Former Bush official unloads on "silent military coup d'etat" in America

By Steve Hynd

If you read one thing today, it should be Thomas A. Schweich's op-ed in the Washington Post scheduled for Sunday but already available online written last year but republished because it's linked from D.N.I. Blair's op-ed calling for greater integration between intelligence agencies - which effectively means greater military control of the intelligence community. Entitled "The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere" it is a searing indictment of the Pentagon's mission creep, which accelerated during the Bush years and has continued unabated under Obama. And Schweich should know what he's talking about - he was "the Bush administration as ambassador for counter-narcotics in Afghanistan and deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement affairs".

He begins:

We no longer have a civilian-led government. It is hard for a lifelong Republican and son of a retired Air Force colonel to say this, but the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striking number of aspects of civilian government. Our Constitution is at risk.

You don't get stronger than that, and many will doubtless describe it as hyperbolic. But Schweich is willing to substantiate his claim that there has been a "silent military coup d'etat that has been steadily gaining ground below the radar screen of most Americans and the media", acomplished by "Pentagon encroachment upon civilian government functions". He details a Bush era "quiet, de facto military takeover of much of the U.S. government" beginning in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Pentagon's stranglehold on both budget and policymaking created the mistakes that have made both such long-term occupations and the travesty of Gitmo, then continuing on into the creation of Africom as a military overseer for even soft power and civilian reconstruction efforts and finally back to home shores.

As military officers sought to take over the role played by civilian development experts abroad, Pentagon bureaucrats quietly populated the National Security Council and the State Department with their own personnel (some civilians, some consultants, some retired officers, some officers on "detail" from the Pentagon) to ensure that the Defense Department could keep an eye on its rival agencies.

...Gates is clearly sincere about chipping away at the military's expanding role, but many of his subordinates are not.

The encroachment within America's borders continued with the military's increased involvement in domestic surveillance and its attempts to usurp the role of the federal courts in reviewing detainee cases. The Pentagon also resisted ceding any authority over its extensive intelligence operations to the first director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte -- a State Department official who eventually gave up his post to Mike McConnell, a former Navy admiral. The Bush administration also appointed Michael V. Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, to be the director of the CIA. National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley saw much of the responsibility for developing and implementing policy on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- surely the national security adviser's job -- given to Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, Bush's new "war czar." By 2008, the military was running much of the national security apparatus.

The Pentagon opened a southern front earlier this year when it attempted to dominate the new Merida Initiative, a promising $400 million program to help Mexico battle drug cartels. Despite the admirable efforts of the federal drug czar, John P. Walters, to keep the White House focused on the civilian law-enforcement purpose of the Merida Initiative, the military runs a big chunk of that program as well.

Now the Pentagon has drawn up plans to deploy 20,000 U.S. soldiers inside our borders by 2011, ostensibly to help state and local officials respond to terrorist attacks or other catastrophes. But that mission could easily spill over from emergency counterterrorism work into border-patrol efforts, intelligence gathering and law enforcement operations -- which would run smack into the Posse Comitatus Act, the long-standing law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement. So the generals are not only dominating our government activities abroad, at our borders and in Washington, but they also seem to intend to spread out across the heartland of America.

Schweich doesn't even mention how generals like Petraeus, Odierno and McChrystal have continually pushed for longer and longer occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, even suggesting publicly that agreements entered into and policies set by civilian leadership were ignorable. But his op-ed accords with one of my own misgivings about the whole COIN complex of military/think tank boosterism - that one of its primary objectives from the military's point of view is to further centralize all the practical, hands-on, elements of American foreign policy in that funny-shaped building by the Potomac.

Schweich ends with advice for Obama:

If President-elect Obama wants to reverse this trend, he must take four steps -- and very quickly:

1. Direct -- or, better yet, order -- Gates, Jones, Blair and the other military leaders in his Cabinet to rid the Pentagon's lower ranks of Rumsfeld holdovers whose only mission is to increase the power of the Pentagon.

2. Turn Gates's speeches on the need to promote soft power into reality with a massive transfer of funds from the Pentagon to the State Department, the Justice Department and USAID.

3. Put senior, respected civilians -- not retired or active military personnel -- into key subsidiary positions in the intelligence community and the National Security Council.

4. Above all, he should let his appointees with military backgrounds know swiftly and firmly that, under the Constitution, he is their commander, and that he will not tolerate the well-rehearsed lip service that the military gave to civilian agencies and even President Bush over the past four years.

In short, he should retake the government before it devours him and us -- and return civilian-led government to the people of the United States.

Good advice, especially the second point. Policy is what gets funded. Obama should listen.