Who’s Up for a Fundamental Reassessment of U.S. Security Strategy?
Americans are aware of two things about the ongoing US-Israel war against Iran: It’s costing tons of money, and all things considered, our leadership has chosen the wrong strategy.
To win any war based on contrived motivations and shaky assumptions, we would have to compensate with an extremely elegant political strategy, a powerful military strategy, and a disciplined and creative decade of logistical and technological preparation for such a war.
We have those shaky assumptions in spades. But the US has no elegant political strategy, and employs a reactive, fragmented and uber-expensive military strategy. Most observers recognize that we were not prepared for the war we started, and are still fighting, in Iran.
Complex systems utilize more and more energy – intellectual and material – to solve increasingly complex problems. These systems – in our case, the political and military entities of the US and Israel – become brittle, unresponsive to change, fragile and prone to collapse and self-destruction. I’m paraphrasing the great Joseph Tainter, who wrote the book on this phenomenon in 1990, called “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”
In a longitudinal examination of many past societies, Painter, an anthropologist, noted that increasing complexity in a system does solve problems effectively and efficiently. Yet, over time that same complexity – faced with new and persistent challenges – has lower and lower returns on investment. Over time, it tends to rigidity, fragility, and eventually systemic bankruptcy.
He writes,
As stresses necessarily arise, new organizational and economic solutions must be developed, typically at increasing cost and declining marginal return. The marginal return on investment in complexity accordingly deteriorates, at first gradually, then with accelerated force. At this point, a complex society reaches the phase where it becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse.
What Painter documented could apply to any large organization, and we periodically observe the de-evolution of great businesses that find – contrary to expectations and past performance – they cannot adapt to new challenges, their toolkit has been overly honed and narrowed, their imaginations introverted, their productive capacity shallow and fragilified.
This evolutionary path has become obvious at the state level, in the United States as well as in Israel, and in many European countries. The technologically and financially complex “West” is approaching the cliffs of insanity, exemplified by their war to destroy Iran and assume control over the Persian Gulf using all the old techniques. The challenge faced by the directors of The Princess Bride in creating the appearance of the ingenious ascent of those cliffs was solvable, not least because no one was shooting at them from land, sea and air as they planned and executed.
A “state” by definition asserts its monopoly on the use of force, and its unconditional extractive powers over population and territory. The US government is massive, spending close to 40% of GDP to manage government interests, including wars of choice overseas. US GDP includes tax redistribution and federal borrowing as part of the domestic product, a “productivity” double-count, despite popular justification to retain this common artifice. It is worse than it appears, more convoluted than we can imagine.
For our soon-to-be $1.7 Trillion military, now is the time to be asking hard questions about national security, and thinking deeply about what kind of military we want to have in the United States going forward. In the past year, Trump and Hegseth have done the American people a backhanded favor by decimating both the stocks and the morale of this monstrous organization, and fracturing NATO and Gulf State alliances. Formerly reliable buyers of our expensive, complex, low Return On Investment security products are looking for the exit.
It is not clear to me who will take the lead in this reassessment. Certainly the current complex system – the MICIMATT – is incapable of fixing itself, for several reasons. First, the MICIMATT collectively believes that the system itself is not the problem. If we can only get more information we will have total battlespace awareness in real time and will “win.” This attitude is supported by current trends in militarized and state-managed AI, which currently makes up a third of total US market value, a shocking percentage that will only grow as the rest of the economy shrinks.
Second, people advocating an affordable multi-use people’s army, decentralized and built for defense, not expeditionary offense – are not plentiful in the current military system. This kind of vision and radicalism is rare throughout the MICIMATT – but we do see emergent examples here, here, and here.
Third, as Tainter observed, over-centralized and over-complex systems fail rather than self-modify; they collapse rather than self-correct.
The collapse of the US “offensive enforcer” military model, tied as it is to discredited and hated ideas of 20st century colonialism, is ongoing. Yet those invested in offensive enforcement are seeking to place it on life support along the same old rails, using the same old arguments. We the people must demolish these rails, reject these arguments, and pull the plug.
We are told that Congressional districts need military spending because of the value added to our economy, and job creation. In reality, among all types of government spending, we get the least bang for the buck in the military industrial establishment. The Cost of War Project at Brown University recently found:
…military spending (including both federal defense spending and various private military industries) produces an average of five jobs per $1 million in spending, including both direct jobs and jobs in the supply chain. By contrast, 13 jobs are created for every $1 million in education spending – nearly three times as much employment. Healthcare spending creates 84% more jobs than military spending, while infrastructure and clean energy create from 24% to 64% more.
For those who like an activist government that creates domestic prosperity, our military and security spending is
low-hanging fruit – we must rethink how we defend our country and how we as a nation, stay strong.
We are told that America stands for liberty and that our military fights for freedom. Yet we find our ubiquitous military and security apparatus stand in firm opposition to our own natural rights and those of people around the world. Freedom of association, movement, speech and worship, the right to reject the feeding and housing of a king’s marauding army (ye olde 3rd Amendment), the right to be secure in our papers and our property, and to limit government takings – each of these have extensive military and security carveouts. Every day, we lose liberty and have our rights infringed, through automated and AI-assisted data harvesting in the name of security, war-time command economies and defense-related crony capitalism.
For those who prefer a government staying in its constitutional lane, we must downshift our foreign and domestic security apparatus towards transparency and true defensive capability. Again, we must rethink how we defend our country and how we as a nation, stay strong.
Complex societies and systems can and will fail, and their rubble fertilizes new growth and new roots of resilience, decentralization, creativity, and liberty. Against this potentially painful and violent inevitability, Americans have one simple task. Reject the false DC suggestion that our massive security state, patrolling the world under a black flag, is a worthwhile necessity that makes us safe. It is neither worthwhile nor necessary. It endangers our way of life, and diminishes each of us economically, psychologically, and morally.
Each of us has a personal role, and a citizen’s duty in these uncertain times, to rethink our country’s security strategy, and to decide what we believe, and what we will tolerate from Washington.
https://karenkwiatkowski.substack.com/p/whos-up-for-a-fundamental-reassessment