波音公司(The Boeing Company)是美國一家開發、生產及銷售固定翼飛機、旋翼機、運載火箭、飛彈和人造衛星等產品,為世界最大的航天航空器製造商。於1997年併購麥克唐納-道格拉斯後,現在為美國境內唯一製造民航用廣體客機的公司,與歐洲空中巴士公司同為世界唯二的大型民航機製造商,彼此瓜分市場。它也提供租賃及產品售後服務。波音公司總部設於伊利諾州芝加哥,在民用航空市場上擁有頗高的佔有率。 波音同時是全球第二大國防承包商,軍售武器量僅僅次於洛克希德·馬丁,產值則高於全球第三的英國航太。單單2014年,該公司國防部門銷售總額達到290億美元,佔波音公司總收入的32%-35%左右。
Upon leaving the White House in 1961, President Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the dangers of a "military industrial complex,"〔 〕
and was clearly worried about the destabilizing effects of a national
economy based on outsized investments in military spending. As more and
more Americans fall into poverty and the global economy spirals
downward, the United States is spending more on the military than ever
before. What are the consequences and what can be done?
sixty-two legislators sit on the House Armed Services
Committee〔 〕, the largest committee in Congress. Since
January, 2011, when Republicans took control of the House, the committee
has been chaired by Howard P. McKeon〔
〕, who goes by Buck. He has never served in the military, but this
month he begins his third decade representing California’s Twenty-fifth
Congressional District, the home of a naval weapons station, an Army
fort, an Air Force base, and, for the Marines, a place to train for
mountain warfare.* McKeon believes that it’s his job to protect the
Pentagon from budget cuts. On New Year’s Day, after a thirteenth-hour
deal was sealed with spit in the Senate, McKeon issued a press statement
lamenting that the compromise had failed to “shield a wartime military
from further reductions.”
The debate about taxes is over, which is one of the few good things that
can be said for it. The debate about spending, which has already proved
narrow and grubby, is pending.
The United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of
the world combined. Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled,
reaching more than seven hundred billion dollars a year—more, in
adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies were fighting the
Axis. The 2011 Budget Control Act〔 〕, which raised the
debt ceiling and created both the fiscal cliff and a Joint Select
Committee on Deficit Reduction〔 〕, which was supposed to
find a way to steer clear of it, required four hundred and eighty-seven
billion dollars in cuts to military spending, spread over the next ten
years. The cliff-fall mandates an additional defense-budget reduction of
fifty-five billion dollars annually. None of these cuts have gone into
effect. McKeon has been maneuvering to hold the line.
In the fall of 2011, McKeon convened a series of hearings on “The Future
of National Defense and the United States Military Ten Years After
9/11.” The first hearing was held on September 8th, the same day as, and
down the hall from, the first meeting of the Joint Select Committee on
Deficit Reduction〔 〕, which is known as the
Supercommittee. It was no one’s finest hour. By the time McKeon gavelled
his meeting to order, just after ten in the morning, only seventeen
members of the House Armed Services Committee 〔 〕( five
Democrats and twelve Republicans ) had shown up to hear the three former
heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been called to testify.
Congressional attendance lies, ordinarily, somewhere between spotty and
lousy. In committees, roll is generally called only if there’s a vote,
and, despite pressure for reform, attendance isn’t even recorded except
on “gavel sheets,” compiled by staffers, which are said to be
unreliable. In short, it’s easy for lawmakers to skip meetings in which
there’s little to be decided. In any case, the point of the Armed
Services Committee hearings wasn’t really to debate the future of the
American military; it was to give the Department of
Defense〔 〕 the chance to argue against the automatic,
across-the-board cuts that were scheduled to go into effect this month
if the Supercommittee failed to reach a compromise.
“Our nation finds itself at a strategic juncture,” McKeon began. “Osama
bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda is on its back. The Taliban has lost its
strategic momentum in Afghanistan, and Iraq is an emerging democracy.”
Yet, “faced with serious economic challenges, we are slipping back into
the September 10th mentality that a solid defense can be dictated by
budget choices, not strategic ones.”
