bloodygranuaile

In one of my book sale fugue states I picked up an extremely short book called The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare, by Nick Turse. The book is barely 95 pages long so the subtitle seems like a bit much for it, but it does mean that you get Exactly What It Says On The Tin. It is essentially a repackaged batch of blog posts from during the Obama administration detailing the steps the military was taking during that time to pivot away from the heavy boots-on-the-ground land invasion type stuff that brought so much bad press during the Bush years and towards things that are full of fancy words and expensive technology and therefore sound more sophisticated and nuanced to people who really want to think of Democratic administrations’ approach to bombing brown people as being more sophisticated and nuanced than the Bush administration’s, but which essentially just constitutes another iteration of expensively expanding the military surveillance state over the entire world to the benefit of absolutely no one except defense contractors because we simply cannot abide the notion of doing anything else. If you are on the foreign policy left, this basic thesis is likely already known to you; what The Changing Face of Empire does is basically just fill that in with a bunch of facts about particular projects in particular parts of the globe, how they work, how they don’t work, how the people pitching them said they’d work, and why they were never going to work like that. It is a disheartening read, unsurprisingly, but it is also quite interesting if you think special ops stuff is inherently interesting, but also does its bit to puncture the mystique of special ops being ~special~ and point out how utterly bad the U.S. military is at anything except setting money (and other people’s countries) on fire, no matter how much fancy equipment or training it has.

I read this book over, like, two entire cups of coffee, and overall I’m glad I did and would be happy to lend my copy to anyone else who would like to be depressed for 95 pages.