Hart-Rudman and the 25 Year Plan
Originally from 2006 or 2007
The structural changes in the American ‘empire’ are pretty much a done deal, and the change has been building since the end of the cold war and most likely would have come about regardless of administration.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/nssg/
The tone of those documents, and a lot of others from that time, presupposes a benevolent American hegemony. From ‘Phase I’ of the project:
“In the next 25 years, the United States will
engage in an increasingly complex world to
assure the benefits that we—and most of the
world with us—derive from American leadership.”
This is interesting:
“The United
States and governments of kindred spirit must
work harder to prevent conflicts as well as
respond to them after the fact.”
Especially in conjunction with this:
“American dependence on
foreign sources of energy will also grow over
the next two decades. In the absence of events
that alter significantly the price of oil, the stability
of the world oil market will continue to
depend on an uninterrupted supply of oil from
the Persian Gulf, and the location of all key
fossil fuel deposits will retain geopolitical significance.”
From the conclusion, very precognizant:
“Interstate wars will occur over the next 25
years, but most violence will erupt from conflicts
internal to current territorial states….The major powers will struggle to
devise an accountable and effective institutional
response to such crises.”
“In dealing with security crises, the 21st century
will be characterized more by episodic “posses
of the willing” than the traditional World War
II-style alliance systems. The United States will
increasingly find itself wishing to form coalitions
but increasingly unable to find partners
willing and able to carry out combined military
operations.”
In Phase II, there are a couple of remarks that one wishes the Bush administration had paid more attention to:
“Having become a global power, the United
States now holds a responsibility it will not
abandon, both for the safeguarding of American
interests and the broader interests of global
peace and security. The United States is the first
nation with fully global leadership responsibilities,
but there are more and less effective ways
to lead. Tone matters. Leadership is not the
same as dominance; everyone elseÕs business
need not also be AmericaÕs. Just as riches without
integrity are unavailing, so power without
wisdom is unworthy. As Shakespeare put it:
O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is
tyrannous
To use it like a giant”
“In all cases, the United States should resort
first to preventive diplomacy: acting with political
and economic tools, and in concert with
others, to head off conflict before it reaches the
threshold of mass violence.”
In the following paragraph you can see the beliefs of experts that were exploited by the Administration:
“Preventive diplomacy will not always
work, however, and the United States should be
prepared to act militarily in conjunction with
other nations in situations characterized by the
following criteria:
¥ when U.S. allies or friends are imperiled;
¥ when the prospect of weapons of mass
destruction portends significant harm to
civilian populations ¥ when access to resources critical to the
global economic system is imperiled;
¥ when a regime has demonstrated intent to
do serious harm to U.S. interests;
¥ when genocide is occurring.”
And in Phasde III we move on to the specific recomendations. This sheds some light on how these policies were made, having been protrayed in the media as the brainchild of the Bush team:
“We therefore recommend the creation of an independent National Homeland Security
Agency (NHSA) with responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S.
government activities involved in homeland security.” Of course Bush went one step further and tried to put every concievable agency under the same umbrella which might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but the reorganization created more chaos than it needed to.
I think he failed to heed this prescient bit of advice:
“The legal foundation for the National Homeland Security Agency
would rest firmly within the array of Constitutional guarantees for civil liberties.”
And also:
“We urge, in particular, that the National Guard be given homeland security as a
primary mission, as the U.S. Constitution itself ordains.” Which I think Bush tried to emplement but failed miserably. By the time of Katrina the Dept. of Homeland Security should have been able to respond effectively but instead, no one seemed to know what they were supposed to do.
(Edit 2010 -
And Bush’s inablity to organize the dept. effectively might also have contributed to the massive influx of illegal immigrants.
Then:
“We therefore recommend doubling the federal research and development budget by
2010, and instituting a more competitive environment for the allotment of those funds.”
This of course was left up to Obama, a Democrat to do
The Republicans shot this one down in many ways, by opposing Obama’s national service agenda and with the Iraq war sending military recruitment down, down, down: “We recommend, first of all, a national campaign to reinvigorate and enhance the
prestige of service to the nation”.
And also left for Obama to do: “The President should direct the Department of Education to work with the states to devise a comprehensive plan to avert a looming shortage of quality teachers. This plan should emphasize raising teacher compensation, improving infrastructure support, reforming the certification process, and expanding existing programs targeted at districts with especially acute problems.”)
This is acutely intersting but I have no idea what it’s status is:
“To reflect how central economics has become in U.S. national security policy, we
recommend that the Secretary of Treasury be named a statutory member of the National
Security Council. Responsibility for international economic policy should return to the National
Security Council. The President should abolish the National Economic Council, distributing its
domestic economic policy responsibilities to the Domestic Policy Council.”
(edit 2011 – sec. of treasury sits on nsc)
“the Secretary of Defense should establish a ten-year goal of reducing
infrastructure costs by 20-25 percent through steps to consolidate, restructure, outsource, and privatize as many DoD support agencies and activities as possible.” This had decidedly mixed results and I think they erred on the side of doing more than what was possible instead of less. That was Rumsfield.
Themocracy
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