U.S. Imperialism and the Sisyphean Quest for Full-Spectra Dominance and Power

Prof. James M. Craven/Omahkohkiaaiipooyii on

Sisyphus and power complete for publication: FULL SPECTRA—NOT SPECTRUM—DOMINANCE

The U.S. Imperium and its Neocon, Neoliberal and bi-partisan theoretician-apologists like to use the term “full-spectrum dominance”.

Actually, for what they really mean, they should really refer to “full-spectra dominance” because what they are really referring to and intend is the quest for dominance over all the different types of spectra or ranges of dominance requisite for the continuance and expanded reproduction of U.S. Imperialism globally.

They seek dominance—not parity or security—over differing types of dynamic (shifting) spectra or ranges (plural) as suggested by their research funding and deployments of:

 

 

  1. The spectra of strategic and tactical geo-historically-sensitive regions, staging areas, bases and locales;
  2. The spectrum of potential realms of conflict and warfare (land, sea, air, space and cyberspace);
  3. The spectra of types of social formations and/at various levels of development (poor, intermediate, “developed”, “monopoly”, competitive, capitalist, socialist, semi-feudal, fascist and imperialist);
  4. The spectra of offensive weapons systems, and defenses against them (nuclear, conventional, WMDs, chemical, biological, psychological, propaganda, race-ethnic-specific, geo-spatial, weather, intelligence, electro-magnetic, economic, diplomatic and overall social systems engineering);
  5. The spectra of alliances and alliance structures (military, economic, political, diplomatic, socio-cultural, religious and ideological, ethnic);
  6. The spectra of offensive and defensive response doctrines and  capabilities (pace, flexibility, force size, specialization, general and context-specific capabilities, adaptability, lethality, precision, contingency, collateral damage risks, logistics);
  7. The spectra of personnel quality, training regimes and support structures for U.S. forces  and allies;
  8. The spectra of centers for R & D, new invention and innovation;
  9. The spectrum of forms of warfare (conventional,  guerrilla, psychological, terrorism, economic, diplomatic, covert and clandestine, nuclear, tactical-nuclear, counter-Insurgency, counter-terrorism, sanctions regimes);
  10. The spectra of forms and instruments of strategic control of resources, staging areas, transportation-communications systems and routes;
  11. The spectrum of strategic global institutions (UN, OECD, World Bank, IMF, NATO, etc.);
  12. The spectra of investment outlets, critical markets and centers of finance;
  13. The spectra of global centers of learning, R & D and sources of highly-skilled labor power;
  14. The spectra of global centers and instruments of culture, news media, entertainment, publishing, tourism and recreation;
  15. The spectra of global centers, institutions, instruments of religious and ideological influence;
  16. The spectra of centers of emerging power-players, and sources and forms of global influence and concern;
  17. The spectra of institutions, instruments and methods of mind control, indoctrination of the young and “manufactured consent”.
  18. The spectra of forms, sources, resources and instruments of power (soft, hard and “smart”; economic, politico-legal, diplomatic, technological, socio-cultural, geo-historical,);
  19. The spectra of strategic trade routes, sea lanes, air corridors and railway infrastructure;

 

THE MEMES AND VOCABULARY OF DOMINANCE AND POWER

 

The language the theoreticians of the U.S. Imperium use is always the language of authority and dominance. It is the language of grandiosity and hubris embodied in notions of some kind of “Manifest Destiny” as their self-and-summarily-asserted “authority” for forms of hegemony they are determined not to allow any other nation or force to even attempt parity let alone achieve dominance.

The first of the immigrants and genocidal maniacs into North America, the Pilgrims, were Calvinists and proto-fascists who spoke of creating a “City-on-the-Hill” example for all other societies to emulate.

They and many of their modern-day descendants still in positions of power due to their lineages, spoke of and employed Calvinistic constructs such as “Predestination” and “Preordination” (to be in God’s grace and to rule those not deemed to be in God’s grace) as sources of justification and legitimization of their genocidal rule and theocratic intentions.

Indeed many of the secret societies today, along with some of the global institutions of transnational elite networking and rule, such as Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, etc., brag about and specifically recruit, those in their ranks from “Pilgrim Stock”.

They are all about a term they claim is to ephemeral and “squishy” to be measured and thus to be even listed in the indexes of “mainstream” texts in Economics—power. 1

The power players of the U.S. Imperium used to avoid the term “power” altogether. In addition to arguing that “power” is a construct too difficult to define let alone quantify 2, they spoke of “cooperation”, “mutual assistance and advantage”, “partnerships”, comparative-mutual advantage, specialization and the like.

