A Child’s Wish For The Future

 

For April 2024 National Volunteer Month – What Makes It All Worthwhile?

By Ken Larson  Smalltofeds

"I had two mentors at key points in my 36 year career in Aerospace.

They were a combination of technical, management and communications talent, rarely found in high tech industry. Neither placed salary, position or ego ahead of developing their subordinates and each reached the pinnacle of their respective careers for exactly that trait.  Their skills at developing and utilizing people were their most highly valued qualities.

I owe my survival in a very hectic environment to those two and much of my ability to guide and counsel individuals as well as communicate effectively springs from their legacy of guidance.

 Mentoring can be a dynamic, two way street.

The most successful organizations pair experienced personnel as models on a staff basis with junior ones. Each has individual assignments and reports to the boss but the senior party is the example in the process/experience-driven aspects of the job and is available to answer questions. The younger individual infuses the older one with energy and new ideas much like osmosis.

The result is a hybrid of old and new that has been put together by a team. The approach works extremely well, imposes on no one, results in the young and old learning by observation, satisfaction and recognition for collective efforts and reduction in the boss’s work load. A "Win-Win" all around. 

Small business volunteering has kept me active in retirement, in touch with my profession and engaged in a continuous learning mode. It has been my "Window On The World" in pursuing those objectives.

I believe we are growing entrepreneurs more than growing monumentally successful enterprises. They, in turn, will grow their unique forms of business using their efforts, not ours. We do not do it for them. They do it for themselves. Hopefully our suggestions help. I have been pleased again and again when a small business owner took my basic suggestions, put their own unique twists on them and developed a thriving business. That is the ultimate reward.

I help with background and knowledge for the entrepreneur to consider as he or she makes decisions. I experience satisfaction every day from the work and I value being useful to highly motivated entrepreneurs who wish to succeed.

I view volunteer counseling much like a garden—a place to plant seeds, a place to grow fruitful enterprises and a place to harvest personal satisfaction and the gratitude of others.

Glad I Did Not Take The Job - 'The Destroyer Without A Round For Its Gun'

 

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EDITOR'S NOTE: 

Near the end of a 36 year career in Aerospace and Defense I was offered a job by BAE in the procurement from Lockheed Martin of the long-range land attack projectile, or LRLAP, a round designed to be fired from the Zumwalt Stealth Destroyer's massive 155mm Advanced Gun Systems weapon that BAE produced.

I turned the job down and retired. 10 years later the LRLAP, at an estimated price of $800,000 each, was cancelled and the Zumwalt Stealth Destroyer became a vessel without a round for its main gun as it headed for Initial Operating Capability. The Zumwalt Program was subsequently cancelled.

I am truly grateful I did not become a part of this debacle.  Other similar projects of this nature continue to this day (The F-35 Fighter, the most expensive weapons system in history, has recently been reduced in production quantity due to high life cycle cost estimates).

Ken Larson

"MILITARY.COM"

"The Navy's futuristic destroyer Zumwalt was some two years away from being ready for battle -- but service leaders still did not know what to load in its main weapon.

In late 2016, the service canceled plans to buy the long-range land attack projectile, or LRLAP, a round designed to be fired from the ship's massive 155mm Advanced Gun Systems weapon. At about $800,000 per round the ammo was just too pricey to load up on the three ships in the limited Zumwalt large destroyer class."

---

"In 2018, the ship was expected to reach initial operational capability by fiscal 2020, but had no substitute round for the AGS.

In a briefing at the Surface Navy Association's annual symposium, Capt. Kevin Smith, Major Program Manager for the DDG-1000 [Zumwalt] Program Office, said the Navy would continue to monitor future technologies and watch industry for a solution.

"The threat's always changing out here and the requirements that the U.S. Navy's looking at, as I said, this is a multi-mission ship," Smith said. "There's lots of things this ship can do but, right now, we're going to be looking hard at what is the best technology to meet the requirements for the gun."

Each of the destroyers costs roughly $4 billion. The USS Zumwalt, the first in class, was commissioned in late 2016; its successor, the Michael Monsoor, is expected to be delivered to the Navy in March. The final ship, the Lyndon B. Johnson, is set for delivery by 2020.

