Los Alamos, New Mexico’s tourism website quickly clues visitors into what the city considers its two principal assets. There’s the national laboratory, represented by an illustrated atom, and there are three national parks, represented in an illustrated leaf. Underneath these symbols is the slogan “where discoveries are made.”

In 2021, New Mexico attracted 7.2 billion in tourist dollars. Many visitors come for the leaf: Outdoor recreation added $2.3 billion to the state’s economy that year. Meanwhile, the atom—the state’s nuclear past and present—attracts a subset of tourists who come to visit Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Trinity test site, and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque. The most hardcore might also check out the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad.

New Mexico is famously the “Land of Enchantment.” “Enchantment” is an abstract noun that evokes remoteness, isolation, and emptiness. It’s easy to see how environmental tourism seeks this out: It’s about sunset-chasing and finding peace in vast expanses of open desert. Nuclear tourism, meanwhile, is an extension of the military’s expansion into civilian life—the cultural arm of a national mission to continue making bombs. It consists of attractions that erase the deathly realities of nuclear events in favor of mythologies of noble actors doing difficult things for the sake of the U.S.’s democracy. But while these two types of tourism might seem opposed, in seeking enchantment, New Mexico’s visitors are oddly alike. In New Mexico, ogling nuclear weapons and enjoying nature are two sides of the same coin: Both activities conjure the state as a blank slate.

New Mexico began calling itself the “Land of Enchantment” in 1999, lifting its moniker from a 1906 travelogue about the Southwest. Author Lilian Whiting wrote that New Mexico was “a territory…whose ethnological interest” in the “remains of Cliff dwellers and of a people far antedating any authentic records, enchains the scientist,” and that its future “promises almost infinitely varied riches.”

Whiting saw New Mexico as the one of most “uncivilized localities” of the Southwest, replicating 20th-century attitudes that assumed Indigenous people were on the brink of vanishing. She described the region as unpopulated, but what she meant was that it hadn’t been settled by Anglo-Americans.

The contemporary earthy tourists that come to see White Sands, the Gila National Forest, or Shiprock caption their Instagram posts with similar language to Whiting’s. They’re exposed to the language and imagery of enchantment and emptiness by the state’s tourism campaign. Today, the slogan is “NM True,” but the vision it’s peddling is the same: star-studded vistas, mountains, forest, and sand dunes all empty and isolated. Vacancy—as an assumption that erases racialized communities—is central to enchantment.

The more complicated reality is that these seemingly empty destinations are products of multiple, contradictory layers of history: resource extraction, the seizure of land for national parks, and military land uses. Nowhere is this most apparent than at the seemingly empty sites visited by nuclear tourists.

In the 70 years since the Trinity site—where the Atomic Age’s first blast melted the sand in an explosion 1.5 times hotter than the surface of the sun on July 16, 1945—first held an open house, New Mexico has become ground zero for nuclear tourism. Army officials installed the obelisk of igneous rock marking Ground Zero in 1965. Today, it is a favorite spot for tourists to snap pictures. Officials designated the site and its grounds a National Historic Landmark in 1975.

In 1969, Congress established Albuquerque’s National Museum of Nuclear Science and History “as an intriguing place to learn the story of the Atomic Age, from early research of nuclear development through today’s peaceful uses of nuclear technology.” Initially staffed by Air Force personnel, the institution is a testament to Cold War efforts to sustain curiosity and enthusiasm around nuclear science.

In Los Alamos, the operational laboratories are closed to the public, there are lots of visitor opportunities—including, since Christopher Nolan’s film, downloadable maps of filming locations and local “Project Oppenheimer” themed experiences that involve drinks, shopping, and sightseeing. Soon, the Los Alamos location of the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park—comprised of three sites across the U.S. that played a significant part in developing the bomb—will open to the public. The weekend of Oppenheimer’s premiere, local news reported a “swell” of calls to the Museum of Nuclear History in Albuquerque and tourists “flocking” to Los Alamos.

Seeing the state as a giant playground for recreation and experimentation is not so different from conceiving of it as an amenity for private enjoyment. In both the nuclear and outdoors tourist economies, it pays to be empty. You can see this in Oppenheimer, much of whose plot turns on the title character’s lifelong yearning: “If only I could combine physics and New Mexico, then I’d truly be happy.”

What is he yearning for? Emptiness, it seems. Emptiness offers Oppenheimer freedom from harm, guilt, and accountability. At times, the film feels like an ad campaign for New Mexico’s nuclear tourism: the empty landscape is both a source for finding the secrets of the natural world and a key to a scientific revelation that functions as spiritual enlightenment. But there is no such thing as the frontier freedom that Oppenheimer thought New Mexico’s landscape promised.

Even attempts to dissuade viewers from romanticizing the events of the film reinforce emptiness. In New Mexico, a somber 15-second public service announcement from the Union of Concerned Scientists preceded screenings of Oppenheimer, reminding viewers that nuclear tests contributed to high rates of infant mortality, cancers, and the poisoning of soil and water. The PSA showed a landscape viewed from a passenger train. It evoked Oppenheimer’s ride to the town of Lamy in Nolan’s film, but also could have been Alamogordo, near the test site. The lack of specificity established the scenery as abandoned: modest discolored buildings, absence of people, the toll of a single bell in ambient natural sound.

The concerned scientists likely didn’t intend to glance over the people of New Mexico, but the PSA nevertheless reaffirmed the idea that the state is empty. Is this a result of the bomb’s devastation, or was it always the case? Who used to inhabit this space? Who still does?

Indigenous and Hispano New Mexicans who were present in the region long before Oppenheimer have been the most impacted by the lab. Many New Mexicans know “Downwinders”— residents of the rural Tularosa Valley downwind of the blast who have borne the brunt of the ecological, economic, and negative health outcomes from nuclear testing, but who have yet to receive any formal recognition or reparation from the U.S. government.

Despite those who profit from silence and emptiness, New Mexico is a land of testimony. This state is full of life and full of people who have dedicated their lives to holding each other close. Organizations like Tewa Women United, an all-volunteer organization founded in 1989 that seeks to create and foster spaces that center Indigenous women’s knowledge and health practices, speak to the specific ways the bomb has affected Indigenous communities in the state. The Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe held an entire exhibition devoted to the topic in 2022, orienting viewers toward the global connections and hazardous histories that arise from the first blast of the Atomic Age in New Mexico’s desert.

Telling stories like these is what makes New Mexico a real place—not the empty “Land of Enchantment” packaged for tourists. When you visit, work towards listening, and you’ll begin to see past the vistas.

The post The New Mexico <i>Oppenheimer</i> Erases appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maybe it’s best to ask if Pakistan’s 2024 election is to be called a general election, or a generals’ election.

As a lawyer and rule of law consultant for different development and non-government organizations, I think that despite the country’s robust court system, its elections exert rule by generals’ rule—not law.

Since Pakistan’s inception in 1947, rarely has an election result here truly conveyed the people’s will. The establishment—comprising of military higher-ups and the occasional inclusion of a few top officials from the civil bureaucracy—has already stolen the people’s mandate to elect national leadership this Thursday.

In Pakistan, the scramble for power among the political parties is like an invitation for bids from the Army. Political parties in Pakistan have internalized that appeasing the military is the only sure way to access power corridors. That means the winning party is always the one that allows the Army the most power over civilian affairs. This ensures a dark reality in which the Army continues to tighten its grip on state affairs at the expense of common livelihood and marginalized regions in the country in a devastating feedback loop.