And if and when they used the term “influence” if at all, it was always framed not as a source or instrument or even form of power, but rather as: “We are simply helping, actually at sacrifice to ourselves, your nation to achieve not what necessarily we want you to achieve, in our interest, or in our interest only, but what we know that you want to achieve and that indeed all or most “free” people want—or “should want”—to achieve.

But power is like the proverbial elephant that is difficult for several blinded persons to describe in the abstract or to agree upon after each touches only a particular part of the whole animal.

Various resources, instruments or arenas of power and power projection are often seen as forms of power themselves. But we know that power, and even the resources and instruments used to gather, apply and project power, are ephemeral, context dependent, transitory, and often illusive.

If power is defined as some objective capacity, capability or force to actually realize (not just attempt) intended and preferred outcomes and agenda, then it is outcomes, not intentions or levels of development of the instruments and resources of power that ultimately define and measure power.

We have all sorts of examples in history and in the present of those with ample resources and weapons, and high levels of development of the resources and instruments of power—hard, soft and “smart” 3—the gathering, holding and projection of it, failing to use them effectively and thus not able to actually realize intended and preferred outcomes and agenda against those holding fewer and less sophisticated resources and implements of potential power.

HARD, SOFT AND SMART POWER

 

We have many examples going back to before the Roman Empire where some forms of hard power undermined and contradicted forms of soft and alleged “smart” power and vice-versa.

So the resources and instruments of power and power projection are at best indices of power potential. They are not identical to power and the objective capacities and capabilities, force if you will, of actual achieved and actualized power potential as measured in actual realized outcomes in terms of intended and preferred outcomes and agenda.

Thus what appears to be surrender or loss of power, with the surrender or loss of control of or access to instruments and resources of power, may well actually add to real power as manifested and measured in the objective ability to realize intended preferences and agenda.

The writings of the Chinese classics such as Sun Tze and Kong Ze are full of examples of appearances, contrived or otherwise, of loss of some control of traditional resources, sources and instruments of power actually adding to and not detracting from, realized power as measured (tautologically to be sure in some cases) in actual capabilities to pursue, impose, attain, co-opt or seduce others in the realization of intended and preferred outcomes and agenda 4.

With the clear losses by the U.S. Imperium in power projections and “LICs” (Low-intensity Conflicts) Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and with various CIA operations past and present all resulting in “Blowbacks” 5 The U.S. has more not less enemies abroad as well as at home.

The CIA has more not less critics and has gone through several Directors who did not last long nor improve the image of CIA. 6 There are more not less local insurgencies on the horizon. The U.S. has less not more allies willing to commit forces in Counter-insurgency (COIN) or Counter-terrorism (CT) campaigns.

The U.S. and the world economy face more and more severe fiscal crises constraining hard, soft and smart power projections not less. Insurgents have more not less examples of how the forces of the U.S. Imperium and its allies can be tied-up and ultimately drained through asymmetric warfare.

The U.S. population as shown in polls is less not more willing to support future wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan and are more not less cynical about how exactly and with what authority and what were the real reasons for U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan 7.

The U.S. has had to summarily dump not protect, more and more dysfunctional and increasingly impotent dictators overthrown by popular uprisings thus sending signals to past and present allies that the U.S. can no longer protect their client regimes from the wrath of their victims.

There is more and more talk inside and outside of the U.S. of the fall of the American Empire and even using terms like American Imperium and Empire not typically used before 8.

“SHOCK AND AWE”—AMERICAN FOR THE NAZI CONSTRUCT OF BLITZKRIEG

In both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. started out with simple “Shock and Awe” 9 military actions designed as originally intended to bully, threaten and signal that any resistance would be futile, bloody and costly.

The notion of “Shock and Awe” and the potential power embodied in such campaigns, meant that there was no need for operational definitions or metrics of “victory” or “success” (it was seen as “guaranteed” whatever it was and however measured); no criteria or metrics for when and how to exit; no criteria for when and how to declare victory; and no plans or resources for the post-war rebuilding of the societies targeted for invasion.

As both American and allied as well as insurgent losses mounted, and hearts and minds were not being won or even sought, there then came a period of supposed “reassessment” and of “learning” or “relearning” the lessons of Vietnam (that were well known already).

