Erik Prince on our failed foreign policy
"The US military is the most expensive organization in 3,000 years of human history and has degenerated into an instrument for selling or grifting overpriced military hardware ..."
Here are some excerpts of Erik Prince’s recent article “Too Big To Win”:
[T]he opportunity to positively engage with Russia after 1991 was rejected by the dominant neoconservative faction and their military-industrial complex allies in Washington. Originally Trotskyites, the Neocons had taken root in the corporatist wing of the Republican Party and gradually increased in influence, to eventually become dominant in the Washington Beltway foreign policy and emblematic of its mentality of continuous warfare funded by an unlimited fiat printing press.
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The US response to 9/11 should have resembled a Scipio Africanus-style Roman punitive raid, killing all Taliban and Al-Qaeda remnants within reach, including those sheltering in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and then withdrawing. Instead, the Neocons saw a lucrative opportunity to ‘nation build’. Because the Pentagon runs on the bureaucratic principle of budget cycles and the internal war for promotion rather than the principle of victory, a vastly inflated occupational army ultimately comprising 120,000 soldiers was deployed to the country. This force represented a repetition of the failed Soviet plan of the 80s, to the extent of occupying the same bases.
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The Neocon plan for Afghanistan, or at least the story, was to impose a centralized Jeffersonian democracy on a largely illiterate, semi-feudal tribal nation by throwing infinite money at a paper-thin civil society. The result, unsurprisingly, was corruption, not infrastructure. …
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[T]he Pentagon-built Afghan forces collaps[ed] only weeks after the American withdrawal. Today of course the Taliban rule Afghanistan with an iron sandal. The trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended by America’s youth were completely wasted – and nobody has ever been held to account. The Taliban have not become more moderate – they are exactly the same group as before and hosting more terror groups than ever. Al Qaeda is resident once again in Kabul, and now known to be gathering means to enrich uranium in Afghanistan.
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America continues to wage futile forever wars of convenience because Washington believes we are immune to reality and evolved beyond history. The grand strategy of the so-called Global War on Terror was conceived on a false premise promoted by Neocon think tanks and the Military-Industrial Complex that American drone technology could revolutionize counter-insurgency warfare through surgical strikes targeting only the leadership of terror organizations. This delusion produced sclerosis in the military …
Ultimately, the paradigm flies in the face of the realities of war. …
Erik D. Prince is a former Navy SEAL officer and the founder of private military company Blackwater. Follow him at: @realErikDPrince
Read the whole thing, including his take on Ukraine and Israel’s response to Oct. 7, here.
Amazingly, this multi-decade grift called the MIC, has actually made us weaker, as cost soars and readiness plummets!
Also, all these sub tier opponents, in all these optional wars, has inculcated a false sense of security that leaves us nearly completely impotent in any kind of peer to peer conflict, which might have been ok, had we not also become compelled to challenge those peers, with goad and provocations; And all at once, just to make it interesting.
Is this supposed be a joke. Is this the same Erik Prince of Blackwater who greatly profited from the Iraq war? I remember hearing them criticized for years for their ops in Iraq.