(#110-1) January 19 2015. If we are predictable and the enemy retains the initiative, how can we claim tactical success? Or are we deluding ourselves? We are certainly missing something. It could well be that elusive thing—the truth. It could be merely that our perspective is flawed. Either way, we consistently seem to misread such situations—deliberately or otherwise—in war, after war, after war.

IF WE WIN ALL THE BATTLES

HOW COME WE LOSE THE WARS?

THOUGHTS ABOUT WINNING & LOSING

Working on my non-fiction military book has made me think a great deal about the widely accepted belief that the U.S. military tends to win at a tactical level virtually all the time—yet we certainly don’t seem to win most of our wars.

The following are the conflicts that come to mind immediately.  Doubtless, I have missed a few, but they are sufficient to make the point.

KOREA—A draw at best, and we got badly hammered by the Chinese when we advanced into North Korea.

VIETNAM—We lost.

LEBANON—After the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks, we withdrew.

GULF WAR 1991/2—We won in that we drove the Iraqis from Kuwait, but then we made an unsatisfactory peace which kept Saddam Hussein in power.

SOMALIA—After Blackhawk Down, we withdrew somewhat ignominiously. Now, we’re back with Special Forces and drones.

AFGHANISTAN—Whatever we pretend, we are still at war in Afghanistan.

IRAQ—As above.

We can report two complete successes—GRENADA and PANAMA.  However. neither constituted a remotely serious enemy. We couldn’t lose. In fact, where Panama was concerned, we were already there. Invading a small country, when you already have bases there, is not too hard.

It strikes me that we are doing ourselves no favors by claiming to win all the battles because it is clear that we don’t. If an enemy attacks us, on his own initiative, inflicts damage, and then retreats on his own terms, we may claim victory—especially if he has suffered more casualties than we do—but we are fooling ourselves if our enemy achieved his objective of hurting us sufficiently so that, eventually, we would lose the will to fight. Our enemies consistently play the long game because they know we rarely can, or wish to.

In his terms, losing more people than we do is worth it (and all but inevitable given our superior firepower).

In this context, for us to win at the tactical level would require us to be able to operate with impunity—virtually free of effective attack—which has decidedly not been the case in either Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, we have suffered enormous materiel damage in both of those countries—and, though our fatalities have not been particularly high by the sad standards of such conflicts,  we have suffered a considerable toll in terms of wounded, and very large numbers of soldiers are suffering from the after effect of IEDs—which include PTSD and a truly concerning number of TBIs (Traumatic Brain Injuries).

A disturbing byproduct of our belief that we are consistently victorious at the tactical level is that we see no good reason to change tactics. After all, if what we are doing is near 100 percent successful, we would be foolish, indeed, to change. In short, our intellectual dishonesty—or simple misreading of the situation—leads to complacency.

In saying this, I don’t wish to imply any criticism of the soldiers on the ground. Again and again they display astonishing courage. However, I do think that those in command  might have done a better job if they had accepted the reality of the situation and adjusted their tactics accordingly.

In particular, we remained Big Base oriented, and road-bound, for far too long. In addition, we should have become much better at preventing IEDs being planted in the first place. The latter would have required significant tactical changes and an integration with air that have still not yet been achieved—nor, for the most part, even attempted..

Chuck Spinney, one of our most prominent military thinkers, is worth reading (although, ironically, he too states that we appear to win tactically). But, essentially, he is making the same point that I am—but provides more context. Not only our enemies like protracted conflicts.

Check out www.chuckspinney.blogspot.com 

Can a Gold Plated Military Counter ISIS?

Lightly armed guerrilla/insurgent/terrorist forces are once again holding off the high-tech, heavily armed forces of the United States.  A string of defeats is slowly accumulating at the strategic and grand-strategic levels of conflict, even though US forces almost always win battles at the tactical level, if they can fix the insurgents and destroy them with overwhelming firepower, particularly bombing.  But when viewed through the overlapping lenses of the operational, strategic, and grand strategic levels of conflict guerrillas have advantages to offset US firepower.