New COIN and CT manuals were created after almost 30 years of no change in COIN doctrine since Vietnam10, followed by new commitments to once again going beyond mere “kenetics” [violence] and military actions to COIN or full-blown counter-insurgency campaigns.

These would be “holistic” (military, politico-legal, socio-cultural, geo-historical, economic and technological) designed not only to win hearts and minds, but to rebuild whole new nations and institutions of nations in the process.

COIN became defined as militarized nation building even by those like Bush who once professed that the U.S. should never be involved in nation building.

But gradually with mounting losses and fiscal crises from wars funded on credit to be paid for by future generations, with the true costs in terms of blood, treasure and deaths of innocents carefully hidden (by an embedded, compliant, protected and beholden mainstream media) but increasingly difficult to hide, the U.S. Imperium has once again shifted from very costly COIN to less costly, more tailored, more military, more focused and more high-tech CT rather than expanded COIN.

The U.S. Government, again, as in Vietnam, Lebanon and elsewhere, wanted “surges” of military forces to provide enough lull in the fighting or diminished military action to be able to get out but without the naked loss-of-face like the exit from Vietnam and leaving with their tails between their legs while leaving former allies and collaborators to the mercy of the victorious insurgents.

No one asked the key questions: “How do you have a “successful” surge or any military actions in an aggressive, unilateral and illegal war founded on lies and cherry picked intelligence and doctrines of the kind that Nazis were hanged for at Nuremberg?

How do you win over hearts and minds when on the wrong side of history, inflicting “collateral damages” and direct intended damages from weapons systems not anywhere near as accurate as portrayed, and all while murdering and torturing the very people, and their families, whose hearts and minds you claim to be trying to win over?

THE LABOR OF SISYPHUS

The U.S. Imperium is caught in several contradictions and cognitive dissonance traps 11 of its own making. It is like the character Sisyphus in Greek mythology doomed to roll a rock uphill never to reach the top of the hill.

Not only are the fiscal and other constraints, forms of impotence, lack of willingness or power to stand with despotic allies about to be overthrown and other forms of compromise and hypocrisy more and more evident to enemies and allies alike, but future crises on the horizon are partly being shaped by the impotence and lack of doctrine by the U.S. in the present.

New crises, contradictions and paradoxes expose present and past impotence, lack of appropriate force structures, lack of correct doctrines and lack of will to support allies under siege for their own despotism.

They also signal and encourage new insurgencies in the future and while also signaling allies who are also competitors in the global economy to be careful of what alliances with the U.S. they form and hold on to.

The old joke was that “The Cold War is over—and Japan won” because the Cold War military and other expenditures by the U.S. while Japan remained under the alliance protection of the U.S. created vacuums for economic competitors against the U.S. who were also U.S. allies to exploit and carve out expanded shares of global markets, strategic resources and investment outlets.

Now we see some nations urging the U.S. to go where they dare not go and prepared to capture windfalls while they urge U.S. forces and resources onward.

Just as terrorism by insurgents is attempted insurgency on the cheap (in terms of blood and treasure) an admission of impotence as well as impatience, the same applies with respect to counter-terrorism U.S.-style (CT) in lieu of full-blown counterinsurgency (COIN).

Terrorism is based on the bogus notion of “politics of the deed” as if asymmetric and alienating forms of terrorism in particular events and actions, somehow signal power and attract new supporters the more theatrical the deed.

This is an anarchist notion and of course anarchists have never produced a sustained and sustainable revolution anywhere. Terrorism is infantilism and worse; it alienates those whose hearts and minds it seeks to recruit far more than recruiting them; and the same applies to U.S.-style CT.

Whereas terrorism is indifferent to “collateral damage” so is CT American-style. Terrorism does not educate or persuade but coerces, threatens and intimidates as does U.S.-style CT.  Terrorism does not act openly, with transparency and accountability but hides its effects, sources, methods and intentions as does U.S.-style CT.

With more military and diplomatic loses since Vietnam, with fiscal crises mounting, the search for high-tech solutions to modern warfare and problems of gaining and sustaining popular support for wars (at home as well as among the populations under the insurgents) has steadily increased.

America’s grand strategy of “Full Spectrum Dominance” was first revealed in the 1998 US Space Command document – Vision for 2020. This document, later released in 2000 as DOD Joint Vision 2020, called for “full spectrum dominance” over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight?and decisively win in global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.

