I am torn on the matter of Defense Secretary Panetta lifting restrictions on combat duties for women. I understand the rationale for greater upward mobility for women in the military. And I grasp that women are already operating in combat areas.

The point I want to offer is this:  rather than broadening the range of the population who may be exposed to combat, perhaps we should put as much energy into demilitarizing just a little bit. If bringing women fully into combat is a solution, then maybe we do not understand the problem.

As an advanced society the USA should be striving to avoid the production of disabled combat veterans. Could it be that we should engage in less combat? Isn’t that the solution we should be seeking?

Right now the USA is so heavily armed with kill-at-a-distance lethality that we have become at ease with radio-controlled diplomacy.  When you have the US arsenal in your pocket, everything looks like a helicopter landing zone.

There is so much money to be made in plundering petroleum resources abroad and in military armaments and materiel that a persistent and refractory global sub-economy of state-protected mineral extraction has frozen in place. With every kilowatt of new load connected to the power grid and with every clever new military toy that is invented we tighten the spiral toward a global energy war.

Where does this new load come from? All of the microprocessed consumer devices certainly contribute. All of the wall-wart chargers for cell phones, iPads, laptops, etc., put stress on the power distribution system and in due course create demand for fossil fuels. This demand is manifested in several ways- 1) electric current to power the devices, and 2) all of the upstream power needed from mine or wellhead to produce ultrapure gallium, arsenic, tellurium, silicon, aluminum, titanium, boron, polyethylene, polypropylene, organic semiconductor materials, etc.

If we take the view that exposing women in our volunteer military to the horrors of combat represents some kind of progress, then I beg to differ. I would like to suggest that the folks in the DoD, the administration, and the congress have salved over a civil service inequity in exchange for equal opportunity for a spectrum of life altering traumas. In regard to military matters, our government and military elites are swept up in a food web of moral corruption so systematically ossified that I do not see how we can steer civilization away from a Malthusian step change.

It is time to withdraw our soldiers from Afghanistan. The latest example of moral depravity exhibited by members of our armed forces shows the effects of prolonged war on our citizens. The US is at war with not so much an insurgency as an idea. An idea is not a form of concentrated power. It is a form of distributed power. You can’t take out a popular idea with a bomb or a 50 cal round.  We are occupying a “country” which exists by default as a void between other countries. Afghanistan is a collection of districts occupied by a weak confederation of tribes who adhere to seventh century cosmology and religion.  A coalition of like minded religious zealots are in the process of retaking the political void which is only weakly occupied by a corrupt, reluctant and treacherous Afghan government.

These latest instances of outrageous and indefensible behavior with Afghan corpses by US forces completely negates whatever moral high ground we once occupied. We have put our troops in a place and circumstance which is unwinnable. We have exposed good men and women to unspeakable horrors and memories.  There are too many public dots to connect now that outline our own corruption in the execution of foreign policy in Afghanistan.

War inevitably corrupts its participants. Our own enthusiasm for war reflects poorly upon us and we must get a grip on this.

Here is a choice tidbit from the Washington Post. The Chinese, it seems, have been constructing a tunnels which some believe are meant to contain (possibly) strategic nuclear weapons and large numbers of people.

What China is actually up to and what it means for the control of nuclear proliferation is unclear. Generally, when a country builds fortifications like this alleged underground capacity, it is for a reason. They wish to be perceived as an irresistable force or an immovable object.

It is also worth considering that a massive, opaque, underground fortification with ICBM capacity is a step change away from the 20th century-style logic of Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD, as it was called, relied on opponents coming to the conclusion that there would be no winners in a nuclear exchange. If this structure is a fact, then it could mean that China means to survive nuclear war. The logic of MAD was based on holding the respective civilian populations hostage.  As crazy as that sounds, it worked.

One of the criticisms of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or Star Wars) of the 1980’s was that it undercut the balance imposed by MAD. In the end, the USSR collapsed at a time and circumstance that not even the CIA was able to forecast. The biggest threat that SDI posed to the Soviets was the inevitability of yet another crippling arms buildup.

A hardened and opaque Chinese missile capability will not go unnoticed by hawks in western governments. This development, real or not, may kick the mania for weaponization of space up a notch or two and tip the guns-or-butter equilibrium even further from butter.

To we Americans, like others throughout history, the impulse to devise new weapons is irresistable. We’ll throw hundreds of billions of dollars of national treasure at the arms and aerospace complex to come up with zesty new engines of war and call it just.  Yet we are unable to justify upgrading infrastructure or a plan to sustain an egalitarian society.

What the US needs to do at this point is to begin intense high level talks with the Chinese to bring strategic armament issues onto the table, if they have not already begun to do so.  China has built a friendly and industrious looking store front. But inside is a tightly wound and ambitious party-controlled military apparatus that is anxious to test its mettle against the US.

If Americans continue to parade around spouting this directionless free market blather instead of devising a more coherent national plan for thriving in the century of China, we will become the next fallen empire. Privatization is decentralization. Even businesses know that market share is not gained by fragmenting command and control. If the Chinese whip us, it will be for this reason.

So, when we invaded Afganistan and Iraq, why didn’t we finance it with a bond drive à la WWII?  Civilian citizens could’ve invested in some real sense in the action and much of the US debt might have been owed to … well … us.  Instead, national treasure is owed to foreign states and anyone else who buys treasury notes.

Am I wrong here? If we’re going to send young men and women off to fight and die on foreign soil for some shared benefit, why wouldn’t we want to invest in it ourselves? Isn’t that the right thing to do?

Instead, we allowed China and others to invest in our foreign adventures and earn some interest in doing so. Citizens get to pay off the cost plus interest. I guess that the interest would’ve been owed anyway, but the money would be in US circulation.

Instead of paying for our own wars, we borrowed the money and had a real estate mortgage calamity bubble instead.

I recall that someone asked President Bush II about this early on and his recommendation was to “go shopping”. The subtext was that they had it all under control.

I have to be missing some key concept, right?

How can reasonably smart people be- collectively anyway- so wrong? Clearly, their ideas and policies are corrupt or faulty.  Parties and their members adopt policies and platforms that are either unsustainable or willfully apply an imbalance of favor.

The party system is corrupt to it’s core and must be taken down. Social networking may be the lightning bolt to do the job.