‘Breach of Trust,’ by Andrew J. Bacevich

[Synthaholic]

Rachel Maddow wrote a review in NY Times Sunday Book Review, and I was struck by the first couple paragraphs:



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Thanks to the magic of American national security politics, a number of young men who grew up in Nepal have found their way west, over northern India and across the breadth of Pakistan, to work at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, destroying million-dollar trucks bought by American taxpayers. They wield blowtorches and wear fireproof suits in the crushing heat, and — according to reporting by Ernesto Londoño at The Washington Post — it takes about 12 hours to demolish each of the vehicles. The trucks need to be cut into pieces small enough to be fed into industrial metal shredders, which grind the parts down into tiny bits of scrap that are sold locally for a few cents per pound. In May, about 11 million pounds of this scrap were apparently sold; by now it is probably more. The contractors who buy it call it “gold dust.”

The reason it takes so much time and effort to break down the trucks is because they were designed to be indestructible. They are Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, which everyone just calls MRAPs. In the early years of the Iraq war, one brave soldier confronted the visiting defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to ask why troops were salvaging scrap metal out of junkyards to bolt onto soft-skinned Humvees as “hillbilly armor.” By about 2007 we finally started supplying MRAPs to the battlefield.


Their prodigious armoring and smart V-shaped hulls were designed to deflect blasts from roadside bombs and more. If you have ever ridden in one, it feels roughly as if you’ve put a steering wheel and some seat belts inside a bank vault and taken it out for a spin. Those are the million-dollar vehicles that third-country contractors at Kandahar are now shredding, by the thousands, into gold dust for the Afghan scrap market.


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What a waste of taxpayer money. Has anyone heard any politician even mentioning this?

 

[Synthaholic]

I posted that separately, since it's not the main thrust of the book. This is:



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In his abrasive, heartbreaking new book, “Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country,” Andrew J. Bacevich starts from the assumption that our modern militarism is unsustainable and unwise. He then proceeds to assign blame, mercilessly: to the public (for our consumerist apathy); to the Pentagon (for its “generals who had slept undisturbed back when Warsaw Pact commanders had ostensibly been planning to launch World War III” but who “now fretted nervously over the prospect of their budget taking a hit”); to the contractors (whose profiteering steals honor from the soldiers they serve alongside); and, naturally, to the politicians. Even Fenway Park and the Red Sox come in for blame, for the staging of a sailor’s homecoming at a July 4 game that left Bacevich all but retching over the “convenient mechanism for voiding obligation, . . . a made-to-order opportunity for conscience-easing.”

Bacevich saves particular vitriol for pro-war writers of both the right and left: Christopher Hitchens, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and the New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier all get filleted and neatly stacked in the corner, to make room for the unleashing of all hell on David Brooks for his commentary before, during and after the Iraq war — followed by what Bacevich sees as an unconscionable repeat of the same mistakes in the late phases of the war in Afghanistan. Bacevich’s scorching litany of what he sums up as “grotesque and contemptible irresponsibility” is a bracing indictment of my profession, and how no one suffers consequences for even the most humiliating failures in prediction and analysis, as long as those failures favor the use of military force. (I should mention here that Bacevich blurbed my own book, “Drift.”)
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Looks like it might be a good book.

 

[Synthaholic]

This is shaping up to be a pretty brutal book, from what I've read so far.

He absolutely eviscerates NY Times conservative columnist David Brooks.

Grab some popcorn and enjoy an excerpt!


David Brooks is constantly wrong - Salon.com