Other spectra of weapons, arenas of combat and institutions were suggested as well including propaganda, NGOs and popular uprisings for regime change, along with expanding NATO eastward into the former USSR, and “a vast array of psychological and economic warfare techniques” as part of a “Revolution in Military Affairs” were proposed. 12

According to Joseph Nye, the global system of power structures, networks, patterns (over time and space) and relations may be seen as a form of “Vulcan Chess” 13 or three-dimensional chess with a central chessboard for forward and backward (first dimension) as well as lateral left and right moves (second dimension), and, a third dimension with an upper chessboard for moves to positions upward or above the positions on the central chessboard, and a lower chessboard for moves to positions below those on the central chessboard (up and down).

Nye sees the global networks, structures, patterns and relations of power as involving very complex interactions within and between entities along the three dimensions of power.

The upper chessboard is seen as a dimension of global military networks, structures and relations with the U.S. seen as the predominant even unrivalled unipolar military forces  globally for some time to come.

The central chessboard is seen as the dimension of economic power structures, patterns (over time and space) and relations that is multi-polar with significant new economic rivals and power players emerging.

The lower chessboard is seen as the dimension of non-state actors, power structures patterns (over time and space) and relations; this dimension includes not only non-state terrorist groups and private militias, but NGOs, non-state nations that are parts of multi-nation nation-states, foundations, charities, think tanks and the likes of elite gatherings at Davos, Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove et al.

 

 

The notion that on the military plane or dimension of global power networks, structures and relations the U.S. has no rivals and will likely be dominant for some time to come, makes the same error that Nye points out and warns against: mistaking potential resources and capabilities for power projections as “fait accompli” or as actual and realized outcomes that, in fact, may or may not result from given potentialities and resources of power projection.

It is often a wide gap between power resources, tools and potentialities on the one hand versus results in actual and actually realized preferred outcomes and agenda on the other hand.

The fact that the U.S. came out with the stalemate in the Korean conflict given the gross disparities in capabilities between the DPRK and the U.S., speaks to the real ineffectiveness of military forces even when fully equipped with the most sophisticated weapons systems yet on the wrong side of history, with incorrect Doctrine guiding them, with incompetents directing them, and without enduring popular support that will endure no matter how protracted the wars and their costs in blood and treasure.

In this full context, the U.S. lost the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and the Afghanistan War, along with several covert and clandestine operations 14

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO GO TO HEAVEN BUT NOBODY WANTS TO DIE”

The U.S. now seeks wars without large body-counts (American and allied) coming home to undermine any popular support from a population raised in a culture of instant gratification.

They seek allies and proxy wars to front more of the costs of blood and treasure of these wars even as they undercut these allies in economic competition and protectionism and even summarily and openly dump former allies like Mubarak of Egypt no longer seen as useful.

They seek weapons systems like drones that can not only be operated covertly and clandestinely without transparency or accountability, and thus without open and naked civilian deaths and war crimes attributed to the U.S., but that are weapons that are capital-intensive, high-tech and supposedly “smart” to reduce “collateral damage”, deaths of U.S. forces and associated the losses of popular support at home and abroad that go with them.

The U.S. Imperium seeks an all-volunteer military and no draft in order to recruit and retain a corps of troops ideologically on the same page of the regimes that control and profit from imperialism.

They seek quick “Blitzkrieg” or “Shock-and-Awe”-like wars that are over quickly before the forms and levels of impatience of the populace sets in and turn into non-support or even outright resistance.

They seek methods of interrogation, international law and treaties against torture be damned, that produce “instant results” and what they call “actionable” and “real time” intelligence; with “justification” solely on the basis of expedience.

They seek to bully other nations and without the usual responses from those who are bullied into submission or into approval of the intentions and agenda of others.

They seek “manufactured consent” of the home and foreign populaces with respect to costly and illegal wars undertaken in their name.

They seek “smart weapons” that are precise, flexible, adaptable, lethal, mobile, small and relatively cheap to operate and maintain; weapons that hide the true costs and carnage of war.

They seek dominance in international institutions like the UN where they can get multilateral approvals, coalitions and covers for illegal and aggressive wars of the kind the Nazis were hanged for at Nuremberg. 15

They seek Total Information Awareness” (TIA) on all systems and persons of interest without the “paralysis of analysis” and data-information overload 16.

 

 

 

The U.S. Imperium understands on an intellectual level that “Shock and Awe” is about coercion and intimidation and inconsistent with winning hearts and minds. They understand the aphorism of Goethe that “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.”

