Lesson of the Cole Incident:
Stop Privatizing Our Generals

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

October 22, 2000

In and of itself, the shocking experience of the attack upon the USS Cole,[1] should have awakened relevant, witting U.S. policy-shapers to the urgency of an immediate and sweeping reversal of the process of "privatization" of the military and immediately related institutions and functions of the U.S. government. Unless the U.S. military were efficiently obliged, and equipped to operate under what had been those traditional U.S. notions of rules of engagement, which requires reversing recent trends toward privatization, such important matters as the issue of responsibility for the security of U.S. forces deployed, tend to fall between the cracks of diverse and ill-coordinated governmental and other agencies. Such is but one among the several classes of closely related leading issues implied in the fatal fueling-stop of the Cole.

The dismal results of related, current trends in U.S. strategic and related policies, of which an obsessive fixation upon "privatization," is but one symptom, is a pervasive problem, a problem whose existence can not be separated from what even non-military professionals should and must recognize as a spreading illiteracy respecting relevant strategic lessons of modern history. The Cole incident, like the haunting unresolved issues of the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk, is a single example of a class of problems which point, by implication, both to the likelihood of related kinds of individual cases during the period ahead; but, even more significant, it points to a much broader class of systemic problems under which the Cole incident itself is merely subsumed.

We must situate that incident not only within the general class of strategic policy blunders which that case implies. It would be sheer incompetence, a fallacy of composition, not to see this incident in the setting of larger policy failures reflecting the combined, corrosive effects of "privatization," "free trade," and "globalization." The subsuming issue, is a nearly thirty-five-year, so-called "utopian" trend in policy-shaping, which has also been the cause for the currently onrushing disintegration of the world's present financial system. The disreputable state within much of our nation's current military policy, is to be traced to its root, in the imposition upon our military institutions, of the alien, destructive influence of such trends in policy-shaping.

It would be an intolerable fallacy of composition, to attempt to isolate cases such as the Cole incident from their root-cause, that inhering decadence of those current utopian trends, which have been misshaping both our nation's military policy, and, more importantly, the strategic outlook under which today's leading political authorities have been shaping military policy.

The spread of this infectious utopian decadence sometimes called "privatization," is not limited to the alarming increase of illiteracy among our more poorly educated younger generations of military professionals. To understand cases such as the Cole incident, we must emphasize the broader implications of related intellectual failures in the Congress and elsewhere, as typified by the influence of the dupes of wild-eyed rug-chewers such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, his lackey Samuel P. Huntington, and self-avowed H.G. Wells devotee Madeleine Albright. The latter cases are merely typical of those who have contributed a leading part in carrying the strategic policies of the U.S. and NATO to their present post-modernist--or, should we say "pre-Raphaelite"--extremes.

The pivot of that widespread moral decay merely typified by Brzezinski, Huntington, and Albright, has been the effect of the 1945, post-Franklin Roosevelt adoption of the intent in threatened use of nuclear weapons, to bully nations, directly or indirectly, into submitting to world government. This utopian policy is to be recognized as that which was introduced to the U.S.A. and other nations, by H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell.

Since immediately following the untimely death of President Franklin Roosevelt, this utopian nuclear-weapons dogma of Wells and Russell, has turned what used to be modern European civilization, back to the direction of restoring the pre-Fifteenth-Century policies of the Middle Ages. This trend has accelerated since the negotiations accompanying the 1989-1991 collapse of Soviet power. Under that policy-trend, the world today has been dominated increasingly by imitations of those medieval, pro-feudalist policies which in the past led to disasters such as the collapse of the Roman Empire and Europe's mid-Fourteenth-Century plunge into a New Dark Age.

Thus, we have that neo-medievalist trend toward what Wells and Russell proposed, in Wells' The Open Conspiracy, as "world government," which has degenerated, over the recent ten years, into an emerging, but self-doomed, Anglophone world empire. This collapse of today's globally extended modern European civilization, is that which has unfolded under the combined dictatorial authorities of the Wall Street- and London-dominated elements of the English-language component within NATO. The follies intrinsic to the strategic thinking, practice, and foolish aftermath of "Desert Storm" and the recent series of Balkan wars, typify the doubtful quality of professional competence, personal morality, and, sometimes, even the lack of sanity, among many of those military officials, and others, who have authored or supervised such follies during the past eleven years.

During the recent two decades, the folly of such post-Franklin Roosevelt trends, has been greatly aggravated by the process which has brought a new stratum of high-ranking officials into government and crucially important private institutions. European civilization is dominated by leaders who are, in fact, functionally, collectively mad in the same sense the term "clinically insane" were rightly applied to a comparable type of individual mental case.

Looking back today across the most recent decade, the characteristic policy-shaping typified in its effect by a now worse than bankrupt set of U.S. financial and economic policy-shaping institutions, demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt, that behind the follies which sometimes erupt in our nation's military practice, or in the follies of that ruling financier oligarchy associated with the so-called Wall Street establishment, the majority among that so-called establishment is collectively and terminally insane. Such effects, are typified by the current, wild-eyed, homicidal lunacy permeating the actions of Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Summers, and the attitudes of currently principal Presidential candidates Gore and Bush.[2]

Some Historical Precedents

As a practical result of that prevailing trend, the post-1989 form of de facto Anglophone empire, is now lurching toward early disintegration, that as surely as Erich Honecker's East Germany in late 1989. The onrushing financial disintegration of the present form of U.S. power, should have forewarned leaders in government, that, contrary to the obsessive claptrapping by the Bush and Gore campaigns, the same type of tragic lurch toward doom displayed in the fall of Honecker and Mielke, is the primary feature of the immediate strategic situation and the present policy-posture of the U.S.A. itself.

It is merely symptomatic of that present historic situation, that the currently careening practice of privatization of U.S. military functions, as in Africa and elsewhere, is to be recognized, at first glance, as a shoddy imitation of British colonial and related imperial practices of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. Mercenary armies, such as those of the British East India Company, perpetrated privatized mass atrocities like those now being conducted, with U.S. State Department backing, by British and U.S. copies of former British East India Company operations. A more ominous parallel to that kind of military decadence today, is the wars conducted under the reign of Fourteenth-Century Lombard bankers, such as the house of Bardi and Peruzzi, financiers of a type who are currently plunging the entire planet into a New Dark Age like that unleashed upon Europe's Fourteenth Century.