Faced with the tactical threat of overwhelming conventional firepower, irregular fighters always strive to retain the initiative at the operational level of conflict by perfecting the arts of quick dispersal and blending in with the physical and cultural background, while relying on provocations (beheadings?), hit and run attacks, and the ubiquitous threat of booby traps to keep US forces on edge and increase our expenditure of effort.  To paraphrase T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), the guerrilla’s operational level goal is to wage a war of detachment, presenting a threat everywhere, “never affording a target” and “never on the defensive except by accident or error.” [Boyd, POC, Slide 64]  At the strategic level of conflict, guerrillas aim to wear down US forces by keeping them under continual mental and physical strain, while at the decisive level of grand strategy, their aim is to stretch out and increase the cost of the intervention to undermine the US political will at home, weaken its allied support, keep neutrals neutral or empathetic to guerrilla cause, and attract recruits.

In short guerrillas love protracted wars -- periods of apparent inaction punctuated by short, sharp fights — or in the naive lexicon of fascinated American counter-insurgency enthusiasts, guerrillas love long wars.  That is because protracted wars create an unfolding stream of events that play into the guerrilla’s hands at the decisive grand-strategic level of conflict.

Juxtapose the guerrilla art of war to that described by President Obama in his declaration of a war on ISIS last September.  Obama called for yet another high-cost, fire-power centric attrition strategy with the objective “to degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS  “through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy.”  This art of war at its core assumes the art is all tactical — i.e. destruction by bombing — and that this assumption of pure attrition is the only effect of military operations needed to eventually procure success at the operational, strategic, and grand strategic levels of war to “ultimately” destroy ISIS.

Put another way, the idea of a protracted military operations implicit in Mr. Obama’s words fits the guerrilla strategy like a hand fits a glove.

It is not as if the United States has not experienced the grand-strategic meat grinding effects of this kind of thinking.  They clearly unfolded to our chagrin in Viet Nam.  They are unfolding again in the perpetual Global War on Terror (GWOT), which, in terms money adjusted for inflation, is now by some estimates the second most expensive war in US history, requiring annual defense budgets far exceeding the annual budgets of the much larger, higher tempo Korean and Viet Nam Wars (see graphic). 

One problem is that like guerrillas, the domestic political-economy of the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) has come to love protracted small wars war for the obvious reason that high budgets enrich and strengthen the MICC’s iron triangle, thereby providing it with the political power and wealth needed to keep its game going, just as President Eisenhower feared over 50 years ago in his farewell address (January 1961)  The explosive cost of small wars is a predictable consequence of  the domestic politics of the MICC’s political-economy and its addiction to gold-plated weapons that naturally flow out of dysfunctional bureaucratic/political power games exhibited by the MICC’s well-documented decision-making pathologies. (a subject discussed throughout the variety of reports assembled here.) 

VOR words 620.

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(#109-2) January 18 2015. One of the great things about creativity is that there are no limits to it. Even if something has been done before endless times,there is always some fresh perspective to explore.

THOUGHTS ON A TRULY BEAUTIFUL WEBSITE FEATURING NUDE WOMEN & THEIR STORIES

HERSELF.COM

QUITE WONDERFUL!

I ran across this in the Huffington Post.

The idea is to photograph naked women in a non-sexual way. Photographer Jennifer Toole has done just that to striking effect, but I would be hard pressed to say that the end result isn’t sexual anyway—and the interviews certainly are.

These is an honesty and directness about the whole thing which is very refreshing. I love great photography—regardless of its subject matter—but the combination, in these cases, is compelling.

I’m left with the thought that women should be this candid more often.

Who would have thought that you could make an original contribution to creativity through photographing nude women and then accompanying the photographs with interviews.

So simple. So beautiful. So thought-provoking. And—despite the stated intent—so sexual..

Go look at www.herself.com

VOR words 139

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(#109-1) January 18 2015. Sometimes, there is good news—and better news.

ARE WRITERS ENTREPRENEURS—(AND CRAZY)?

YES—AND SMALL BUSINESSES (TRYING TO GET LARGER) AS WELL—THOUGH WHERE WRITING IS CONCERNED (NOTE THIS WELL), THE WRITING COMES FIRST

SOME AUTHORS ARE SURPRISINGLY LARGE BUSINESSES. IT’S RARE—BUT IT’S POSSIBLE (though that is not why most of us write)

The following infographic projects an impressively upbeat picture. Since I often write about serious issues, I thought this would make a pleasant contrast. It supports the idea that business—like life—can, and should be, fun.

