The Deep State by Mike Lofgren Page A

personnel from the DOD’s Northern Command, which is tasked with giving military support to civilian authoritiesin case of a domestic emergency. He said Northern Command was hard-pressed to think of
any
circumstance in which it would employ the DOD’s assets. Given the Pentagon’s virtual nonstop involvement in foreign interventions and unpreparedness to defend U.S. territory, perhaps it should change its name to the Department of Offense.
    Wheeler calculates that all of this national security spending by the various agencies totals around $1 trillion a year. 3 To put that in perspective, during the first dozen years of the twenty-first century, the Pentagon alone spent money at an average rate of more than a billion dollars a day—every single day. For twelve years, the United States was spending more on its military than the next ten countries combined. 4 Only such staggering largesse could permit the military to incur costs of anywhere from $100 to $600 per
gallon
to deliver motor fuel to the scene of combat in Afghanistan. 5 A country that indulges in that kind of extravagance risks imposing severe constraints on the resources available to improve the health, safety, and economic productivity of its citizens.
    Throughout 2013 and 2014, press attention focused on budget cuts to the Pentagon arising from the Budget Control Act of 2011. What the media almost always neglected to point out was that military spending, even after reductions mandated by the act, remained well above the average defense budget during the cold war—a time when the United States faced the combined militaries of the Warsaw Pact.
    Since the removal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq on December 31, 2011, the American people have been under the impression that the United States has been withdrawing forces and cutting military budgets. Republicans, in particular, have kept up a constant oratory about defense cuts as part of their perennial campaign to make any Democrat occupying the Oval Office look weak on defense. They are clearly intent on depicting the 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was both an Obama campaign promise and a move a majority of Americans approved of, look like some sort of strategic calamity in the making. In the end, the president compromised, maintaining a floor of 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014 with no time limit mandating their withdrawal.
    But all of the talk about cuts and retreat creates a misleading impression of what the military is actually doing and, more important, its plans for the future. Military spending is down only slightly from its peak in 2010, and then mostly because of the decline of the exorbitantly expensive combat activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well the mandatory budget sequestration that Republicans themselves insisted upon. Once the drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan were completed—although, as recent events have shown, any sigh of relief at being done with Iraq has been premature—the military-industrial complex immediately set its gaze on new horizons.
    The Pentagon Seeks New Theaters of Conflict
    Few Americans have heard of AFRICOM, or the U.S. African Command. It did not officially exist before 2008, although planning for it began in 2004. Incongruously, its headquarters are in Stuttgart, Germany, where it will remain for the foreseeable future. It has only one permanent, acknowledged military base in Africa, but it maintains a shadowy and secretive temporary presence in most of the continent’s fifty-five nations—including, for example, a surveillance drone operation at a facility called Base Aérienne 101 at the international airport in Niamey, the capital of Niger.
    The only base that the Pentagon openly acknowledges is Camp Lemonnier, a former French Foreign Legion facility in Djibouti, in the horn of Africa. It is host to approximately 4,000 military personnel and contractors, and the military has big plans for it. On May 5, 2014,