Capt. James Kirk, the first commanding officer of the Zumwalt, indicated that the designated purpose of the ship itself might be affected by its lack of a working mega-weapon.

"We're going to be looking at shifting the mission set for this ship to a surface strike, land-and -sea-strike surface platform," he said. "We're predecisional on budget ... but that's what the focus is going to be, on a long-range surface strike platform, in contrast with previous focus on a littoral volume suppressive fires, in close to land."

The AGS is designed to deliver a high rate of fire, as well as precision strikes.

As it stands, the Zumwalt is not without weapons: It's built to carry RIM-162 Evolved Sea Sparrow missiles; Tactical Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles; Vertical Launch Anti-Submarine Missiles; and two MK-46 30mm chain guns.

Officials have discussed the possibility of arming the AGS with a hypervelocity projectile, such as the one the Navy is currently testing out with its futuristic railgun prototype, but a decision on whether to move forward has yet to be made.

"We're monitoring that technical maturation to see do we get that to get the kind of ranges and capabilities that we want, what's the right kind of bang for the buck in cost and capability for the Navy," Kirk said. "We're monitoring that, but we have not made a decision on that."

https://www.military.com/dodbuzz/2018/01/12/navys-stealthy-mega-destroyer-still-doesnt-have-round-its-gun.html

Human Suffering, War Profiteering, A $1 Trillion 2025 Military Budget And Irony Supporting Both Sides In Gaza

"THE PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT” (POGO) ‘The Bunker‘ By Mark Thompson

Pentagon rolls out a proposed 2025 budget nearing $1 trillion; senators call for probe alleging “war profiteering”; the U.S. finds itself supporting both sides in Gaza fight; and more.

This is what happens when you have too much money. The Pentagon’s post-9/11 cash gusher “hasn’t forced us to make the hard choices,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in 2011. “It hasn’t forced us to limit ourselves and get to a point or deciding, in a very turbulent world, what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do."

__________________________________________________________________________

“DEFENSE DOLLARS

Military spending remains on auto-pilot

Even as 40% of Americans want the U.S. to step back from solving the world’s conflicts, the Pentagon is marching smartly ahead, seeking a nearly $1 trillion budget for 2025. The Defense Department rolled out next year’s request March 11, proposing $849.8 billion for the Pentagon and $45.5 billion more for military expenditures — like nuclear warheads — handled by other government agencies. That totals $895.2 billion, basically freezing defense spending because of a deal struck last year between the White House and Congress to avoid a government default.

But if history is any guide, Congress will pile on additional tens of billions of dollars using various forms of fiscal flimflammery. The same day the Pentagon unveiled its budget, in fact, the government’s intel chiefs held their annual threatfest on Capitol Hill to justify more spending. Preoccupied and uncertain people, and governments, unsure of their own place in the world, tend to double down on the status quo.

It’s small wonder many Americans feel tuckered out when it comes to the front lines. Just over 20 years ago, President Bush the Younger warned us of dire consequences unless we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Eight trillion dollars, 7,053 U.S. troop lives, and more than 400,000 civilian lives later, there’s scant evidence that the investment was worth it.

This isn’t just a Republican issue. Over the past two years, the Biden administration has allocated $111 billion in military and other aid to Ukraine. In fact, there’s $60 billion more snared on Capitol Hill because of GOP doubts it will make much difference in that war’s bloody stalemate following Russia’s 2022 invasion. The White House also wants $14 billion sent to Israel to help in its war in Gaza. The U.S. provides Israel with about $3.3 billion a year in military aid; since 1946 it has given Israel nearly $300 billion in aid, including more than $200 billion for its military.

The good thing about these two conflicts, jingoistically speaking, is that there are no U.S. combat boots on the ground in either Ukraine or Gaza. The bad news, taxpayer-wise, is that American wallets are Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. And with close to another trillion dollars slated to fuel the U.S. military next year, it’s a safe bet we’re going to get deeper and muddier.

TRUMAN 2.0

Six senators call for panel to probe “war profiteering”

The U.S. keeps spending more on its military and getting less — fewer troops, fewer tanks, fewer ships, and fewer planes. Surely some of that is because the hardware is becoming more complex. But a half-dozen progressive senators say defense-contractor greed is also driving the less-bang-for-the-buckU.S. Military.

