Customer Reviews

Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read Stan's book inside of two days, it was well written, and had a lot to say about the behind the scenes life of someone who was on the front line of training and liasing with foriegn militaries and governments. Stan is someone who has valid criticisms of both left and right, so both sides are going to have something to disagree with him about in this book, but I think his criticisms are quite valid. The left is too soft and the right is simply wrong. They're just wrong, and delusional as well. Reading Stan's book reminded me of my father's life in the military, a life where civilians just don't get it and live sheltered lives cut off from the reality of the world situation. One of Stan's valid criticisms of the left is that they see all military personnel as trigger happy Rambos and it's just not so. For someone who wants to see the inside of this government's deeply flawed foreign and military policy, I can't recommend this book highly enough. To give you an idea of how popular the book is here, all seven copies at our local bookstore were sold out in one week, and several friends are ordering it from Amazon right now. Run, do not walk to your local bookstore, this is a revealing and educational book in these desperate times we live through now.

I have read some of Stan Goff's email postings to various websites on current affairs, and found him to be knowledgeable, smart, funny, and always relevant. His perspective on military affairs is essentially unsurpassed, but amazingly, he identifies with the "left" political spectrum as a former Special Ops soldier, and that (alone) makes Stan Goff unique and worth listening to.

But this book took my appreciation of Stan Goff to a whole new level. Although I never met him and have no idea of key aspects of his personal history, I have a theory about Stan Goff. I believe that, as a non-commissioned officer in the U.S. military (and let me say that I have absolutely no experience in the military and am only speculating), I believe that Stan Goff must have experienced condescending treatment from commissioned officers who expected obedience and implementation of commands without discussion or intellectual questioning. I sense that Stan Goff eventually said, "To hell with this!" and did the necessary self-educating to make himself a bona fide, well-read, deep thinking, highly informed intellectual.

Intellectualism is a working platform for this book. Stan Goff is the sort of self-confident, mature, person who is not afraid to assess current affairs and produce analyses and predictions. He is not afraid to make a mistake, and is not afraid to take criticism. I find that refreshing, and Stan Goff has earned his credibility with flying colors!

I think Stan Goff nailed his many analyses of current problems, strategies, and solutions. He figured it out, and although the prognosis for the future of the American Empire looks bad, that is where the facts led Stan, and I agree with him.

I think Stan is doing the left a great service in offering advice on dealing with military people, and using their experiences, specialized knowledge, and sensibilities to a degree never even contemplated by leftists. Military people, like ex-Sgt. Goff have unique skill sets that may make the telling difference in future struggles for freedom and preservation of democracy, even right in the U.S.A. as our civilization implodes due to its inherent unsustainability.

I recommend Stan Goff's book to everyone. I want to read more of his work. I hope he is as prolific as he is intelligent, and as versatile as he is honest.

READ THIS BOOK!

Stan Moore San Geronimo, CA

As a veteran of the '91 Gulf War and Drug Wars in the Caribbean, I am deeply grateful for such an honest and courageous account from an NCO who functioned in the most covert levels of military operations.

A simply amazing piece of literature which cuts to the bone. Full Spectrum Disorder is an adventurous journey with philosophical hues that only an experinced combat veteran could provide. With incredible observation and biting wit, Goff takes the reader through one compelling political, strategic and tactical level at a time, ultimately depositing them atop a dizzying peak amidst a sobering view of the immediate obligation of humanity.

In this illuminating set of essays, Goff puts forth a series of penetrating critiques of the capitalist world order and the military institutions that sustain it. His humble, direct writing, grounded in a wealth of personal experience in the military and sharpened by years of disciplined autodidactic study, raises many important issues for the anti-capitalist left. His comparison of the Colombian FARC with the Zapatistas in Mexico is an incisive challenge to unexamined pacifism, and his discussion of radical leadership and forms of organization will stimulate anarchists and authoritarian communists alike. I, for one, will be reading his blog closely in the coming months.