For all too many employees—particularly those who work for large corporations and are underpaid (not necessarily one and the same—and all corporate employees are certainly not underpaid) work is frequently far from enjoyable and stressful—way more so than it needs to be in many cases. Pay issues apart, having a thoughtless or unpleasant boss seems to be the greatest problem.—and research shows that most people are not committed to their jobs (as in fully engaged). In short, most of us work because we have to—though there often aspects we enjoy such as the social intercourse.

In contrast, running your own business (especially in good times) can be very satisfying and enjoyable.

It’s difficult to set up a successful business—but you have some degree of control over your own economic destiny—and the challenge is part of the fun.

Strangely enough, American entrepreneurship is in decline—and has been for some time—but that’s a topic for another day.

Writing certainly is immensely satisfying—the most fun you can have to with your clothes on. When I get up in the morning, I really like to start the day with a mug of tea (I’m Irish so not really a coffee guy) but tend to write first nine times out of ten. I wake wanting to write.

I hate using clichés such as “the most fun etc.”—but I heard on the radio the other day that where journalism is concerned, where you are trying to convey a great deal of information in limited time and space, they are virtually inevitable—and permissible. Is blogging journalism? No—though it can be—but I’m availing of literary license.

Now I think of it, I have never tried writing naked. Could one write while having sex? I’m not sure January in Seattle is the time to experiment.

Actually, we writers write under any and all circumstances—if only in our heads. We are both involved in whatever is going on—and detached, as in observing and recording it on the principle that it’s all material.

A disconcerting thought, isn’t it.

Mind you, sometimes we think with other parts of our anatomy.

VOR words c.400.

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(#108-1) January 17 2015. Riddle me what you are about to read. Why do we neglect this Great Nation so?

THE U.S IS ONE OF THE WEALTHIEST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD

YET THE WASHINGTON POST HAS JUST FEATURED THE FOLLOWING STARK HEADLINE:

“MAJORITY OF U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS ARE IN POVERTY”

WHAT KIND OF NATION ARE WE?

I’m truly baffled by our lack of social concern. It has to have the most serious social, political, and economic consequences. We are growing a vast and ever-increasing underclass—yet we are endeavoring to compete internationally.

If this is the best the American Business Model can do, we need another business model fast. This is a disgrace. It doesn’t say much for the current state of American democracy either.

Hasn’t it occurred to anyone that the countries that really do succeed internationally—nations like Germany, all of Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland, and the like (who,  incidentally, leave us in the dust under a whole host of headings)—are nations with highly educated, well off workforces that know how to add most value and practice Social Democracy..

Meanwhile much of corporate America is engaged in the Big Squeeze on labor with the active support of the Republican party—and, in many cases—the complicity of the Democrats—and against a backdrop of the indifference of most affluent Americans.

Let me quote from the Washington Post story. It would depress a saint!

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches in the 2012-2013 school year. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

“We’ve all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it’s here sooner rather than later,” said Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Columbia University, noting that the poverty rate has been increasing even as the economy has improved. “A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.”

The shift to a majority-poor student population means that in public schools, more than half of the children start kindergarten already trailing their more privileged peers and rarely, if ever, catch up. They are less likely to have support at home to succeed, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school, and are more likely to drop out and never attend college.

It also means that education policy, funding decisions and classroom instruction must adapt to the swelling ranks of needy children arriving at the schoolhouse door each morning.

Schools, already under intense pressure to deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards, face the doubly difficult task of trying to raise the achievement of poor children so that they approach the same level as their more affluent peers.

The data show poor students spread across the country, but the highest rates are concentrated in Southern and Western states. In 21 states, at least half the public school children were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches — ranging from Mississippi, where almost three out of every four students were from low-income families, to Illinois, where one out of every two was low-income.

Carey Wright, Mississippi’s state superintendent of education, said quality preschool is the key to help poor children.

“That’s huge,” she said. “These children can learn at the highest levels, but you have to provide for them. You can’t assume they have books at home, or they visit the library or go on vacations. You have to think about what you’re doing across the state and ensuring they’re getting what other children get.”

The new report raises questions among educators and officials about whether states and the federal government are devoting enough money — and whether it is allocated in the most effective way — to meet the complex needs of children living in poverty.

