[Salon] THREAT INFATUATION, The latest fire drill

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Mark Thompson, November 3, 2021

Washington, DC

This week in The Bunker: the Threat Thread—threats, more threats, and missed threats (the yeast of our worries); defense contractors shifting focus from slow wars to fast weapons; no Bunker next week; and more.

THREAT INFATUATION

The latest fire drill

It has been a bad week for military threats against the United States:

Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says China’s recent hypersonic-missile testis “very close” to a new “Sputnik moment.” A 4-year-old Bunker recalls that Russian satellite flying over his front yard, generating fear across the U.S.

Terror groups in Afghanistan could attack the U.S. next year, following the recent U.S. defeat there in the longest war in American history, a top Pentagon official told Congress October 26.

Iran was behind an October 20 drone attack on a U.S. base in Syria (we have a base in Syria?), U.S. officials have concluded, signaling a fresh escalation in Tehran-Washington tensions.

And, back to the Pentagon’s threat-du-jour, there is apparently little the U.S. can do if China tries to seize a small string of islands in the South China Sea currently administered by Taiwan, according to a war game (don’t you love that phrase?) conducted by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “Such a scenario could be a prelude or pathway to war involving China, Taiwan, and the United States,” CNAS warns in an October 26 study.

You knew this was going to happen as soon as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sputtered out; the Pentagon abhors a vacuum. But here’s the thing: there will always be threats. It will always be in someone’s interest to inflate those threats. And there will always be those in the grandstands cheering them on, convinced that military might is synonymous with greatness. Much of America is infatuated with the chest-beating that comes with spending trillions on shiny ships, warplanes and tanks, and the sharp-stepping troops who operate them.

The press is hardly immune. Defense One’s daily news briefing appears under a THREATS heading (that story category comes first across the top of its homepage, along with others including POLICY, BUSINESS and SCIENCE & TECH). The biggest news radio station in D.C. has a weekly national security podcast called TARGET USA that’s routinely promoted over WTOP’s airwaves (“Whether its terrorists, anarchists, cyber criminals or nation states, America has a target on its back,” the station says). The staid New York Times’ website dedicated to military matters is called AT WAR (“News related to current conflicts, civil unrest and military action around the world,” the old gray soldier says). Even The Bunker isn’t immune.

Hey, everybody: Relax. We need to stop mindlessly adding yeast to all these potential threats to make them rise. We need unleavened threats, not those puffed up with gaseous exaggerations.

New Chinese weapons are always hyped, with scant attention paid to China’s growing economic and demographic woes. Beyond that, China’s latest hypersonic breakthrough isn’t all that significant. “The technology is far less dangerous than it is often portrayed,” Stanford University nuclear weapons expert Sanne Verschuren writes. Fareed Zakaria agrees. “The Chinese test has nothing in common with Sputnik,” he says, “and claiming that it does feeds a dangerous paranoia growing in Washington these days.”

Don’t count on such sanity prevailing. In that same Sputnik interview, Milley made clear what the Chinese test means to him and his comrades: “We’re going to have to adjust our military going forward.” That’s Pentagon code for—wait for it—more money. After all, this new Wonder(Bread) (PDF)weapon could render the $400 billion the U.S. has spent on missile defenses impotent and obsolete (PDF).

Less yeast, please.