hobo Philosopher - Author of:

Mein Kamp - An Analysis of Book One