He then welcomed prepared remarks from two former chairs of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and one former vice-chair. No one denied the size of the
deficit. At issue was whether military spending should be on the table
or off. General Peter Pace, of the Marine Corps, insisted that it was
inappropriate to look at defense “from a dollar-and-cents perspective.”
Better to count risks and threats: Iran, North Korea, and, looking
ahead, China. Admiral Edmund P. Giambastiani, Jr〔 〕.,
compared the prospective cuts to “performing brain surgery with a
chainsaw.” General Richard B. Myers〔 〕, of the Air Force,
declared that “the world is a more dangerous and uncertain place today
than it has been for decades.”
None of this was contested by anyone, including the ranking Democrat,
Adam Smith〔 〕, a lawyer from Bellevue, Washington, who has
served on the House Armed Services Committee since 1997 and who agreed
that “defense is in an incredibly vulnerable position” because budget
cuts, which could lead to force reductions and base closings, would
“change the equation of power projection.” Around the world, “power
projection” is, in fact, a central mission of American forces. Smith
expressed alarm at the prospect of its diminishment. He asked a
question, which was purely rhetorical: “What if, all of a sudden, we
don’t have troops in Europe, we don’t have troops in Asia, we are just,
frankly, like pretty much every other country in the world?”
The long history of military spending in the United States begins with the establishment of the War Department〔 〕,
in 1789. At first, the Secretary of War, a Cabinet member who, from the
start, was a civilian, was called the Secretary at War, a holdover from
the Revolution but also a prepositional manifestation of an ideological
commitment: the department was chiefly to be called upon only if the
nation was at war. Early Americans considered a standing army—a
permanent army kept even in times of peace—to be a form of tyranny.
“What a deformed monster is a standing army in a free nation,” Josiah Quincy〔 〕,
of Boston, wrote in 1774. Instead, they favored militias. About the
first thing Henry Knox did when he became George Washington’s War
Secretary was to draft a plan for establishing a uniform militia.
Beginning in 1822, congressional oversight was handled by two standing
committees: one for the Army, the other for the Navy. A committee on the
militia, established in 1815, was abolished in 1911—the militia itself
having been essentially abandoned. Six years later, the United States
entered the First World War, and the staggering devastation of that war
raised both new and old fears about the business of arming men. In 1934,
the publication of “Merchants of Death,”〔 〕 a best-seller
and a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, contributed to the formation,
that year, of the Senate Munitions Committee, headed by Gerald P.
Nye〔 〕, a North Dakota Republican. Not coincidentally,
that was also the year Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which,
among other things, strictly regulated the private ownership of machine
guns.(Keeping military weapons out of the hands of civilians seemed to
the Supreme Court, when it upheld the Firearms Act, in 1939, entirely
consistent with the Second Amendment, which provides for the arming of
militias.)For two years, Nye led the most rigorous inquiry into the
arms industry that any branch of the federal government has ever
conducted. He convened ninety-three hearings. He thought the ability to
manufacture weapons should be restricted to the government. “The removal
of the element of profit from war would materially remove the danger of
more war,” he said. That never came to pass, partly because Nye was
unable to distinguish his opposition to arms profiteering from his
advocacy of isolationism, a position that had become indefensible.
Not until the Second World War did the United States establish what
would become a standing army. And even that didn’t happen without
dissent. In May of 1941, Robert Taft〔 〕, a Republican
senator from Ohio, warned that America’s entry into the Second World War
would mean, ultimately, that the United States “will have to maintain a
police force perpetually in Germany and throughout Europe.” Taft, like
Nye, was an ardent isolationist. “Frankly, the American people don’t
want to rule the world, and we are not equipped to do it. Such
imperialism is wholly foreign to our ideals of democracy and freedom,”
he said. “It is not our manifest destiny or our national
destiny.”〔 〕 In 1944, when Nye ran for reëlection, he was
defeated. Taft three times failed to win the Republican Presidential
nomination. The Second World War demonstrated the folly〔 〕
of their vantage on foreign policy. It also made it more difficult to
speak out against arms manufacturers and proponents of boundless
military spending.