They cite recent stock buybacks by Lockheed and RTX as evidence that top U.S. defense contractors are being paid too much. “There’s a name for all this: war profiteering,” they said, adding “that defense contractors routinely overcharge the Pentagon by nearly 40% to 50%, lining their pockets at taxpayer expense.” The March 4 letter(PDF) was sent to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) by Senators Edward Markey (D-MA), Jeffrey Merkley (D-OR), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR). They asked him to recreate World War II’s so-called Truman Committee to probe Pentagon contractor profits.

That panel, officially known as the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, was led by then-Senator Harry Truman (D-MO). “Where there has been so much haste in the expenditure of such enormous sums there are bound to be leaks and mistakes of judgment,” Truman said in 1941. “Many people believe in both patriotism and profits, but sometimes, unfortunately, profits come first with them.” Truman estimated his panel, in operation for seven years, cost $1 million and saved taxpayers $15 billion.

That’s nearly $200 billion in today’s dollars.

BOTH SIDES NOW

A Pentagon paradox in the Middle East

As the Defense Department seeks to spend nearly $1 trillion next year (it’s well past that, actually, once you add in the nearly $400 billion spent annually on veterans), it finds itself on the horns of a dilemma. The old saying was that “the U.S. is in an arms race with itself,” seeing as the Pentagon has been pushing for ever-more advanced armaments to leapfrog what it’s already got in its arsenal (along with a sprinkling of bogeyman pixie dust, of course). But the war in Gaza finds the U.S. on both sides of the conflict: bombs for the Israelis, and box lunches for those they’re bombing.

Washington has quietly approved more than 100 weapons sales to Israel since it invaded Gaza, largely financed by the more than $3 billion in annual aid the U.S. gives to Israel. At the same time, the U.S. Is airdropping tens of thousands of meals to feed starving Palestinians in the Gaza strip and plans to build a temporary port to try to avert a famine. “We are airdropping food to famine-stricken Gaza today and supplying bombs for Israel to drop on devastated Gaza tomorrow,” Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) said March 5. Hamas attacked Israel last October, killing more than 1,100 Israelis. Israel has responded with barrages that Hamas health authorities say have killed more than 30,000 Gazans, despite repeated pleas from the Biden administration that Israel do more to protect civilians in Gaza.

This is what happens when you have too much money. The Pentagon’s post-9/11 cash gusher “hasn’t forced us to make the hard choices,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in 2011. “It hasn’t forced us to limit ourselves and get to a point or deciding, in a very turbulent world, what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do.” Thirteen years later, unfortunately, the U.S. has yet to sit itself down and have that discussion.”

https://www.pogo.org/newsletters/the-bunker/the-bunker-closing-in-on-1-trillion

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mark Thompson has been covering U.S. national security for four decades, including from 1994 to 2016 as senior correspondent and deputy Washington bureau chief at TIME Magazine.Mark worked at TIME from 1994 to 2016. Before that, he covered military affairs for the late Knight-Ridder Newspapers (including the Detroit Free Press, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Jose Mercury-News) for eight years.Prior to Knight-Ridder, Mark reported from Washington for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for seven years. During that time, he and his paper were awarded the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a series of articles on an uncorrected design flaw aboard Fort Worth-built Bell helicopters that had killed nearly 250 U.S. servicemen.

Pentagon’s High-Tech Transition Doomed Without Buy-In From Primes

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“FEDERAL TIMES” By Jere Glover

“Incentivizing the major primes to incorporate small business technological solutions needs to be the first step in fully harnessing America’s small business innovative power”

______________________________________________________________________

“It is no secret that U.S. Department of Defense has long struggled with getting advanced technology into the hands of military end users quickly.

Under Secretary Heidi Shyu, the DoD’s Chief Technology Officer, has made speeding up technology transition a priority. Last year her office released the National Defense Science and Technology Strategy which included as one of its 3 strategic tentpoles: “accelerating the transition of new technologies into the field”.