Such lunatic bankers' dark-age policies, are U.S.A. and British policies and practices in Africa and in the Albright State Department's anti-nation-state, pro-drug-legalization operations in South America today. The increasing reliance upon the use of those methods of mercenary types of "special operations" within the domain of military functions, such as the notorious Iran-Contra operations of the 1980s, has become, over the span of the past several decades, in and of itself, like the bungled U.S. Middle East policy, today's greatest single source of lurking threat to the national security and other vital strategic interests of our republic and its traditional pro-republican allies. This is the current situation within the Americas and world-wide.

In that and other respects, the Cole incident is properly to be seen as essentially a typical, and ominous by-product and symptom of such a pervasive trend of decadence in our government's current military and related budgetary and other practice. The fact that the tragi-comedy of U.S. policy-errors leading into such an incident could occur, points toward the subsuming, larger and deeper implications of that incident for U.S. policy-reshaping today.

Now, when the greatest financial collapse in modern history looms for the period immediately ahead, the only sane leaders of nations are those who, increasingly, take that collapse of the present financial system as already inevitable.

As I have said repeatedly, on earlier occasions, we must see our present U.S. situation in the same general sense that the Edgar Bronfman-backed East Germany regime of Honecker and Mielke was doomed at the close of 1989. Sane leaders then were those who proposed, as I had done, in my October 12, 1988 televised address, and as Deutsche Bank's murdered Alfred Herrhausen had intended in Autumn 1989, to concentrate on rebuilding the post-collapse Eastern Europe of 1989, rather than cling to the ideological relics of a doomed "Cold War" past.

Sane leaders are those, today, who, instead of continuing foolish attempts to prevent the inevitable bankrupting of the Wall Street financial bubble by lunatic "bail-out" strategies, are concentrating their efforts on rebuilding the world which has been greatly ruined by recent orgies of so-called "privatization" and related policies.

Now, as even the United Kingdom is poised, promising to forsake at least some of the follies of privatization, by re-nationalizing its ruined railway system, this same corrective outlook is demanded in our military policy, as well as other domains.

Summarized most simply, the point is, that civilization will not long outlive the presently onrushing global financial explosion and widely heralded, early collapse of the U.S. dollar, unless governments act to eradicate the kinds of follies typified by the recent three decades fads of "free trade," "privatization," "globalization," and financial "deregulation." Accordingly, in the domain of military affairs, in particular, sane leaders will act to uproot the novelties which those follies have introduced to the sphere of military policy and practice.

For reasons which shall become apparent after assimilating the material summarized in the following pages, it is urgent that we return the U.S. military doctrine and policy to the great engineering-based, republican military and foreign-policy tradition which U.S. West Point and Annapolis came to share with the traditions of such republican, revolutionary geniuses of the military domain as France's Lazare Carnot and Germany's Gerhard Scharnhorst.

Sane leaders are those who will bury those utopian styles in military and related decadence which have been decreed fashionable during the recent thirty-five-odd post-Kennedy years. We must uproot the lunatic fads unleashed from that Pandora's Box of nuclear deterrence and neo-liberal fanaticism which was opened by the likes of Wall Street's John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and Henry A. Kissinger.

1. The Present Strategic Turning-Point

The root of the worst trends in U.S. military and related policy-shaping, is to be located in an implicitly anti-constitutional shaping of U.S. policy. That means trends which have come into being through subordinating the interests of our Federal constitutional republic to the perceived special self-interests of a Wall Street-centered financier-oligarchical establishment.

This systemic corruption of our institutions and their practice, is properly appreciated by viewing that establishment as it is represented by an extensive, century-long subversion of the permanent bureaucracy of our Federal government. That is the subversion which has been effected chiefly by the overreaching influence of a Venetian-style cabal of financiers and their associated leading law firms. This is a cabal, launched in its present form under pro-Confederacy, Wall Street puppet-Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Ku Klux Klan fanatic Woodrow Wilson, a cabal which continues to rely for a large amount of its popular political support, upon its currently conspicuous adaptation to a pro-racist, implicitly treasonous current, which is plainly rooted in the unpurged legacy of the slave-holders' Confederacy.

The continued existence of that establishment's role and power, has been called into question by the currently onrushing global financial collapse of the present IMF system. That establishment's present power is now threatened with extinction, by the implications of the onrushing reality of the greatest financial crash in modern history. In a time when more and more of the world's leading press, as in Germany, Britain, and France, are heaping justified contempt upon the current choices of leading two U.S. Presidential candidates, it is that global crisis, which now brings that establishment's very existence into doubt.[3]

This state of affairs not only defines the imminent, crisis-born possibility for returning our republic to the service of its original and true constitutional interest; it defines a situation in which our republic might, even probably, soon cease to exist: unless we act to make precisely that revolutionary change at some early, critical moment of opportunity offered by that present breaking-point in the modern history of this planet.

The greatest, most doomed fools in the U.S.A. today, include those who are plotting increasing world-rule by the kinds of U.S. policies which are associated with those among today's U.S. influentials who are our nation's present equivalent to the Honeckers and Mielkes of 1989, notably the world-widely ridiculed U.S. candidacies of the two carefully pre-selected intellectual and emotional wrecks known as Governor Bush and Vice-President Gore.

Thus, so far, although few leading circles of strategic planners among Anglo-American policy-shapers appear to recognize this, the Anglo-American regime of rule over this planet has reached just such a point of imminent, self-induced doom, a condition comparable to, but far more awesome historically than the 1989-1992 disintegration of the Soviet system. So, often in history, empires have suddenly collapsed at the very moment the relevant Ozymandias believed that his power was absolutely secured.

This present, actually revolutionary situation in world affairs, requires a radical change in the current thinking of any sane remnant still to be found among our leading military and related professionals.

In contrast to those saner professionals we may hope will be selected as our current leading policy-influencers, today's typically pathetic cases shaping our nation's economic policy up to now, should remind us of those fools who insisted that the cause of the 1929-1931 depression, was that "some people had talked the economy into a depression." Today's most foolish people are those still seeking to deny, hysterically, the immediate peril against which I have warned them. In this circumstance, more and more among the more intelligent and sane people from around the world are joining me in taking the doom of the present Anglo-American utopian policies as a given fact. The only really intelligent people, are those who are concentrating their attention on the steps to be taken at the early moment the now onrushing chain-reaction collapse obliterates the world's present financial order.

The reader, as he or she moves through the successive phases of the argument I present here, will be shocked by the contrast between what I propose in this report, and the tenor and content of the discussion, proposals, and debate found in the recent deliberations of the U.S. government, in the leading news and entertainment media, and from the mouths and lunatic gesturings of the leading U.S. Presidential candidates of the moment. In brief, the world which those commonly heard discussions and reports have ruled, is now dead, soon to be buried under the rubble of the financial collapse caused by the very arguments and choices of topics which those continuing reports and arguments of the U.S. Wall Street establishment and its dupes still reflect. If we are to survive, we shall soon have entered a new world, the kind of world I describe here, the kind of world in which the actions I propose will be the typical, leading topics of daily life in government and among the people generally.

