Hucksters in Uniform.

• Author: PETERS, RALPH
• Position: Military purchasing policy needs to be changed to protect the troops

Abandoned by the elite, too many officers sell out to the military--industrial--Congressional complex

In the Year of Our Lord 2020, the young pilots of America's armed forces will fly aircraft designed in a previous century for that earlier century's wars. The Army's ground troops will be weighed down by leviathan systems unsuited to the knife-fight conflicts of the coming decades. And the Navy will be splendidly prepared for the Second World War. Along the way, the United States may pay a trillion dollars for weapons that constrain rather than enable, that bankrupt the services, and that preserve cherished traditions at the expense of practical capabilities.

The world has changed even more profoundly than we have noticed. Nineteen eighty-nine marked not only the end of the Cold War, but the end of half a millennium of history dominated by the rise and fall of European empires. For the American people, a 250-year tradition of fighting empires came to a close--our major wars engaged empires and only empires, first those of kings, then those of demagogues. Even our Civil War was fought to cast off the vestiges of imperial inheritance, from human bondage to a loathsome aristocracy of landholders. The American purpose, unspoken but accomplished, was to destroy empires and their patterns of human organization. Now a quarter-millenium's mission has been fulfilled, and we are victorious but without compass.

Our military does not know what to do, so it does what it long has done: It organizes for grand wars against conventional militaries. No matter that the few such establishments still in existence do not, cannot, and will not threaten our nation and, at most, are positioned to annoy their neighbors--the portion of our wealth spent on arms will purchase systems to fight a reflection of ourselves. To exploit the weapons we are buying, we would have to share them with our enemies, or divide into teams and fight each other. Meanwhile, under-funded soldiers and Marines will do our nation's dirty work abroad, while in the skies and at sea we display a shining, irrelevant legacy. We have entered the age of the impassioned butcher, with a crude weapon in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and hatred in his soul. As of this writing, we see him in Kosovo, and we shall often meet his like again.

In this age of brilliance and dissolution, individuals and organizations long for verities. This manifests itself in religious fundamentalism, ethnic separatism, rejectionist terrorism, and Pentagon stubbornness. Our military hides behind technologies that give an illusion of progress, while preserving the old ways of thinking, organizing and fighting. But our military thinking, such as it is, looks backward, our organizations are ponderous and grotesquely inefficient, and, when allowed to fight by our political leadership, combat commanders must improvise their way to victory.

We are a land of fabulous, but not unlimited, wealth. As weapons costs increase--even as their versatility and dependability decrease--we must make sensible choices. Almost without exception, the services are determined to make disastrous ones. Our country will be ready for the war that will not come, but unprepared for the urbanizing, chaotic and morbid conflicts whose coming is already upon us.

Consider a few purchases in progress:

At a time when no power can match our control of the skies and none intends to confront us with dueling aircraft, we are buying three new fighters at a cost of $340 billion dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office's accounting. The CBO's figure is that of an apologist, and does not include the metastasizing costs of fitting these systems to the force and keeping them there. Further, the General Accounting Office--our government's unpopular honest broker--states that "cost increases of 20 to 40 percent have been common...