The Long Gray Line
Obama Attacks Keystone Of America's Defense: Military, Economic—And Galactic!
by Pam Lowry, Carl Osgood and Michele Steinberg
April 2011
The creation of West Point and the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) comes directly out of the collaboration of the United States with anti-British elements in Europe to defeat the British Empire. It is that tradition that British Empire stooge Obama is directly assaulting with his genocidal attacks on American science, from NASA to ACE. The ACE tradition has been under attack for decades, and Obama's Fiscal Year 2012 cuts are the nails in the coffin. According to a well-informed Washington intelligence source, ACE is slated to be reduced to a "hiring hall" for contractors, if not completely privatized. This would be the fulfillment of a centuries-long British hope, and is being promoted by British outfits like the Cato Institute and British Empire publicist Niall Ferguson.
In 1816, the aftermath of the War of 1812, where the U.S.A. had again defeated the British Empire, two young American Army officers--Sylvanus Thayer and William McRee, both War of 1812 veterans, went to Paris, France, on a mission crucial to the future of the United States. They had been sent to rescue the science and technology which had been developed by France's republican faction at the Ecole Polytechniqe and bring it back to America. It would be desperately needed -- now the British Empire could turn its attention away from the just-defeated Napoleon and towards another attempt to ruin independent America by using free trade and dumping its manufactures in America at cost, in order to strangle the development of new American industries.
America needed to develop its productive capacity--both industrial and agricultural--but had only a few self-taught engineers. No American school existed which could teach the scientific and technical skills required for a massive internal improvements program. These skills were what Thayer brought back to revive the Army Corps of Engineers. (See Documentation.)
Obama's F.Y. 2012 ACE budget of $4.6 billion reduces the already under-funded Corps, cutting the budget by about $840 million, or 15 percent. Funding for the ACE peaked in F.Y. 2010 at about $5.5 billion, which was the last time Congress actually passed a budget. Most of the cuts will be in the ACE construction program, which drops from $2 billion in FY10 to $1.48 billion in FY12, and in the Mississippi River and Flood Control program, which drops to $210 million in FY12, from $340 million in FY10.
At a March 31 hearing, even members of the Senate Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee of the Environment and Public Works Committee, did not find the proposed ACE budget credible. Subcommittee chairman Democrat Max Baucus (D-ND) characterized the proposals for what the Corps is supposed to do with $4.6 billion as "vague," and while top Corps officials talk about how much of a problem aging locks and dams are, they had no plan for actually recapitalizing that aging infrastructure.
The problem is that the Corps' original national development mission, going back to its founding in 1802 and deriving from even earlier discussions led by people such as George Washington, has been under assault for decades. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had been trained as an engineer, and promoted that tradition, but it was heartily attacked in the 1950's. Geo-politician Samuel Huntington, in his 1957 book "The Soldier and the State," railed against what he called "technicism," that is, the US Military Academy's original focus on engineering. Huntington wanted to reduce the American military officer to a professional skilled in the "management of violence," who takes the orders of the civilian leadership without question, much as what Adolph Hitler demanded from the professional officer cadre of the Wehrmacht. Gen. Maxwell Taylor was superintendent of West Point, in the early 1950's, 30 years after MacArthur, and began the Academy's shift away from engineering even before Huntington penned his infamous book. (Taylor later became more infamous for lying about what was going on in Vietnam during the mid-1960's.)
There is still an engineering school at West Point, but most of the top leadership in the Army are products of the Social Sciences Department. Gen. Pete Chiarelli, the current vice chief of staff of the Army, taught in the Social Sciences department, known as "Sosh" in Army slang, in the 1980's, and its products are typified by people like Gen. David Petraeus, who may be an "expert" on international relations and counterinsurgency doctrine, but couldn't build a bridge if his life depended on it. Few of the top leadership in the Army are actually engineers. It's seems not to be a good career path.