The required changes which sane and intelligent people will now be preparing, include a sweeping improvement in the training, quality, and assigned mission of our national military institutions. The new role of that military will be merely an aspect of the remedies required, but it will be, as I shall show here, an important aspect.

I shall now explain the revolutionary character of the present situation, and then identify certain among the needed changes in the assigned mission and composition of our military and related forces.

The U.S. National Interest

The U.S. national interest is defined most efficiently by understanding the heretofore continuing role of the British monarchy as, in fact, the generally recognized leading mortal enemy of our republic, from the 1776 Declaration of Independence through the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. It was that assassination, run in the interest of Wall Street adversaries of McKinley, through Emma Goldman's Manhattan Henry Street Settlement House, which led to the misguided adoption of that monarchy as the principal Twentieth-Century U.S. ally, an alliance based in widespread mis-perception. It was based upon a widespread delusion which continued to dominate U.S. policy-shaping throughout most of the Twentieth Century, excepting during the happier intervals under the leadership of two Presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Unfortunately, each of those latter died suddenly, prematurely, in office, leaving crucially important, unfinished business undone.[4]

The principal issue of that adversarial relationship between our republic and the British monarchy, has been the signal historical role of our republic from its birth, as our republic is typified, from that time, by the moral imperative of commitment to forming a community of principle among those sovereign nation-state republics which were each and all committed to the general welfare of all their own peoples and a similar benefit in their relationship to one another.

The British monarchy, conceived by the bloody tyrant William of Orange, and set into motion by the coronation of William's political heir George I, has emerged as the world's leading adversary, world-wide, of the modern sovereign form of nation-state republic. That drug-pushing (e.g., "drug legalizing") monarchy has continued that role to the present moment this is written. Especially among us English-speaking people, we might wish that monarchy would change its commitments, even at this late date; but, so far, it has not. Echoes of King Richard III: the contrasted image of victim Princess Diana and her cruel mother-in-law, would supply a contemporary Shakespeare or Schiller the relevant tragic metaphor.

Popularized Hollywood, New York Times, and other fairy-tales aside, our republic's principal adversary in fact, has been, from the beginning, the literally Romantic form of imperial rentier-financier order most efficiently typified by the British monarchy.[5] Other notable adversaries of our republic, have been, like Hitler Germany, relatively transient by-products of the essential, primary, continuing, global issue of strategic conflict. The primary conflict, like that between nominal war-time allies Churchill and Roosevelt, has been between the American System of political-economy and its chief long-term, continuing opponent, the Romantic British imperial model associated popularly with the errant dogma of the British East India Company's lackeys Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham.

To understand recent history, we must emphasize, that the crucial point of confrontation, in that adversarial relationship to the British monarchy, is, once again, the U.S. constitutional commitment to the promotion of the general welfare of all of our people and their posterity, rather than to the morally decadent notion of "shareholder value." That commitment to the general welfare, upon which our republic was founded, which was adopted as the natural law argument of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, attests, in explicit opposition to the presently continued policies of the British monarchy itself. The constitutional existence of our republic has been premised upon the notion that each person, of whatever social origin, is set apart from, and placed above the beasts, as a being endowed with a creative power lacking in the beasts, a power which shows us to be made in the likeness of the Creator.

On that account, the principal strategic enemy of our republic from within, has been the combination of the Wall Street interest early associated with both the British Foreign Office asset Aaron Burr and the slave-holder interest associated with the legacy of the Confederacy. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson typified the traditions of alliances between Wall Street and the legacy of the Confederacy, as, in fact, Calvin Coolidge did also.

In this adversarial relationship, the strategic objective of the informed patriots of the U.S.A., has never been to establish U.S. hegemony over other regions of this planet. As President Franklin Roosevelt had intended for the post-war world, unlike his successor President Truman, Roosevelt's intention, which should be our nation's today, was to secure the entirety of this planet for the dominant role of a colonialism-freed community of principle among numerous, each perfectly sovereign nation-states. It was our leading patriots' intent, as I, as one among many simple soldiers of that time, also understood at the time of President Franklin Roosevelt's most untimely death, that there should be a reigning community of republics which shared that constitutional commitment to truthfulness and the general welfare which is set forth in the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of our Federal Constitution.

Our object has been to win that struggle for that cause, that by whatever means are both required for, and were otherwise appropriate to that objective. President Lincoln's leadership in the struggle for victory over a British monarchy asset, the treasonously led slave-holders' Confederacy, typifies the awful efforts the defense of that interest has sometimes required.

In that perspective, the proper function of the military doctrine and practice of the U.S.A., has been to uproot the cabinet-warfare and related military follies of aristocratic Europe, and to premise the needed war-making capabilities of our republic, as they might be required, on the skills and means of great engineering works of peace, as did the greatest European commanders, typified by the master of defense Vauban, plebeian engineering officer Carnot, and plebeian artillery officer Scharnhorst, each in their time and place.[6]

It is time to remember, that the U.S.A., despite its inferiority in the average combat capabilities relative to Germany's military forces of that time, won World War II, a victory won partly despite British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, through our mobilized and shrewdly applied advantage in logistics, that under the appropriate leadership of commanders best typified by President Roosevelt and General MacArthur.

The governing mission of the military institutions of a republic such as our own, is not to win wars as brutish mercenaries seek to do, but to win the peace, as the inspired authors of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia did. We must continue to reject the mouth-frothing demands of the lunatic advocates of perpetual warfare, such as our lunatic promoters of that prolonged war in Indo-China which did so much to ruin the U.S.A. The object of republican strategy, is to win the battle for a durable peace among respectively sovereign nation-states, whatever specific policy and effort that cause may properly require of us.

The Economy of Military Policy

The key to that practice lies in the science of physical economy, as it did for the Lazare Carnot who, during 1792-1794, snatched total victory for invaded France from the jaws of what had been France's inevitable defeat at the hands of the invading massed military forces of both Britain and of continental Europe.

The key for defining a competent such military policy, is to be found in that science of physical economy founded by Gottfried Leibniz. This branch of physical science measures action in terms of the increase or decrease of the potential relative population-density of a culture, as that measurement is to be made in terms of per-capita and per-square-kilometer rates of growth of net physical output.

