There’s that classic line of career advice to the confused young hero of the 1967 film The Graduate: “I want to say one word to you. Just one word… plastics.” With the perspective of a few extra decades under our belts (or beltways), that word probably should have been “arms.” After all, what a couple of weeks it’s been for Washington’s war industries: The Pentagon announced the resumption of military aid to Guatemala after fifteen years (can weapons be far behind?) as well as, after another fifteen year hiatus, the prospective sale of a first batch of F-16s — the latest version of the plane and a lovely big-ticket item evidently capable of carrying nuclear weapons India-wards — to the Pakistanis in appreciation for their help in the borderlands (thanks, thanks, for the memories…). It also released a major document, the National Defense Strategy, pledging us to war, war, war till hell freezes over and, both in the document and elsewhere, signaling a new push for the militarization of space, guaranteed to enable “us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation.” (If you launch it, can the biggest ticket weapons be far behind?)

The week’s cautionary note: Donald Rumsfeld’s urge to create the highest tech military in anyone’s history may have a few bugs, according to the superb Tim Weiner in a front-page piece for the New York Times (An Army Program to Build a High-Tech Force Hits Costly Snags). The vast program, called Future Combat Systems and overseen by Boeing (which is being paid $21 billion for the honor), is supposed to be “a seamless web of 18 different sets of networked weapons and military robots,” including tanks so stripped down in terms of armoring that they can be flown instantly onto the battlefield. The program, initially only meant to arm 15 brigades or about 3,000 soldiers is, Army officials told Weiner, “a technological challenge as complicated as putting an astronaut on the moon.” And as Paul L. Francis, the acquisition and sourcing management director for the Government Accountability Office commented, it is “a network of 53 crucial technologies… and 52 are unproven.”

Think our Star Wars missile-defense system that, endless billions of dollars later, in test after test against mock-enemy missiles turns out to be incapable of hitting the broad side of a barn. Already the crucial Joint Tactical Radio Systems, known as JTRS (or “jitters”), which is slated to link the robots and humans of Future Combat Systems into one battlefield Megatron-like beast, doesn’t work and production on the first set of radios has been halted.

Speaking of “jitters,” Congressional supporters of just about any Pentagon weapons system that comes down the pike, are getting edgy indeed when it comes to Future Combat Systems, which, at an estimated $145 billion or more, threatens to burst the congressional piggybank — something of a Bush administration specialty in so many different areas. (Best line in the Weiner piece: “They said this month that they did not know if they could build a tank light enough to fly.” I thought the line was, “… if pigs could fly,” but I stand corrected.)

And, the money thing aside, here’s the rub -– one of them anyway: Sometimes the only effective defense against the highest tech levels of warfare turns out to be the lowest levels of the same. Remember the salutary tale of the wonderfully named Marine General Paul Van Riper (okay, it’s not Ripper, but close), who commanded the enemy “red army” in the military’s Millennium Challenge 02 war games in 2002? These maneuvers involved a war in a fictitiously named Persian Gulf country that resembled Iraq.” The games were carefully scripted to prove the efficacy of a Rumsfeld-style high-tech army. Unfortunately, Gen. Van Riper stepped outside the script and using such simple devices — the sort now undoubtedly being employed by the Iraqi insurgency — as “motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to Red troops, thereby eluding Blue’s super-sophisticated eavesdropping technology,” he trumped the techies. “At one point in the game, when Blue’s fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, ‘refloated’ the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)” He was reprimanded and finally quit in protest. But someone — with the last couple of years in Iraq in mind — should have paid the man some mind.

Perhaps that’s why our Secretary of Defense, responsible for sending those F-16s to Pakistan, has been in a panic over the fact that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government recently bought 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles. Little Venezuela’s purchase of 1940’s-era-design rifles has Rummy in a tizzy; and, for all the high-tech goodies at his command, not without reason. The insurgency in Iraq has demonstrated that a relatively small force of lightly armed insurgents in an area roughly the size of California can bog down, stretch to the limit, and effectively counterbalance for two years the might of the U.S. military, despite its trillions of dollars worth of satellites, armor, artillery, air power, futuristic weapons, and old-fashioned bullets.

Two years on, as faithful readers of Juan Cole’s indispensable Informed Comment blog can attest, Iraq’s anti-occupation movement shows few signs of slowing. Right now, it’s keeping up a steady pace of 50 to 60 attacks a day, despite frequent cheery pronouncements on our evening news and in the press about “tipping points” (known back in Vietnam days as “progress” or “the crossover point,” or the infamous “light at the end of the tunnel”).

Take, as USA Today’s Steven Komarow reports, the military’s Abrams tank: “[D]esigned during the Cold War to withstand the fiercest blows from the best Soviet tanks, [it] is getting knocked out at surprising rates by the low-tech bombs and rocket-propelled grenades of Iraqi insurgents. In the all-out battles of the 1991 Gulf War, only 18 Abrams tanks were lost and no soldiers in them killed. But since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, with tanks in daily combat against the unexpectedly fierce insurgency, the Army says 80 of the 69-ton behemoths have been damaged so badly they had to be shipped back to the United States.”

As Nick Turse reminds us, however bad the times may be for American tanks or troops, it’s springtime for ever-conglomerating American munitions makers. For them, and not just for the makers of the most futuristic weaponry either, the future beckons like a soaring Pentagon budget, like a strobe light at the end of an ever-darkening tunnel. After all, as Guy Dinsmore of the Financial Times reported just the other day (US draws up list of unstable countries):

“The US intelligence community is drawing up a secret watch-list of 25 countries where instability might precipitate US intervention, according to officials in charge of a new [State Department] office set up to co-ordinate planning for nation-building and conflict prevention… Conceived out of the acknowledged failure of postwar reconstruction efforts in Iraq, the new State Department office amounts to recognition by the Bush administration that it needs to get better at nation-building — a concept it once scorned as social work disguised as foreign policy.”

And keep in mind that that’s just what’s happening in the once-scorned State Department on a budget of virtual pennies. Don’t even think about the interventionary planning going on in a place where you can imagine producing weaponry systems based on 52 unproven technologies.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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