A few favorite passages:

"Every successful revolution requires either the neutralization or active participation of military people. It's really time we factor that into our thinking. It's time we thought about organizing within the military. And organizing is not helping out a handful of conscientious objectors (though that is important) or dropping into Fayetteville with antiwar petitions for GIs to sign. Organizing is getting to know them, listening to them, building relationships with them, and standing alongside them when they confront their own institution."

"I will say this about the Zapatistas and the FARC-EP. At the end of the day, the difference between the two, aside from those who are condoned or condemned by those outside the conflict, is that one is winning and one is losing... because one understands the iron logic of war, and the other does not."

In fairness, Goff's writings should be criticized in the appropriate context: they are anecdote laden, rantish, autobographical, yet analytical and provisionally authoritative.

Goff is not uncomfortable deploying simile, metaphor, or limited allegory to connect his personal experiences to the conceptual and/or assumptive framework he offers. A basic premise of his writing is his commitment to engage a world of competing (or impoverished) perspective on global realities, offering clarifications or counter-points to what he regards as conventional and/or largely inadequate wisdom.

That being said, he offers no "smoking gun" critiques of world affairs. I'm not sure that he means to; it's enough that he has been there and seen what needs to be seen; he's not trying to reify or vindicate his point of view, just to provide a meaningful contrast to those views that over-saturate the public imagination. His objective seems to be the "sobering" of the naive and jingoist assumptions that Americans cling to, but too often take for granted.

In other words, he's not trying to convert anyone; he's "playing Cassandra" as Camus said, holding up the mirror to the nation he served and risked his life for, aparently banking on the hope that we'll demonstrate the existence of a national conscience. If in reading his work, you feel disturbed and spurred to a greater degree of deliberation about the narratives you recieve from day-to-day, then his work has had the intended effect.

In this respect, he's just doing his duty. Little more, little less.

It strikes me as a bit absurd that other reviewers would place such liberal import on his political sympathies, as if to imply that these might somehow eclipse the over-all body of points, impressions, and conjectures Goff puts on the table. Goff himself is a bit circumspect (at times, outright cagey) about his personal politics. At others he's in your face about them. I'm not clear on what standard of political objectivity is in vogue with the readers out there, but we swim in a sea of ideology-laden "facts". Let's grow up and move on.

If you're worried about the integrity of Goff's ideological proclivities, go befriend a current or former member of special forces. See what his anecdotes and opinions do to your impeccable clinicism and analytical detatchment. Maybe your "objectivity" is more of an obstacle to your own understanding than you've presumed.

This is a hard-hitting critique of recent US foreign policy. Goff, who used to be a soldier in Army Special Operations, analyses the US state's wars in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, Somalia, Haiti and Iraq.

In Korea, General MacArthur ordered his forces to "destroy every means of communication, every installation, factory, city and village from the front line to the Yalu River." General Curtis LeMay boasted, "We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both, and ... we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes." The USAF dropped more bombs on Korea than on all Europe in all of World War Two and dropped 7.8 million gallons of napalm. US forces killed about four million Koreans, as against `only' three million Vietnamese people.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) faced huge problems. The US state maintained its punitive sanctions. Russia cut its oil supplies by 90%. In 1995, the country suffered the worst floods for a century, which swept away more than 400,000 hectares of prime farmland just before harvest time and made five million people homeless. In 1996, there were more floods and in 1997 a severe drought destroyed 70% of the country's corn. In 2000-01, the country suffered the worst drought in its history.

Despite all these hardships, the DPRK honoured its commitment under the 1994 Agreement with the USA to suspend its plutonium production facilities. The US state, on the other hand, broke its promises by failing to supply the promised alternative energy sources, failing to normalise relations and targeting the DPRK with nuclear weapons. The DPRK had warned that if the USA reneged, it would restart its nuclear power programme. In 2002, Bush named the DPRK as a target in its Nuclear Posture Review. The DPRK then stated that it had the right to develop nuclear weapons in self-defence. (The USA has had nuclear weapons in South Korea since 1958).