Whether in measuring economic performance in general, or in the military application of that branch of science, it is the society's improved control over territory through the development of the organized, physically defined productive powers of labor, and through the development of basic economic infrastructure, which determines the desired potential for peace or conduct of war. Hence, especially after the spectacular successes in military reforms under the leadership of Carnot, Scharnhorst, and the other pro-republican Prussian reformers typified by Friedrich Schiller's circles, the relative importance of science-driven engineering became a central feature of the progress in military arms and related strategic practice.

This does not represent a mere recipe in any sense. It is an appropriate reflection of the superiority of the form of modern society represented by the perfectly sovereign modern nation-state republic, over all forms of organization of society existing prior to Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, and the specific superiority of the modern sovereign form of nation-state republic over the modern form of neo-feudalism, the rentier-financier oligarchy typified by nearly three centuries of rule of the present British monarchy.

SDI: Then and Now

This was the basis for my personal development of and campaigning for what President Reagan presented to the world on March 23, 1983 as his offer to the Soviet government known as a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The specific strategic conditions under which SDI was introduced, first by me, and then announced by President Reagan, no longer exist, and the attempt to revive that policy in that exact same form today, would be farce. Nonetheless, the lesson of the experience with SDI, as presented by me during 1982-1983, still provides one of the most important strategic object-lessons for study today. The actual SDI, was, unlike the contrary proposals of the U.S. Heritage Foundation then, or recent, dubious concoctions in the name of missile defense by half-witted zealots of the same general type as Zbigniew Brzezinski today, was no gimmick; it was premised upon the soundest and most fundamental principles of modern statecraft and strategy.

Many senior military professionals in the U.S.A., Europe, and elsewhere, agreed with my argument, as I presented it to relevant professionals and others of many nations, over the period February 1982-February 1983. Unfortunately, other, less competent such professionals and other policy-influencers, such as Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, and General Secretary Gorbachev later, did not agree. The incompetents, on both the NATO and Soviet sides, insisted, more or less fanatically, on operating within the bounds of the Wells-Russell military utopian dogma of that time. It was those admired by Vice-President Gore's former sponsor, Armand Hammer, such as Andropov and Gorbachev on the Soviet side, who agreed with the relevant, utopian economic and strategic policies of the anti-SDI faction. It was the follies among those Soviet opponents of the proposal whose actions ensured the collapse and subsequent looting of what had once been the Soviet super-power.

The lesson to be learned now, is, that had the incompetents not prevailed, in ruining the SDI program, as I had designed it and as President Reagan initially proposed it, the world would not have fallen into the terrifying mess it has become today. For adopting and defending that policy, even though the policy itself was sabotaged from below, President Reagan will forever merit credit, offsetting in that degree, the mistakes he made on certain other matters.

That case for SDI must now be reassessed according to the original terms in which I stated it prior to March 23, 1983. Although today's circumstances are qualitatively different than those of the period 1977-1983, during which I developed what was briefly called SDI, the kind of economic and strategic policy required, nearly twenty years later, under the conditions of the global financial disintegration, requires us to return to many of the same considerations involved in the original design of the SDI. The relevant lessons for application of crash-program approaches to science-driven technological progress, must be applied to the promotion and defense of a world economy revived from the ruin now created by accumulated trends of the recent thirty-odd years of policy-shaping.

In introducing that retrospective view of the SDI experience here, we must take into account the danger to military policy which inheres in tolerating a pedant's sterile fascination with the supposed authority of mere textbooks and their dead doctrines. War and peace are not won, and may be more probably lost, by literal faith in selected textbooks. In all worthy examples of the great flanking operations which express strategic thinking in the most distilled form, just wars can be won only through the same specific quality and form of cognitive passion which motivates a successful discovery of a universal physical principle. A passion for the success of a mission of that quality of choice, is the simplest expression of the point.

In the earlier years of U.S. military and related policy, under Presidents Monroe and Quincy Adams, and the influence of Sylvanus Thayer, Friedrich List, Alexander Dallas Bache, Henry Carey, and their associates and followers, the defining mission of military policy, was not merely our continuing recognition of the British monarchy as our republic's principal adversary, but the tasks of nation-building, as typified by the requirement of large-scale infrastructure-building.[7] It was the passion associated with such a conception of national mission, a mission in nation-building, on which the survival of our republic has depended during each existential crisis until this time. The mustering of science and engineering to that end, as typified by Thayer's West Point and Bache's part in the founding of Annapolis, provided the future military leaders that organized form of passion suited, on balance, to our national needs.

Today, the frontier of all progress in man's relationship to our universe, per capita and per square kilometer cross-section of our biosphere, is to be located in science-driver programs which adopt the exploration of nearby Solar space as their most forward-looking, pivotal feature. New frontiers in discovering and mastering the physical principles specific to living processes, are a consideration which illustrates the scope implied in a space-exploration orientation as a driver for all national military and related development.[8]

Notable is the fact, that although we have made progress in our ability to cope with the effects of natural catastrophes since Plato wrote his Timaeus, we have not yet mastered any of the principled kinds of natural disasters inherently threatening the existence of mankind from within our Solar System. Nor, shall we succeed in gaining the power to do so, until progress in exploration of Solar space and beyond has, sooner or later, yielded to us the kinds of knowledge needed to address that greatest known threat to human existence on this planet.

While the great expanses of Central Asia and the African and Australian continents are still great subject-matters of unfinished work in developing infrastructure on Earth, the construction of a suitable infrastructure for human scientific exploration of nearby Solar space, will be the leading edge of all mankind's fundamental scientific and related technological progress during the century and more immediately ahead. It is science-driver and related engineering programs adequate to support space missions, which will define the leading edge of the applicable scientific and technological progress for the indefinite future presently before us. Here we find the contemporary standard for continuing the engineering tradition of Carnot and Monge and the West Point of Thayer's time. Here we find the successor implied by the model of the 1982-1983 SDI policy which I introduced to the world at that time.

On the condition that our economy adopts a corresponding mission-orientation toward the development of its infrastructure and toward conquering the frontiers of scientific and technological progress, the military orientation will be fully consistent with the economic and social policy of our nation in all other ways. So, it was from among the West Point engineering graduates during the Nineteenth Century, that our nation built those railway and water-management systems which integrated our nation as a unified and powerful national economy.

Today, the adoption of long-range such scientific missions in building up the infrastructure of space-exploration, will supersede the objectives of the early through middle Nineteenth Century, as the cutting edge in science and technology for the development of the needed basic economic infrastructure here on Earth. It is from the capabilities, including the mental habits of true flanking capabilities, fostered in our military through the impact of such programs, that the potential military capabilities of our nation will always be the most advanced, and truly competent once again.