This time around, the Army under the command of General Asim Munir has thrown its backing to Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), the party headed by Muhammad Nawaz Sharif. It’s a rekindling of their romance; the last breakup between the military and the party resulted in Sharif’s imprisonment in July 2018. After seeking court permission to travel abroad on medical grounds, Sharif chose the cold of London over that of prison bars, never completing his sentence and returning to Pakistan only after he was confident that everything could be managed in his favor. He is now expected to win this week’s election with military backing.

But PML-N, a center-right party, isn’t the most popular party in Pakistan. That distinction arguably goes to the populist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party led by Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, who was removed from office via a vote of no confidence in April 2022. Together with PML-N, the Army is trying every trick up its sleeves to keep PTI out of the polls. There have been wide-scale arbitrary arrests of ordinary PTI workers and top leaders, including Khan himself. The Supreme Court upheld a controversial decision by the Election Commission of Pakistan depriving PTI of its electoral ballot symbol (a cricket bat, since Khan is a lauded cricketer known for helming the team that won the 1992 Cricket World Cup). Intelligence agencies have attacked PTI candidates, coerced them to leave PTI, and tried to stop them from submitting their nomination papers to participate in the polling process. Those are just a few instances of pre-poll rigging that have already marred the credibility of the upcoming polls.

The major parties—PML-N, PTI, and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)—all see themselves as Pakistan’s savior. But how can one believe them?

Many of the mainstream political parties’ leaders are influential industrialists, businesspersons, and landowners. They contest elections only to further their economic interests. Monetary concessions in the forms of rebates, zero percent taxes, and huge subsidies to the agriculture, industrial, and manufacturing sectors these politicians lead have left the economy in tatters. The common man comes at the bottom of the government’s priority list when it formulates economic policies. Regulations are tilted always in favor of the elite.

Economic stability is far from sight. Inflation and unemployment are the highest they’ve been since 1973. Experts are forecasting a deepening economic crisis, as Islamabad has to pay off $77.5 billion in external debt, mostly to Saudi Arabia, private creditors, and Chinese financial institutions, by June 2026. Some economists fear that the government may default. The incoming government, in the meantime, will need another boost from international lenders to churn the economy. That will result in even higher inflation, industry shutdowns, and massive unemployment.

The political landscape of Pakistan is even more complicated. This election, the mainstream parties will battle in the urban centers of Sindh, Punjab, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). None are focusing on the periphery areas of Balochistan and the newly merged areas in KP where the military is the de facto administrative force. Why? Is it just that there are too few seats for them to bother? Or is it that any party that attempts to address the forceful abductions, and extra-judicial killings of dissenters in these remote areas, like Turbat and Waziristan, will eventually invite the wrath of the military? The Army, reluctant to give up on the influence and control that it has gained over the years, thinks its control over these areas is necessary for keeping Pakistan intact and to have a greater say in the formulation of Islamabad’s foreign policy.

The marginalization of the Baloch and Pashtun belt—where these two ethnic groups make up the majority—poses serious threats to Pakistan’s political foundations. The army controls the Balochistan province and gross human rights abuses in these regions over the last two decades have given birth to militancy and political agitation, including the emergence of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) in 2018. But instead of pushing back by considering what is wrong with its policies, the establishment has succumbed to nationalistic paranoia, its favorite fodder, and often amps up the abuse. The arrest of Manzoor Pashteen, PTM’s leader, in December 2023, and the manhandling of participants of the Baloch Yakjehti Mahaz, a female-led protest movement by Baloch people against the Army’s rule of Balochistan and the forceful abductions and extra-judicial killings of Baloch dissidents, by Islamabad police are exemplary of this. None of the political parties have offered any plan in their manifestos to address political fault lines which, if left unchecked, could result in the implosion of the country.

Rule of law is the only solution to the political challenges confronting Pakistan. It is my firm belief that rule of law, in Pakistan’s context, means having an uncompromising stance on the “Fundamental Rights” granted to citizens under the Constitution. This includes upholding the right to a fair trial and protecting people from arbitrary detentions, forceful disappearances, and extrajudicial killings in the hands of law enforcement. If the judiciary ferociously upholds these rights for all the citizens, only then will the establishment respect rule of law and think twice before committing violence against ordinary people. Unfortunately, the courts have repeatedly failed to fulfill their responsibility thus far.

For a long time, I used to persuade my friends and colleagues not to settle abroad, and to play their part in taking the country forward. I sincerely believed that earning a few thousand dollars less in Pakistan was better than adding a few bucks to one’s pocket and leaving one’s homeland. My worldview has changed significantly over the past three years. Now I encourage people to shift to countries that offer them a decent lifestyle. The rot is so great that only a new social contract, perhaps in the form of a new Constitution, unambiguous in its language on the supremacy of rule of law and inviolability of human rights between the state and citizens, can fix it.

Will the next government deliver, and hold rule of law supreme and human rights inviolable?

Probably not. This election will not change anything for good.

The post Pakistan’s General Election Is a Generals’ <br>Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Conflict and Reconciliation Expert Emma Sky appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yale University’s Emma Sky, director of the Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program and a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute, interviewed Miska, whom she first met when they were both in Iraq in 2007. She is also among the people who encouraged him to chronicle his experience helping interpreters come to the United States as refugees in a book.

“Why should Americans care about the fate of those who interpreted for U.S. troops?” asked Sky.

“We serve by an ethos of leave nobody behind, and we tend to think of that as those of us in uniform,” answered Miska of the U.S. military. However, he pointed out, interpreters “are men and women who go on patrol with us every day,” and do so under the threat of death, of kidnappings for ransom, and of harm coming to their families. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. enemies have used violence against interpreters “to send a message to anyone who would think about working alongside us,” said Miska. “We don’t want to violate this ethos that the military inculcated in us.”

Who are these interpreters, Sky asked Miska, and why do they put themselves and their families at risk to help the U.S.?

They have a variety of motives, and those motives have changed and evolved over the past 20 years, said Miska. In the early days, he speculated, “hope was a real driving factor.” For example, a man Miska calls Ronnie, whose story is detailed in Baghdad Underground Railroad, became an interpreter as a teenager just out of high school looking to help renew Iraq post-Saddam Hussein. As the job got increasingly risky, though, he stayed on in order to survive. “Once you’ve committed,” said Miska, “it’s hard to get away from that and to hide that from the nefarious actors who are out there.”

In 2007, Ronnie got approved for a Special Immigrant Visa; at the time, there were only 500 such Visas available for Afghan and Iraqi interpreters annually, so Miska explained, it “felt like winning the lottery.” Over the past two decades, thanks to Special Immigrant Visas, 18,000 interpreters have arrived in the U.S. with 45,000 family members; more than 18,000 applicants and 70,000 family members remain in Afghanistan waiting to come.

Their situation is extremely precarious. “These are people the Taliban are mercilessly hunting,” said Miska.

The post-9/11 wars have taken an enormous toll on the military, said Sky, pointing to the 7,036 American service members who have been killed to date, but also that “we’ve been fighting without winning for 20 years,” with goalposts that kept moving. The costs to Afghanistan and Iraq have been even higher. Are Miska and his partners in helping interpreters driven “by guilt, by a type of penance… because this is something we could actually do and do right?” she asked.

