Here, we must finally make a very basic critique of the entire national security establishment in America, and particularly of the people intending to bring about reform. No thinker, no policy wonk or international relations buff inside the Beltway, would have any problem whatsoever with the suggestion that the military apparatus inside a rival country like Russia, China, or Iran was in fact not a “pure” kinetic instrument but also a tool of ideology. Indeed, the suggestion that modern-day Russia possesses a “pure” military, completely shorn of any function as a tool of regime legitimacy and regime ideology, would typically be dismissed inside the Beltway. Of course the Russian military faces a steady flow of demands on its behavior conditioned by the Kremlin’s desire to appear credible and tough; of course this happens even in cases where this competes with the practical demands of warfighting. This dual nature of the Russian or Chinese militaries—both tools of kinetic warfare and tools of ideology—is simply accepted without argument in D.C., just as everyone willingly accepts, without the need for any particular evidence, that the tension between these two functions often results in a meaningful degradation of capability and readiness for these militaries. Yet for all this casual acceptance of the very real nature of this dangerous and destructive institutional dynamic abroad, America’s most serious thinkers generally display a shocking naïveté and lack of awareness about how this same sort of dynamic plays out inside America itself.