Military Cadres for Today

During the 1930s, the initials U.S.A. were often translated as "Useless Sons Accommodated," thus reflecting a condition we had painful reason to regret, when that decade came to its close. For reason of the moral and intellectual competence, and passionate devotion to true mission which our leading military cadres must typify, the standard for training, enlistment, and service of our military forces, must be much higher than that which the provisions of the U.S. Executive Branch and Congress have been lately inclined to allow.

Military tasks of the implications I indicate here, can not be left to a small military elite. Lazare Carnot and the Prussian reformers of Scharnhorst's time already demonstrated that point. For us, the military professional must provide the cutting edge of a qualified citizen-army, based upon qualified reserves in depth, which would, among its other duties, fight effectively any justified warfare it were required to conduct.

We must not permit the continuation of that current, disgraceful policy of national practice which, in fact, prescribes that our military forces be brutish in conduct, and brutalized in the conditions of selection, income, and other features of personal life imposed upon them and their families. Our military cadres must have the primary quality of being nation-builders, both in our nation and in assistance of other nations; those capabilities must be those of a true peace corps, as much as of the world's best-qualified military force. The foundation and pivot of such use of these technical qualifications, is to be found in emphasis upon scientific education and a technologically modern expression of that tradition of engineering practice we used to associate with our Corps of Engineers.

This array of qualifications includes, as it should be obvious, the leading reserve capability of our nation for combat against epidemic and pandemic diseases, in addition to the other kinds of conditions associated with wars and other general catastrophes. Presently, as a result of the immoral destruction of the Veterans' hospital and related programs, and the devastation imposed upon so much of our hospital and public-health system, the current pretense of government, that we have a Federal emergency capability under today's FEMA, is a farce in fact, as the first major epidemic or pandemic crisis next to hit our nation will demonstrate.

Notably, the serving military, its reserves, and the support of the care of veterans of military service, should be recognized, once again, as featuring a leading component of the mobilizable capabilities for medical and related needs. Under present conditions, it will be largely through the recruitment, education, and reserve assignments of physicians, nurses, and other specialists qualified and employed through aid of both military and public health service programs, which will supply our nation a crucial part of that indispensable reserve-in-depth requirement which national health security represents.

Given present economic and related conditions, when the private sector's capabilities are so massively depleted, the production of scientists and engineers conducted into careers in private employment, will come, for some time to come, in large part from the initial education and employment of recruits to education and deployment for work in government functions or government-sponsored military, and other, essentially civilian institutional programs.

Granted, under conditions of economic reconstruction to be faced in the period immediately ahead, the generally prevailing conditions of personal life will tend to be spare, but reasonably secure and comfortable, that for a decade or more of rebuilding of our economy out of the wreckage it has become. But, spare times or not, we shall be generally happy, and, for the most part, secure in the sense that our lives and our work are acknowledged as important and respected; for those born during these times of reconstruction, the future will be bright. We who must work through the coming, relatively lean years of economic recovery, will be pleased, as millions of immigrants to the U.S. foresaw in times past, that the future for today's children is being secured.

Thus, there are three essential ingredients to be realized in the recruitment, education, training, and assignments of the military and complementary institutions of our ruined nation's reconstruction: education, skill, and a passion like that of great scientific discoverers, to accomplish the urgently required mission successfully, as the best French and German military tradition, that of Carnot, Scharnhorst and the Prussian reformers associated with Friedrich Schiller and the Humboldts, defined the significance of this notion.

Therefore, it is notable, that on the latter account, whether in military training, or training in other professions, we do not break down the recruit, and then rebuild him to a predetermined mold. Instead, we will assess the potential the recruit brings with him, or her, and will build upon that potential through intensive training of, not breaking of, that pre-existing foundation of potential within the individual. The mission of such intensive education and other training shall be, that once the individual has completed that training, it is urgent that his, or her mind be one capable of acting as Germany's Scharnhorst and the famous "Old Moltke" insisted, capable of acting effectively according to mission-orientation: that, whether in military practice, or any other kind of mission in life.

Think of the creative cognitive potentials of the individual youthful mind, as in the image of the Pegasus of Schiller's celebrated poem. As that poem emphasizes, Pegasus, the creative, cognitive powers of mind, do not fly well when yoked to brutish, simple-minded obedience.

On such accounts, consider the state of both the U.S. labor-force and of what the economic and related role of the military forces must become, that in response to the awful problems confronting us on both accounts today.

2. The Role of Public Funding

Under the present and continuing conditions of a great national and global financial and economic crisis, the U.S.A. requires, most urgently, at home, and abroad, a highly dedicated force deployed, either military, civilian, or a combination of both, one dedicated to the purpose of rapid build-up of the basic economic infrastructure of both our own nation and those of our partners abroad.

The crucial issue of national policy-making posed by that situation, is, that, contrary to those deluded "free traders" whose reputations are soon to be shattered by the onrushing world financial collapse, military expenditures for the engineering tasks allotted to such institutions, are not a deduction from, but rather, a powerful, large, and indispensable contribution to national income and wealth.

As we should have learned from the experience with the Civilian Conservation Corps' (CCC's) transition from its peacetime efforts to war-time military service, our nation needs again, today, and that most urgently, a new, large-scale institutional mobilization of otherwise unemployed or poorly employed from among our youth, who can be developed as an educated, skilled capability for major and other needed works of maintaining and building basic economic infrastructure.

To effect that change, we must aim at some of the capabilities and other benefits which our population as a whole enjoyed as a result of 1940-1945 compulsory military service. With no foreseeable present need to reinstitute a general military draft for this purpose, we must create the conditions which attract program volunteers, to a combination of both military and civilian programs, who will typify a cross-section of the best potential from among our adolescent and young adults, to work, study, and live together for a time, for public works undertaken in the national interest, here and abroad.

In effect, this combination will represent a kind of amalgam of the lessons to be learned from the CCC, 1940-1945, Peace Corps, and related types of national lessons from the past.

As I shall outline the principles of the matter in the course of the following pages, the present circumstances afford us a distinctive opportunity, and also the necessity, to develop such a force at this time.