Miska said there are many reasons to protect interpreters, including assisting U.S. troops and counterterrorism investigators around the world, who need local allies that will trust them. “There might be some guilt in there; that’s absolutely true,” he added. “But it’s guilt because we’re being precluded from trying to honor something that we really believe in,” he said, returning to his point about the military’s “no one left behind” ethos.

Turning to Sky, who is British, Miska said that there’s a long, global history of protecting allies; after the American Revolution, for example, the British evacuated between 60,000 and 70,000 Loyalists to Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and London.

What would the equivalent of that action be right now, asked Sky: What is Miska asking from President Biden and his administration?

Miska said that the interpreters and their families in Afghanistan who have applied for Special Immigrant Visas need to be evacuated to Guam, or some other safe third territory—preferably under U.S. jurisdiction—as quickly as possible, before U.S. troops fully withdraw. Government resettlement agencies—which have worked at a similar scale after wars in Vietnam and Kosovo, for instance—need more support to do so. “It won’t be easy,” he said.

The difficulties don’t end when interpreters are able to ultimately arrive in the U.S. Challenges range from enrolling children in school to adjusting to a culture of paper plates. (Miska’s mother, who sponsored a family, would find dinner plates and silverware in the trash due to a misunderstanding about which place settings were indeed disposable.)

Miska called on veterans and civilians alike to do whatever they can to help refugee interpreters, from becoming sponsors to getting involved with organizations like Miry’s List in Los Angeles, No One Left Behind, and the International Refugee Assistance Project. For veterans, specifically, he advised that they check in with their interpreters, and contact their representatives in Congress for help because unlike most issues that have become politically polarizing, assisting interpreters is one of the precious few issues that both parties agree on.

The post Leaving No One Behind—Interpreters Included appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’d hoped to avoid ground combat by enlisting in the Navy, but within nine months of joining, I found myself in Vietnam.

During those long 13 months at war, the one good thing was the circle of friends I made, first as a hospital corpsman in an aid station in the jungle, and then onboard the hospital ship Repose.

The first gay man I met was at the aid station located in Dong Ha near the DMZ. His name was Matt, and we laughed when we found we both loved the movie The Group, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Mary McCarthy. The story of the friendship of a group of Vassar College women who deal together with discrimination, jobs, and men, The Group also had a secret lesbian character who gave us an idea. Matt introduced me to a buddy of his, Joe, and together we bonded like the girls of The Group, and for the same reasons. We added more members who also loved the name—ultimately seven in all—and so we called ourselves “The Group.”

We were noticed, and maybe recognized as gay, but no one bothered us. I know some of our officers knew about us. It didn’t matter. We were in a war zone, and as long as we did our jobs, what the hell?

I had a difficult upbringing. I was born in a field on a farm in California’s Salinas Valley, and my father beat me from the time I was 7 years old. My mother tried to protect me, but one day my father nearly killed me by beating me with a pipe. He left, at my mother’s insistence, abandoning her to raise three children by herself. The last time I saw my father, he said, “I know what you are. I never loved you. I hate you.”

I hated the war, but suddenly because of the Navy, I had a place where I belonged. A family called The Group to share a life with.

Then in mid-December 1969, back stateside and stationed at the Quantico Marine Corp Base, the bottom fell out. I was summoned by the commanding officer of the Marines, who directed me to report to OSI, the Office of Special Investigation. I sat in a small room, where I waited for what seemed like hours. Finally, a man dressed in civilian clothes came in and introduced himself as a special agent of the OSI. He said allegations had been made against me.

I knew immediately what this was about. It was my secret, and it’d been found out.

“What allegations?” I asked anyway.

“You being a faggot,” he said.

I’d been turned in by a man called Anonymous. My military career ended even as I was coming to the very end of my enlistment. My year of service in a war zone counted for nothing. My passion for saving the lives of my fellow servicemen counted for less.

The OSI man said he wanted names and ranks of other homos I knew, and that I was going to have to submit to more detailed questioning by other agents.

“You will report back here to my office at 0900 tomorrow. Do you understand?”

A shipmate in Vietnam, David Monarch, had been arrested for being gay and removed from the ship. A very private man who’d kept to himself, he wasn’t part of The Group. But we all found out that he’d been court-martialed and sentenced to prison. Just months before OSI called me in, I’d gotten word that David had died at Leavenworth Federal Prison. I never learned how and why, but in 1960s America, we gay men deserved to die, according to popular thinking. So, who was going to investigate the fate of a queer Black man behind bars?

I was filled with terror at the prospect of dying like David.

I might as well die now, I thought. On my own terms.

Hours before I was supposed to return to the OSI office, I went to the small laboratory, where I worked as a medical technician. The bottles and beakers looked frightening in the thin 2 a.m. light.

Removing a Bunsen burner from the gas valve, I used the attached tubing to fill up a large plastic bag, which I then taped securely around my neck.

I shut my eyes. Was it the war? Was it the harassment for being gay? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I hated being gay and that I felt like I didn’t deserve to live.

As the gas replaced the oxygen in my system, my head started spinning, and I heard squeaky noises inside my skull. But then I realized I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to give into them. I pulled the plug on the gas pipe, tore off the bag, and sat up.

After I reported my suicide attempt to the psychiatrist in my clinic, that stopped the legal proceedings in their tracks. Even the U.S. Navy wasn’t so cruel as to deny treatment to someone endangering his life.

I was first treated with strong psychotropic drugs and kept in a padded cell to protect the other patients from the “homosexual.” Later, I was released into the general population but kept on drugs with regular interviews and discussions with a military psychologist, all to treat my homosexuality rather than the PTSD I’d suffered because of the war, which remained undiagnosed. I spent nine weeks in the hospital.

Ultimately, it was decided that I must be discharged. A military medical board promised me a General Discharge under Honorable conditions—but it was qualified. On my Military Separation Paper DD214 were three codes: #265, unsuitability because of a character disorder; #256, admission of being a homosexual, acceptance of discharge in lieu of board action and punishment; and a re-enlistment code of RE4, unsuitable for military service.

This is known as a “bad paper discharge.” Other codes tell stories of drug use/sales, anger/aggression toward others, drunk driving, and any number of crimes or misdeeds. And there are other types of discharges, too, including Dishonorable and Bad Conduct Discharges.

These codes, and your DD214 form, follow you for the rest of your life. Employers can demand to see the form, for government jobs, especially; it indicates your job worthiness. The Veterans Administration will use it to see if you qualify for benefits, such as medical and retirement pay. Some of these General or even Dishonorable designations are the result of PTSD or traumatic brain injury; others are the result of the same mistakes a civilian young person may make, but in the civilian world there’s a chance they’ll forgive and forget these errors of youth. The DD214 is always the same and never changes. The codes give a picture of a person that is as one-dimensional as the ink on the paper.

A bad paper discharge can lead to higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, and suicide. For gay and lesbian people, the discharge has designations showing you as a criminal for many decades.

After getting out, I tried for a job at a city agency in Los Angeles. They refused to hire me after seeing the character flaw designation on my DD214. Later, I applied at Pacific Bell Telephone to become a janitor. They didn’t check my discharge; it wasn’t necessary for someone being hired to clean toilets.

