Free The United States of Fear by Tom Engelhardt Page B

bounds; nor, it seemed, did the money and resources that began to flow into the Pentagon, the weapons industries, the country’s increasingly militarized intelligence services, mercenary companies like Blackwater and KBR that grew fat on a privatizing administration’s war plans and the multi-billion-dollar no-bid contracts it was eager to proffer, the new Department of Homeland Security, and a ramped-up, ever more powerful national security state.
    As the Pentagon expanded, taking on ever newer roles, the numbers would prove staggering. By the end of the Bush years, Washington was doling out almost twice what the next nine nations combined were spending on their militaries, while total U.S. military expenditures came to just under half the world’s total. Similarly, by 2008, the United States controlled almost 70 percent of the global arms market. It also had eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups capable of patrolling the world’s seas and oceans at a time when no power that could faintly be considered a possible future enemy had more than one.
    By then, private contractors had built for the Pentagon almost three hundred military bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny combat outposts to massive “American towns” holding tens of thousands of troops and private contractors. They were in the process of doing the same in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in the Persian Gulf region generally. This, too, represented a massive investment in what looked like a permanent occupation of the oil heartlands of the planet. As right-wing pundit Max Boot put it after a flying tour of America’s global garrisons, the United States possessed military bases that add up to “a virtual American empire of Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses, and gyms.”
    Depending on just what you counted, there were anywhere from seven hundred to twelve hundred or more of those bases, micro to macro, acknowledged and unacknowledged, around the globe. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was pouring money into the wildest blue-skies thinking at its advanced research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose budget grew by 50 percent.
    Through DARPA, well-funded scientists experimented with various ways to fight wars in the near and distant future (at a moment when no one was ready to put significant government money into blue-skies thinking about, for instance, how to improve education). The Pentagon was also pioneering a new form of air power, drone warfare, in which “we” wouldn’t be anywhere near the battlefield, and the battlefield would no longer necessarily be in a country with which we were at war.
    It was additionally embroiled in two disastrous, potentially trillion-dollar wars (and various global skirmishes), all this at top dollar at a time when next to no money was being invested in bridges, tunnels, waterworks, and the like that made up an aging American infrastructure. Except when it came to victory, the military stood ever taller, while its many missions expanded exponentially, even as the domestic economy was spinning out of control.
    In other words, in a far wealthier country, another set of leaders, having watched the Soviet Union implode, decisively embarked on the Soviet path to disaster.
Military Profligacy
    In fall 2008, the abyss opened under the U.S. economy, which the Bush administration had been blissfully ignoring, and millions of people fell into it. Giant institutions wobbled or crashed, foreclosures happened on a mind-boggling scale, infrastructure began to buckle, state budgets were caught in a death grip, teachers’ jobs, another kind of infrastructure, went down the tubes in startling numbers, and the federal deficit soared.
    A new president also entered the Oval Office, someone (many voters believed) intent on winding down Bush’s wars and the delusions of military omnipotence and technological omniscience that went with them. If George W. Bush had pushed this country to the edge of