The Obama administration wants Congress to add $1 billion to the $14.4 billion it spends annually to help states educate poor children. It also wants Congress to fund preschool for those from low-income families. Collectively, the states and the federal government spend about $500 billion annually on primary and secondary schools, with about $79 billion coming from Washington.

The amount spent on each student can vary wildly from state to state. Vermont, with a relatively low student-poverty rate of 36 percent, spent the most of any state in 2012-2013, at $19,752 per pupil. In the same school year, Arizona, with a 51 percent student-poverty rate, spent the least in the nation at $6,949 per student, according to data compiled by the National Education Association. States with high student-poverty rates tend to spend less per student: Of the 27 states with the highest percentages of student poverty, all but five spent less than the national average.

Republicans in Congress have been wary of new spending programs, arguing that more money is not necessarily the answer, and they have rebuffed President Obama’s calls to fund preschool for low-income families. A number of Republican and Democratic governors have initiated state programs in the past several years.

The report comes as Congress begins debate about rewriting the country’s main federal education law, which was first passed as a part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and was designed to give federal help to states to help educate poor children. The most recent version of the law, known as No Child Left Behind, has emphasized accountability and outcomes, measuring whether schools met benchmarks and sanctioning them when they fell short.

That federal focus on results, as opposed to need, is wrong­headed, Rebell said.

“We have to think about how to give these kids a meaningful education,” he said. “We have to give them quality teachers, small class sizes, up-to-date equipment. But in addition, if we’re serious, we have to do things that overcome the damages­ of poverty. We have to meet their health needs, their mental health needs, after-school programs, summer programs, parent engagement, early-childhood services. These are the so-called wraparound services. Some people think of them as add-ons. They’re not.

VOR words c.200

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(#107-1) January 16 2015. As matters stand, the American Business Model is broken. Can it be fixed? Maybe…

ANY BUSINESS MODEL BUILT ON TREATING YOUR EMPLOYESS BADLY IS FUNDAMENTALLY UNSOUND, CORRUPT, AND BAD BUSINESS

THE GOOD NEWS? AT LAST, A FEW LARGE CORPORATIONS ARE BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT. BUT THERE IS A LONG, LONG, WAY TO GO

Since I started researching the U.S. economy seriously back in 2004, I have been appalled at the prevailing ethos that a corporation’s workforce is of no significance because only the shareholders count. And I should add that shareholders only count—as far as many CEOs and senior managements are concerned—because looking after them pushes up the share price—and such executives receive the bulk of their remuneration through share options.

I shudder to think how much damage has been done to the corporations themselves, and to the U.S. economy as a whole, as a consequence of such a morally bankrupt, damn-fool thesis. Managements should consider themselves fortunate that more workers haven’t fought back—but, in truth, they have been so abused over the last few decades, they seem to be pretty well crushed.

Evidently, some management teams are beginning to realize that their greed has consequences—and that sooner or later someone is going to reinvent the guillotine.

Better late than never.

I was glad to see that phrase ‘social compact’ re-appearing. Of course there has to be a social compact (also called a ‘social contract’) in business—or else you get exactly what we have had—a lousy economy full of scared people (and a relatively small number of very rich, very greedy ones).

The American Nightmare. We can, should be, and will be—I can but hope—better than this. Nonetheless, it is sobering to observe that the very latest government statistics—in the middle of some very encouraging figures about the economy—actually reported earnings going down.

The following is from The Progress Report.

Health Insurance Giant Aetna Is Raising Wages For Its Lowest Paid Workers

A common refrain from some in the business community who oppose a minimum wage increase is that higher wages for low-income workers will be costly enough to either force businesses to raise prices for consumers or cause them to lay off workers. Aetna, a Fortune 100 company with nearly 50,000 employees, just made a decision that sharply rebukes that argument. The health insurance giant has announced it is raising the minimum wage for its workers to $16 per hour. In doing so, the company specifically cited the business benefits, not the costs, of the move.

The raises, which comes on the heels of similar wage increases by big name companies likeStarbucks and Gap, are significant. An estimated 5,700 Aetna employees will get a pay bump — an 11 percent increase on average and up to 33 percent for some workers. And it won’t be free: the company expects the move to cost an estimated $14 million this year, and $25.5 million in 2016.