Goff also has some brilliant insights into how the American working class can defeat this imperial and anti-American US state. "The most important quality in a leader is the aggressive tenacity that never loses sight of the mission, combined with the creativity to achieve it." He attacks the `left' for "their utter lack of aggression and their constant moral hand-wringing ... they only know how to mobilize fear that demoralizes people, instead of mobilizing rage that drives through fear and seizes the initiative."

It was hard to choose a rating for this review, so consider my three stars more of a two-to-four rating. Goff's book, "Full Spectrum Disorder", is all over the place, swinging punches at capitalism, imperialism, liberalism, the U.S. military and many token "liberal" or "progressive" issues. He lands a few punches, but much of it reads like wild swinging, and there is little provided to back up his assertions. For this reason, he's likely to reduce the receptivity of any audience except those that already agree with him.

In some ways this works. Goff's primary message seems to be directed at what he believes will be a liberal or progressive revolutionary vanguard. He leaves little room for misunderstanding this message in the last lines of his epilogue: "We are all Palestinian now. When in Palestine, we do what Palestinians do. We learn the lesson of the rocks. Intifada."

The language of violent revolution is unsettling to most self-described liberals, and it is this weak stomach for the grittier realities of global power that Goff is trying to beat out of what might be called the peace-loving, tree-hugging, hippy heart that is driving progressive ideology today. Having lived and worked in the West Bank, I can't subscribe to his belief in the value of violent resistance. I very much appreciate, however, his plea to liberals to drop their holier-than-thou disdain for anything associated with the U.S. military and to recognize the centrality of violence throughout the world today.

Liberals tend to dismiss war and warriors as blood-thirsty or blindly chauvinistic, a characterization that is both inaccurate and - for liberal ideology - self-defeating. In this sense, Goff's challenge to the liberal movement to better engage with the U.S. military is a rare but much-needed message.

If you have ever been called a hippy or a wacky, fuzzy-headed liberal, read this book precisely for this message.

But aside from this one very important message with a very specific intended audience, this book is too scattered to make any solid points. His accusations and assertions are pretty far-reaching, and he fails to properly back them up. He states up front that this book is primarily intended to "shake people up", but he kind of leaves the reader hanging on to his shirt-tails as he bounces around.

As someone who probably agrees with his underlying ideas more than the majority of his readers, I was disappointed. There is certainly value in this book, but with so many interesting books out there, this one is probably worth skipping.

Inflation has been so low for a few years that I didn't notice it at all in the topics covered in FULL SPECTRUM DISORDER by Stan Goff. The book does not have an index, but the notes at the end of the book contain some economic information which was useful for the author's Marxist theories. The recent election of George W. Bush to a second term with a majority of the votes cast makes an outbreak of revolutionary civil war within the United States seem highly unlikely anytime soon, but a belated consideration of A TRACT ON MONETARY REFORM by J. M. Keynes (1923) suggests that a working class view of the state of the global economy with an eye to the future is in order.

Goff's first book, HIDEOUS DREAM, was about his participation in the American occupation of Haiti. One of the most brilliant things in FULL SPECTRUM DISORDER is his use of that perspective. "The Haitians say, the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more you see nothing but his ass." (p. 85). Eventually his "the more all you can see is his ass" view comes to dominate the analysis which Antonio Gramsci called "the basis of the new type of intellectual." (p. 184). Goff became familiar with Samuel P. Huntington's ideas, `a creepy theory of "military professionalism" and the "civil-military relationship" ' (p. 187) while teaching West Point freshman after he was relieved of his Delta Force duties and his security clearance was suspended on Thanksgiving Day, 1986. (p. 186). Goff only mentions it in passing in emphasizing `the actual experience of the people behind the wretched Special Ops mystique. In our case, these are the experiences of enlisted people who in many ways transgressed the invisible boundary between enlisted people and the credentialed "managers of violence." ' (p. 189). More as a former private, drafted when I first started to attend Harvard Law School in 1968, than as the sergeant I briefly became in Nam, this is the point in this book at which I felt closest to the author.

