The Center for Public Integrity

The U.S. intelligence community has confirmed in a new report that global power in the future will not be marked by the deployment of large military force or arsenals of nuclear weapons, two measures of American power that still have a large following in Washington.

In a new report entitled “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”, the National Intelligence Council said global power in that year will be reflected instead by a mix of factors, including the state of technology, health, education, and governance as well as GDP (the size of the national economy), population size, and military spending.

And by 2030, countries in Asia will have surpassed the United States in many of these power metrics, meaning that “the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana – the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945 – is fast winding down,” the report said. “There will not be any hegemonic power” in 18 years but instead a collection of “networks and coalitions” in which Asian nations and rising economic powers such as India, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa and Turkey will take part.

This may not seem revolutionary, but it contravenes some rhetoric that surrounded the presidential campaign, which still animates those wedded to a nostalgic model of American predominance in global affairs. The days of primacy are over, says the council, which held meetings with scholars and experts in 10 states and 20 countries, and drew on studies by national laboratories and advice from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Predominance is an ambition Americans cannot expect to see fulfilled, and certainly not by doing more of what we do now, says the report, prepared by an analytic unit of the White House’s Director of National Intelligence.

Officials in central Indianapolis thought deeply a few years back about what equipment they needed to defend against a local attack involving weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical arms or a nuclear bomb, and their answer was (ba dum, ba dum) a hovercraft!

Luckily, the city didn’t even have to foot the$69,000 bill. The funds instead came from a Federal Emergency Management Agency program known as the Urban Area Security Initiative, which has so far spent more than $7 billion trying to make about five dozen of America’s cities safe from the threat of terrorism.

When officials in Louisiana calculated how they could best deal with the terrorism threat in their own backyard, their answer in part was – yes, really – a teleprompter and a lapel microphone, again purchased with funds from the FEMA initiative. Similarly, Oxnard-Thousand Oaks officials in California deliberated and decided to buy new fins and snorkels for their dive team.

But the City of Clovis in that state was even more creative: They used a $250,000 FEMA grant to buy an armored vehicle known as the BearCat, which wound up being used to patrol at an Easter egg hunt and other public events.

Some of the urban security funds were undoubtedly carefully spent. But a report last week by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) highlighted the highly unusual spending choices listed above and accused FEMA of extraordinarily weak oversight. FEMA and the department in which it sits, Homeland Security, have failed either to carefully assess which cities need help or to examine which of its grants have been properly used, Coburn said.

The Obama administration is moving forward with plans to modify the Medicare payment system for radiological isotopes used in diagnostic procedures despite concerns that the change would not do enough to end health care providers’ reliance on bomb-grade uranium.

Effective Jan. 1, hospitals and other medical facilities will be entitled to an additional $10 in government reimbursement for every diagnostic procedure they conduct on Medicare patients using isotopes not derived from highly enriched uranium.

The Health and Human Services Department proposed the change in July, and it has been viewed favorably by nonproliferation advocates who want to see the United States weaned off of isotopes produced with material that could be used to make a nuclear weapon if it fell into the wrong hands.

Health care industry officials, however, have argued the administration underestimates how much more it will cost to switch to producing isotopes without HEU material. The extra $10 per procedure is not likely cover the cost increase passed on health care providers, and will therefore not be enough to persuade hospitals and other medical facilities to make the switch, industry officials argued in September comments to the HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In a passage buried within a 357-page notice published in the Federal Register last month, CMS officials acknowledged the additional payment might not be a great incentive. They argued, though, that they are merely looking to compensate providers who switch to non-HEU sources, not give them motivation to do so.

The Pentagon’s budget is almost assuredly going down in coming years, under heavy pressure from those who wish to trim the federal deficit and see the agency – whose budget increased by two-thirds over the last decade – as a ripe target. But it looks like a specific type of weaponry,  the nation’s stockpile of nuclear warheads, is also headed down, with Barack Obama’s reelection.

This is not a great surprise. Obama promised in a 2009 speech in Prague, after all, that the U.S.-Russian arms control treaty he was then negotiating “will set the stage for further cuts.” But the administration’s planning was not detailed publicly before the election to avoid creating controversy.

Now that the voting is past, a group of independent advisers to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has publicly urged her to consider pursuing an informal accord with Russia aimed at lowering the number of nuclear weapons the two countries might deploy under existing treaties. Its report, issued Nov. 27, has also acknowledged official support for deeper cuts inside the administration.

The idea of an informal agreement would essentially sidestep the need to obtain formal congressional approval for cuts deeper than those authorized in a 2011 U.S.-Russian arms treaty known as New Start. The accord, which caps strategic deployments by both countries at 1,550 warheads, was approved by around a three-quarters margin in both legislatures, but only after months of political debate.

The Environmental Protection Agency imposed a new penalty for wrongdoing against the BP oil company on Nov. 28, but it may fall heavily on the Defense Department, an unflaggingly loyal client that has kept buying fuel from BP since the company’s errors caused its well to disgorge nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

The agency’s order temporarily bars new contracting with the oil giant by all federal agencies, although it does not interrupt existing government contracts, including the many large ones it has with the military. It also leaves the door open for BP to prove that it has reformed itself enough to requalify for federal contracts at some point in the future.

But the Pentagon might find itself scrambling if the ban is prolonged, since BP has been the military’s principal single fuel supplier for years and collected billions of dollars for fuel used by U.S. forces in the Middle East and elsewhere, a practice that drew criticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill and others.