Nonetheless, Aetna CEO Mark T. Bertolini laid out the business case for raising the wages of low-income employees. Here are a few of the reasons he cited, in an interview to the Wall Street Journal:

• Adapting the company for the future: “We’re preparing our company for a future where we’re going to have a much more consumer-oriented business.”
• Workforce development: “[Aetna wants] a better and more informed work force.”
• Reducing turnover costs: According to the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Bertolini said Aetna hopes to reduce its turnover costs of around $120 million a year and improve the quality of job prospects and the engagement of workers who interact with consumers and health-care providers.”

And then there is a broader reason that factored into Mr. Bertolini’s decision: “It’s not just about paying people, it’s about the whole social compact,” Mr. Bertolini said, adding, “Why can’t private industry step forward and make the innovative decisions on how to do this?”

BOTTOM LINE: The decision by Aetna to raise wages for their low-income employees demonstrates one of the business imperatives for raising wages. Simply put, investing in workers pays off for companies in more ways than one. We’d thank Aetna for it’s decision, but we know that the company didn’t made this move because of groups like ours. It made the move because it cares about its workers, and it cares about its bottom line.

VOR words c. 250

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(#106-1) January 15 2015. Why do we do what we do—and could we do it better? After all, if they can make it work, why can’t we?

THE U.S. APPEARS TO BE INCREASINGLY OUT OF STEP WITH MUCH OF THE REST OF THE DEVELOPED WORLD—AND PARTICULARLY THE SCANDINAVIANS—AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY

A FASCINATING, INSIGHTFUL, AND IMPORTANT POST BY ANN JONES. WORTH REFLECTING UPON

This is such a good piece that it deserves to be read in full. It reflects much of my own thinking—as anyone who reads this blog regularly will know.

On the one hand, the answers to many of our current problems are out there and working—on the other hand, by and large, Americans don’t look—and our media doesn’t encourage us to do so. And when, occasionally, we do look, we don’t learn.

A consequence is much unnecessary misery—and a country, despite all the encouraging economic statistics, still in (highly preventable) decline.

Economics progress is of little use if the benefits accrue to only a few people.

This Great Nation could be a much more enjoyable place —for all Americans to live in—than it currently is.

And those ‘socialist’ Europeans with their ‘socialist’ healthcare live about three years longer than Americans do on average—and are healthier, better educated, have long vacations, and have vastly less stress in their impressively secure lives—and have a high standard of living.

Better than us? Better than many of us—excluding the 1 percent. Go to Northern Europe and see for yourself.

In truth, they all practice capitalism—but they have fine-tuned it better than we have. They call it Social Democracy—or commonsense. It’s less political than practical. It works.

Could it be they know something we don’t?

Read on.

Is This Country Crazy?
Inquiring Minds Elsewhere Want to Know
By Ann Jones

Posted by Ann Jones at 8:00am, January 11, 2015.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175941/

Americans who live abroad -- more than six million of us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government) -- often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States.  Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world.

In my long nomadic life, I’ve had the good fortune to live, work, or travel in all but a handful of countries on this planet.  I’ve been to both poles and a great many places in between, and nosy as I am, I’ve talked with people all along the way. I still remember a time when to be an American was to be envied. The country where I grew up after World War II seemed to be respected and admired around the world for way too many reasons to go into here.

That’s changed, of course. Even after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people -- in the Middle East, no less -- willing to withhold judgment on the U.S.  Many thought that the Supreme Court’s installation of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004. His return to office truly spelled the end of America as the world had known it.  Bush had started a war, opposed by the entire world, because he wanted to and he could. A majority of Americans supported him.  And that was when all the uncomfortable questions really began.

In the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway, through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in those two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy? Please explain.

Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.”  It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign observers are far better informed about us than the average American is about them. This is partly because the “news” in the American media is so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how other countries think -- even countries with which we were recently, are currently, or threaten soon to be at war. America’s belligerence alone, not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels the rest of the world to keep close track of us.  Who knows, after all, what conflict the Americans may drag you into next, as target or reluctant ally?

