Megalomania Powers a “Defense” Budget
At $900 Billion — And Rising
Bill Astore / Bracing Views

(December 28 2024) — I wrote the following short article early in 2020. You can count on the Department of War Defense to come up with grandiose visions to justify its enormous budgets. “All-Domain Operations” is one of them.

Basically, the idea is that US forces must dominate every conceivable domain of warfare — must be strong everywhere — and that all this must be fully integrated into a god-like vision of the “battlespace,” so that America will always have a winning advantage.

Grandiose jargon, of course, is no substitute for victory or wisdom for that matter, but what it’s really all about is winning money for the Pentagon, where it’s proved enormously successful. Just look at this year’s war defense budget, set at $895 billion and due to rise even higher under President-elect Trump.

All-Domain Operations: Hubris Unleashed!
(Written early in 2020)
You can always count on the Pentagon to come up with jargon that unleashes hubris. When I was in the Air Force, it was all about “global reach, global power.” I also heard about “full-spectrum dominance.” Now the latest buzzword is “All-Domain Operations.” “All-domain” means land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace, which are supposed to be integrated by computers, with information being shared at the speed of light, or close to it. The US military will know so much, be so nimble, and act in such a coordinated fashion that its rivals and enemies won’t have a chance.

This is what the Vice-Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to say about this:
“We’ll have a significant advantage over everybody in the world for a long time, because it’s the ability to integrate and effectively command and control all domains in a conflict or in a crisis seamlessly — and we don’t know how to do that. Nobody knows how to do that.”

I’ve been hearing about “seamless” and “global” integration for a long time, and it’s never going to happen. War is fundamentally messy, chaotic, a realm of chance, influenced by what Clausewitz termed “fog and friction,” and of course the enemy rarely reacts in ways that are predictable. No matter. A “global” vision of “all-domain” dominance has the virtue of justifying enormous defense budgets, so it’s likely here to stay.

As an aside, I do like the way the term has grown like Topsy, according to this report:

“Breaking Defense readers have seen these ideas evolve rapidly over the last few years, with even the terminology becoming ever more ambitious, from Multi-Domain Battle to Multi-Domain Operations to All-Domain Operations.”

Yes — who wants only multi-domain battles when you can have all-domain operations? Let’s show some ambition here!

Note how in this vision, there’s no talk of national defense or of upholding the US Constitution. It’s all about power projection in the cause of dominance. It’s an enabler to forever war — one that will be increasingly driven by computers.

What could possibly go wrong with such a vision?

One thing is likely: if there’s ever a war of hubristic buzzwords in the future, the Pentagon might finally have a fighting chance.