For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.
JUSTICE WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS, NEW YORK TIMES CO. V. UNITED STATES, 403 US 713 (1971) (PENTAGON PAPERS CASE)
Bombarded” is exactly the right word to describe America today: the country is bombarded with real-world events and what-ifs—terrorism, our wars, other people’s wars, Iranian and North Korean nukes; loose nukes; biological and chemical weapons; instability in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and throughout the Middle East and Africa; China emerging; Russia declining; crime syndicates and drug cartels and pirates; cyberwarfare, cybercriminals; hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, wildfires, drought; pandemics, genetically modified everything; global warming; water wars, resource wars, population explosions, financial meltdowns; rising sea levels. Audits and analysis indicate that 2012 was the second-costliest year in history in terms of natural disasters,1 and everything—climate, resources, infrastructure, and human nature—conspires to make things worse in the future.
As a solution to these problems and threats, it’s hard not to champion good government and better management, and even reorganization, to use the language of fraud, waste, and abuse; to want greater attention and internal coordination and leadership; to decry duplication and promote collaboration. Who doesn’t want true priorities and the wise expenditure of tax dollars; who doesn’t think there should be adequate staff if there’s going to be staff at all? Suffice it to say: scratch the surface of any government program and you’ll find that billions’ worth go wrong—always—and that’s not referring to the number of trees killed to draft and redraft and publish and revise, the rinse and repeat that has and will forever be the paper harvest of government. That is, after all, government’s basic nature.
Yet even in the most seemingly urgent components of the Program—the highest-priority, the least bureaucratic, the freest and loosest to operate—there’s no greater guarantee of economy. The BioWatch system of terrorism sniffers never lived up to its promise; it was poorly defined, slow to be executed, of questionable assurance, the next generation of automated equipment in question.2 The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office is no different; technologies are constantly in need of better and more.3 The FBI-led WMD crisis management and in extremis effort is also constantly in question.4 And continuity is no better: rules for orderly evacuation and operations that ignore families and children; the assumptions about what 300,000 federal employees in Washington would do at the end of days, when even on a normal day the Beltway is pure gridlock. Post-9/11, the executive agents have introduced evacuation hoods and bunny suits in almost every national security office to facilitate movement in a chemical or biologically compromised environment. They’ve instituted “telework” and other virtual-office schemes and “social distancing operations” to take into consideration pandemics and other types of contamination. They’ve developed a variety of “family” support plans in hopes of increasing “employee availability.” They’ve pre-positioned vital records, handed out memory sticks with key documents and plans for evacuating personnel, invented an orderly “devolution” process to supplement the three-deep successor process and the delegations of authority to allow uninterrupted operations.5 They are all fabulous (and expensive) ideas, but merely the duck and cover of our age; an entire apocalyptic drama of civil defense again being extended down to the states and cities, but one that has so many inherent flaws and such brittleness that it just confirms the need for something else, something higher.
The national argument that breaks out after any 9/11, any Katrina, or any Newtown is about what kind of nation we are and want to be, some saying that America should be ashamed because of what it is and what it has done, others grumbling that Americans are fat and lazy and selfish and too tolerant. Liberalism or religious fundamentalism or any fill-in-the-blank ism is said to be the true threat and the actual cause of our problems. There are those who argue that America is really controlled by an x or a y; that they are hell-bent on taking away the freedoms and rights that are the country’s defining features. And one doesn’t have to tap into some secret society of Freemasons or Trilateralists to get to a they; nor does one need some outside other—World Bank, World Health Organization, United Nations—to imagine an even more enormous and transposable threat.