So wherever we expatriates settle on the planet, we find someone who wants to talk about the latest American events, large and small: another country bombed in the name of our “national security,” another peaceful protest march attacked by our increasingly militarized police, another diatribe against “big government” by yet another wannabe candidate who hopes to head that very government in Washington.  Such news leaves foreign audiences puzzled and full of trepidation.

Question Time

Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years (which 1.6 million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our way).  At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880.  Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems.  Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care. That so many Americans do strikes Europeans as baffling, if not frankly brutal.

In the Scandinavian countries, long considered to be the most socially advanced in the world, a national (physical and mental) health program, funded by the state, is a big part -- but only a part -- of a more general social welfare system.  In Norway, where I live, all citizens also have an equal right to education (state subsidized preschool from age one, and free schools from age six through specialty training or university education and beyond), unemployment benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid parental leave, old age pensions, and more.  These benefits are not merely an emergency “safety net”; that is, charitable payments grudgingly bestowed upon the needy.  They are universal: equally available to all citizens as human rights encouraging social harmony -- or as our own U.S. constitution would put it, “domestic tranquility.”  It’s no wonder that, for many years, international evaluators have ranked Norway as the best place to grow old, to be a woman, and to raise a child. The title of “best” or “happiest” place to live on Earth comes down to a neighborly contest among Norway and the other Nordic social democracies, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland.

In Norway, all benefits are paid for mainly by high taxation. Compared to the mind-numbing enigma of the U.S. tax code, Norway’s is remarkably straightforward, taxing income from labor and pensions progressively, so that those with higher incomes pay more. The tax department does the calculations, sends an annual bill, and taxpayers, though free to dispute the sum, willingly pay up, knowing what they and their children get in return. And because government policies effectively redistribute wealth and tend to narrow the country’s slim income gap, most Norwegians sail pretty comfortably in the same boat. (Think about that!)

Life and Liberty

This system didn’t just happen. It was planned. Sweden led the way in the 1930s, and all five Nordic countries pitched in during the postwar period to develop their own variations of what came to be called the Nordic Model: a balance of regulated capitalism, universal social welfare, political democracy, and the highest levels of gender and economic equality on the planet. It’s their system. They invented it. They like it. Despite the efforts of an occasional conservative government to muck it up, they maintain it. Why?

In all the Nordic countries, there is broad general agreement across the political spectrum that only when people’s basic needs are met -- when they can cease to worry about their jobs, their incomes, their housing, their transportation, their health care, their kids’ education, and their aging parents -- only then can they be free to do as they like. While the U.S. settles for the fantasy that, from birth, every kid has an equal shot at the American dream, Nordic social welfare systems lay the foundations for a more authentic equality and individualism.

These ideas are not novel. They are implied in the preamble to our own Constitution. You know, the part about “we the People” forming  “a more perfect Union” to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  Even as he prepared the nation for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt memorably specified components of what that general welfare should be in his State of the Union address in 1941. Among the “simple basic things that must never be lost sight of,” he listed “equality of opportunity for youth and others, jobs for those who can work, security for those who need it, the ending of special privileges for the few, the preservation of civil liberties for all,” and oh yes, higher taxes to pay for those things and for the cost of defensive armaments.

Knowing that Americans used to support such ideas, a Norwegian today is appalled to learn that a CEO of a major American corporation makes between 300 and 400 times as much as its average employee. Or that governors Sam Brownback of Kansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey, having run up their state’s debts by cutting taxes for the rich, now plan to cover the loss with money snatched from the pension funds of workers in the public sector. To a Norwegian, the job of government is to distribute the country’s good fortune reasonably equally, not send it zooming upward, as in America today, to a sticky-fingered one percent.

In their planning, Norwegians tend to do things slowly, always thinking of the long term, envisioning what a better life might be for their children, their posterity.  That’s why a Norwegian, or any northern European, is aghast to learn that two-thirds of American college students finish their education in the red, some owing $100,000 or more. Or that in the U.S., still the world’s richest country, one in three children lives in poverty, along with one in five young people between the ages of 18 and 34. Or that America’s recent multi-trillion-dollar wars were fought on a credit card to be paid off by our kids. Which brings us back to that word: brutal.