They seek sources and methods of mind control, agenda influence, persuasion and attraction. They are funding brain research and research into memetics, hypnosis, thought identification and reading, subliminal advertising and influence and into new frontiers in pedagogy and social systems engineering.

The idea is to find mechanisms and instruments through which the masses can energetically participate in their own enslavement and brainwashing along with welcoming agenda, preferred outcomes and interests not their own but adopted and internalized as their own.

 

 

The U.S. Imperium understands that the most effective forms of power are those more covert and subliminal. They understand that if whole populations can be taught and brought into notions that the agenda, preferred outcomes and values of the U.S. Imperium are their own, and that they will benefit more than being harmed, then this is to be preferred over naked terrorism and forms of repression designed to force and coerce, rather than seduce, mass acceptance if not overt support for the policies and machinations of the U.S. Imperium.

They want it all and they want it now. 17

 

Prof. James M. Craven/Omahkohkiaaiipooyii is one of the frequent contributors for The 4th Media.

 

FOOTNOTES:

Power is one of those constructs and forces difficult to define and measure in the abstract but is clearer when assessed in terms of outcomes actually realized rather than in the potential resources and instruments of power that may or may not be effectively employed to realize actual preferred outcomes and agenda. Power is: contextual; ephemeral; relative and relational; transitory; scope-depth-domain dependent; overt and covert;

2. See Nye, Joseph The Future of Power, Public Affairs Books, N.Y. 2011, pp. 3-18; Nye defines power in terms of outcomes rather than potentialities as the capability or force to realize preferred outcomes and agenda—not necessarily over or against the preferred outcomes and agenda of others. Often the resources and instruments of potential power (which may or may not be used most effectively and may or may not translate into realization of preferred outcomes and agenda; cooptation and manufactured “consent” are also instruments of power) are confused with power (as measured in behavioral outcomes realized) itself. Mainstream textbooks in Economics, that speak of imperfect competition and market power nonetheless do not have the word or construct power anywhere in their indexes.

3.  Joseph Nye got in early and cornered the academic market niche dealing with the defining and measurement of various forms of power. “Hard power” refers to military and other forms of direct and potentially violent and “kenetic”-based capacities to realize intended and preferred outcomes and agenda; “soft power” refers to capacities to realize intended outcomes based on persuasion and attraction; “smart power” is supposed to be capacities to realize preferred outcomes and agenda based on tailored recipes or algorithms of hard and soft power.

4. Classical Aikido and Jujitsu are all about using the force and potential power of the opponent against him to create a chasm between the level of power potential and its actual diminished realization. The most effective power is that which is disguised and even portrayed as diffused power when it is not. For example the notion that increasing shares of stocks among the general population diffuses and democratizes power over those corporations is a myth because of dispersion of stock among parties who will never meet or act collectively allows a tight-knit group to maintain effective control and power with fewer and fewer shares of total voting stock. The same principle applies with respect to supposed free elections as a measure of “democracy”. With fewer and fewer shares of the potential electorate voting due to mass cynicism, and with more and more parties and candidates running for office, a given candidate can wind up elected with smaller and smaller shares of the potential electorate voting for him. Thus the appearance of diffusion of power actually aids in the concentration and centralization of power.

5. Blowback is a term first used in a CIA after-action report on the 1953 U.S. British and CIA overthrow of freely elected Mossadegh in Iran to mean the possibility, which came to pass, of covert operations resulting in exactly the opposite outcomes intended by the covert operations and even worsening of the situations they were intended to deal with. Virtually all of the studies, or most of them of CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, including those written by insiders who remained pro-CIA document virtually all of the past CIA covert and clandestine operations resulting in worsening the situations they were designed and intended to ameliorate and in worsening the reputation and influence of CIA and other U.S. institutions. See for example: Weiner, Tim Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Anchor Books, N.Y. 2008 references and notes. Tim Weiner does the same with FBI documenting a long history of “Blowbacks” where power potential was undermined and not realized rather outcomes and agenda opposite of those intended and preferred resulted over and over: Weiner, Tim;Enemies: The History of the FBI, Random House Books, N.Y. 2012 Examples of very pro-CIA memoires that wind up documenting serial Blowbacks and U.S. intelligence/warfare failures since 1945 include Holm Richard,  The Craft We Chose: My Life in the CIA, Mountain Lake Press, 2011 and the extremely pro-CIA memoire of Henry A. Crumpton The Art of Intelligence: Lesson’s From a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service, Penguin Press, N.Y. 2012 documents both failures and Blowbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq while attempting to sanitize the history of CIA including while he was in it. We can also add the memoires of Robert Bayer to the list of former insider memoires revealing at times a bungling CIA and at other times an outright criminal enterprise.