“When someone recklessly crashes a car, their license and keys are taken away,” Rep. Ed Markey (Mass.), the senior Democrat on the Natural Resources committee, said in a prepared statement yesterday. “Suspending BP’s access to contracts with our government is the right thing to do.”

EPA acted two weeks after the corporation entered guilty pleas in federal court to 14 criminal counts, including manslaughter, related to the spill. It was not a speedy decision, however, since EPA employees began considering a contracting ban years ago in response to a BP oil spill in 2006 and a refinery explosion in 2005.

“What can you do with a general, when he stops being a general?” crooned Bing Crosby in the 1954 movie “White Christmas.” “Who’s got a job for a general when he stops being a general?”

Alas, the answer, 58 years later, is now clear. Retired generals don’t open ski resorts in Vermont.  Instead, they hunker down in Washington as the paid employees of corporations that draw most of their income from the service branch in which the generals worked. Once there, they work to maintain a stream of funding from the public treasury.

The revolving door between government service and private companies for those with beribboned chests is now an entrenched feature of life in Washington, according to a new report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government watchdog group.

Updating a 2010 Boston Globe report that documented the practice, CREW found that over the last three years, 70 percent of the 108 three-and-four star generals and admirals who retired “took jobs with defense contractors or consultants.”

What’s more, CREW found, some of these same retirees were then appointed to Pentagon advisory boards, such as the Defense Policy Board. The study did not cite examples of improper decision-making, but said the retired generals’ advice to the Pentagon may not be “unbiased,” due to their new financial interests.

The Pentagon’s rules only require a one-year wait before retired generals can contact former colleagues still at the Pentagon on behalf of their new employer. But even before that brief period ends, they can provide useful advice to new bosses about how to tap into fresh revenue streams and tip them on  upcoming contract opportunities.

What do scientific experiments involving babies and robots have to do with excessively costly elementary schools and low-priced grocery stores for the elderly?

The answer is, these endeavors are all financed by the Department of Defense’s $629 billion annual budget, in what one Senator depicts as a spending free-for-all that adds to the federal deficit while diverting resources from genuine military needs.

The examples are cited in a 73-page report issued last week by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., that describes how cash-rich the Pentagon is and how distorted some of its spending priorities have become. “We highlight, as in every other agency, a lot of the stupid things that are happening,” said Coburn, a blunt-spoken family physician, at a press conference last week.

Coburn’s report suggests that the massive infusion of funds into the military budget over the past decade — it grew by two-thirds from 2000 to 2009 — has prompted some scientific researchers to treat the Defense Department’s budget like a piggybank for questionable projects.

He mentions the Office of Naval Research’s recent effort to track how babies interact with robots, which concluded after much observation that “if you want to build a companion robot, it is not sufficient to make it look human … the robot must be able to interact socially.” The Pentagon defended the study, funded under a $450,000 grant, as necessary to “enhance and improve warfighter ability” to work with robots. But Coburn’s report called it a useless confirmation of “common sense,” with no connection to national security.

President Obama and Congress now have just over seven weeks to reach an agreement on the federal budget that would avert a round of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts in defense and social programs that members of both parties have depicted as draconian.

Jan. 1 is the deadline set by the so-called “sequestration” law of 2010 that imposes substantial cuts automatically – over a ten-year period – if the government fails to whack away at the federal deficit. Front and center in the punishment will be the Defense Department, which accounts for a fifth of all federal spending and about a half of so-called “discretionary” funds, or those that lawmakers review and approve annually.

Fifty program areas at the Pentagon would collectively take a roughly $500 billion hit, which seems like a lot but would actually be less than ten percent of the $5.8 trillion that the Obama administration wants the Pentagon to spend from 2013 to 2021. Military leaders have complained fiercely, partly because the Obama administration last year chose to halt a planned 16 percent increase in defense spending, keeping the military’s budget essentially level after a decade of steep growth.

Only a few Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have said they want to cut defense programs deeply, but both parties agreed in the legislation to hold the military’s budget hostage to force a deal. The Democrats’ aim, in particular, was to force the Republicans to raise taxes on the wealthy by threatening to kill military programs that the party faithful traditionally cherish. The Republicans supported the deal because it pushed the issue beyond the election – now just concluded – and because they knew that a disagreement would also harm social programs that Democrats cherish.  

A culture of cheating pervades the guard force at America’s premier processing and storage site for nuclear weapons-grade uranium, according to a new report this week by the Energy Department’s inspector general.

Contract officers and supervisors of the force at the Y-12 plant outside Knoxville, Tennessee, shared advance copies of test materials with patrolmen, said inspector general Gregory H. Friedman, rendering their responses unreliable. But he put the blame squarely on the Energy Department for mismanaging the facility’s operations.

The abuses he cited are not new. Eight years ago, Friedman blew the whistle on even worse cheating by the Y-12 guard force, disclosing that for years they obtained advance word of mock assaults meant to test their capabilities, and carefully redeployed their forces to produce impressive but faked results.

But this time, Friedman suggested the problem was not isolated. A contract official who works both at Y-12 and another “high-security DOE” site told Friedman’s staff that the official “had taken similar actions” to share written test materials in advance with the managers of that site’s guard force, his report stated.

Friedman’s report did not name the second site, but two government officials confirmed it is the sensitive facility known as Pantex, in Amarillo, Tex., the government’s principal factory for assembling, taking apart, and storing plutonium triggers for its nuclear arsenal. As a result, the reliability of the protective force for key components of that arsenal in two locations can now be considered open to question.