Under present conditions, what I have just indicated, is no idle speculation. We are presently at the brink of a financial collapse which, unremedied, will be a sudden and far more devastating national experience than is known from the 1929-1939 decade. As the presently onrushing financial collapse strikes with full force, perhaps half of those in the upper twenty percentile of family-income brackets will soon become suddenly unemployed with the most devastating, and perilous side-effects imaginable looming, as both present conditions and worse threats, immediately before them. Simultaneously, the conditions of life among usually employed and retired adults in the lower eighty percentile, will be analogous, if less shocking to most of them, whereas the conditions faced among youth, especially the children and youth of the poorest social strata, will represent not only a horrible spectacle, but also politically and socially a menace to the continued existence of civilized domestic order. Drastic, but well-considered emergency actions in the domain of economic policy, those chiefly of a type which can not be mobilized by any means other than the sovereign powers of government, will be soon the leading choices upon which national survival and security on this planet depend absolutely.

Happily, the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt demonstrates, that not only can the needed kinds of measures be implemented under our constitutional form of government, but that constitutional form will be greatly strengthened, as Roosevelt strengthened the cause of democracy in the U.S. so greatly, relative to the repressive conditions of common life under the awful succession of his principal predecessors: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, and the original model of today's doomed Alan Greenspan, Andrew Mellon.

The unavoidable action by government, to place the vast bubble of implicitly worthless financial assets in a bankruptcy-reorganization deep-freeze for the time being, will be the setting for the use of the sovereign credit-creation power of the Federal government, under our Constitution, to launch vast enterprises in public works, and in credit issued to worthy private enterprises, to maintain employment and to expand it through absorption in such forms as the most needed categories of public works. The latter, done in the spirit of the great TVA project, should be concentrated in the areas of transportation, energy production and distribution, water-management and sanitation, education, health-care and related services, and urban reconstruction.

U.S. Public Works

Without such public works programs, so motivated, a recovery from the presently onrushing great depression were impossible. You, the so-called ordinary citizen, like the leaders of our nation, have a free choice between two mutually-exclusive alternatives, between continued trends in privatization, or national survival. Either we are sane enough to undertake those public works and related measures, or, by reluctance to do so, we, as a nation and as a people, will have demonstrated to the world our loss of the moral fitness to survive, in which case this nation would not survive.

Misguided critics of President Franklin Roosevelt's successful recovery, make an observation which is ostensibly factual, but only deceptively so, and that only from the worst sort of simple-minded accounting standpoint. In fact, it is an opinion based upon a terrible falsehood, and this should be recognized readily when all relevant facts are considered.

The referenced critics argue falsely, that public works do not generally produce directly the amount of income needed to offset the costs of public expenditures. They argue, that such matters were better left to the irrationality of the so-called "free market," than to actions governed by men and women of reason. The critics' argument is a falsehood concocted out of what is called a fallacy of composition of the facts as they have defined them.

Such critics ignore the essential fact, that the typical national contribution made by public works, is mostly indirect, but nonetheless indispensable for the profitability of the economy as a whole; therein lies their fraudulent fallacy of composition of the critics' argument. In fact, contrary to the critics' argument, these indirect contributions to the profitability of private enterprise, are vast, and, as the experience of the Roosevelt years shows, the total benefits are vastly greater than the total governmental expenditure advanced on their behalf. History has shown, that without precisely those kinds of public works programs which the critics oppose, no recovery from an economic collapse of the presently onrushing form were possible, just as recovery from the 1929-1931 collapse had not been possible, without the types of actions taken under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt.

Indeed, properly conceived, large-scale public-works programs often represent a greater rate of net return to the national economy than all other immediate actions available. The greatest benefits are expressed immediately in physical-economic terms, rather than financial ones; but, in any case, the available financial return indirectly produced is enormous, and overall direct, nonetheless, and can not be replaced by other means. This is one of those cases in which fools insist that an indispensable cost does not exist, because some silly financial accountant or neo-liberal fanatic simply refused to include it in the chart of accounts.

As those who lived through the 1930s and also recall relevant experience from the 1950s and 1960s, the most obvious source of financial return from such public works programs, is the direct impact upon the economy of the employment and other expenditures for the projects themselves. Such programs will keep otherwise destitute, depression-stricken communities alive, and therefore also productive. The way in which the U.S. national highway system was developed during the 1950s and later, is but one rich source of examples of this point. The impact of the TVA on the entire region in which it was developed, makes a more powerful case.

Otherwise, the obvious financial benefits occurring as by-products contributed to the private sector, are of two general classes: immediately, contracts issued to private contractors associated with supplies and services for the public-works programs, and, indirectly but even more substantial, as the TVA case illustrates, the benefit of private-investment opportunities which would not have been viable without the impact of the relevant public works upon the total economic environment in which the public works are located.

In general, the rule is, that the higher the rate of advancement in technology employed, the greater the rate of gain. The benefit of such public works program, lies not in the repayments, such as tolls and other duties often associated with them as direct income, but in the chain-reaction, multiplier effect of the rates of gain in productivity, per capita and per square kilometer, unleashed in the area in which the various forms of impact of the public works are experienced. The result, is a greater contribution to the available, non-regressive sort of tax-revenue contribution to the tax-revenue base of the national economy, than is represented by the public expenditure needed to prompt that growth.

The scientific argument, is far more powerful, than such sampled cases from the past century might seem to suggest. That argument is not only more powerful, but conclusive.

Contrary to the lunacies of today's wild-eyed neo-liberals, the significance of public works lies in a physical reality which is unknown to the fantasy-life of today's prevalent financial-accounting dogmas. The hard realities of real-life, real world economies, which are unknown to such accounting dogmas, are located entirely in mankind's physical relationship to nature. In other words, the increase of our species' power in and over the universe, as measurable, in physical, non-financial-accounting terms, per capita of total population, and per square kilometer of the surface-area of the nation and planet.

For this purpose, there are two kinds of basic economic infrastructure. The one kind is typified by network-systems of improvements of land-areas, of transportation, of water management, and of large-scale production and distribution of energy supplies of generally increasing energy-flux density. The other, which may be recognized as "soft infrastructure," is typified by the unique responsibility of society as a whole in providing universal systems of education and health care and sanitation, on which the fostering and maintenance of the average productive powers of the individual depend absolutely.

In general, as our republic's first U.S. Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, emphasized implicitly in his December 1791 Report to the Congress On the Subject of Manufactures, these and cognate elements of basic economic infrastructure, exist either entirely outside the competence of the domain of private investment, or approximately so.

The function of the development and maintenance of basic economic infrastructure, is, as I have elaborated the argument in various published locations, to change the physical-economic characteristics of individual action occurring within the national economy as a whole.[9] By changing the environment, as the indicated types of improvements in basic economic infrastructure do, the efficient result of the individual's action upon the world at large is transformed by the mere presence of such infrastructural improvements in the environment in which the individual's action occurs.