On my discharge day, in February 1970, I went to Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of a man I loved. Matt had died a hero in my arms, the last week I was in Vietnam. I remembered how we had decided to create a tribe of our own. The other men, Matt said, had their support system all laid out for them. Surrounded by killing, we gay men needed to protect our minds, and strengthen one another.

As I stood at Matt’s headstone, rivulets of tears ran down my cheeks.

I was never religious. But I looked to the sky and hoped there was a God and that my Matt was with Him. I spoke the words I had said that moment when he died: “I wish we could have been lovers. I love you, man. I love you.”

Over the past 50 years, I have had many battles with the PTSD I suffer because of my war experiences, but I have also fought hard for the rights of Matt and other men and women like me.

It was only after I retired, though, that I began to think about correcting the injustice of my own discharge.

In 2016, I was volunteering at the Los Angeles County Department of Veterans Affairs, where I befriended the chief deputy director. She heard my story and helped me use her office’s resources to start my petition for a change to my discharge. It took four years, the help of a young gay psychologist at the VA Hospital and a high-powered legal team, and it changed my life. On June 3, 2019, my DD214 was administratively reissued to show a full and unqualified Honorable Discharge.

I now belong to veterans’ organizations where Afghanistan and Iraq veterans meet. They have struggles from their wars, and I suspect some have bad paper discharges. I show them that they can have a life—a long life—after service. They are my family now, my Group.

The post The Navy Gave a Gay Man a Home—And a ‘Bad Paper’ Discharge That Haunted Him for Decades appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The move to military imagery was understandable. In response to an unprecedented threat, emergency mobilization on a wartime scale seemed necessary. The politicians also knew that nations tend to rally around military heroes and war leaders, and the charisma and masculinity that they seem to embody. More than half the men elected to the American presidency have either had distinguished military records or led the country successfully in a war.

Yet, today, months after the brash declarations of a war on COVID, the pandemic has shown once again that military-style leadership is poorly suited to the crises that contemporary states most often face. Instead, the most successful responses to COVID-19 have come from women leaders—Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Angela Merkel of Germany, or Mette Frederiksen of Denmark—who combine public empathy with political skills and technocratic know-how. Is the age of the hyper-masculine, charismatic war leader at its end?

The human tendency to associate charismatic leadership with masculine, military-style heroism is ancient, of course. Long before the modern age, monarchs based their reputations on their military prowess. Those perceived as the greatest and most charismatic—from Alexander the Great to Charlemagne and beyond—were most often leaders who protected their people from conquest and made glorious conquests of their own.

Democracy changed little about this perception. The great revolutions out of which modern democracies emerged were all accompanied by significant bloodshed and were led by generals who became founding fathers: George Washington in the United States, Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, José de San Martín in Argentina, and Simón Bolívar across South America.

In the 20th century, the American presidents seen as most charismatic have had great charm, but also a macho strength associated with international conflict: the war hero and cold warrior John Kennedy, and his cold war successor Ronald Reagan. But the spell they cast has worn off. Importantly, the strategy of treating any intractable challenge as if it were a foreign enemy to be defeated has worked less and less well. Nixon’s “war on crime” and “war on cancer,” Reagan’s “war on drugs,” and George W. Bush’s “war on terror” produced few victories, and often had disastrous side effects.

The reason for the failure of these rhetorical “wars” is clear enough. Military leadership puts a premium on courage, strength, decisiveness, and speed. (An old British joke holds that the mark of a good officer is to make decisions swiftly and forcefully—and if they happen to be correct, so much the better.) Real warfare generally involves an obvious, visible enemy, conspicuous targets, and a clear sense of what “victory” entails. But what did it mean to win a “war” on crime, drugs, cancer or terror? None of these things were going to disappear altogether, and it might take long years before measurable progress was made against any of them. What were the most important targets to attack? In the case of crime or drugs, did it make more sense to focus on policing, on sentencing, on education, on community organization, or on something else entirely?

Without clear answers to such questions, how could the government keep the public mobilized on a “war footing”? The answer, of course, is that it couldn’t.

Despite these conspicuous failures, climate change too is now being described with the rhetoric of warfare. Last year, former U.S. Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a California Republican, came together to announce an initiative they called “World War Zero” to fight for a target of zero carbon emissions. But the news sank with barely a ripple. How do we declare war on CO2?

The COVID-19 pandemic is, similarly, another crisis poorly suited to be treated as a war. “Victory” will happen when an effective vaccine has been developed, produced, and distributed. Beyond providing money to the vaccine developers and preparing manufacturing and distribution facilities, there is little that governments can do on this front except wait for the science.

China, Europe, and New York City have all shown what it means to win an initial “battle” against COVID-19: shutting down society and reducing human interaction to the point that the virus stops spreading and comes close to dying out. During the initial shutdowns, health care professionals, significantly described as standing on the “front lines,” were treated as military heroes of a sort.

But these shutdowns have come at massive economic and social costs. And the shutdowns were followed not with victory parades but by agonizingly difficult choices. How quickly can cities and states open up? How can citizens be persuaded to alter fundamental sorts of behavior over an indefinite period of time? What risks are tolerable in return for rescuing an economy?

In the newest phase of the crisis, it is less evident who the heroes are. Not surprisingly, the politicians most eager to claim the mantle of war leaders have performed poorly and lost public support. Donald Trump has frenetically oscillated between declaring premature victory and insisting that the entire crisis is a hoax perpetrated by his political enemies. Trump, along with Macron and Johnson, has seen his approval levels drop precipitously in polls.

A different sort of charismatic leadership has proven far more effective, with women leaders shining. Ardern, Merkel, Frederiksen, and Tsai Ing-Wen of Taiwan have emphasized compassion and patience, rather than war and victory. They have not posed as commanders dispatching brave conscripts off to the front, but rather as mothers and daughters sharing the fears and privations of their fellow citizens.

Ardern has hosted Facebook Lives from her living room, dressed in a sweatshirt, after just putting a child to sleep, driving home the point that everyone has an equal role to play in containing the virus. Frederiksen, the Danish leader, posted a clip of herself singing Danish pop songs while doing the dishes, injecting much-needed humor into the grim diet of daily news. Each of these women has calmly refused to sugarcoat the threat, or to predict easy victory in the manner of Trump. Merkel shocked her citizens near the start of the crisis when she predicted that 70 percent of Germans would ultimately come down with COVID-19. Most importantly, each of these women has also emphasized the absolute priority of kindness, and of saving lives.

These approaches have had a demonstrable effect, particularly in winning cooperation from the citizenry for wearing face masks and other behavioral changes. As a result, the countries with women leaders have had far lower levels of COVID-19 mortality than countries led by would-be strongmen like Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. New Zealand, most spectacularly, has effectively eradicated the virus within its territory, allowing normal life to resume. Ardern herself now has the highest approval ratings of any New Zealand Prime Minister in the last century—since the First World War, in fact.

Political charisma is an elusive phenomenon. It is usually spoken of as a personal quality, something people either have or don’t, or as the product of searing experience, as in war. But in fact, charisma is more of a relationship. It depends not just on the leader, but on the public recognizing a special quality in him or her, and feeling an intense attraction as a result. Historically, throughout much of the world, people have regarded masculine military qualities as charismatic. Perhaps, by the time the crisis ends, worldwide understandings of political leadership and political charisma will have changed. The figure of the compassionate mother and nurse may yet come to have greater political appeal than that of the aggressive wartime commander.

