The Bunker: Tower of Cower

This week in The Bunker: a rancid roster, including the erosion of U.S. might and influence around the globe; comparing the disgusting notion of livestreaming the execution of a U.S. soldier with scant news from the continuing war with Iran; the contrasting views of top Pentagon leaders on just how special U.S. troops are; and more.

THE EBBING OF U.S. POWER

Because bullying never works in the long run

For close to a century, the U.S. military has been the globe’s mightiest armed force. But ever since President Donald Trump invaded Iran over seven months ago, it has slid from an undisputed power into a retreating cower.

It’s pretty much all self-inflicted.

Like a flustered flock of ring-necked pheasants flushed from fallowing fields, a dozen U.S. B-1 bombers rushed back to the U.S. October 4 from their base in England. They had been launching bombing runs against Iran from the U.K., and intelligence reports suggested local Iranians might launch inexpensive drones to destroy the planes and kill their crews.

This embarrassment highlights how the U.S.-Iran war is changing military conflict. “A war that was intended to demonstrate the reach of American power has now done the opposite,” the New York Times noted. “It is a lesson in unintended consequences.” The same kind of cheap weaponry has driven U.S. troops from bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, weakening the U.S. role in the region.

Changes in warfare — used against the U.S. — and changes in foreign relations — imposed by the U.S. — are conspiring to shrink the value of the U.S. investment in the Pentagon. U.S.-launched trade wars, the resulting tariffs, and threats to seize territory have the world viewing China more positively than the U.S. Some see the U.S. engaged in a “puzzling strategic retreat” from East Asia.

Trump’s repeated criticism of NATO nations — for not spending enough on their militaries, or failing to help the U.S. fight Iran after he began the war without consulting them — has left Europe leery of U.S. support, the keystone of the most powerful and successful military alliance in world history. The Trump administration has pulled out of dozens of international organizations, chilling civilian cooperation on issues ranging from health to the environment to population.

As the anti-Dale Carnegie might have said: This is no way to win friends and influence people. And that has translated into a diminished standing for the U.S. on the global stage. No matter how many trillions the nation pumps into its Department of Defense.

Military might means little when it is frittered away by angering long-friendly nations and launching wars with ill-defined objectives and no end in sight. The U.S. has spent decades tending to the care and feeding of its allies. Yes, sometimes that meant — especially among NATO members — that they didn’t fully share the burden of their own defense. But it represented a geographic Golden Dome, buffering the U.S., along with two oceans, from the troubles of the Olde World.

For too long, too many Americans have viewed national security and military spending as the same thing. In actuality, military strength is a vital part of national security — but only a part. Diplomacy and deference also play key roles in determining deterrence.

Now plans are underway for Trump’s Golden Dome aerial shield, which, if ever built, will offer only the illusion of invulnerability the president promises. Meanwhile, thanks to the explosion in drone technology, literal and otherwise, the protections once afforded by the Atlantic and Pacific are shrinking down to puddles.

But reluctance to relinquish the American Way of War® has sparked widespread discussion about protecting the Pentagon’s favorite kinds of weapons rather than retooling a 20th Century war machine for the new century, already a quarter gone. After all, if the Ukrainians can destroy Russian warplanes deep inside Russia, and the Iranians can drive U.S. warplanes out of Britain without firing a shot, why should we think U.S. warplanes — and U.S. warships, too, for that matter — at U.S. locations are any more secure?

Meanwhile, two days after the B-1s flew the Continent, the Air Force announced it is doubling down on plans to build more bombers, without knowing how to defend those it already has.

PECULIAR PENTAGON PUBLICITY

Airing an execution, but not a war

You can tell a lot about this nation’s leaders by how they play hide and seek. In February, they secretly launched the war with Iran, urged by Israel, and have kept it pretty much under wraps since then.

But occasionally news leaks out. An October 5 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service raised eyebrows because it said that 81 U.S. aircraft have been lost or damaged in the war, 93% more than the 42 it tallied (PDF) on May 12. (Twenty-one U.S. troops have died in the campaign.)

An apparent U.S. missile strike in the war’s opening hours killed more than 150 Iranians, most of them schoolchildren. It remains unexplained by the Pentagon. The families of the six U.S. troops killed in an Iranian drone strike on their Kuwait base on March 1 — more than seven months ago — have not yet received a briefing from the Defense Department on their deaths. In Bahrain, Iran devastated the U.S. Navy’s key base in the region, home to the service’s 5th Fleet, crippling resupply efforts.

