LAROUCHE ON ARKANSAS RADIO
`Return to Classical Military Policies'
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
From an interview with Lyndon LaRouche conducted by Lee Tibler of "The Front Porch" talk show on KXOW radio, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on March 30, 2004.
Q: In terms of your Presidency, whither the military? I was astounded to find out recently, what a large percentage of our military operations, including the incursion into Iraq, and about one or two other places, are now handled—more than 50%, I understand—by private companies, corporations. And, several months ago, one of our regular callers out here—we call him "Butch"—he's a military guy, Marine, fought in Vietnam, he came out here, and drew the ire of many of our listeners, by referring to many of our present military as a mercenary operation. Well, he got through that. He didn't care. He doesn't pull his punches.
That spurred me on to do some research. You know: Kellogg, Brown & Root; and Paul Bremer, what he did, and what he's involved with; just who's protecting Hamid Karzai, in Afghanistan. And, all of a sudden, I'm looking at a list of the Fortune 500 companies, that are running our war.
LaRouche: Yeah!
Q: So, the question is: Whither the military, under your administration, under your leadership?
LaRouche: Well, first of all, on this thing, to identify the problem. I believe the Classical military doctrine—that is, we have from the 18th Century and the 19th Century—calls for strategic defense. It was introduced under that name, codified in a sense, by Lazare Carnot, who led France to victory over invading armies in 1792-1794. It was the German military policy, which expressed itself, especially, in the Prussian advice to Russia on defeating Napoleon's invasion of Russia, which led to the fall of Napoleon.
This is an approach which was adopted in our military, in West Point, particularly in the time of Monroe and John Quincy Adams, and so forth. Or, at least a lot of it. And, we based our policy on the engineering approach, which was defined by Carnot et al., from the Carnot-Monge tradition. So, our military training at West Point, and later, when Annapolis was built, on the basis of having a Naval equivalent of West Point, on engineering; our military officers were largely trained as engineering officers, whose ability to deal with logistics was considered as the basic, ongoing day-to-day task, under which you get a high-quality military; intellectually high quality.
Now, the contrasting thing you have, is, [what] we had, when Rome became an empire. They ended a system of population-organized defense, of its own military, and went to a mercenary-like system, which became the Roman legions under the Caesars. These were people recruited from all kinds of nationalities, and assigned as units to police the world, as an empire. And that empire destroyed itself.
This also happened with Hitler: When Hitler took over the Reichswehr, which he renamed the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht maintained the military tradition as such, in terms of training qualifications; this was the expertise; the excellence of the German military in World War II—and also, World War I—was this system. But, Hitler wanted to get rid of it—and Göring did. So, you had Göring, who represented the financier interests controlling Hitler: Hitler was an instrument, used by these financier interests, which was called the Synarchist International. What they did, is, they went through the process of destroying the Wehrmacht, to replace it with what became known as the Waffen SS.
The intent of this group—which is the group that Allen Dulles and company brought into the U.S., and into NATO, during the post-war period—was to set up a copy of the Roman legions: recruiting people from all kinds of nationalities into a kind of mercenary force, a killer mercenary force, used with imperial intent, to become what was called the "Allgemeine SS"—a universal SS, for world empire.
What has happened is, that since Cheney was Secretary of Defense, a transformation has occurred—and he became part of Kellogg, Brown and so forth, Halliburton, as a part of this process—in which he proposed demilitarizing the military, to farm out military functions into civilian corporations, so corporations could make money, at war. And this is the characteristic of the driver.
So, those who say that the U.S. Army is being turned into mercenaries: They're right. That's what's happening. That's what the competent general officers have been resisting. That was the issue between Rumsfeld and the military, on the issue of going into Iraq—the key to that. They're saying, "You're stupid!" We did not have a military capable, of dealing with an Iraq operation, that is, the occupation of Iraq. We didn't have it. We still don't have it.
My view: Get our military out of there! Get them back to the States. Go through a reconstruction of our military, based on a Classical, strategic-defense conception. Go back to integrate the development of our military, as some people in the Congress are also thinking, on the basis of something like the CCCs. Let's take our unemployables, as we did back under Roosevelt. Let's put them out in work, employ them in work, and training and education, to make them something. Remember, we had a division that came out of Michigan, for World War II: They were CCC kids, who were taken in, practically right into the military, and became one of the important fighting divisions in World War II.
Q: Sure did.
LaRouche: My view is, let's go back to our tradition of a high-grade, highly-educated, scientifically-oriented military, where you train people; they're delighted to be in, say, two-year service, in training, as reservists; proud to be part of that, proud to be part of the National Guard; proud to be the people who have engineering capabilities, who turn out, when the governor has an emergency on his hand. That kind of people. We want people who are in military, not as against the population. We want the people to see the military as part of the population, and to be part of it. That way, the people, then, are implicitly, spiritually and otherwise, controlling their own military.
Q: And needless to say, the bottom line—for me, one of the major red flags in my own thinking, was the moment that we apply profit motives to warfare, we've totally lost it! We've transcended the need for military to solve and address social issues, as opposed to just simply going to war for a profit motive.
LaRouche: [laughs] We won World War II, not with our military capabilities—I was involved in training people at that time: We were taking people out of the swamps, and in 16 weeks trying to get them to be soldiers. These were not the best fighters in the world! They were no match, man for man, with the German soldier. But, we had logistics. We had logistics like nobody else had. This was Roosevelt's achievement. We had sheer tonnage per manpower of logistical capability, which overwhelmed anything, any opposition. And we won it with that. The soldier went out, as an instrument of the logistical capability, he represented. He was able to do an impossible job, beyond the capability of better-trained opponent forces, because of that.
That's the way I think about military capabilities.
Q: Okay, so for those who had any doubts, that you want to negotiate your way through everything—because, I have heard that from people; you have detractors, as you are well aware. What I've heard here, is a return to the true basis of how we've gotten this far, in this nation, militarily. And I applaud you for it.