In recent years, many efforts have been made by various defense components to speed up technology transitions from high-tech small businesses. Focusing on Dual-use commercial technology, use of other transaction authorities, or OTAs, and enticing Venture Capital-backed firms with matching funds are some of the ways that the DoD and its services have tried to accelerate technology transition and insertion. Some of these initiatives have shown moderate success, but the problem still persists.

While it is useful to continue to look for ways to streamline the relationship between DoD and high-tech small businesses, most of these efforts fail to address the most important pathway for speedy technology transition to DoD: the large prime contractors.

Prime contractors control the majority of DoD programs of record. The top 5 DoD contractors combined made over $120 billion in Defense contracts in 2022 alone. These large prime contractors have no incentive to insert any technology not developed inside the prime into its program when they believe they could reinvent it themselves on the government’s dime. It’s slower and less innovative for the government, but a lot more profitable for the large primes.

The point here is simply to illustrate that their incentives to utilize SBIR proven small business technologies or any other technologies from any source outside the prime do not exist. If DoD wants to fully unlock the innovative power that small businesses are capable of providing, there needs to be a paradigm shift.

There are more than 25,000 small businesses that participate in the defense industrial base, while the number of primes has shrunk from around 50 to 5. Building in incentives to adopt small business developed technologies would not only speed up innovation but also benefit the prime contractors long term by ensuring a healthy defense industrial base and supply chain.

Incentivizing the primes to insert small business technology into their programs of record has proven to be a game changer in the past. A decade ago Lockheed was facing major setbacks with its Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. The program was massively over budget and behind, and the Air Force was desperate to speed up development any way they could.

Under the leadership of the JSF PEO General Bogdan, Lockheed and Air Force began inserting small business developed technologies from the SBIR program to solve the various problems they were having. These technologies helped get the JSF program back on target, and led to over $500 million in savings from the program.

The incentives that drove Lockheed to insert small business technology into its JSF program were necessity and desperation, which unfortunately meant this example was a one-off, rather than the beginning of a trend. In prior years, PEO Subs utilized SBIR to produce similar efficiencies for the Virginia Class Submarines.

The law already permits “any incentives in effect” or to create new incentives and required reporting by primes of use of SBIR technology. DoD and the Services would do well to learn from this experience and create a more formalized reporting and initiative to incentivize primes to insert SBIR or other small business technology into their programs.

The Army, for its part, has unrolled a program designed to create incentives for large primes to insert SBIR-funded technology into its contracts. Called Project VISTA, it will grant source-selection credits to proposals that include technology funded through the SBIR program. While they are starting small, it is a good first step to addressing this program, and hopefully will lead to greater things. Much more needs to be done to meet the challenges of wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, as well as growing threats from China.

It is incredibly difficult to even know what SBIR-funded technology is being used by primes. The DoD approves more follow-on Small Business Innovation Phase III contract dollars than it spends on SBIR contracts each year, but how many of these technologies get into programs of record? Requiring primes to report the number, amount, and significance of each small business developed technology the primes use in their systems would help give us a better understanding of how important small businesses are to the Defense innovation system, as well is highlight where small business can better support defense programs.

Secondly, DoD should implement incentives for prime contractors to insert SBIR funded technology into their programs of records and other contract awards. There are a number of different kinds of incentives that DoD could consider, from preferential scoring for proposals that include SBIR technology like Project VISTA, to financial incentives such as bonuses or increased fees. Whatever the DoD decides, it must be impactful enough to ensure primes to take on innovative small business developed technology.

Getting cutting-edge, advanced technology into the hands of military end users quickly and efficiently requires full integration and cooperation of all participants across the defense industrial base: large primes provide capability and resources to manage major programs while small businesses bring nimbleness and rapid innovation.

As long as these two forces are separated, DoD will continue to struggle with speedy technology transition. Incentivizing the major primes to incorporate small business technological solutions needs to be the first step in fully harnessing America’s small business innovative power, and ensuring the DoD’s innovation ecosystem remains the most advanced in the world.”

https://www.federaltimes.com/govcon/2024/03/07/pentagons-high-tech-transition-doomed-without-buy-in-from-primes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jere Glover is the Executive Director of the Small Business Technology Council (www.sbtc.org), a non-partisan association of small, technology-based companies in diverse fields. He previously served as Chief Counsel for Advocacy under President Obama and has been involved in innovation, technology, and procurement policy for over 40 years.