A peace dividend expected after the Allied victory in 1945 never came.
Instead, the fight against Communism arrived, as well as a new
bureaucratic regime. In 1946, the standing committees on military and
naval affairs combined to become the Armed Services Committee. Under
amendments to the National Security Act of 1947, which created the
position of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the War
Department, now housed for the first time in a building of its own,
became the Department of Defense.
Meanwhile, during Senate hearings concerning the future of the national defense, military contractors such as the Lockheed Corporation*〔
〕—which was an object of Nye’s investigation in the nineteen-thirties,
and built more than ten thousand aircraft during the Second World
War—argued not only for military expansion but also for federal
subsidies. In 1947, Lockheed’s* chief executive told a Senate committee
that the nation needed funding for military production that was
“adequate, continuous, and permanent.”
In the nineteen-fifties, at the height of both the Korean War and
McCarthyism〔 〕, the United States’ foreign policy had
become the containment of Communism the world over, and military
spending made up close to three-quarters of the federal budget.
“Defense,” no less than “national security,” is a product and an
artifact of the Cold War. So, in large part, is the budget for it.
On September 8, 2011, when Buck McKeon convened the first of his House
Armed Services Committee hearings on the future of the military, no one
much disputed the idea that the manifest destiny of the United States is
to patrol the world. Truth be told, no one asked any particularly
searching questions at all. The only real flareup occurred when McKeon
had to suspend the session briefly owing to the noise of protesters in
the hall. “This demonstration that is going on outside is not to do with
us,” the chairman explained. (It was a spillover from the
Supercommittee.)
Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism April 20, 2005.
Still, John Garamendi〔 〕, a Democrat from California, who
during the Vietnam War served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia,
read aloud from “Chance for Peace,” Eisenhower’s first major address as
President, delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on
April 16, 1953. Eisenhower had sought the Republican Presidential
nomination in order to defeat Taft and the isolationist wing of the
G.O.P., but, six years into the Cold War, he was as worried as Nye had
been about what an arms race would cost. In the speech, Eisenhower
reckoned the price of arms:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This is a world in arms. This
world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of
its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. .
. . This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the
clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Eisenhower, a five-star general who during the Second World War had
served as the Supreme Allied Commander, was the son of pacifist
Mennonites who considered war a sin, as James Ledbetter reports in
“Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial
Complex” (Yale)〔 〕. Ledbetter writes that “when, as a
child, Dwight began to show a voracious appetite for military history,
his mother was disturbed and tried to keep the family’s history books
locked in a closet.” Better known, if less stark, than “Chance for
Peace” is the farewell address that Eisenhower delivered when he left
office, in 1961, after years of failing to end the U.S.-Soviet arms
race. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower warned then. “Only an alert
and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge
industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods
and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
If any arms manufacturer today holds what Eisenhower called “unwarranted
influence,” it is Lockheed Martin. The firm’s contracts with the
Pentagon amount to some thirty billion dollars annually, as William D.
Hartung〔 〕, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy〔 〕, reports in his book “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex” (Nation).〔
〕 Today, Lockheed Martin spends fifteen million dollars a year on
lobbying efforts and campaign contributions. The company was the single
largest contributor to Buck McKeon’s last campaign. (Lockheed Martin has
a major R. & D. center in McKeon’s congressional district.) This
patronage hardly distinguishes McKeon from his colleagues on Capitol
Hill. Lockheed Martin contributed to the campaigns of nine of the twelve
members of the Supercommittee, fifty-one of the sixty-two members of
the House Armed Services Committee, twenty-four of the twenty-five
members of that committee’s Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land
Forces—in all, to three hundred and eighty-six of the four hundred and
thirty-five members of the 112th Congress.