6. Former 4-star general David Petraeus is but one of several former CIA directors who wound up exposing the CIA as anything but the omniscient, omnipotent or omnipresent—or even minimally competent—entity that some of its supporters would have us believe. He was caught in an affair with a woman who was his self-described “biographer” using common email systems that would have and likely did compromise Petraeus’ security even in just in terms of his itineraries which were classified. In any case, having an official biographer using public resources is not on the list of allowed perks for generals or CIA directors and this whole affair showed how sloppy his vetting was along with how poor was his tradecraft and that of his mistress Paula Broadwell both with high-level security clearances.

7. Recent polls show some 70%+ of the population willing to support drone strikes and assassinations if they mean that real terrorists are being hit and if it means that fewer American body bags will be coming home. But there are still the mounting and prohibitive costs of U.S. wars and power projections, largely unfunded out of present budgets that are key in current fiscal crises. Indeed the whole focus on restructuring the U.S. military is on a more mobile, lethal, accurate, flexible, adaptable, customized and high-tech force structure run by highly-trained forces able to project power from U.S. soil or from carrier groups deployed thus reducing the costly and alienating military bases abroad and the numbers of body bags coming home to Dover Air Force base in Delaware that also cost public support for U.S. wars and covert/clandestine operations.

8. Even historians specializing in the Rise and Fall of Empires like  Carroll Quigley in his opusTragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time , GSG & Assoc., San Pedro, CA. 1966 referred to an “American Empire (?)”  posing the question if the word “empire” or the word “imperialism” does now or ever did apply to America whereas Joseph A. Tainter referred to The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. 1988 . In bookstores like Barnes and Nobel there are whole sections about the rise and fall of empires like Rome and the possible parallels with the U.S as an empire or Imperium like Rome; there are books, magazines, DVDs on Mayan and other supposed Biblical prophecies of the Apocalypse, get-rich-quick schemes; the occult and cults, power networks, arresting aging, hitting the Lotto, pandemics, lessons of Vietnam, the rise of China and other potential superpower rivals, and general themes of approaching “End times”.

9. Shock and Awe was a supposed “Doctrine” [that word is used to denote something somber, thought out, strategic and high level policy] defined by its authors Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade of the National Defense University as “Rapid Dominance” designed “to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe.” And “impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on . . . [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.” (Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade,? Shock And Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance ?(National Defense University, 1996), XXIV.

10. U.S. Army (No. 3-24) and U.S. Marine Corps (No. 3-33.5) Joint Counterinsurgency (COIN) Field Manual, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007 and U.S. Army Stability Operations Field Manual No 3-07, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2009 In the Forward to the COIN Manual  John Nagl writes: “…the sad fact is that when an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared to fight it. The American Army of 2003 was organized, designed, trained, and equipped to defeat another army; indeed it had no peer in that arena….The story of how the Army found itself less than ready to fight an insurgency goes back to the Army’s unwillingness to internalize and build upon the lessons of Vietnam.” (P. xiii) and “Former Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane concurs, recently noting that in Iraq: ‘We put an Army on the battlefield that I had been a part of for 37 years. It doesn’t have any doctrine, nor was it educated and trained to deal with insurgency…After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency because it had to do with how we lost that war. In hindsight that was a bad decision.’ (General Jack Kean on “The Jim Lehrer News Hour”, 18 April, 2006 quoted by Nagl, Ibid, p. xiv)…When the Iraqi insurgency emerged, the Army had not published a field manual on the subject of counterinsurgency for more than twenty years, since the wake of the El Salvador campaign.” (Nagl, Ibid, p. xiv)

11. Cognitive dissonance refers to dissonance or disharmony that is physiologically and psychologically disturbing caused by contradictions between: facts versus beliefs; facts versus emotions; beliefs versus emotions.  The attempts to portray and create a mass belief in an Imperium not in decline and able to project various forms of power globally with impunity are contradicted by the inability of the U.S. forces to handle relatively poor, unarmed and untrained insurgents practicing asymmetric warfare and able to strike deep within U.S. controlled areas at will. The notion that the U.S. has come to liberate and promote “democracy” is contradicted by the wide array of despots and dictatorships supported by the U.S. for no other reason than they profess anti-Communism and promise to remain reliable client states. Not only are supporters from the masses deterred but potential despotic regimes that are allies of the U.S. are also deterred as they see they will be dumped like Mubarak of Egypt, Assad of Syria (once an ally of the U.S. in 1991 against Saddam Hussein and a sub-contractor in torture for U.S. extraordinary renditions), Saddam Hussein (once a CIA asset and ally against Iran), Kaddafi (once also an ally of the U.S. and destination for extraordinary renditions).