Decades-Old Congressional Authorizations To Presidents For Carte Blanche War-Making Are Ticking Time Bombs

 

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"THE HILL" By Jim Jones - Vietnam Combat Veteran, Idaho Attorney General (1983-1991) and 12 Year Justice On The Idaho Supreme Court (2005-2017)

"Both the 2001 and 2002 congressional authorizations should be repealed because they are no longer needed and are ticking time bombs of potential abuse should future military action be necessitated,

The public should demand action, rather than once again handing a president carte blanche authority to conduct a limitless war."

_____________________________________________________________________

"The nation recently observed the 22nd anniversary of the horrendous 9/11 attacks by Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. Bin Laden died 12 years ago and, while there are still elements of his network in various locales around the world, al Qaeda no longer poses a direct threat to the American homeland.

After the 9/11 attacks, it made sense for Congress to authorize the president to respond — to seek out and neutralize the terrorists and their enablers. Congress has historically granted the executive branch the ability to conduct war through what is called authorization for use of military force (AUMF) in specified circumstances. They should obviously be narrowly targeted at the culprits and those in league with them, rather than granting virtually unlimited power to conduct warfare.

Unfortunately, the 2001 AUMF approved by Congress on Sept. 18, 2001, which initiated the country’s global war on terrorism, was not limited in time, geographic scope or circumstances. It is still very much alive today, even though the threat it was intended to address has largely dissipated.

There is good reason to believe that the carte blanche war-making power granted in the 2001 authorization was designed to include military action against Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were both part of an organization advocating the removal of Hussein well before George W. Bush was elected president.

Congress approved a 2002 authorization specifically directed against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, but there is strong evidence to suggest that the Bush administration had already decided in the fall of 2001 to invade Iraq. The 2002 war authorization was just handy window dressing. That no evidence turned up to justify the Iraq War was not the result of an intelligence failure. Rather, it likely resulted from a fabrication of intelligence.

Many American and Iraqi lives were lost because of the overly broad 2001 authorization and the totally unwarranted 2002 authorization. Nearly 4,600 U.S. service personnel and 3,650 American contractors died in the Iraq War and its aftermath. There have been between 280,771 and 315,190 Iraqi civilians killed by direct violence since the U.S. invasion. All of those deaths can be laid at the feet of Vice President Dick Cheney, Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the other opportunists who took advantage of the 9/11 tragedy, twisting the nation’s grief and anger to further their personal political agenda of conquering Iraq.

In addition to the cost in human lives, the AUMFs imposed crushing economic burdens on American taxpayers. The cost for just the Iraq War was about $2 trillion. The total cost, past and future, for the global war on terror, has been estimated at $8 trillion, including almost $6 trillion for war and war-related outlays through fiscal year 2022.

Added to the cost in blood and treasure is the loss of trust in America’s leaders, both by our own people and by our allies across the world, the extreme wear and tear on our military from having to conduct two bruising wars simultaneously and the fact that we handed a great victory to Iran by disposing of Saddam Hussein, its arch enemy. It is unfortunate that Rumsfeld, Cheney and their enablers were not called to account in the criminal justice system for their misuse of the congressional war authorizations.

There is no reason for the 2002 authorization to remain on the books. It should be outright repealed. The Senate voted overwhelmingly for repeal in March and the issue is supposed to come before the House of Representatives soon. Americans should weigh in to see that it gets done.

The 2001 AUMF may have provided some initial benefits to the United States in Afghanistan but, overall, it has done more harm than good to the country. Because of its virtually limitless wording, it poses a much greater threat of potential misuse in the future. Legislation is pending in the House that would repeal the 2001 AUMF and replace it with a measure narrowly targeting existing terrorist threats. House Joint Resolution 2 also contains a sunset clause, so it would not be on the books forever. The public should demand quick and favorable action on this legislation.

Both congressional authorizations should be repealed because they are no longer needed and are ticking time bombs of potential abuse. Should future military action be necessitated, Congress must do its job — demand adequate justification for an AUMF, tailor it to the exact needs and limit its duration — rather than once again handing a president carte blanche authority to conduct a limitless war."

