02 August 2007

Containment

There was a catastrophe in Minnesota this morning, as I'm sure you heard. It was one of such dimensions and so astonishing that London was the first to tell me of it. There are at least seven dead in the collapse of the I-35 bridge, a big honking 1,000 foot span sixty feet in the air, and it happened without warning at rush hour.

It is the worst nightmare possible, worse than an air crash, since you are prepared for that doom the second you sit down in the airplane. I can't believe the things fly to begin with, and the magic could evaporate at any moment. You don't contemplate it in your car on the commute, listening to the radio and waving your cigarette out in traffic. If you did, you would go mad with constant apprehension. One moment here, and the very next moment living the Falling Dream into the water without time to change stations on the radio.

They say there are more than a thousand structures across the land in the same sort of shape, maybe on the verge of failure, like the proud Roman aqueducts that marched in such marvelous majesty toward the capital of the known universe until a key arch was overthrown, and the water stopped.

It all has a remarkable resonance, these falling bridges and the failing force that contained their integrity. In my personal life, I am about halfway to the water. I won't bore you with the details, since they are not particularly interesting to anyone but me and the interlocking individuals. I can swim well enough. While my guts are knotted as the prospect of the impact, I am confident that everything will be just fine, and I can kick my war clear.

I'll let you know how it goes, though if the stories cease, it may not have turned out as expected. I might be still contained in the car, trapped in the seatbelt in the act of trying to change the channel on the radio.

Life goes on, right? At least part of my brain is still functioning, even if the bridge is collapsing. I read a fascinating article on the legacy of George Kennan yesterday. He was the visionary State Department official who wrote an anonymous essay in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. It may have been the most influential article in history, if you count fiscal impact.

He wrote as “x,” and his reasoning that the Soviet Union carried within it hairy bosom the seeds of its own destruction was the basis of the policy we knew throughout the Cold War as the doctrine of containment. 

I loved the article, since it brought a lot back. All down through the years since he wrote the words, Kennan was appalled that his words were hijacked for something else. We read his words “in the original” at the War College as we discussed the central underpinning of the National Security decisions of 1948. Despite the venue it was a valuable and objective discussion, and quite necessary to understand our next assignments in the bureaucracy. 1948 is when all the institutions we know and love today were created out of the mass of the demobilization of the war against the Fascists: OSD, CIA, NSA and all the rest of the Washington alphabet soup.

Kennan got such a bad wrap for the whole containment thing- and as an armed container for so long, I have a special recollection of the cost of the weapons and boys toys that enforced it. I always had the usual combination of surreal dream and the full-blown Willies when I had to deal with the nucs. That was either planning tactical missions in support of the Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear victory, or dealing with the command and control end of things.

"Strongbox, Strongbox....." were the codewords that floated out of the ether on the HF radios, and in satcom and ELF- all modes and codes, redundant, strange, disembodied.

Don't get me wrong. I am no pacifist, and believe that death in the interest of the state can be justified for a variety of good reasons- some of them preemptively. Force is a fact of life, and if you are not capable of dealing them out, someone will do unto you. Ask the Goths and Vandals how they liked the pleasures of Rome when they got there.

But I was on Kirkland AFB two years ago in Duke City New Mexico and got an eyeful of the costs. Kirkland is the home of Sandia National Laboratory, one the Manhattan Projects, and, incidentally, the Atomic Museum.

The place was shuttered, since they are moving it off-base to improve access (Post 9-11 security closed the base to casual visitors) and celebrate New Mexico's unique contribution to Armageddon.

Since the museum was essentially abandoned, I walked around the back to the storage area, which was in disarray to take a walk down memory lane. There was all kinds of nuclear trash there. Nothing of value now, and nothing hot, mind you, but the cost involved in producing the trash is unimaginable. There were connectors for the old weapons laying around, and special storage crates and parts of missiles. Little bits you could not identify and the special racks with which you mount the bombs to the airplanes strewn haphazardly.

All of it was guarded as carefully as the weapons themselves, in their time. Now they were just waste. I can't put my finger on whether the nuclear deterrent was part of it or not. Or what part the tactical forces racing around the perimeter of the Iron Curtain played; I know at least that part was not what Kennan was advocating.

When it all fell apart, I realized we had spent them into the ground. Their system did not work and could not compete with the raw market. A decade later, we are finding that ours does not either. But we were big enough not to notice. After the last gasp of conventional war in the Gulf, I found us floundering and unprepared for what was to come. Of course I was a participant, and take my share of the blame. I was a Good Sergeant Schweik in the harvesting of the Peace Dividend for our Congressional masters, and whatever strategy the Intelligence Community had to adopt to comply with their dictates on the money.

Then the tipping point into the brave new century, the one we knew was coming and did nothing to stop.

In the months that followed, I gave it my best college try. I thought we should try a comprehensive approach to bankrupt our opponents intellectually, and with message content. Eventually, I soured on the Government approach to the information war on terror- only the last word is really true- and decided to retire, I realized I had come full around. At the time I wrote a story about walking around Washington, from CIA to Pentagon to Old Executive Office Building, trying to influence how we would deal with the radical fundamentalists who were determined to destroy us.

The struggle was about the minds of those in the middle ground, I argued, not completely certain that there were any. I am still not sure that there are, and the effort to create that middle ground might take longer than we have on the world stage. But I thought it was worth a try, along with slitting the throats of the Bad Guys who were responsible for the murders.

The story had to be reviewed before publication, and I submitted it to OSD in accordance with the rules.

One of the reviewers scrawled on the margins of the manuscript in peevish manner. The words were: “nothing classified contained” and then, “appalled this is written by an active officer."

That is precisely when I decided to stop being one. I will never be a George Kennan. I am not that smart. But I am familiar with the wilderness in which he walked. I also realize I should start signing my name in lower case, though that is true for a variety of reasons, containment being only one of them.

Copyright 2007 vic socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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