The primary reason for this stems from how policymakers in Washington perceive the world -- a perception that bridges partisan divisions. According to most officials, the international security environment is best characterized by limitless, complex, and imminent threats facing the United States. Those threats require the military to be perpetually on a wartime footing and the president to frequently authorize the use of lethal force. As a Pentagon strategy document first noted in 2010, the United States has entered "a period of persistent conflict."
In an excellent op-ed on Sunday, Greg Jaffe pointed out that threat inflation is a chronic habit shared by news media, think tanks, and policymakers, who have made the following observations in the past year:
- General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed: "In my personal military judgment, formed over thirty-eight years, we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime, right now." Considering the vastly more threatening times that the United States faced since Dempsey was born in 1952, his diagnosis of the world is either flawed or suffers from hindsight bias, defined as "the inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place."
- Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has constantly repeated his threat smorgasbord of specific and generalized threats that emanate from innumerable states and nonstate actors (i.e., everyone). Although he admitted, "I don't consider myself to be schooled in the art of knowing what the hell cyber systems [do] and how it all works," three weeks ago Panetta warned (again) of an impending "cyber Pearl Harbor," which computer experts have predicted since at least 1991. This is a remarkable claim given that no American has ever died from a cyberattack, while the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,345 American troops and another 57 U.S. civilians.
- Senator Lindsey Graham referred to Iran as "an existential threat" on the floor of the Senate. Again, if he actually believes that the existence of the United States is threatened by a country with a defense budget that amounts to less than 3 percent of the Pentagon's and no nuclear weapons or deployable military capabilities, then endorsing unilateral preventive attacks would be justified. And, indeed, if diplomacy fails, Graham has called for unilateral and preventive attacks, both against the suspected nuclear weapons sites and to "neuter the regime's ability to wage war against us and our allies."
In response to this world of grave uncertainty and looming threats, the United States has invested heavily in offensive military capabilities that the president leverages with speed, secrecy, and minimal oversight.
Drones: On September 11, 2001, the U.S. military had fewer than 200 drones (less than a handful were armed). Today, there are approximately 7,500, a few hundred of which are equipped to fire several types of missiles. The workhorses of the U.S. drone strike campaigns are the Predator and Reaper systems. In 2007, there were 18 Predator and Reaper Combat Air Patrols (CAPs), in which a few drones maintain one continuous orbit over a specific territory. Today, there are 60 CAPs, with plans for 65 by May 2014. As I noted last week, America's use of drones to conduct targeted killings in non-battlefield settings has now entered its eleventh year, with plans to continue them for at least another decade.
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