American war efforts begin under the auspices of noble missions, but almost every time the missions assume bureaucratic lives of their own, and contracting becomes an end in itself.
'All of the locales for our foreign adventures become boondoggles in large part because they’re so many levels removed from anything like oversight. The entire Pentagon is not audited, and could not pass an audit if there were ever to be one, which means the $700 billion military budget is already an unguarded trough for contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Overseas theaters are simply more inaccessible plunder zones within that already impenetrable black box of over-spending, for missions whose justifications are often so inscrutable that the public has a hard time immediately converting knowledge about waste or fraud into outrage.
How would the public have looked at practices like bringing billions of dollars in cash on pallets to pay bribes, or multi-million-dollar construction projects to nowhere, or millions spent on hired guns for phantom deliveries or security exercises, during the Battle of the Bulge? Much differently than it did for the endless war in Afghanistan, which on some level every American understood was a massive welfare program for contractors.
That’s corruption on a level so deep that we can’t even speak of it ruining the chances for a successful mission, since spending was the mission, and we succeeded at it on a grand scale. Given that reality, pointing the finger anywhere but at ourselves for failure in a place like Afghanistan is absurd, and just continues the practice of lying to ourselves about the motives underlying our military misadventures, which keep ending the same way, and not by accident.
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