The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)
From chapter 05:
War in Perpetuity?
Overwhelmingly, our government and media choose to categorize national security as the identification of foreign (and occasionally internal) threats and the selection and employment of violent, coercive, or covert means to neutralize those threats. The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Pentagon’s primary summary of strategic goals, identifies the following regions as arenas for potential national security concern: the homeland (a tiresome post-9/11 buzzword meaning the landmass of the United States), Europe, Russia, the Middle East, South Asia, China, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, the Indian Ocean, Latin America, Africa, the Arctic, and Cyberspace. Other than Antarctica and the nonpolar regions of Canada, that pretty much covers the planet. It is a pretty expansive definition of national security, one that requires a heavy monetary commitment to back it up.
The QDR’s definition of vital interests also implies that the United States will be in a condition of war, cold war, or near war in perpetuity. This state of affairs has already had profound effects on politics, behavioral patterns (as anyone who has passed through an airport in the last dozen years will have discovered), and even psychology. Just as a state of perpetual war has lodged the Teutonic-sounding and creepy term “homeland security” in the national vocabulary, so has our military virtually ceased to consist of citizen-soldiers in popular speech.
Traditional slang terms for a soldier—GI, dogface, ground-pounder, grunt—used to be humorous and mildly self-deprecating designations connoting a citizen who happened to be in uniform performing an onerous task. Now the preferred term is “warrior,” a term not often heard before in American history in reference to our soldiers. In tribal societies, warriors are members of a caste, like priests and aristocrats, and the term does not seem fitting in a constitutional republic. I am still unsure whether “warrior” is a popular coinage that emerged on its own or whether Pentagon public relations operatives inserted it into the national demotic speech by means of constant repetition. But it is one small semantic clue as to how our governing classes define national security and the citizen’s role in it. The all- volunteer force has evolved from GIs into warriors.
https://steemit.com/@rogueintel
https://busy.org/@rogueintel
https://d.tube/#!/c/rogueintel
https://www.facebook.com/Rogue-intel-199510644152096