Capitalist political economy has grown fat on the idea that economic growth provides the wherewithal to imagine a brighter future. Currently, our prosperity depends on a global economy which sucks up American dollars, as Goff earlier demonstrated: "But this meant that the U.S. could pay for oil in money that it could print, which it did--a practice that would normally devalue the currency in an open market, were it not for the fact that that same devaluation would now wipe out creditors like Europe. . . . They know the U.S. will never pay back its debt, . . ." (p. 156). Individual workers seem to start out working for nickels and dimes, compared to the dollars which signify real wealth, but by the time they reach retirement, dollars are hardly worth the nickels and dimes they initially made. Investment for retirement might make sense for professionals whose salaries reflect the levels enjoyed in peak times by top earners, but a great number of people living in poverty with numerous children, step-children, and apart from first wives or steady handouts, are unlikely to strike it rich in any investment program. Constant attention to the income of the top one percent of the population, or those who make more than $200,000 per year, as lawmakers, lawyers, and accountants are most likely to consider worthy of financial consideration, most likely captures what the people in Haiti seeing a monkey up in a tree are likely to notice.

Even if interest rates start rising to try to catch inflation, the actual state of the American economy, with pharmaceutical companies making enormous profits compared to other top corporations, executives raking in millions while cutting retirement obligations by pushing workers into early retirement, etc., the problems suggest why Goff sees the need for "getting grounded in historical materialism and the labor theory of value, the key components, along with class struggle, of the Marxist challenge to the bourgeois episteme." (p. 204). The global economy has found an outsourcing solution for the labor theory of value, and modernity seems to be looking for ways that people can avoid economic thought entirely. Certainly the recent presidential campaigns suggested that no one on either side could demonstrate an ability to actually do the numbers for anything larger than 200 billion dollars per single project, as the war on terror is definitely not. Initiative is the overriding driving force in military operations, as Goff admits in numerous places, and a majority of American voters decided to continue with those operations that currently have some momentum going, but the ability of these people to guard anything that is highly explosive was an issue that only William Safire might call a keeper.

Contrary to the subtitle, this is NOT a book about the military. This is a book about government policy (so it occasionally discusses how the military is used in pursuit of policy).

Mr Goff is an admitted socialist and this book is an attempt to convince readers that socialism is a much more responsible form of government. Fair enough, except for the misleading title. His principal argument is that captialism's reliance on economic expansion will inevitably exhaust all natural resources leading to collapse. In this he is probably right. He then argues that socialism is the cure to this problem. One look at the environmental wastelands of Eastern Europe disproves this, so he ignores it. He claims the reason that the Soviet Union collapsed is that it didn't have enough third-world neighbors to exploit--neglecting the fact that Russia has incredible amounts of natural resources right at home that they couldn't exploit because of the intrinsic flaws of their system.

Reading this book reminds me of a Daman Wayans character on "In Living Color," who [mis]used big words to make himself sound more knowledgable. Readers will want to keep a dictionary handy to decipher words like "reification" and "epistimelogical". However, using impressive vocabulary can't hide the fact that he makes many accusations which he fails to support and states as fact that which needs to be proved by argument.

Goff's disillusionment with American policy and the military's role in it is completely reasonable--he has participated in enough outrages to earn the right to be bitter. However, the conclusions he reaches as a result are at best unsupported (at least in this book) and at worst totally flawed.

If you're a liberal looking for more reasons to hate capitalism, and the U.S. in particular, you'll like this book. If, like me, you're looking for a book about the use of military power in 4th-generation warfare, look elsewhere.