For some, terrorists lurk everywhere within: if not personified by insider and homegrown threats, then in ecoterrorists and PETA activists, or in lawless government itself. Government detention camps wait to be filled up; trains are at the ready to take people there. They, the government bureaucrats, the liberals, Obama, are coming for the guns, ready to turn America over to international control, seeking to complete some socialist plot by erasing individual freedoms.6 On the other side is an equally convinced group who think they are Bush or Cheney; the neocons, the evangelicals, the Tea Party, the radical right, K Street, Wall Street, the survivalists, the gun owners. For both sides, they are the Pentagon, homeland security, TSA, the CIA and FBI, for reasons wedded in a general sense to particular conspiracies. The two factions—already facetiously labeled Red and Blue—overlap more than they would like to admit; imagining secret programs with supposed real names—Chemtrail, Northwoods, Area 51, HAARP, Stellar Wind—all hiding clandestine plots under the rubric of the war on terror or emergency response, sweeping aside the Constitution and instilling government tyranny.
Somewhere in the middle is a vast and self-labeled reasonable center that decries extremism of any kind, that makes fun of the tinfoil-hat set, the rabid, and the overwrought. These people gawk at the estimated 5 million “preppers” readying individual and family survival plans; or shake their heads over as many as 25 million who worried about the Mayan apocalypse or the close to half of all Americans who think 9/11 was some kind of government conspiracy. This is American martial life at its very essence: the threats are so great, externally and internally, and the people are so divided, that it is the executive agents who have to act as furtive adjudicators of two warring realities, two motherlands in need of an ABC and XYZ to keep the peace. To be sure, some solutions might lurk in some legislative remedy of gun control or arms control, but these are small facets on a very big jewel. And bigger changes are blocked by those who need society to move forward under officiated parole with the illusion that security is well ordered and that no one’s individual freedoms are invaded.
Government at almost all levels from local to federal has to pave the way for the XYZ through an increasingly thin facade of ABC, recognizing in so doing that one shouldn’t make too many startling or threatening moves around a populace already so spooked and trigger happy. The product is the complete militarization of US civil, social, and political life in the defense of the nation, a deskbound takeover run by a powerful group of executive agents sanctioned and even encouraged by our elected leaders, an invisible ruling class that works to save the nation from threats far and near. America floats on a comforting appearance of civilian purpose, where the pseudoenlistment of millions of erstwhile civilians confuses the distinctions between what is military and what is civilian. Though it is easy to fire back at “the” military-industrial complex, an Iron Triangle, Top Secret America, inside the Beltway, the federal government, Congress, or even Washington itself, the Program flourishes because it is not any of these self-interested entities. These scapegoats are the problem, and that is precisely why the Program has to serve as captain of an exceptionally guileless ship of state, one that survives precisely because the dysfunction of the ABCs demands someone pursue the immutable between-the-lines needs of the XYZ.
“When a disaster strikes your state,” former NORTHCOM commander Admiral Winnefeld told the 132nd General Conference of the National Guard Association in 2010, “I don’t want to be one second too early… nor do I want to be one second too late. I want to be limited only by physics, not by bureaucracy.”7 It is a rousing and sensitive call to arms. Winnefeld told the assembled guardians of the states that we are simply not as good as we need to be, that unity is achieved in not even having to define or fight about what we or as we need to be means.
“In the twenty-first century,” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said in 2012, “we recognize that climate change can impact national security—ranging from rising sea levels, to severe droughts, to the melting of the polar caps, to more frequent and devastating natural disasters that raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.”8 “We recognize,” of course, means that the military recognizes. The National Military Strategy, a document written by the Joint Chiefs, pledges that the military will “provide the ways and means” to advance American “enduring national interests.” It calls itself “facilitator, enabler, convener, and guarantor.” Even the US national debt is labeled “a significant security risk.”9
These days, any ranking officer worth his brass is both rousing and sensitive. These men (and women) pledge to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” the principles that embody America encapsulated in the Preamble:
… form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…
It is the Constitution that is to be defended; not the president, nor an administration nor the government, and not even just the physical security of the United States. Most Americans would be happy to turn over the country to these hallowed guardians, for who else would be trusted with the task? But they are still the military. Which is exactly why any notion of military dominance in domestic rule doesn’t work. When Honoré declared Katrina the enemy and New Orleans a battlefield, when he took charge with Landreneau’s guardsmen, he was hardly pulling off some coup. He was just thinking the way a military man thinks, doing what he was trained for.10
When the national PowerPoint slide utters “The Nation Is at War” in the first bullet point, it seems inevitable that the scenarios of national danger end up so broadly drawn that the terrorist threat is swallowed up in a great flood, every event equally menacing. The experts of what-if apply a universal template of internal danger, of overloaded networks, destroyed infrastructure, failed backups, scarce supplies, casualties, public panic, and political havoc. The Program emerged in this tangle as the fail-safe to ensure everyday life under this constant state of threat. Yet every Katrina and Newtown demonstrates that what has been created is incredibly complex and convoluted, that few even in government fully understand the laws and rules.