12. Lendman, Stephen, “Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order; Review of F. William Engdahl’s Book”; Global Research, http://www.globalresearch.ca/full-spectrum-dominance-totalitarian-democracy-in-the-new-world-order/14046

13. This refers to the character Spock in the TV series “Star Trek” who, as a Vulcan, was super intelligent but devoid of sentiment or emotion and who played three-dimensional chess where pieces moved not only forward and backward, sideways left and right, but also into positions on separate chessboards to above-positions and below the main chessboard (where moves were the usual two dimensional forward and backward or left or right laterally) to below-positions on the lower chessboard.

14. Covert operations are designed to be secret but if discovered not denied whereas clandestine operations are designed not only not to be discovered, but if discovered, to provide “plausible deniability” as to who ordered and carried them out.

15. See Craven, James “Just War: The Interrelated Predicates and Precedents of Nuremberg” at http://jimcraven10.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/just-war-and-the-interrelated-predicates-and-precedents-of-nuremberg/

16. See Bamford, James on the NSA and TIA versus information overload and the “paralysis of analysis” in The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency, Houghton-Mifflin, N.Y. 1982; The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization, Viking Press, N.Y. 2001; Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency  Anchor Books, N.Y. 2002; The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, Doubleday Books, N.Y. 2008; A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies, Anchor Books, N.Y. 2005 These books and others like them document hundreds of thousands hours of intercepts of phone and other electronic messages and millions of documents prior to and after 9/11 that remain un-translated due to lack of translators and information overload.

17. See Craven, James “I Want it all and I want it Now: The Real National Anthem of the United States” http://jimcraven10.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/i-want-it-all-and-i-want-it-now-the-real-national-anthem-of-america-and-capitalism/ and http://www.4thmedia.org/2012/09/10/i-want-it-all-and-i-want-it-now-the-real-national-anthem-of-america-and-capitalism/

 

1 Power is one of those constructs and forces difficult to define and measure in the abstract but is clearer when assessed in terms of outcomes actually realized rather than in the potential resources and instruments of power that may or may not be effectively employed to realize actual preferred outcomes and agenda. Power is: contextual; ephemeral; relative and relational; transitory; scope-depth-domain dependent; overt and covert;

2 See Nye, Joseph The Future of Power, Public Affairs Books, N.Y. 2011, pp. 3-18; Nye defines power in terms of outcomes rather than potentialities as the capability or force to realize preferred outcomes and agenda—not necessarily over or against the preferred outcomes and agenda of others. Often the resources and instruments of potential power (which may or may not be used most effectively and may or may not translate into realization of preferred outcomes and agenda; cooptation and manufactured “consent” are also instruments of power) are confused with power (as measured in behavioral outcomes realized) itself. Mainstream textbooks in Economics, that speak of imperfect competition and market power nonetheless do not have the word or construct power anywhere in their indexes.

3 Joseph Nye got in early and cornered the academic market niche dealing with the defining and measurement of various forms of power. “Hard power” refers to military and other forms of direct and potentially violent and “kenetic”-based capacities to realize intended and preferred outcomes and agenda; “soft power” refers to capacities to realize intended outcomes based on persuasion and attraction; “smart power” is supposed to be capacities to realize preferred outcomes and agenda based on tailored recipes or algorithms of hard and soft power.

4 Classical Aikido and Jujitsu are all about using the force and potential power of the opponent against him to create a chasm between level of power potential and its actual diminished realization. The most effective power is that which is disguised and even portrayed as diffused power when it is not. For example the notion that increasing shares of stocks among the general population diffuses and democratizes power over those corporations is a myth because of dispersion of stock among parties who will never meet or act collectively allows a tight-knit group to maintain effective control and power with fewer and fewer shares of total voting stock. The same principle applies with respect to supposed free elections as a measure of “democracy”. With fewer and fewer shares of the potential electorate voting due to mass cynicism, and with more and more parties and candidates running for office, a given candidate can wind up elected with smaller and smaller shares of the potential electorate voting for him. Thus the appearance of diffusion of power actually aids in the concentration and centralization of power.

