File:Surviving-Victory-conference-Washington-DC-2006.pdf

The "Surviving Victory" conference was held in Washington DC in September 2006.

The basis of the conference was detailed earlier in a national security brief by Roger Morris and Steven Schmidt, Strategic Demands of the 21st Century: A New Vision for a New World.

The conference-forum was organized by the Green Institute and Steven Schmidt, editor of the global policy magazine of the Institute. Roger Morris was the featured speaker and contributors included Steve Clemons (current national security commentator on MSNBC) and Susan Rice (former US United Nations ambassador and current US National Security advisor to President Barack Obama).

The conference focused on issues of costs of war, new definitions of national security, and growing risks of failed policies and global interventionism.

The conference served as a foundation for security studies of Green Policy and Strategic Demands. The founding of Strategic Demands in 2014 has continued to expanded this security policy work over the years. The larger goal is to develop a Strategic Demands-GreenPolicy360 vision with New Definitions of National Security with new strategies of Environmental Security.

New Definitions of National Security

About Strategic Demands

Orthodox views of national security are challenged in a world connected by next generation networked communication and far-ranging global interests. Conventional interests are giving way to a new world of over-the-horizon understandings, trade, education, and common interests. StratDem envisions new perspectives, new visions for a new world

We begin with a simple construct -- a 360° connected world in a fast-arriving Internet era. Where we connect is a beginning point to participation in a worldwide economy and politics. When we are online, we are shaping politics, government, and transactional markets interactively, forming inter-related communities...

Security is Indivisible

Billions of individuals are connected today as never before — creating a future shaped by networked citizens — citizens of nations and ‘citizens of the planet.’

Strategic Demands History

The Global Policy project of the Green Institute began strategic security work in 2005 with the publication of an initial security brief, "Strategic Demands of the 21st Century", a forward-looking policy paper written by Roger Morris and Steven Schmidt. (PDF format) — (Word format)

A forum and conference was held in Washington DC to propose and consider "new definitions of national security". Since then, on multiple fronts and venues, we have continued our work, now extended and independent of the Green Institute with national security/environmental studies at Strategic Demands online.

• Strategic Demands' goal as an policy group is to add independent perspective and opinion to the contemporary national security debate. We bring experience and a belief that the current Washington DC/New York/Boston corridor that holds most all foreign policy think tanks is limited in its politics as a two-party normative system competes for influence and positions under Democrat or Republican administrations).

Read More @StrategicDemands:

Environmental Security, the Security Horizon

Deep Costs of War

New Definitions of National Security

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Surviving Victory: New Definitions of National Security

Mideast woes alarm U.S. experts

By JACOB RUSSELL

United Press International Correspondent / September 2006

http://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2006/09/22/Analysis-Mideast-woes-alarm-US-experts/28101158948625/

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 (UPI) -- Prominent policy analysts warned this week that America's foreign policy had to be urgently re-evaluated to prevent wider disaster.

The Bush administration should even consider evacuating its military forces from the Middle East, according to experts speaking a meeting of the Green Institute think tank Wednesday.

The meeting reflected the growing unease among both traditionally conservative and liberal foreign policy analysts in the U.S. capital about the consequences of the deteriorating situations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the growing anti-American sentiments expressed throughout the region.

"This is really an effort to assess where we are right now in the wake of the catastrophe with Iraq and Afghanistan, "panelist Roger Morris, senior fellow with the Green Institute, said."We want, above all, to point the way out. We want to ask: what are the alternatives here?"

The think tank, hosted by the Green Institute as part of its Global Policy 360 project, and led by Steven Schmidt, co-director for GP360, explored current U.S. policy in Iraq and the Middle East as well as current national security concerning Iraq, Lebanon, Iran and Israel....

Surviving Victory: A New Definition of National Security

Sponsored by the Green Institute www.greeninstitute.net & Böll Foundation www.boell.org/

Washington DC / September 20, 2006

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Presentator/Resources:

Roger Morris

Strategic Demands of the 21st Century: A New Vision for a New World

by Roger Morris & Steven Schmidt / June 2005 [PDF]

“The moment requires bold innovative approaches to our interests and responsibilities on a drastically changed, swiftly changing planet. What we see as essential to a wide-ranging democratic discussion and debate is a new strategic discourse, addressing causes as well as effects. We must look ahead, envision and plan without illusion or compromising influence, recognize new realities, tell unpopular truths, put the national interest ahead of office, educate and act…”

Cited: Globalization and Its Discontents / Joseph Stiglitz – W.W. Norton, June 2002

Updated: The Three Trillion Dollar War by Joseph Stiglitz & Linda Bilmes

Sascha Müller-Kraenner

Security in Our One World / Updated: Global Green Recovery / Boell Institute, July 2006 [2]

“… generating new sources of revenues to fund green technologies; intensifying dialogue on existing national green policies; and spurring new international co-operation on green technologies.”