Implications of brutality, or of a kind of uncivilized inhumanity, seem to lurk in so many other questions foreign observers ask about America like: How could you set up that concentration camp in Cuba, and why can’t you shut it down?  Or: How can you pretend to be a Christian country and still carry out the death penalty? The follow-up to which often is: How could you pick as president a man proud of executing his fellow citizens at the fastest rate recorded in Texas history?  (Europeans will not soon forget George W. Bush.)

Other things I've had to answer for include:

* Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?

* Why can’t you understand science?

* How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?

* How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?

* How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?

* How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?

* Why do you Americans like guns so much?  Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

To many, the most baffling and important question of all is: Why do you send your military all over the world to stir up more and more trouble for all of us?

That last question is particularly pressing because countries historically friendly to the United States, from Australia to Finland, are struggling to keep up with an influx of refugees from America’s wars and interventions. Throughout Western Europe and Scandinavia, right-wing parties that have scarcely or never played a role in government are now rising rapidly on a wave of opposition to long-established immigration policies. Only last month, such a party almost toppled the sitting social democratic government of Sweden, a generous country that has absorbed more than its fair share of asylum seekers fleeing the shock waves of “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.”

The Way We Are

Europeans understand, as it seems Americans do not, the intimate connection between a country’s domestic and foreign policies. They often trace America’s reckless conduct abroad to its refusal to put its own house in order.  They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of its organized labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social inequality in almost a century. They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and fearful. They understand as well why so many Americans have lost trust in a government that has done so little new for them over the past three decades or more, except for Obama’s endlessly embattled health care effort, which seems to most Europeans a pathetically modest proposal.

What baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary Americans in startling numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support its new representatives, bought and paid for by the rich. How to explain that? In Norway’s capital, where a statue of a contemplative President Roosevelt overlooks the harbor, many America-watchers think he may have been the last U.S. president who understood and could explain to the citizenry what government might do for all of them. Struggling Americans, having forgotten all that, take aim at unknown enemies far away -- or on the far side of their own towns.

It’s hard to know why we are the way we are, and -- believe me -- even harder to explain it to others. Crazy may be too strong a word, too broad and vague to pin down the problem. Some people who question me say that the U.S. is “paranoid,” “backward,” “behind the times,” “vain,” “greedy,” “self-absorbed,” or simply “dumb.”  Others, more charitably, imply that Americans are merely “ill-informed,” “misguided,” “misled,” or “asleep,” and could still recover sanity.  But wherever I travel, the questions follow, suggesting that the United States, if not exactly crazy, is decidedly a danger to itself and others. It’s past time to wake up, America, and look around.  There’s another world out here, an old and friendly one across the ocean, and it’s full of good ideas, tried and true.

Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan, among other books, and most recently They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars -- The Untold Story, a Dispatch Books project.

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(#105-1) January 14 2015. “Waiter, waiter, there’s a drone in my soup!”

IT SEEMS INEVITABLE THAT DRONES WILL TAKE OVER---WHAT? PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING!

AND YET?

COULD THE MARK 1 EYEBALL IN A MANNED AIRCRAFT STILL BE SUPERIOR?

A recent report by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security is scathing about the value and effectiveness of drones in relation to border security.

The IG audit report, Customs and Border Protection's Unmanned Aircraft System Program Does Not Achieve Intended Results or Recognize All Costs of Operations, is the IG's second audit of the program since 2012, and "found the effort by CBP's Office of Air and Marine (OAM) still has no reliable method of measuring its performance and that its impact in stemming illegal immigration has been minimal."

The report concludes that "CBP has invested significant funds in a program that has not achieved the expected results, and it cannot demonstrate how much the program has improved border security. The $443 million CBP plans to spend on program expansion could be put to better use by investing in alternatives."

To cut to the chase, an analysis by the mega-department responsible for US border drones has concluded that they are basically a colossally expensive failure at achieving their dubious mission. 

"Notwithstanding the significant investment, we see no evidence that the drones contribute to a more secure border, and there is no reason to invest additional taxpayer funds at this time," Inspector General John Roth said in Homeland Security Today.

My interest is primarily in the military side of things—where drones are being used more and more—but it really makes you think.

Where the Army is concerned, I believe ground and air need to integrated as intimately as a pair of mating octopi—but should the someone-to-watch-over-you be manned or otherwise?

I need data on this.

Who said a writer’s life was simple!

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