In the language of mathematical physics, the development of basic economic infrastructure, like the introduction of practice of revolutionary new technologies, changes the characteristic curvature of the economic domain in which the productive act occurs, thus increasing the output even, often, without any necessary improvement in the performance of the operative himself or herself.

Conversely, on this same account, the level of development of basic economic infrastructure, defines and imposes an upper boundary, beyond which sustainable progress in physically defined productive powers of labor in society as a whole can not advance.

Thus, those who delude themselves that cutting public expenditures for basic economic infrastructure, will lessen tax burdens and thus promote economic growth, are dangerously incompetent persons. If we encounter such incompetence in government, we are not merely justified, but compelled, on moral grounds, to regard holders of such errant beliefs to be dangerously insane. More cautious critics of such neo-liberal lunatics might reprove us: "You can not call them insane. They are merely victims of their own fallacy of composition of facts." Such a fallacy of composition is typified by the case of a man who walks in confidence outward, and steps across a deep chasm, supported by nothing other than a foot-bridge which is not there.

Public Credit, Private Enterprise

In that government-directed economic recovery, public works will be complemented by the use of public credit for promotion of relevant categories of private enterprise. For reasons I have given in earlier reports, emphasis should be placed on credit for closely held, entrepreneurial enterprises, such as modern family farming or employed in other technologically energetic small to medium-sized private firms, rather than shareholder-controlled corporate organizations. This does not exclude public credit to Wall Street-controlled, nominally shareholder-owned corporations; rather, it expresses the need, for reasons I have explained in earlier locations, to tilt the balance back to preponderance of preference for the closely-held, technologically aggressive entrepreneurships of the types which have often struggled hard for their very continued existence during the first three to five years of their business life.

In the soon-to-be-realized circumstances, virtually all leading banks, together with most publicly held corporate enterprises, will suffer the unveiling of their inherently pitiable state of bankruptcy. The only responsible form of action available to our government, under those circumstances, will be to immediately freeze all imperilled financial assets, under a general emergency bankruptcy action, and to manage the bankruptcy proceedings in such a way as to ensure that virtually all essential day-to-day functions of banking, production, trade, pension payments, health-care, and other essential services, are performed in a timely fashion.

We must accept as inevitable, that most of the world's bankrupt financial holdings currently on the books will never be paid, simply because they never could be paid as long as the economy is being looted in the futile effort to maintain payments on such accounts. There is no possible way in which a mere tens of trillions U.S. dollars current equivalent of the world's combined domestic product can carry the hundreds of trillions of dollars-equivalent of total combined long-term, medium-term, and short-term, financially capitalized forms of debt now outstanding, and still, at this moment, ballooning under the combination of compound interest-charges and financial leveraging. Derivatives and junk bonds, for example, must be simply written off summarily, as simply another form of gambling debts.

Unless such drastic bankruptcy measures are taken, the attempt to maintain the present volume of debt, or even a large portion of it, will assuredly plunge the entire planet into a global new dark age, comparable, on a planetary scale, to what Europe suffered during the Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age, as that was triggered by the indebtedness held by the Lombard bankers of that time.

The needed government-directed bankruptcy proceedings, must pare the total amount of debt and related financial claims down to the essentials of a functioning national and world economy. In some respects, the result will differ from what the Dawes Plan did do, in fact, for hyperinflation-bankrupted 1923 Germany; but it should be what the Dawes Plan arrangements should have done, rather than exactly what was done then. That is approximately what we must do in the case of the now onrushing global financial collapse. The immediate concern must be to keep the core of the physical economy functioning in a state as near to normal as possible, despite the collapse of categories such as financial services and the so-called "new economy," and to use those emergency measures of stabilization as a launching-pad for a strong and increasing surge of regrowth, a form of growth freed of most of the practices and policies which had been the cause of the U.S.-dollar-led, new world-wide financial collapse.

Treasury Secretary Hamilton's role for national bankruptcy, should be a guide to the constitutional definition of precedents for measures to be taken by government. The experience of the recovery from the Coolidge-Hoover-Mellon depression, the recovery launched and conducted under the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt, must be a prime point of reference. When policy choices might otherwise be in doubt, the principle of the general welfare of all of the people and their posterity, must have overriding authority. "Shareholder equity" and similar pleas, are subordinated in the manner and degree the general welfare principle may require.

Without adding a public-funded recovery program to the actions in bankruptcy reorganization, the threatened state of affairs of much of the population will be ugly, to say the least. Two principal portions of the present U.S. population should come to our attention on this account: those persons who were destitute, or nearly so, prior to the financial crash, and the very large percentile of those who had been in the upper twenty-percentile of family-income brackets, virtually dumped into the streets from useless, or virtually useless former types of "new economy" and kindred forms of widespread new unemployment. The immediate peril and rage from these two parts of the population, present government with the combustible material of a most perilous social crisis. Appropriate action must be quickly forthcoming.

Two leading types of measures must be deployed to address the social crisis represented by those categories. In part, the relatively economically helpless cases must be accommodated by providing expanded provisions of social-welfare systems: housing and other essential social infrastructural needs, including health care. That part done, the emphasis must be placed on expanded employment. This employment must be provided essentially through two types of channels: expanded public works, especially in maintenance and development of needed basic economic infrastructure, and stimulus to growth of places of early employment within the so-called private sector.

For all of the purposes I have indicated as needed features of a recovery program, two features of U.S. Government policy-making are most crucial. First, the generation of public credit. Second, the manner in which the Federal government, through its Treasury arm, must deal with the problem represented by a situation in which not only most banks are terribly bankrupt, but in which most of those banks must continue to operate despite their financial difficulties. Begin with the second of those two leading challenges.

In reorganizing banks and insurance companies in bankruptcy, the leading immediate issue, is which nominal assets and liabilities of those institutions shall have relatively preferential treatment? Both the principle of the general welfare and other highly practical problems demand that the pensions, health-care, and personal savings of citizens and short-term financial requirements of small-business employers be given precedence over any and all competing claims. As much as possible, the capacity and freedom of independent action of the citizen and local community must be defended and promoted; the more problems of daily life resolved on that level, the better the chance for a general recovery of the system as a whole, and the more secure the required liberties implicit in the Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution. Essentially, on this account, the supervisors of the bankruptcy proceedings, must act promptly to ensure the application of the assets of the bankrupt institution as security for credit to the benefit of those indicated categories of persons and enterprises.

The principle underlying the priority afforded this approach, is the vital national security interest: as much as possible, the essential details of daily life of the citizens must proceed, in virtually every local community, virtually without losing a step. Life, considered in the smallness of the locality, must go on, as near to normal as possible. This is an essential part of our needed political-economic holding position, a position we must secure in order to attack the threatened disaster on its vulnerable flank.