The merchants-of-death argument explains only so much, as the political scientist Daniel Wirls observes in “Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense from Reagan to Obama” (Johns Hopkins): “The military-industrial complex,
such as it is, does not produce the propensity or predisposition for
war or even hawkish policies short of conflict, as much as war or
hawkish policies (driven primarily by political decisions) produce an
opening for the military-industrial coalition to take advantage of the
biases built into the system that favor, over the long run, hawkish
policies.” Ledbetter is less concerned with Eisenhower’s
military-industrial complex than with private contractors, abuses of
civil liberties, and foreign arms sales (the U.S. sells more guns than
any other country), which, he believes, together “constitute an
overreaching military-industrial complex at least equal to the one
Eisenhower warned against” and create “problems that cannot simply be
resolved with more rational budgets.” Neither can these problems be
solved without thinking about guns sold, owned, and carried within the
United States. At home and abroad, in uniform and out, in war and in
peace, Americans are armed to the teeth.
“Every gun that is made,” Eisenhower said, “signifies, in the final sense, a theft.” During that first hearing, when Garamendi finished quoting Eisenhower, he invited General Myers to comment. Myers said, “I wonder what President Eisenhower would have done in New York City on 9/12/2001.”
In 2001, military spending, as a function of the over-all American
economy, was, at six per cent, the lowest it had been since the Second
World War. Then, for a decade, it rose. In much the same way that the
peace dividend expected with the Allied victory never came because of
the Cold War (during most of which military spending made up roughly
half the federal budget), a peace dividend expected after the end of the
Warsaw Pact〔 〕, in 1991, came but didn’t last. Instead,
after 9/11 the United States declared a “global war on terror,” a fight
against fear itself. The Iraq War, 2003-11, went on longer than the
American Revolution. The war in Afghanistan, begun in 2001, isn’t over
yet, making it the second-longest war in American history. (Only Vietnam
lasted longer.) Troops may be withdrawn in 2014; the fighting will rage
on. During George W. Bush’s second term, the National Defense Strategy
of the United States became “ending tyranny in our world.” But a war to
end tyranny has no end; it’s not even a war.
The United States, separated from much of the world by two oceans and
bordered by allies, is, by dint of geography, among the best-protected
countries on earth. Nevertheless, six decades after V-J Day nearly three
hundred thousand American troops are stationed overseas, including
fifty-five thousand in Germany, thirty-five thousand in Japan, and ten
thousand in Italy. Much of the money that the federal government spends
on “defense” involves neither securing the nation’s borders nor
protecting its citizens. Instead, the U.S. military enforces American
foreign policy.
“We have hundreds of military bases all over the world,” Melvin A. Goodman 〔《國家不安全:美國軍國主義的支出》 〕observes in “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism” (City Lights). “Few
other countries have any.” Goodman, a former Army cryptographer and a
longtime C.I.A. analyst who taught at the National War College for
eighteen years, is one of a growing number of critics of U.S. military
spending, policy, and culture who are veterans of earlier wars. Younger
veterans are critical, too. A 2011 Pew survey of veterans of Afghanistan
and Iraq found that half thought the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth
fighting, and nearly sixty per cent thought the Iraq War wasn’t.
The most persuasive of these soldier-critics is Andrew J. Bacevich,
a West Point graduate who fought in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971; served as
a career Army officer, rising to the rank of colonel; and is now a
professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A
Catholic and a conservative, Bacevich is viscerally pained by
Americans’ ”infatuation with military power.” Everything, in Bacevich’s
account, comes back to Vietnam, the way it does for a great many of that
war’s veterans, including Chuck Hagel, the President’s nominee for
Secretary of Defense.
Lately, Bacevich argues, Americans “have fallen prey to militarism,
manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see
military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and
outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree
without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the
nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness,
military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military
ideals.” Even as military spending has soared, war has become more
distant: less known than imagined, less remembered than forgotten. War
has become a fantasy: sleek, glossy, high-tech (more “Top Gun”〔 《壯志淩雲》〕
than “Apocalypse Now”〔《現代啟示錄》 〕), and bloodless. Americans have less
experience of war, and know less about the military, than at any point
in the past century. Since 9/11, at any given time about one-half of one
per cent of Americans have been on active duty. Only a tiny minority of
members of Congress have known combat, or have family members who have.