AUMS -Ticking Time Bombs

How the Pentagon Became Walmart

“FOREIGN POLICY”  By Rosa Brooks

“Asking warriors to do everything poses great dangers for our country — and the military.

Our armed services have become the one-stop shop for America’s policymakers.

Here’s the vicious circle in which we’ve trapped ourselves: As we face novel security threats from novel quarters — emanating from nonstate terrorist networks, from cyberspace, and from the impact of poverty, genocide, or political repression, for instance — we’ve gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of “war,” thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks. But viewing more and more threats as “war” brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion — and its reduced protections for basic rights.

Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere, so we freeze or cut spending on civilian diplomacy and development programs. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.

“If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war, and “war rules” appear to apply everywhere, displacing peacetime laws and norms. When everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission, displacing civilian institutions and undermining their credibility while overloading the military.

More is at stake than most of us realize. Recall Shakespeare’s Henry V:

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage… 

In war, we expect warriors to act in ways that would be immoral and illegal in peacetime. But when the boundaries around war and the military expand and blur, we lose our ability to determine which actions should be praised and which should be condemned.

For precisely this reason, humans have sought throughout history to draw sharp lines between war and peace — and between the role of the warrior and the role of the civilian. Until less than a century ago, for instance, most Western societies maintained that wars should be formally declared, take place upon clearly delineated battlefields, and be fought by uniformed soldiers operating within specialized, hierarchical military organizations. In different societies and earlier times, humans developed other rituals to delineate war’s boundaries, from war drums and war sorcery to war paint and complex initiation rites for warriors.

Like a thousand other human tribes before us, we modern Americans also engage in elaborate rituals to distinguish between warriors and civilians: Our soldiers shear off their hair, display special symbols on their chests, engage in carefully choreographed drill ceremonies, and name their weapons for fearsome spirits and totem animals (the Hornet, the Black Hawk, the Reaper). And despite the changes ushered in by the 9/11 attacks, most of us view war as a distinct and separate sphere, one that shouldn’t intrude into our everyday world of offices, shopping malls, schools, and soccer games. Likewise, we relegate war to the military, a distinct social institution that we simultaneously lionize and ignore. War, we like to think, is an easily recognizable exception to the normal state of affairs and the military an institution that can be easily, if tautologically, defined by its specialized, war-related functions.

But in a world rife with transnational terrorist networks, cyberwarriors, and disruptive nonstate actors, this is no longer true. Our traditional categories — war and peace, military and civilian — are becoming almost useless.

In a cyberwar or a war on terrorism, there can be no boundaries in time or space: We can’t point to the battlefield on a map or articulate circumstances in which such a war might end. We’re no longer sure what counts as a weapon, either: A hijacked passenger plane? A line of computer code? We can’t even define the enemy: Though the United States has been dropping bombs in Syria for almost two years, for instance, no one seems sure if our enemy is a terrorist organization, an insurgent group, a loose-knit collection of individuals, a Russian or Iranian proxy army, or perhaps just chaos itself.

We’ve also lost any coherent basis for distinguishing between combatants and civilians: Is a Chinese hacker a combatant? What about a financier for Somalia’s al-Shabab, or a Pakistani teen who shares extremist propaganda on Facebook, or a Russian engineer paid by the Islamic State to maintain captured Syrian oil fields?

When there’s a war, the law of war applies, and states and their agents have great latitude in using lethal force and other forms of coercion. Peacetime law is the opposite, emphasizing individual rights, due process, and accountability.

When we lose the ability to draw clear, consistent distinctions between war and not-war, we lose any principled basis for making the most vital decisions a democracy can make: Which matters, if any, should be beyond the scope of judicial review? When can a government have “secret laws”? When can the state monitor its citizens’ phone calls and email? Who can be imprisoned and with what degree, if any, of due process? Where, when, and against whom can lethal force be used? Should we consider U.S. drone strikes in Yemen or Libya the lawful wartime targeting of enemy combatants or nothing more than simple murder?

When we heedlessly expand what we label “war,” we also lose our ability to make sound decisions about which tasks we should assign to the military and which should be left to civilians.