Charles Peña

Winning the Un-War, A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism

Potomac Books / March 2006 [3]

"Brilliant and incisive demolition of the misguided strategy that the Bush administration concocted in the wake of 9/11.”

A Smaller Military to Fight the War on Terrorism [PDF] / from Future of US Military Strategy Conference – FPRI / December 2005 [4]

“Our global force posture should transition from a sprawling one to that of a balancer of last resort. We would understand that crises and conflicts that develop around the world, for the most part, actually don’t threaten U.S. national security…The military should be about half the size that it is today. In order to transform the military it needs to learn to do more with less. Reducing the defense budget will drive transformation…”

Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy [5]

Winslow Wheeler

Is There Any Hope for Military Reform? F-35 Update [PDF] / September 12, 2006 [6]

How Congress Sacrifices Readiness for Pork: Smoke and Mirrors in the Defense Budget

January 2006 [7]

Wastrals of Defense: How Congress Sabotages US Security / October 2004 [8]

_________________

Forum Contributors:

Steve Clemons

The Real State of the Union 2006: A No-Nonsense Assessment of U.S. Foreign Policy and Call to Action / January 2006 [9]

The Washington Note / American Strategy Program

What "Thinking the Unthinkable" Really Looks Like / September 11, 2006 [10]

Susan Rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Rice [U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, nominated 2008 / National Security Advisor, begininng July 2013]

Global Poverty, Weak States and Insecurity / August 2006 [12]

“Transnational"spillover" from these states includes conflict, terrorism, disease, and environmental degradation. Efforts to illuminate the complex relationship between poverty and insecurity may be unwelcome to those who want assurance that global poverty and U.S. national security are unrelated. However, we ignore or obscure the implications of global poverty for global security at our peril.”

The Threat of Global Poverty / Spring 2006 [13]

Today, more than half the world's population lives on less than $2 per day, and almost 1.1 billion people live in extreme poverty, defined as less than $1 per day. The costs of global poverty are multiple… The end of U.S.-Soviet competition, the civil and regional conflicts that ensued, and the rapid pace of globalization have brought to the fore a new generation of dangers. These are the complex nexus of transnational security threats: infectious disease, environmental degradation, international crime and drug syndicates, proliferation of small arms and weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism.

Julia Sweig

Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century / Published by PublicAffairs, April 2006 [14]

"Since 2000, polls by over a half dozen organizations -- from Pew to Zogby, German Marshall Fund to the Guardian, Eurobarometer to Latinobarómetro -- have tracked the declining views about America, Americans, and U.S. foreign policy in every region of the world."

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Reference Links:

[1] http://www.greeninstitute.deanmyerson.org/files/pdf/NewVision.pdf

[2] http://www.boell.org/downloads/Global-Green-Recovery_Atlantic_Initative.pdf [updated 2009]

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Un-War-Strategy-War-Terrorism/dp/1574889656/ref=pd_sxp_f_pt/002-0129656-6257608?ie=UTF8

[4] http://www.comw.org/pda/14dec/fulltext/06pena.pdf

[5] http://www.realisticforeignpolicy.org/events.php

[6] http://www.cdi.org/PDFS/WheelerSPWG911article.pdf

[7] http://www.counterpunch.org/wheeler01242006.html

[8] http://www.amazon.com/Wastrels-Defense-Congress-Sabotages-Security/dp/159114938X

[9] http://www.newamerica.net/events/2006/the_real_state_of_the_union_2006

[10] http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001641.php

[11] http://www.newamerica.net/people/steven_clemons

[12] http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2006/08/globaleconomics-rice

[13] http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2006/03/spring-globaleconomics-rice

[14] http://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Fire-Enemies-Anti-American-Century/dp/1586483005

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Surviving Victory Updates

(2018)  

Tomgram: Making Sense of America's Empire of Chaos

Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 4:11PM, May 27, 2018.

  Mark Karlin: How much money has gone to the U.S. war on terror and what has been the impact of this expenditure?

Tom Engelhardt: The best figure I’ve seen on this comes from the Watson Institute’s Costs of War Project at Brown University and it’s a staggering $5.6 trillion, including certain future costs to care for this country’s war vets. President Trump himself, with his usual sense of accuracy, has inflated that number even more, regularly speaking of $7 trillion being lost somewhere in our never-ending wars in the Greater Middle East. One of these days, he’s going to turn out to be right.

As for the impact of such an expenditure in the regions where these wars continue to be fought, largely nonstop, since they were launched against a tiny group of jihadis just after September 11, 2001, it would certainly include: the spread of terror outfits across the Middle East, parts of Asia, and Africa; the creation -- in a region previously autocratic but relatively calm -- of a striking range of failed or failing states, of major cities that have been turned into absolute rubble (with no money in sight for serious reconstruction), of internally displaced people and waves of refugees at levels that now match the moment after World War II, when significant parts of the planet were in ruins; and that’s just to start down a list of the true costs of our wars.

