The Deep State by Mike Lofgren

dunk”? Did the CIA’s analysts provide the White House with an accurate assessment of Vladimir Putin’s likely moves as the United States attempted in early 2014 to edge Ukraine toward association with the European Union and possible membership in NATO? Putin had clearly telegraphed his intentions back in 2008, when he struck out at Georgia under nearly identical circumstances. While the bulk of responsibility for the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine lies with the Kremlin, Washington bears considerable blame for its accessory role in stoking the unrest in Kiev that led to the coup. Later in the book, I shall describe some of the professional operatives involved in that project. That the CIA was either professionally incapable of seeing where their caper could lead, or suspected but did not tell the White House, is shocking. These glaring deficiencies in the basic functioning of the NSA and the CIA urgently need to be rectified.
    The Pentagon: Sparing No Expense Not to Defend Us
    The United States needs a defense establishment and an intelligence apparatus; only a hopeless idealist or an ostrich would deny that. In some ways, however, our huge national security establishment has been lagging in its role of defending the country from the newer forms of espionage and warfare. That said, providing for a military and intelligence establishment that protects the country and keeps our leaders adequately informed about world developments is not to be confused with maintaining, at crushing expense, a globe-girdling military colossus. Figures vary according to how one defines a military base, but, according to the
Department of Defense Base Structure Report for Fiscal Year 2013,
the Pentagon has598 overseas bases in forty foreign countries. There were 193,111 U.S. military personnel deployed overseas, exclusive of those in Afghanistan. During 2014, U.S. Special Operations Forces deployed to 133 countries for a variety of liaison, training, and covert missions. 2 Paying for these and related military activities together constitutes by some estimates the largest single category of the federal budget. For 2014, Congress enacted a defense budget of $587 billion. While this sum is smaller than annual spending for Social Security, there is much more to the national security state than the Pentagon’s far-from-modest budget.
    Winslow T. Wheeler, a former national security analyst with Congress and the Government Accountability Office, is of the view that the Department of Defense budget leaves out significant related costs and legacy financing: DOD’s military retirement costs are carried elsewhere in the federal budget; nuclear weapons are in the Department of Energy’s budget; and the cost of caring for veterans is borne by an independent agency. Wheeler believes the State Department’s budget should be included as well: since the end of the cold war, State has emphasized so-called coercive diplomacy, and several secretaries of state have been far more eager for military intervention than DOD’s military and civilian leaders. Finally, he includes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
    Some may argue with this choice, as Homeland Security fulfills a domestic function, but I believe Wheeler is right: DHS was created as a direct result of 9/11, when a blowback resulted from repeated U.S. interventions in the Middle East and the arming and training of questionable insurgent groups. The Department of Defense, for all its hundreds of billions of annual spending, was incapable of defending our national territory, or even its own headquarters, the Pentagon. Ironically, the heraldic symbol of the U.S. Army’s Military District of Washington is an image of the Washington Monument with a sword placed diagonally across it in a protective manner. The motto is “This we’ll defend.” But not anymore—it’s now a job for DHS. A former Hill colleague who went on to work at DHS recalled a meeting with