The post Seeking a New Kind of Leader for the ‘War’ Against COVID-19 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Bring back Topgun!

By that, I do not mean Top Gun, the cliché-ridden, late-Cold War, Tom Cruise film about speed-crazy Naval fighter pilots that still defines San Diego in the public imagination. That Top Gun never really left us, and it is already on its way back with a sequel scheduled to crash-land in theaters next year.

No, what California really needs back is Topgun, the U.S. Navy’s graduate school for elite fighter pilots that inspired the movie. For nearly 30 years, Topgun thrived in San Diego—before it was moved to the Nevada desert, as part of the military consolidation of the 1990s. Its departure still burns. Topgun was a human-centered institution that closely studied the many failures of naval aviation in order to train better pilots. As such, Topgun represents the road not taken by a California that grows ever more obsessed with attaining technological superiority and celebrating successful inventions, and too often ignores the difficult work of teaching people how to cope with technology’s inevitable failures.

While the film Top Gun portrayed Topgun as an intramural pilots’ tournament full of egomaniacs and guys who famously “felt the need, the need for speed,” the actual Topgun has long embodied a sober, resilient, and strikingly democratic theory of excellence. It is precisely this spirit that California so desperately needs now.

From its earliest days, Topgun has prided itself on being counter-cultural, like California itself. While the military is rank-obsessed, Topgun was led from the beginning by junior officers, on the theory that younger pilots will see new possibilities and will innovate. While it’s part of a Defense Department famous for over-spending, Topgun was started on the cheap in a discarded trailer with stolen furniture. And in an era of automation and simulation and failsafe systems, Topgun was built on the notion that the human in the cockpit comes first, and that pilots don’t need new tech toys but rather loads of live practice learning how to fly their flawed planes.

“We live today in times of great uncertainty with problems that seem unsolvable,” writes Topgun founder, Dan Pedersen, in a terrific new memoir, Topgun: An American Story. “Topgun is a reminder that things can be changed.”

As Pedersen describes it, Topgun, launched at Naval Air Station Miramar in just 60 days in 1968, was an insurgency within the military that responded to large numbers of deaths and plane losses during the Vietnam War. Pedersen and other young officers who founded the school believed that the U.S. was losing in Vietnam because it had too many rules and regulations for its pilots, and too much faith in technology. “We brought our expensive high tech into this knife fight in a phone booth,” Pedersen writes of Vietnam.

These junior officers launched Topgun to try new approaches. They succeeded. The school changed the ways pilots fired their missiles against their enemy, and they developed brand-new tactics for flying the F-4 Phantom, so that it could better compete with North Vietnamese MiGs. Topgun has been pioneering new techniques ever since.

Perhaps the most important part of the school was how it transformed the culture of naval flying, rather than just training a few guys. “It was about flying and ideas … Topgun was best understood as a graduate school. It functioned essentially like a teachers’ college for fighter pilots,” writes Pedersen. “Our job was not just to teach pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky. It was to teach pilots to teach other pilots to be hottest sticks in the sky.”

In this way, Topgun seeded the Navy and the U.S. military with new ideas about flying. By the 1980s, their ideas had spread worldwide, as Topgun ran roadshows for troops, sent detachments to the Philippines, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, and formed a mobile training team to visit NATO allies. British fighter pilots were regulars at Miramar (though they partied too hard for their American hosts to keep up).

The movie, which arrived in 1986, was not particularly realistic (despite some assistance from Topgun officials, who made one durable suggestion—turning Tom Cruise’s love interest from an aerobics instructor into a brainy tactical consultant modeled on a real-life military mathematician.) But the movie made Topgun world-famous, and applications and foreign visits soared. Unfortunately, it also sparked jealousy from other parts of the military.

Filming of the movie Top Gun at Naval Air Station Miramar, California (USA), in 1985. Here, a real U.S. naval aviator assists filmmakers in the production of the motion picture. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

“There were unintended consequences within naval aviation that affected Topgun for years to come,” writes Pedersen. “The other communities … felt slighted by the movie. It stirred old resentments and as the 1980s came to a close, the school faced another series of bureaucratic assaults that I believed were designed to cripple it.” Those attacks included efforts to eliminate Topgun’s status as its own separate command and even to take away its name.

Then, in the 1990s, with the defense budget cut and bases being consolidated, Topgun became an actual target. When the Miramar Naval Air Station was handed over to the Marines, who had themselves been pushed out of El Toro and Tustin in Orange County, Topgun lost its home and was relocated to Fallon, Nevada, where it became part of the United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program. As trucks pulled out of Miramar for the move to the Nevada desert in 1996, people lined the San Diego-area freeways to say goodbye.

Pedersen praises more recent generations of Topgun commanders for keeping its spirit alive, but he is full of warnings about how the military’s devotion to expensive new technologies steals money and attention from essential training. He laments the 2006 decision, driven by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, to kill off the F-14 Tomcat, a versatile and reliable plane (it’s what Cruise flies in the film), in favor of expensive and ineffective stealth fighters.

“Our country has been put at risk by the Pentagon’s fascination with stealth technology,” he writes. “We worship at high technology’s altar and are on the verge of selling our souls.” Pedersen adds ruefully that the F-14 is still being flown by the military of one country—Iran.

What’s been lost in our love of technology is the emphasis on the human, and the importance of failure, time, and practice. “The basic truth of fighter combat remains the same. It is not the aircraft that wins a fight, it’s the man in the cockpit,” he writes. More importantly, Topgun is about a hard-earned wisdom: fighter planes, like other products made by humans, eventually fail, and pilots must be trained extensively to manage such failures.

In a hostile and competitive world, is there any skill more important than knowing how to fail—and keep on fighting?

The post Why California Should Mourn the Loss of Topgun appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ever since the late 1950s, when the advent of the jet engine revolutionized commercial air travel, Hawai‘i has enjoyed, or some would say endured, an unceasing tourist boom. Since that time the state has become adept at handling an overwhelming number of passengers traveling to and from Asia and the mainland United States.

Yet this impressive tally of travelers, as well as the availability of so many direct and inexpensive flights to the Hawaiian Islands, obscures a foundational truth about air travel to Hawai‘i: Less than a century ago, it was a near-miracle for anyone to arrive to the Paradise of the Pacific by airplane.

In fact, 17 of the 25 aviators who attempted the first transpacific flights failed to land in Hawai‘i.

Despite their high rate of failure, these aviators’ efforts during the summers of 1925 and 1927 were instructive and inspiring. It took tremendous courage to wing across the water for more than 24 hours from California, traveling across half an ocean in a fragile, primitive flying machine made mostly of wood and fabric. These early American aviators were incredibly determined and industrious, as well as dead set on establishing an air link between Hawaiian shores and the mainland, no matter the danger of crossing 2,400 miles of open water.

As the young civilian air navigator Emory Bronte exclaimed in 1927, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s heaven, hell, or Honolulu for me—and I know it’ll be Honolulu!”

