At Mother Jones, Justin Elliott writes:

^{Don't Know Much About History}

In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA) published an 85-page monograph called "Military Advantage in History." Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's "futurist in chief," the study looks back to the past—way back. It examines four empires, or "pivotal hegemonic powers in history," to draw lessons about how the United States "should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Though unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to some of history's most powerful empires.

The study looks a little like a high school text book, devoting chapters to Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France and citing texts by Sun Tzu, Livy, and Jared Diamond. It attempts to break down exactly how historic empires sustained their military might across continents and even centuries. The study posits that the historical examples offer "insights into what drives U.S. military advantage," as well as "where U.S. vulnerabilities may lie, and how the United States should think about maintaining its military advantage in the future." ...

Most striking is how the study conceives of the United States in imperial terms. "You'll see some neoconservatives at the beginning of the Bush administration crowing that 'we do have an empire, let's just come out of the closet and say we do,'" said Ivan Eland, the author of a book on America's "informal empire" and the director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute, on hearing a description of the study. "But the administration never did that because empire doesn't sell well with the public." After reviewing the study at Mother Jones' request, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, said he was struck by its "arrogance and immorality." "The presumption that the United States should rule the world, sword at the ready, for the foreseeable future is an unacceptable basis for a just, even-handed foreign policy."

Elliott goes on to point out that it isn't just objectionable ideology to be found in the monograph, but factual inaccuracy as well. Given a chance to review the section on the transformation of the Roman Army over a period of 1000 years, Lee Brice of Western Illinois University, who is the president of the Society of Ancient Military Historians, described it as "so completely incorrect as to be useless."

The entire study, Brice said, is afflicted with "an intense, myopic habit of wanting to make the ancient world fit into modern stereotypes," something that might be expected in "much lower-undergraduate-level work."

It's become habitual over the past nearly eight years to tie such work to the machinations of the Cheney-Bush administration, but imperial thinking is no newcomer to American politics, nor the project of a single administration or two. In this case the idea for the study arose in 1999. Its five authors, employees of federal intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, wrote it for the Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center - a Department of Defense operation that their company has run since 1998. Elliott notes that the Carlyle Group announced in May that it will be taking over Booz Allen's government services operation.

Just as the transformation of the United States from great power to American Empire was not done on the watch of a single administration, it will not be dismantled by a single one. Just getting started on such a project will require a commitment to actually want to dismantle and the political clout to move in that direction.

Gargantuan forces - including a deeply instilled belief among most Americans that the U.S. has no empire - form a strong counterweight to any such moves. One of the strongest of those forces is the election-killing theme that any leaders who try to reduce the imperial footprint - though they do not describe it as such - are "weak on defense." Overcoming that obfuscation, then, has to be the first step.

+ + +

^{The Overnight News Digest is posted..}