This report from USA Today ("Pentagon panel has contractor contacts") was widely ignored despite its disturbing (if unsurprising) implications:
"More than half of the panel members appointed to review the Pentagon's latest four-year strategy blueprint have financial ties to defense contractors with a stake in the planning process, a USA TODAY analysis shows. Congress created the 20-member panel in 2006 to analyze the Defense Department's four-year plan, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review. Lawmakers called for the committee to provide an independent "alternate view" of the Pentagon's plan, which shapes future military policy and spending on weapons and other needs..."The Pentagon often talks about its cooperation with industry, but this makes you wonder who's wearing the pants in this relationship," said Mandy Smithberger, national security investigator for the Project on Government Oversight."
Unfortunately, the article, while showing potential, managed to miss the mark. Among the members that it omitted from it list of "members with defense ties," are members of the defense-connected "shadow elite" such as (Ret.) Lt. Col John Nagl, counterinsurgency guru and President of the Center for a New American Security think tank (dubbed Obama's Cabinet-in-waiting, CNAS has been integral to the selling of the AfPak adventure specifically, and the counterinsurgency PR crusade generally). Unlike USA Today, retired Pentagon military analyst Franklin Spinney picked up on this, writing in Counterpunch that fully "17 out of 20 members of the QDR review panel have close ties to the status quo Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex."
Perhaps the problem for USA Today's reporters is that they fail to recognize the existence of the 'shadow elite,' a term taken from the title of an important new book by Janine R. Wedel, Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. The shadow elite is defined as:
"a new system of power and influence, in which a new breed of power brokers draws on diverse interconnections in and out of government, deliberately blurs state and private interests and organizations, flouts traditional authorities, plays overlapping roles, and brands their message to promote their own agendas and ideology. Increasingly these power brokers have been using untraditional means, pushing influence outside the boundaries of the government organization they officially report to."
Recall that in January, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Deputy Chief of Staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, leaked his report, 'Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan," using CNAS as his conduit. Wedel describes how this leak "demonstrates all of the features" of the shadow elite "as well as the ambiguity that characterizes the shadow elite. Perhaps that ambiguity is just as Flynn intended, because in this new arrangement of power, ambiguity can serve as cover for those in charge. And the story also highlights another trend explored in Shadow Elite: the way think tanks have emerged not just as simple outlets of policy research but as real accessories to power."
While noting that Wedel's analysis is by no means radical (she says, for instance, that "maybe Flynn's report will improve intelligence-gathering in Afghanistan, which would be entirely welcome," and discloses that she wrote the book while a fellow at the New America Foundation think tank, itself arguable a 'shadow elite' think tank, which gets funding from several liberal imperialist philanthropic foundations), both the article and the book are important to read for those of us who are interested in navigating the Web of Democracy.