These first flight attempts to Hawai‘i occurred during the golden age of aviation, the two decades between the World Wars when the airplane matured from a curiosity to a useful, semi-reliable, and absolutely revolutionary mode of travel. Airplanes of this era evolved from biplane designs to monoplanes, and used more powerful and efficient engines. By the mid-1920s, airplanes regularly flew between cities, above mountains, and over lakes, jungles, and deserts. Aviators, too, were performing amazing feats, pulling off airplane stunts for movie cameras and air show crowds, landing on ships, and consistently shattering speed and altitude records.

Yet for all this progress, by 1925 there was one glaring omission on the list of aviation accomplishments: No one was making nonstop flights across oceans. (The exception was one flight in 1919 between Newfoundland and Ireland that ended in a crash landing, but that’s a different story.)

To remedy this shortage of transoceanic flight—and to establish an air route to military facilities at Hawai‘i’s Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy organized its own pioneering, transpacific, and nonstop West Coast-Hawai‘i Flight. On the afternoon of August 31, 1925, two Navy flying boats (a type of seaplane that combined a boat hull with wings) took off from the northern arm of San Francisco Bay, beginning an anticipated 26-hour flight to Pearl Harbor. Tens of thousands of people lined the bay and stood on San Francisco rooftops to watch the flying boats, heavily laden with fuel for the long flight, slowly lift from the bay, fly past Alcatraz, and pass through the Golden Gate (which had yet to be bridged).

“Running parallel with the shore for a mile or more,” wrote San Francisco Mayor James Rolph, “they rose as gracefully as two birds.”

Flying out past the Farallon Islands and across open ocean, the flying boats tracked a path toward Maui, the nautical midpoint of the Hawaiian Islands. Aiming for Maui was important. While lots of things could go wrong on the 26-hour flight, from mechanical failure to pilot fatigue to bad weather, the biggest worry was navigational error. Should the flying boats’ route be off more than three degrees when leaving San Francisco, its crews would not even spy the Hawaiian Islands and could become hopelessly lost above the world’s largest ocean.

To help ensure safe passage, the Navy placed ships every 200 miles along the flight path, providing visual markers for the aircraft as well as assistance should the flying boats need to refuel or make repairs. This guard line of vessels proved its worth when one of the two flying boats was forced down atop the waves because of a broken oil line and needed a tow back to San Francisco.

The oil line mishap left just one Navy aircraft remaining in the air—flying boat PN-9 No. 1. Operated by Commander John Rodgers and a crew of four, this flying boat powered on through the night, keeping course by use of a variety of navigational tactics, including dead reckoning, radio communication, celestial navigation, and the consistent sighting of the line of Navy guard vessels. But while the flying boat was on course, it was not on time. The aircraft had battled an unrelenting headwind from the start.

As gas ran low and the headwind persisted, Rodgers grudgingly conceded he could not make a nonstop flight and made plans to rendezvous with a refueling ship about 500 miles from Hawaii. But when he alighted hours later atop the water in a bad rainstorm, a radio mix-up left him and his crew desperately alone, out of sight of any nearby Navy vessels.

As hours and then days passed without rescue, the crew of the floating flying boat realized the Navy might never find them, especially since their radio transmitter was inoperable, leaving them incommunicado. So, in a resourceful moment, the Navy men ripped fabric from the flying boat and strung up the cloth between the upper and lower wings of the floating aircraft. If they couldn’t fly all the way to Hawai‘i, they decided, they’d sail there. And so they did for ten days, all the while slowly starving and suffering from thirst as sharks and barracuda trailed their clumsy and slow-moving, makeshift sailboat.

Finally, as they sailed through the channel between the islands of O‘ahu and Kaua‘i, a Navy submarine spotted the missing Navy craft and towed them into a harbor at Kaua‘i. The world rejoiced over the rescue and the crew’s amazing flight and voyage. But still it remained for someone to fly nonstop across the Pacific to Hawai‘i.

The U.S. Navy crew of PN-9 No. 1, rested and bedecked in leis on Kaua‘i in September 1925 after 10 days lost at sea. Courtesy of the Naval History and Heritage Command.

Two years later, aviators were again ready to tackle the oceans. In May 1927 the young American airmail pilot Charles Lindbergh shocked the world by flying alone and nonstop across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris. Overnight, Lindbergh became an international hero, a model of ambition and derring-do. Among those inspired by Lindbergh’s feat was James Dole, Hawai‘i’s pineapple baron.

Dole, eager to connect the islands to the wider world and expand the local economy, offered a $25,000 prize to the first aviators to duplicate Lindbergh’s flight and cross the Pacific to Hawai’i. When dozens of people responded enthusiastically to the offer, Dole had to amend his contest and establish a formal air race to Hawai‘i, with all aviators able to leave for the islands on a race day set at the end of the summer.

Meanwhile, other flyers chose to skip Dole’s contest and try for Hawai‘i even sooner.

The U.S. Army had been preparing for a transpacific flight since the beginning of 1927, hoping to finish the job started by the Navy. And when the Army Air Corps’ plans for the flight became public in the days after Lindbergh’s epic flight, the military picked up a civilian rival. By the end of June 1927, a month after Lindbergh’s flight, two planes sat at the start of the runway at the new Oakland Airport along San Francisco Bay: a trimotor Fokker C-2 designated by the Army as Bird of Paradise and a single-engine Travel Air 5000 named City of Oakland, which was to be piloted by civilian Ernie Smith. With tens of thousands of Bay area residents again watching the beginnings of transpacific flights, the planes took off on June 28, each aiming to be the first to fly to Hawai‘i.

Inside Bird of Paradise, Lieutenant Lester Maitland piloted the plane while Lieutenant Albert Hegenberger provided expert navigation. They made the flight across the Pacific with hardly a hiccup, arriving to a hero’s welcome on O‘ahu, where a healthy portion of Honolulu’s population stayed up through the night to welcome the aviators the morning of June 29.

City of Oakland’s flight, however, was short-lived, as a wind deflector broke off the aircraft just a few minutes after takeoff, requiring Smith to abort the flight and return to Oakland. Two weeks later, however, he was en route to O‘ahu once again, taking along a new navigator, Emory Bronte. They flew above fog the entire way, not seeing ocean until they sighted the Hawaiian Islands a full 24 hours after takeoff. But just as they spotted the islands, their gas began to give out, forcing the daring duo to make a crash landing in a thicket of thorn trees on Molokai. Smith and Bronte had both flown safely to Hawai‘i, but landed on the wrong island!

Despite Bird of Paradise and City of Oakland both making the Hawaiian Hop, James Dole insisted his contest would continue. So weeks later, on August 16, 1927, eight planes containing 16 pilots and navigators took off from Oakland in succession, about two minutes apart. Three other entrants in the race had died in crashes en route to the starting line.

The bad fortune continued during the race, as only four planes successfully flew away from the coast. The other flights were all foiled by mechanical problems or crashes during takeoff. And of the four planes that cruised out over the Pacific, only two finished the race, with Hollywood stunt flier Art Goebel and his navigator, Navy Lieutenant William V. Davis, capturing first prize in Woolaroc and barnstormer Martin Jensen and his navigator Paul Schluter finishing as runners-up in Aloha.

Gone missing over the Pacific was Golden Eagle, a speedy Lockheed plane sponsored by the Hearst newspaper chain, and Miss Doran, a biplane carrying a pilot, navigator, and one famous passenger: a 22-year-old schoolteacher from Michigan named Mildred Doran. Photos and interviews of the cute and sassy “Flying Schoolma’am” had been splashed across newspapers for weeks leading up to the race, endearing the young woman to Americans nationwide. “I’m really tickled to pieces to be here, and I haven’t the slightest misgivings about the coming jaunt to Hawai‘i,” Doran said before her disappearance. “I’ve always wanted to do something different and to be the first woman to do it.”

