The American Way of War by Eugene Jarecki

Author:Eugene Jarecki [Jarecki, Eugene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416565321
Published: 2008-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

John Boyd, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Meaning of Transformation

Our scientific powers have outrun our spiritual powers; we have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Strength to Love, 1963

When the four 2,000-pound bombs dropped by Fuji and Tooms in the opening moments of Operation Iraqi Freedom struck a suburban Baghdad compound called Dora Farms, the attack missed its targets—Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay. Though only time will reveal the attack’s larger repercussions, the war it launched was a fulfillment of Eisenhower’s fears of runaway American militarism. Yet, to its planners, the opening strike seemed a natural extension of America’s expanding foreign role since World War II and of the technological advances made possible by the American way of war.

Whereas for the neoconservatives the strike fulfilled long-standing foreign policy aspirations for a “New American Century,” it seems to have meant something different, though not incompatible, to Donald Rumsfeld. Despite the defense secretary’s apparent collaboration, Fukuyama points out that there is no evidence from Rumsfeld’s history that he was inclined toward the kind of Pax Americana the neocons advocate. To him, Fuji and Tooms’ strike (which he personally authorized) more narrowly represented the fulfillment of a technological military ideal, one that had emerged over the decades of his military-industrial career. “Transformation,” as this concept is called, is a catchall for a wide array of technological advances that comprise a twenty-first-century vision of American war fighting.

The transformation ideal is commonly associated with the late maverick Air Force colonel, John Boyd, a household name among military brass, who is all but unknown to the mainstream. Yet a close analysis of Boyd’s career by those who knew him reveals that while Rumsfeld’s war plan for Iraq may have emphasized the kind of high-tech airpower commonly associated with Boyd, it fundamentally violated John Boyd’s larger vision of American war strategy. To those who knew Boyd, Rumsfeld’s plan—and notably its failure—is a case study in how the military-industrial forces Eisenhower feared may not only prove disfiguring to the nation’s balance of power and its spending priorities but even distort U.S. military strategy in the field. As such, they fuel a self-perpetuating cycle of overzealous militarism and gross miscalculation, with spiraling consequences.

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