“God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know
the military as well as I do,” Eisenhower once said. From Reagan to
Obama, but especially during the Administrations of the past three
Presidents, none of whom ever saw active duty, civilian thinking about
foreign policy has been subordinated to military thinking. The State
Department has deferred to the Department of Defense. And the
Commander-in-Chief has deferred to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
The United States, a nation founded on opposition to a standing army, is
now a nation engaged in a standing war. Bacevich locates the origins of
America’s permanent war more than a decade before 9/11. “During the
entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military
actions abroad totalled a scant six,” he reports. “Since the fall of the
Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events.” Bacevich
places much of the blame for this state of affairs on intellectuals,
especially neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz and Donald Rumsfeld,
but also liberals, who, he points out, have eagerly supported the use of
the military and of military force “not as an obstacle to social change
but as a venue in which to promote it.” The resort to force is not a
partisan position; it is a product of political failure.
And a failure, as well, of political culture. CNN
loudmouths〔 〕, neocon opinion-page columnists, retired
generals who run for office, Hollywood action-film directors, Jerry
Falwell〔 〕, Wesley Clark〔 〕, Tom
Clancy〔 〕, Bill Clinton〔 〕—Bacevich has long
since lost patience with all these people. He deplores their ego-driven
mythmaking, their love of glory, their indifference to brutality.
War, by its nature, is barbarous, grievous, and untamable. There never
has been a “smart war.” Still, some wars are worse than others. “Surely,
the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even
shameful failures of the Iraq War make clear the need to rethink the
fundamentals of U.S. military policy,” Bacevich suggested in his 2005
book “The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.” 〔 《新的美國軍國主義:美國人是怎樣被帶入戰爭的》 〕That
scrutiny has not yet been given, not least because, as Bacevich has
observed, “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited
any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of
national security policy.” Don’t ask, don’t tell. But, especially, don’t
ask.
In 2007, Bacevich’s only son, Andrew Bacevich, Jr., a
twenty-seven-year-old first lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry
Division,* died of wounds sustained during combat in Iraq. Bacevich
didn’t testify at Buck McKeon’s hearings on the military’s future in
2011, but he did testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
in 2009, when its chairman, John Kerry, convened a hearing about the war in Afghanistan. This winter, the President nominated Kerry as Secretary of State.
During the hearing on Afghanistan, Kerry looked exhausted. “Colonel
Bacevich,” he said, “you get to be the wrap-up.”Bacevich read a
statement. Kerry listened intently, covering his mouth with his hand.
The war in Afghanistan, Bacevich said, reminded him of Vietnam and of
how, in 1971, Kerry testified before this committee on behalf of Vietnam
Veterans Against the War. “Yet there’s one notable difference between
today and the day, thirty-eight years ago, when the chairman of this
committee testified against the then seemingly endless Vietnam War,”
Bacevich said. “When the young John Kerry spoke, many of his
contemporaries had angrily turned against their generation’s war. Today,
most of the contemporaries of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan
have simply tuned out.”
Kerry picked up his pen.
Bacevich read on: “Recall that in his testimony before this committee,
speaking on behalf of other antiwar veterans, the young John Kerry
remarked that ‘we are probably angriest about all that we were told
about Vietnam, and about the mystical war against Communism.’ ”
Kerry looked down at his notes.
“The mystical war against Communism,” Bacevich said, “finds its
counterpart in the mystical war on terrorism.” Mystification, he said,
leads us to exaggerate threats and ignore costs. “It prevents us from
seeing things as they are.”
People in the room began to applaud.
Kerry wiped his brow. “Please, folks,” he begged. “We will have no demonstrations of any kind.”
On October 13, 2011, at the fifth of Buck McKeon’s hearings on the
future of the military, the House Armed Services Committee heard
testimony from Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, and General
Martin Dempsey〔马丁·登普西将军 〔 Gen. Martin Dempsey〕 〕, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Committee〔 参谋长联席会议主席的证词 〕
attendance was bad, but better than before. (Eleven Democrats and
twenty-two Republicans were in the room when the hearing began.)
