PRESS RELEASE

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Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
September 4, 2001 (2:02pm)

Fred Hiatt
Editorial Page Editor
WASHINGTON POST
1150 15th St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20071

RE: Military Reforms

Dear Sir:

On the subject of David Ignatius' September 2nd column. As I warned in a January 3rd webcast, everything which the present Bush administration brought into the Executive Branch, including its Defense Department policies, will continue to prove itself a catastrophic failure. For the sake of our nation, and the peace of the world, those policies must be abandoned by the current administration, and replaced by suitable alternatives. However, the wisecracking attack on current Defense policies by by Ignatius, and that pompous retort by the Council on Foreign Relations' Lawrence J. Korb, which appeared in today's edition, represent the diversionary kind of influential mass-media "spin" which tends to make bad worse.

There are influential circles, inside and outside the current administration, which are hoping to compel certain nations to become the certifiable military adversaries of the U.S.A.; otherwise, there would be no probable wars on the U.S. horizon at this time. We are in a time when the entire planet is dominated by a global financial- monetary crisis for which there is no precedent in the experience of the past century; except for an influential minority of geopolitical fanatics, most of the world is looking for new approaches to durable peace and cooperation in effecting a Franklin Roosevelt- style economic recovery. The principal immediate strategic threat, comes from currently rapid escalation of such forms of "unconventional warfare" as the international terrorist organization, run from Europe, and now deployed from bases in Virginia and elsewhere, for a worse-than-Genoa insurrection in our nation's capital this month. Potentially, the latter terrorist deployment into the nation's capital, could be a crippling shock to both the sovereignty and the Constitution of world's leading thermonuclear power.

The problem is, that since events of 1989-1991, a certain faction of the English- speaking world, has been gripped by the delusion that it should bring the entire planet under a system of so-called "globalization" modeled, essentially, on the system of imperial maritime rule of Venice's heyday. Already, the onrushing collapse of the world's present monetary-financial system, has doomed "globalization," even before it could be fully established. Meanwhile, under the world conditions which developed after 1989, military policy became an incongruous mixture of the rusting relics of the Cold War period, blended with a modern caricature of police-actions of colonial powers against their victims. More and more, as the physical economies collapse, the role of regular military forces is replaced by a combination of multi-national mercenary forces and an increasing role of international terrorism and related forms of "irregular warfare." The current policies of NATO, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. Bush administration, are a reflection of that state of aggravated decadence in those institutions' current strategic doctrines.

The state of decadence in NATO military affairs, suggests to me the image of a budget-stripped Germany sending a single, naked Bundeswehr soldier to infiltrate an Albanian nudist camp, where he would steal his clothing and weapons for deployment into Maceonia. Current U.S. Defense policy seems headed such directions.

Nonetheless, even if we assume that peaceful economic cooperation will remove the current threat from "H. G. Wells" style scenarios of some utopian geopoliticians, there are compelling institutional reasons for rehabilitating our nation's mutilated military forces, both active-duty and capable reserves. The simple principle of national sovereignty requires this. This means a military capability based on a technologically modern version of the same principle of strategic defense associated with Vauban, Lazare Carnot, Scharnhorst, and the U.S. military tradition typified by the late General Douglas MacArthur. This rebuilding would require developing a science-driver spearhead for those forces, in the sense of the approaches developed by engineering officer-scientist Carnot and artillery officer Scharnhorst (Not the overrated Romantic Jomini). The military capabilities would be congruent with peace-time engineering functions, such as those we used to associate with the building and maintenance of basic economic infrastructure by the Corps of Engineers.

Meanwhile, as for pompous Korb's sexual-like fantasies about weapons- systems, check off the items from the corporate catalogue, one by one; see the potential effect on each of those and similar "chess pieces," by the existing and likely applications of new physical principles, such as electromagnetic pulse systems. If you wish to defeat the world's greatest living chess-master, flank him! Choose a different game, one in which you are the master. Those who play by the gambling house's rules, often become known as "losers." On the subject of strategy, both Ignatius and Korb appear to be losers.

Sincerely,

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.