At home, in a far quieter way, the impact has been similar. Just imagine, for instance, what our American world would have been like if any significant part of the funds that went into our fruitless, still spreading, now nameless conflicts had been spent on America’s crumbling infrastructure, instead of on the rise of the national security state as the unofficial fourth branch of government. (At TomDispatch, Pentagon expert William Hartung has estimated that approximately $1 trillion annually goes into that security state and, in the age of Trump, that figure is again on the rise.)

Part of the trouble assessing the “impact” here in the U.S. is that, in this era of public demobilization in terms of our wars, people are encouraged not to think about them at all and they’ve gotten remarkably little attention. So sorting out exactly how they’ve come home -- other than completely obvious developments like the militarization of the police, the flying of surveillance drones in our airspace, and so on …

Donald Trump would have been inconceivable as president without those disastrous wars, those trillions squandered on them and on the military that’s fought them, and that certainly qualifies as “impact” enough.

Read more at Strategic Demands

https://www.strategicdemands.com/surviving-victory-updated/

https://www.strategicdemands.com/surviving-victory-from-the-archive/

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(2010)

In the summer of 2010, the 2011 U.S. military spending budget is announced by DoD Secretary Robert Gates. In August he follows with Congressional testimony. The publicly announced figure approaches $700 billion dollars.

What is not discussed by Congress concerned as always with how military spending effects their districts is the true price-tag to the nation and wider ripple effects that extend far beyond the nation's borders.

The announced spending does not provide, as the Green Institute's Surviving Victory conference addressed, a true 'full cost' accounting including 'black budget' secret spending (see the Washington Post link below as illustration of the extent of this secret world. The Post's July 2010 investigative series provides a near unique, albeit high level, view of a world few know of, a new burgeoning military-industrial complex which numbers nearly one million Americans with 'top secret' government clearance and which adds hundreds of billions annually to the announced military budget.)

Annual military spending, with an aggregate 'white' and 'black' secret budget now approaching a trillion dollars annually, does not take into account the direct costs of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, separately funded by appropriations bills which add and have added hundreds of billion more annually over a seven year 'Centcom' engagement to date at a cost approaching three trillion dollars according to estimates (see Joseph Stiglitz update below).

These almost unfathomable costs do not, upon any clear-eyed review, consider the vast array of additional costs/opportunity costs, 'blowback' costs, related human costs, environmental costs, costs to alliances and the strategic standing of the U.S., costs to U.S. economic competitiveness, drawdown of U.S. capital and government capabilities to invest in private/non military productivity ('guns or butter'), nor does the publicly advanced military budget address the costs of U.S. debt/deficit/annual interest, the generally acknowledged exposure to a mounting debt crisis (and political costs of a frayed political system and decreased ability of political parties and polity to 'solve' problems and produce a comity of cooperation with clear progress)... nor do the public numbers address the peril of Chinese and other foreign entities holding U.S. debt and looming security/economic impact on U.S security and economic positions in the international arena... nor does the debate address the future costs, the costs to the young, the costs to people beyond our shores, to the future of the planet which faces an 'all hands on deck' crisis that greens, scientists and an increasing number of 'everyday folks' are seeing and raising as an actual, real problem -- and even an existential threat to life as we know it....

All of this remains un-debated as the military budget is announced and in Florida where I live the vets who've retired in one of the most popular states for ex-military see things from their perspectives and grouse as benefits are threatened and services cut and little is learned, less is debated about the cost of perpetual war and much is in fact forgotten... the clock ticks and the historic democratic American experiment of liberty faces a twilight horizon.

SJS - August

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Surviving Victory / Additional Resources

[Chart prepared for Surviving Victory Conference, DC, September 2006]

A Hidden World by Dana Priest and William Arkin

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/

"FreeFall" by Joseph Stiglitz

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/4108597 [New America Foundation/Washington Note with Joe Stiglitz re: Freefall - America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy]

http://www.amazon.com/Freefall-America-Markets-Sinking-Economy/dp/0393075966/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262810665&sr=8-1

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_04/b4164066543966.htm

The Extended Costs of the Iraq War

The Three Trillion Dollar War (Updated: 2008)

Linda J. Bilmes $ Joseph E. Stiglitz

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Trillion-Dollar-War-Conflict/dp/0393067017/

Four, Six Trillion... (Updated: 2013)

More Than Dollars

Overextended, the US Overlooks Larger Costs and Greater Risks

http://strategicdemands.com/costsofwar/

Ω

The Costs of the National Security State

(continuing)

• http://www.pulitzer.org/files/entryforms/WashPost_TSA_Item1.pdf

"A hidden world, growing beyond control"

"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

• Annual costs, known and unknown, in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

• Loss of privacy across political spheres with near-and-present threats to civil liberties and rights.

Ω