In the wake of so many deaths, the Dole Derby became known as the Disaster Derby. As an indication of the considerable danger still present in any ocean crossing, all those aviators who flew nonstop across the Atlantic and Pacific in the summer of 1927 packed up their planes and took steamships back home. No one wanted to push their luck by flying across so much water once again.

But progress would not wait forever. By the 1930s, Pan Am Clipper ships started regular service to Hawai‘i, only to be interrupted by World War II. In the late 1950s, the first passenger jets began landing in Honolulu, launching the modern age of air travel to the Paradise of the Pacific.

Nowadays, anyone with a few hundred dollars can fly comfortably and safely to Hawai‘i from California. Next time you do so, remember that the air route you’re traveling was pioneered by a few brave American men and women, some of whom gave their lives in the pursuit of new paths across the Pacific.

The post How Hawai‘i Inspired the Advance of Aviation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

While we sipped coffee at a roadside cafe in southern India, about 1,500 miles from the private military compound that supplied fuel to U.S. bases in Southern Afghanistan, Raj explained how his boss made it clear that the missing items were to be labeled “lost” or “stolen,” in order to keep the books balanced.

For six years, Raj was one of over 100,000 non-American contract employees working for the Department of Defense in Afghanistan. For most of this conflict there have been more contractors working on U.S. contracts than there have been U.S. military personnel in the country. Through no fault of their own, the shift from American soldiers to contractors like Raj has made the war more expensive, less democratic, and more dangerous.

Contractors come from countries including Bosnia, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, the Philippines, and Nepal, to name a few—and do much of the day-to-day work of the war. But unlike soldiers deployed to these war zones, they have fewer rights and fewer protections. Most can be fired at a moment’s notice. If injured, some receive compensation, but others I interviewed did not. Many had borrowed significant amounts from brokers to get their initial contracts, meaning they lived in fear of termination. With constant anxiety over deportation, such an environment is ideal for both corruption and rights abuses.

In Raj’s case, being a vulnerable low-level administrator gave him a perfect view of the corruption and mismanagement of the war in Afghanistan, but no ability to do anything about it. As a manager, he oversaw the work of the mostly South Asian laborers on the base and could watch various scams in progress. He knew that his American and European bosses did little to hide these operations, since they did not fear being reported by those below them. By contrast, if Raj complained, he could be fired and sent out of the country on the next flight.

Like many of his colleagues in low-level management, he was from Kerala and had struggled to find work in India. “There are no jobs here,” he said. So he stayed quiet. So did thousands of other contractors who felt they had no other means to support their families, inadvertently becoming a part of a corrupt war economy.

Raj’s story explains some of the corruption and high cost of the war in Afghanistan, but it also helps explain why U.S. voters have lost interest in America’s ongoing wars. With the bulk of the work being done by contractors rather than their children and neighbors, Americans have stopped watching the war. In the process, they’ve given up much of the democratic oversight that is meant to help shape American foreign policy.

Part of the lack of opposition to ongoing U.S. wars is that Americans have become less involved in both policymaking and policy implementation. Without conscription, participation in war is perceived as voluntary. And while numbers of American dead in wars formerly affected public opinion about continuing to fight those wars, with fewer deaths of American soldiers, the public has become disengaged—and so have its elected representatives.

U.S. voters have long been more interested in domestic issues than in international affairs, but the organization of America’s recent wars has made civilian oversight more and more difficult. The shift to contracting means that military strategies are less likely to be discussed in public forums and more likely to be simply embedded in contracting or budget agreements out of the public eye. When things go wrong on a contract, companies have significant incentives to cover up their shortcomings, while lower-ranking workers like Raj are pressured to remain silent. Further, as the work has shifted to international contractors, the result is that wars are increasingly shaped not by generals and soldiers, but by companies and the businessmen who run them and who are primarily driven by profit.

In part, these wars also remain out of the news because of a deliberate strategy by the U.S. military to limit access to information about the war. The majority of international reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan embed with U.S. troops and report primarily through the lens of the experience of an American soldier. They do not visit bases like the one that Raj worked on.

Little reporting is done on contract workers. In fact, the total number of these workers is impossible to track because some U.S. government agencies outside the Department of Defense—including USAID—didn’t even record the number of contract workers they were employing until recently. Other agencies still don’t.

While many of the popular narratives about private contractors suggest that this work is not as dangerous as soldiering, it is not clear if this is true. Department of Labor statistics suggest that almost 4,000 contractors have been killed while working to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this number includes only those working directly for the Department of Defense. More importantly, contractors have self-reported these numbers to the U.S. government, so the real number of those killed is no doubt higher.

Contractors also face dangers through exploitation that soldiers may avoid. One of Raj’s colleagues, for example, explained to me how his boss instructed him to climb into an empty fuel truck to inspect a rocket that had been fired at it, even though he was not hired to do security work. Other employees I interviewed described being trafficked to Afghanistan, having their passports confiscated and being forced to work long hours for less pay than they had initially been promised.

Contracting in conflict zones is organized by nationality. At Raj’s base, the security guards were Nepali, the engineers were Turkish, and the cooks and cleaners were Filipino. Generally, it is those from the poorest countries who face the most danger and get paid the least. The outer guards at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, like at many international bases and installations, are all Afghan, while the next layer is Nepali, and only far inside do you encounter American or European contractors.

This economic angle brings up another undiscussed aspect of outsourcing wars: For the majority of the international contracts actually involved, the war is not about service or patriotism, as with soldiers. It is about a paycheck. And a paycheck that their extended family might be relying on to repay high interest rate loans to brokers that trafficked them to the war zone. Contractors find themselves in compromised situations, with complex loyalties, which may affect the conduct of the war itself. Raj was doing nothing to actively try to extend the war in Afghanistan, yet it was also clear that he did not want it to end—because that would mean termination. The majority of those that the U.S. is employing to fight its wars have a vested interest in seeing those wars continue despite their dangers.

While Raj returned home fine, other colleagues were not so lucky. More than one I spoke with had been kidnapped—a difficult situation for someone from a country like Nepal, which had no diplomatic presence in the country. In cases like these, workers become pawns that brokers trade and companies use or simply discard. Another Nepali I interviewed spent three years in an Afghan prison after sitting through a trial he could not understand, with the Nepali government only learning of his fate much later through a reporter.

The economic costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are staggering and should not be dismissed. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, when taking into account debt incurred and long term costs, like benefits to veterans, America’s post-9/11 wars will cost the U.S. $5.6 trillion dollars.

But critiques of the war done by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and other overseers focus almost exclusively on financial audits and mismanagement of funds. Unfortunately, less work has been done on how contracting has made the management of the war itself even more difficult to monitor. Few are interested in the corruption happening on small contracting bases, and fewer still are tracking human rights abuses that occur as workers make their way toward these war zones.