A weaker nation emerges with complex and unenforceable rules, with everyone and anyone having good reason to be wary of the authorities. That is the case with labyrinthine rules about civil life—whether it is the tax code or gun control—where any law-abiding citizen is potentially made into a criminal. The state is endowed with a set of powers to decide what is allowed, and those who are charged with enforcing the law are forced—since everyone is driving over the speed limit at some point—to make choices as to whom to go after. At the local level, the posse can be personal and racial and religious; at the federal level, it can be ludicrously fastidious and compassionless, not inconsequentially overseen by a set of administrative crusaders whose local community is national security—a combination of twenty- and thirty-something policy automatons condescending to locals of any stripe, and a military where more than 93 percent of everyone under arms joined up after 9/11,11 an ahistoric group already infected by a peculiar opinion about threats and the nation.
The contingency becomes the contingency.
Once upon a time in America, a small standing army existed around which the people—a well-regulated militia, citizen soldiers—were mustered and discharged whenever an emergency presented itself. But when the emergencies never went away, the requirements of national survival demanded a permanent military establishment and then a professional one. In the era of terrorism and relentless vulnerability, that professional group is not just who is in uniform; it includes the forces of homeland security and law enforcement, first responders, and all the accompanying pseudosoldiers of the whole of the nation. Even inside the US government, what is military and what is civilian is increasingly obscured;12 the state and local police forces are militarized and networked into one; states have their own intelligence establishments; the big cities make their own foreign policies.
In theory, the guardians of the state come first: state police, National Guard, local volunteers. Yet given the mobility of society and the erosion of the uniqueness of National Guardsmen, with combat units serving overseas and operating everywhere and anywhere in the United States, what even is local? Denied deep civic knowledge and established links with more distant officials when operating under the new regional arrangements, the Guard’s answer is to just link everyone together in one nationwide “Joint Information Exchange Environment,” a system it describes as “a web-based intelligence-driven picture of where they’re operating, where others are, and where the threat is.”13 In other words, it is intelligence manufactured in Washington, perhaps more comprehensive but in terms of nuance and practical sensitivity about as remote as remote could be.
Many marveled during Katrina that General Honoré was local, but as he says, “Although I was born in Lakeland, Louisiana, in Pointe Coupee Parish little more than a hundred miles northwest of New Orleans, I had spent the last thirty-four years stationed everywhere but Louisiana.”14 Honoré admits to having had to start from scratch, just as the National Guard does today in pursuit of its “homeland” mission. So that’s the way it is.
Our constitutional design of a community-supplied common defense—of a community of shared interests—is not only gone; the executive agents and the whole-of-society army firmly believe that it is obsolete and impractical and insufficient and even dangerous. And it is, for them. For the citizens, not only do pervasive threats and vulnerabilities sow fear and suspicion and strengthen the hand of the state, but mistrust and individual concern for one’s survival and one’s family feed apprehension—apprehension about speaking up, apprehension about assembling and crossing the government or the law enforcers. The American Coup complete, you are free to say what you want, believe what you want, assemble where you want, as long as you don’t violate invisible limitations and barriers or interfere with the workings of the XYZ.