5 Blowback is a term first used in a CIA after-action report on the 1953 U.S. British and CIA overthrow of freely elected Mossadegh in Iran to mean the possibility, which came to pass, of covert operations resulting in exactly the opposite outcomes intended by the covert operations and even worsening of the situations they were intended to deal with. Virtually all of the studies, or most of them of CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, including those written by insiders who remained pro-CIA document virtually all of the past CIA covert and clandestine operations resulting in worsening the situations they were designed and intended to ameliorate and in worsening the reputation and influence of CIA and other U.S. institutions. See for example: Weiner, Tim Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Anchor Books, N.Y. 2008 references and notes. Tim Weiner does the same with FBI documenting a long history of “Blowbacks” where power potential was undermined and not realized rather outcomes and agenda opposite of those intended and preferred resulted over and over: Weiner, Tim; Enemies: The History of the FBI, Random House Books, N.Y. 2012 Examples of very pro-CIA memoires that wind up documenting serial Blowbacks and U.S. intelligence/warfare failures since 1945 include Holm Richard,  The Craft We Chose: My Life in the CIA, Mountain Lake Press, 2011 and the extremely pro-CIA memoire of Henry A. Crumpton The Art of Intelligence: Lesson’s From a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service, Penguin Press, N.Y. 2012 documents both failures and Blowbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq while attempting to sanitize the history of CIA including while he was in it. We can also add the memoires of Robert Bayer to the list of former insider memoires revealing at times a bungling CIA and at other times an outright criminal enterprise.

6 Former 4-star general David Petraeus is but one of several former CIA directors who wound up exposing the CIA as anything but the omniscient, omnipotent or omnipresent—or even minimally competent—entity that some of its supporters would have us believe. He was caught in an affair with a woman who was his self-described “biographer” using common email systems that would have and likely did compromise Petraeus’ security even in just in terms of his itineraries which were classified. In any case, having an official biographer using public resources is not on the list of allowed perks for generals or CIA directors and this whole affair showed how sloppy his vetting was along with how poor was his tradecraft and that of his mistress Paula Broadwell both with high-level security clearances.

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9 Shock and Awe was a supposed “Doctrine” [that word is used to denote something somber, thought out, strategic and high level policy] defined by its authors Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade of the National Defense University as “Rapid Dominance” designed “to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe.” And “impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on . . . [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.” (Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade,??(National Defense University, 1996), XXIV.

10 U.S. Army (No. 3-24) and U.S. Marine Corps (No. 3-33.5) Joint Counterinsurgency (COIN) Field Manual, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007 and U.S. Army Stability Operations Field Manual No 3-07, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2009 In the Forward to the COIN Manual

11John Nagl writes: “…the sad fact is that when an insurgency began in Iraq in the late summer of 2003, the Army was unprepared to fight it. The American Army of 2003 was organized, designed, trained, and equipped to defeat another army; indeed it had no peer in that arena….The story of how the Army found itself less than ready to fight an insurgency goes back to the Army’s unwillingness to internalize and build upon the lessons of Vietnam.” (P. xiii) and “Former Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane concurs, recently noting that in Iraq: ‘We put an Army on the battlefield that I had been a part of for 37 years. It doesn’t have any doctrine, nor was it educated and trained to deal with insurgency…After the Vietnam War, we purged ourselves of everything that had to do with irregular warfare or insurgency because it had to do with how we lost that war. In hindsight that was a bad decision.’ (General Jack Kean on “The Jim Lehrer News Hour”, 18 April, 2006 quoted by Nagl, Ibid, p. xiv)…When the Iraqi insurgency emerged, the Army had not published a field manual on the subject of counterinsurgency for more than twenty years, since the wake of the El Salvador campaign.” (Nagl, Ibid, p. xiv)

12Lendman, Stephen, “Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order; Review of F. William Engdahl’s Book”; Global Research,

13 This refers to the character Spock in the TV series “Star Trek” who, as a Vulcan, was super intelligent but devoid of sentiment or emotion and who played three-dimensional chess where pieces moved not only forward and backward, sideways left and right, but also into positions on separate chessboards above and below the main chessboard where moves were forward and backward or left or right laterally.

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