With the drawdown of troops from Afghanistan, some might hope that democratic control over U.S. foreign policy will improve, but exactly the opposite is happening. While the number of contractors the U.S. is employing in Afghanistan has decreased, it has not decreased as quickly as the number of troops. This means that while in 2011 there were approximately 1.5 contractors for every U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, there are now three contractors for every soldier, making contractors increasingly the face of the U.S. presence. Furthermore, as the war wanes, contractors like Raj are looking for work elsewhere: Syria, Yemen, Russia and the Central African Republic. Some of Raj’s coworkers are now providing security for oil-rich countries in the Gulf, like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

This suggests that we are not far from a world where wars between rich nations could be fought entirely by contractors. Already, proposals to privatize the war in Afghanistan, allegedly to save tax dollars have gained political traction in Washington. But really, as Raj knows, such strategies will further move war away from transparency and democratic oversight and into the shadowy world of corruption.

The post Why Using Foreign Contractors Helps Prolong Foreign Wars appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The American military may be the finest fighting force in the history of the world. But how long can it defend Camp Pendleton?

Marine Base Camp Pendleton is best known as our state’s signature military facility, a center for training the men and women who fight for our country.

But Pendleton is also one of our state’s most desirable pieces of land, making it an increasingly inviting target in a coastal Southern California starved for housing, parks, infrastructure, and transportation. In the years to come, trends in economics, budgets, politics, demographics, environment, and warfare itself will create pressure for Californians to take at least some of it back from the federal government.

The military’s defenders will ridicule this suggestion, but here’s the reality on the ground, soldier: Camp Pendleton may be too wonderful for the Marines to hold it forever.

It’s the largest coastal open space between Santa Barbara and the Mexican border. At 200 square miles, it covers more ground than the sprawling city of San Jose and is four times larger than San Francisco. Its beauty is legendary: Major General Graves Erskine, the base commander after World War II, called it “the finest post in the world.”

But Pendleton’s future hasn’t received much public attention, even though it touches contested Congressional districts at the front lines of this fall’s political wars. This may be because Pendleton’s charms remain mostly hidden.

Many Californians think of Pendleton as merely the 17 miles of coast it occupies along Interstate 5 between L.A. and San Diego, but that’s only a fraction of a vast compound running 10 miles inland, nearly to Riverside County. The property offers scenery so diverse—mountains, canyons, bluffs, mesas, estuaries, coastal plains, beaches, lakes, a bison preserve, and a free-flowing river—that it can feel like a militarized microcosm of California itself.

This diverse geography explains the place’s military value. Camp Pendleton is the Marines’ largest West Coast expeditionary training facility, offering a wide variety of training not only for Marines but also other U.S. military branches and civilian agencies. The grounds have prepared marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, landed at Inchon, and fought in Vietnam’s jungles, Afghanistan’s mountains, and Iraq’s sands.

Today, tens of thousands of people live on the base, and the daytime population can swell to 100,000, though people occupy less than 20 percent of the camp’s land. Small-town settlements of housing and training facilities are scattered around the base (like in the San Mateo area toward Orange County, where signs display the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines’ memorable motto, “Make Peace or Die”). But most development is on the base’s southern and eastern sides, near the northern San Diego County communities of Oceanside, San Luis Rey, and Fallbrook (the last of which has been engaged in a decades-long legal battle with the base over water rights).

Those who live and work at Camp Pendleton lack for little in services. The base has a new half-billion-dollar naval hospital, car washes, grocery stores, a scuba center, theaters, a museum, a YMCA, the Leatherneck Lanes bowling alley, most established franchise eateries (from McDonald’s to a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf), a championship golf course, a par-3 golf course, mini-golf, a lake with fishing and campgrounds, 11 fire stations, five public schools, four ranges for recreational shooting, three chapels, two hotels, two travel agencies, three recycling centers, 14 barbershops, eight dry cleaners, and two tailors. The official base guide estimates the total value of land and improvements at more than $1.7 billion, but that seems low.

Indeed, Pendleton has been quite an investment. The land—a rancho that once belonged to the brothers Andrés and Pio Pico—cost just $4.2 million in 1942 when the military, seeking a training base for the Pacific theater, seized it. It was named for Marine Major General Joseph Pendleton, a Coronado mayor who had lobbied for a West Coast training base for Marines.

For decades, the Marines have successfully defended the base against those most rapacious of California enemies—real estate developers—who sought to build retail, housing, and airports. The military has made some strategic concessions, permitting the popular San Onofre State Beach and the San Onofre nuclear power plant to operate on its property.

Indeed, Camp Pendleton’s record as an “ecological buffer,” as the base site puts it, has been a wise strategy for defending the base from incursions. Generations of commanders, backed by environmental staff and research and state partners, have protected 18 threatened and endangered species (notably a small songbird known as the least Bell’s vireo) and revived native habitats, particularly near the Santa Margarita River, which flows freely for 10 miles through the base to the Pacific.

“Camp Pendleton has proved that national security and natural security do not have to be mutually exclusive,” writes environmental journalist Marilyn Berlin Snell in her smart new book, Unlikely Ally: How the Military Fights Climate Change and Protects the Environment. She writes that Pendleton also advocates for environmental protection off-site, so the base does not become a “last refuge” for species, which would limit its flexibility in military training.

But having such a magnificent piece of land in the midst of urbanizing Southern California is provocative. The first frontal attack on Pendleton’s perimeter has come from San Diego business interests desperate to add an airport before Lindbergh Field reaches capacity in 2035. Cal State San Marcos researchers found that the best place for a large, international airport serving all three counties is Camp Pendleton. Such an airport would provide at least 100,000 jobs and billions in economic activity, while requiring less than 5 percent of the base’s acreage.

Pendleton has fought the airport and Orange County proposals for a toll road through the base. But Pendleton, which already is traversed by three different rail services, is a possible hub for future transportation networks. In a state that is not producing enough college graduates, Pendleton’s open space and location makes it a natural future home for universities seeking expansion. And as California’s housing crisis deepens, how long before developers look to Pendleton as part of the solution?

Pendleton also is likely to become part of the debate over Californians’ access to the coast. Today, in defiance of the state constitution’s guarantees, many wealthy landowners are restricting such access. But the public owns the Camp Pendleton property, through the U.S. government, which makes it a natural place for a massive new state park or nature preserve.

The military maintains that surrendering any Pendleton land undermines its training mission. But in an era in which wars are conducted by drones or online, how much does the military need Pendleton? Yes, the coast provides amphibious training, but there hasn’t been a major Marine amphibious assault since 1950. And North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune is another Pendleton-sized base that accommodates varied training.

If Americans ever consider larger questions of budget policy, Pendleton could become an easy target. Does the United States, with $1 trillion annual deficits and having spent trillions on Iraq and Afghanistan, require a secondary land force in the Marines? Is military training the highest-and-best use of valuable California land?

There’s also this unpleasant reality: Pendleton serves a Commander-in-Chief who treats California like an enemy nation. A Time report said Trump plans to detain 47,000 migrants at Camp Pendleton under border policies that include child detentions and systematic violation of refugees’ rights. If Pendleton were actually used for such outrageous purposes, California’s leaders would be justified in demanding that the feds leave.

The notion of a Camp Pendleton with a diminished military presence, or without the military at all, might seem unthinkable. But, at one time, so was the idea that the military would depart the Presidio in San Francisco or Fort Ord on Monterey Bay. Both have productively transitioned to civilian use. Like them, Camp Pendleton is a California place big and beautiful enough to serve us all.

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