“There are some in government who want to use the military to pay for
the rest, to protect the sacred cow that is entitlement spending,”
McKeon said, in his opening remarks, referring to Social Security and
Medicare. “Not only should that be a non-starter from a
national-security and economic perspective, but it should also be a
non-starter from a moral perspective.” Cuts should be made, he said, not
to “the protector of our prosperity” but to “the driver of the debt.”
“The driver of our debt is our military-complex machine!” someone shouted from the gallery.〔 “我们复杂的军事机器推动形成了我们的债务问题!” 〕
The Capitol Hill Police stepped in and arrested several protesters,
including Leah Bolger〔 利娅·博尔杰女士〕, the vice-president of Veterans for
Peace.
“The war machine is killing this country!” she cried, as she was carried away.
The hearing resumed. McKeon introduced Panetta. But the moment Panetta
began to speak a protester interrupted. He identified himself as an Iraq
War veteran. “You are murdering people!” he shouted. “I saw what we did
to people. I saw.” He was escorted out of the room.
The hearing lasted two more hours. Much time was spent defending defense
spending. “I don’t believe that the D.O.D. should have to pay one penny
more in discretionary budget cuts,” McKeon said. Much time was devoted
to inventorying threats to national security, which, Panetta said, are
only increasing in both danger and number. (His list included Pakistan,
Somalia, Yemen, and North Africa.)
Hank Johnson〔佐治亚州的民主党人,汉克·约翰逊 〕, a Democrat from Georgia, attempted to
draw an analogy between the Capitol Hill Police’s ability to arrest
protesters in a hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building〔
雷伯恩众议院办公大楼 〕 and the deployment of U.S. forces〔 〕 in
every corner of the globe. “From time to time, there are disturbances
throughout the world, and these disturbances may interrupt some of our
various interests around the world, and it is necessary for us to have
some kind of force to maintain order,” he said. “It is like competition,
like capitalism.”
Protesters are by no means uncommon at congressional hearings, but this
particular protest had rattled people. “I know we started the day with
protesters in the room, and sometimes they seem disruptive or their
tactics are some we might argue with,” Chellie Pingree〔 缅因州的民主党人切利·平格里〕,
a Democrat from Maine, said. “But, frankly, we are facing a time when
there are protesters in almost every city where we reside or represent.”
This time—emboldened, maybe, by the protesters—a few committee members offered comments that were more pointed. Niki Tsongas
, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told Dempsey〔 登普西将军〕, “I would hope
you also take into account that not every risk can be dealt with through
a military response.” And the questions were tougher. Walter B. Jones, a Republican* from North Carolina, asked Panetta〔 帕内塔 〕, “Why are we still in Afghanistan?”
Leon Panetta〔 帕内塔 〕
circled around an answer. “One thing we do not want,” he said, “is
Afghanistan becoming a safe haven again for Al Qaeda.”
“Mr. Secretary,” Jones pressed, “we got bin Laden, and Al Qaeda has dispersed all around the world. Let’s bring them home.”
But by far the most adamant statement came from Dempsey. “I didn’t become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
to oversee the decline of the Armed Forces of the United States, and an
end state that would have this nation and its military not be a global
power,” he said. “That is not who we are as a nation.”“〔
我没有成为目睹美国军事力量衰落的参联会主席,也没有看到美国作为全球性力量的终结。 〕
Either the United States rules the world or Americans are no longer
Americans? Happily, that’s not the choice the 113th Congress faces. The
decision at hand concerns limits, not some kind of national, existential apocalypse.
Force requires bounds. Between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy,
accountability, and restraint. Dempsey’s won’t be the last word. ♦
*A redistricting of California’s Twenty-fifth Congressional District
went into effect in January, 2013. The district no longer includes a
naval weapons station, Army fort, or a Marine mountain-warfare training
center.
*Walter B. Jones is a Republican, not a Democrat, as originally stated.
*Executives from the Lockheed Corporation appeared at the hearings and
before a Senate Committee. They were not from Lockheed Martin, as
originally stated; the Lockheed Corporation became Lockheed Martin in
1995.
*The original article stated that Andrew Bacevich, Jr., served in the
U.S. Army’s Third Battalion, but there are multiple Third Battalions in
the U.S. Army.