A CBS News broadcast leaked videos October 7 showing the destruction Iran has inflicted on a major U.S. military installation in Kuwait. The following day, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told reporters he was denied access to a Qatari base, home to the biggest U.S. post in the Middle East, to hide the damage Tehran has inflicted. “They are using every tool they can, including withholding information [PDF] about damages, slow walking the pace of reports about casualties and denying us access to see the damage as part of a campaign of cover-up, so as to mask the true cost of the war,” said Murphy, a member of both the foreign relations and defense appropriations committees.

Contrast that with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bloodlust boast that the U.S. military will publicly stream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan (PDF). He is the U.S. Army major who in 2009 murdered 13 of his fellow soldiers at Texas’ Fort Hood.

Pentagon regulations used to require that “military executions will be by lethal injection.” But in 2019, the U.S. military removed that mandate, saying that the Army’s top civilian “designates the method of execution” without specifying how. The summary page simply noted that the revised regulation “removes the term ‘lethal injection’ (throughout).” Apparently, “lethal” isn’t Hegseth’s favorite word after all. He endorsed the death-by-firing-squad recommendation of Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle, which Trump then approved. The last time the U.S. military executed a service member by firing squad was for desertion during World War II.

Lest we lose sight of what’s important here, these are the people Hasan killed

Army contractor Michael Grant Cahill, Major L. Eduardo Caraveo, Staff Sergeant Justin M. DeCrow, Captain John P. Gaffaney, Specialist Frederick Greene, Specialist Jason Dean Hunt, Staff Sergeant Amy Krueger, Private First Class Aaron Thomas Nemelka, Private First Class Michael Pearson, Captain Russell Seager, Private Francheska Velez, Lieutenant Colonel Juanita Warman, and Private First Class Kham Xiong.

Trump was initially supportive of the streaming. But after widespread outrage, he has voiced doubts about serving as the execution producer of a state-sponsored snuff film. The Bunker bets he’ll yell “Cut!” to the cameras before “Fire!” is uttered to the carbines.

But regardless of Trump’s final decision, Hegseth has shown his true colors. In our name, he is befouling U.S. values, morality, and human decency. How dare you compound Hasan’s treachery by exposing my grandchildren to your perverted patriotism, Mr. Secretary.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said of the public execution.

Too bad the U.S. government isn’t taking the same approach to the war it launched secretly against Iran nearly eight months ago. You know, the one that Trump predicted would be over in “four to five weeks.”

THE COMMON DEFENSE

The 1%, 2.0

The roughly 1% of the U.S. adult population wearing U.S. military uniforms are Americans who represent this country. Some Pentagon leaders think this makes them better than the rest of us. On October 3, Hegseth told Air Force Academy cadets that he had worked out “with the best Americans on the planet” earlier that day at their Colorado school. He said he invited reporters to tag along “because we want to showcase you, the real 1%, the best of our country.” The U.S. military, he continued, has always “required the absolute best.” These “elites,” he added, have “a perspective that 99% of Americans do not have” because they don’t wear the nation’s uniform. Hegseth went on to talk of his initiatives to groom future officers at conservative colleges and to bring U.S. troops back to U.S. soil and house them in well-appointed new quarters.

His words upset Eliot A. Cohen, a one-time Army Reserve intelligence officer who has cycled in and out of the Pentagon and State Department for decades. As Cohen wrote in The Atlantic,

What Hegseth is saying amounts to this: You are better than 99 percent of your fellow Americans. You are better physically and morally. You are crusaders, and they — particularly the media and the intellectuals — are not only uncomprehending of your merits but ready to subvert you. They are traitors. We want to select you from a specific slice of society: We want socially conservative young men and (very few) women from Liberty University and Hillsdale, not from liberal research universities and colleges. We want you to be isolated on bases from the rest of this corrupt society, which we despise, as should you.

It was only 15 years ago that another defense secretary pointed out the U.S. military’s true strength. Robert Gates didn’t care for an Army display along a Pentagon corridor that said the service embraces values like loyalty, respect, and honor that “distinguish American Soldiers from American society.” He spoke about it in 2011 while addressing other U.S. military cadets, at West Point, where future Army officers are forged. The Bunker wrote about it in a Time magazine cover story under the headline “The Other 1%.”

Gates said that “it is rather peculiar to suggest that attributes such as integrity, respect and courage are not valued in the United States of America writ large … It is off-putting to hear … comments that suggest that [the] military is to some degree separate and even superior from the society, the country, it is sworn to protect … There is a risk over time of developing a cadre of military leaders that politically, culturally and geographically have less and less in common with the majority of the people they have sworn to defend.”

He said, “Getting this relationship on a sound footing is so important because a civil-military divide can expose itself in an ugly way, especially during a protracted and frustrating war effort.”

Don’t look down now, but the “sound footing” that Gates wanted is crumbling beneath our feet.

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