Today, American military personnel operate in nearly every country on Earth — and do nearly every job on the planet. They launch raids and agricultural reform projects, plan airstrikes and small-business development initiatives, train parliamentarians and produce TV soap operas. They patrol for pirates, vaccinate cows, monitor global email communications, and design programs to prevent human trafficking.

Many years ago, when I was in law school, I applied for a management consulting job at McKinsey & Co. During one of the interviews, I was given a hypothetical business scenario: “Imagine you run a small family-owned general store. Business is good, but one day you learn that Walmart is about to open a store a block away. What do you do?”

“Roll over and die,” I said immediately.

The interviewer’s pursed lips suggested that this was the wrong answer, and no doubt a plucky mom-and-pop operation wouldn’t go down without a fight: They’d look for a niche, appeal to neighborhood sentiment, or maybe get artisanal and start serving hand-roasted chicory soy lattes. But we all know the odds would be against them: When Walmart shows up, the writing is on the wall.

Like Walmart, today’s military can marshal vast resources and exploit economies of scale in ways impossible for small mom-and-pop operations. And like Walmart, the tempting one-stop-shopping convenience it offers has a devastating effect on smaller, more traditional enterprises — in this case, the State Department and other U.S. civilian foreign-policy agencies, which are steadily shrinking into irrelevance in our ever-more militarized world. The Pentagon isn’t as good at promoting agricultural or economic reform as the State Department or the U.S. Agency for International Development — but unlike our civilian government agencies, the Pentagon has millions of employees willing to work insane hours in terrible conditions, and it’s open 24/7.

It’s fashionable to despise Walmart — for its cheap, tawdry goods, for its sheer vastness and mindless ubiquity, and for the human pain we suspect lies at the heart of the enterprise. Most of the time, we prefer not to see it and use zoning laws to exile its big-box stores to the commercial hinterlands away from the center of town. But as much as we resent Walmart, most of us would be hard-pressed to live without it.

As the U.S. military struggles to define its role and mission, it evokes similarly contradictory emotions in the civilian population. Civilian government officials want a military that costs less but provides more, a military that stays deferentially out of strategy discussions but remains eternally available to ride to the rescue. We want a military that will prosecute our ever-expanding wars but never ask us to face the difficult moral and legal questions created by the eroding boundaries between war and peace.

We want a military that can solve every global problem but is content to remain safely quarantined on isolated bases, separated from the rest of us by barbed wire fences, anachronistic rituals, and acres of cultural misunderstanding. Indeed, even as the boundaries around war have blurred and the military’s activities have expanded, the U.S. military itself — as a human institution — has grown more and more sharply delineated from the broader society it is charged with protecting, leaving fewer and fewer civilians with the knowledge or confidence to raise questions about how we define war or how the military operates.

It’s not too late to change all this.

No divine power proclaimed that calling something “war” should free us from the constraints of morality or common sense or that only certain tasks should be the proper province of those wearing uniforms. We came up with the concepts, definitions, laws, and institutions that now trap and confound us — and they’re no more eternal than the rituals and categories used by any of the human tribes that have gone before us.

We don’t have to accept a world full of boundary-less wars that can never end, in which the military has lost any coherent sense of purpose or limits. If the moral and legal ambiguity of U.S.-targeted killings bothers us, or we worry about government secrecy or indefinite detention, we can mandate new checks and balances that transcend the traditional distinctions between war and peace. If we don’t like the simultaneous isolation and Walmartization of our military, we can change the way we recruit, train, deploy, and treat those who serve, change the way we define the military’s role, and reinvigorate our civilian foreign-policy institutions.

After all, few generals actually want to preside over the military’s remorseless Walmartization: They too fear that, in the end, the nation’s over-reliance on an expanding military risks destroying not only the civilian competition but the military itself. They worry that the armed services, under constant pressure to be all things to all people, could eventually find themselves able to offer little of enduring value to anyone.

Ultimately, they fear that the U.S. military could come to resemble a Walmart on the day after a Black Friday sale: stripped almost bare by a society both greedy for what it can provide and resentful of its dominance, with nothing left behind but demoralized employees and some shoddy mass-produced items strewn haphazardly around the aisles.”

How the Pentagon Became Walmart