Thus, in accord with that, the intention of government, at the Federal and state level, is to maintain the regular functioning, day to day, of those banks whose activities are needed for maintaining the ordinary business of the local region or community.

By promptly freezing bankrupt assets and terminating compound-interest claims which might otherwise be associated with them, and by writing off those trillions of dollars of claims which have the moral quality of gambling debts, we reduce the mass of debt involved in bankruptcy to a more nearly manageable amount, and isolate the sovereign pledged debt of the Federal government--its currency and Treasury debt, and Federal entitlements--from other forms of debt within the system.

In fact, provided that proper strategies for dealing with financial bankruptcies reign, the collapse of the financial shareholder values of a corporation, need not be considered a catastrophe in fact. In the end, it may turn out to be a blessing for that corporation itself. By wiping inflated financial obligations of the productive enterprise from its books, as this benefit will be assisted by the typical ways in which financial markets collapse, we bring a view of the real, physical-economic interest of that firm to the surface. As was famously said of the 1929 stock-market crash: What was falling was, suicides aside, only paper. The object is to build up the afflicted firm as viable over the middle to longer term, by protecting the actually physically productive values of that organization, even at the price of wiping even relatively vast amounts of merely nominal financial assets from the books.

The included object is to clear the way for the pledging of new masses of public credit, especially long-term credit, through the U.S. Treasury Department which has just taken the merchant-banker-controlled U.S. Federal Reserve System into receivership.

The private banks still operating, even those under bankruptcy reorganization, will then function as what would otherwise be viewed as normal roles in mediating the relationship between Federal creation of public credit, and the flow of that credit into assigned public and private applications. It is the role of the administrative function of the banker, in the bank's personal relationship to depositors and the local enterprises, which must be promoted in its capacity as a function vital to the national interest.

Organizing the Recovery

The applicable policy is, that this flow of public credit shall be chiefly devoted to expanding employment and production in those aspects of the national division of labor, in both the public and the private sectors, which will generate the most efficient national physical-economic growth.

This brings us to a most crucial point of policy, a point in scientific method which virtually no member of the Congress, and only a tiny fraction of members of the Federal Executive understand, so far, today. Here, my unique expertise in relevant matters of economics becomes an essential national-security asset. Why did virtually no member of the U.S. Congress, for example, know that the U.S. economy has been going bankrupt, that largely as a result of U.S. government policy-shaping, over a past period of about three decades? Were they, perhaps, like some legendary Rip Van Winkle, sleeping through these decades? Why do the accounting figures used to assess U.S. economic performance over those decades, willfully lie, still today?[10] Why has our government, both Congress and the Executive Branch, not chosen and verified policies which do not repeat that same kind of terrible blunder during the years just ahead? Why does most of the nation's most popular news media lie about these matters, to the present moment these lines are being written?

I have presented the answer to those questions in earlier reports published on the subject of accounting methods. I now summarize that argument in the form it applies directly to the discussion in progress here.

Very soon, nearly all our citizens will look down, with a mixture of contempt and pity, upon the poor fool who still argues that the U.S. economy, and also our government's economic policy-making, has not been increasingly bankrupt over the past several decades. Since generally accepted accounting practice has been shown to have been a terrible failure on this point, what methods must be used, instead of those unfortunately customary ones, in choosing the needed alternative in national economic and related policy?

As I have presented the case in various published locations, no rational notion of economic growth, nor even the notion of national economy itself, existed prior to Europe's Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Renaissance. The notions of economic growth and of national economy, are by-products of the creation of a new political form of organization of society, called today the sovereign nation-state republic, in the aftermath of Europe's recovery from the great New Dark Age of the preceding century, and in the setting and aftermath of the great ecumenical Council of Florence.

A clear understanding of the nature of the constitutional principle underlying the existence of the modern form of sovereign nation-state republic, is the key to all among those forms of government-directed action essential to a successful recovery from the financial doom now descending on both our nation and the world at large.

Here, I summarize the presently relevant points, to that effect, which I have made at greater length in earlier reports.

The crucial notion, on which the existence of the modern sovereign nation-state and national economy were premised during that Fifteenth Century, was the redefining of government as absolutely subject to a universal principle of promotion of the general welfare of present and future generations. The notion that no state has legitimate authority to rule, except as it is efficiently dedicated to promoting the general welfare, was combined with the principle, that the promotion of the general welfare depends upon the fostering of fundamental scientific and technological progress. As one might rediscover, by reading the opening paragraphs of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of independence, the founding of the U.S.A., and also of its Federal Constitution, was based explicitly upon that point of natural law. The conjunction of these two notions, as typified initially by the revolutionary reforms of King Louis XI for France and Henry VII for England, were the occasions of birth of the first functioning sovereign nation-states, and the first approximations of an actual national economy, or so-called commonwealth.

Therefore, since the existence of the general welfare depends absolutely upon the changes effected by scientific progress, the term "economic growth" is degraded by common usage to virtually a nonsense-term, unless the notion of growth is defined in terms of the application of scientific and technological progress in ways which increase the potential relative population-density of humanity, as this can be measured in terms of demographic characteristics of populations, and measured in physical terms per capita and per square kilometer.

Political-economy, as that term is used to define the functions of national economy associated with the political institutions of the nation-state, means essentially the increase of man's power in and over the universe, as measured, not in today's misleading, but widely accepted, financial-accounting terms, but in physical terms, per capita and per square kilometer, and as increases are correlated with improvements in the demographic characteristics of populations and their households.

The Scientific Basis for Recovery

Therefore, the following point of principle is crucial.

Although the relevant measurements do involve consideration of physical products produced, it is not the simple counting of those products which is the standard of measurement for economic performance, for real economic growth. What must be measured is the effect of consumption of a produced market-basket of product upon the similarly defined productive powers of labor in the emerging generation. In other words, the subject of measurement of rates of economic growth, is the measurement of the effects of consumption of produced product, that in terms of the increase of the average productive powers of labor for a population of relatively improved demographic characteristics.

On this account, contrary to Vice-President Al Gore's perverse ideology, there is no similarity of human beings to lower forms of life. Thus, successful forms of modern society could be introduced to mankind only by cultures which defined mankind as a species set apart and above all other forms of life, as made in the image of the Creator of the universe. It is the development of man as man, man so defined, which is the axiomatic premise upon which all successful realization of modern economic progress depends.

Once the implications of that set of definitions are grasped, competent understanding of economic science may begin. Then, competent modes of measurement are possible, not before.

As I adopted that view more than fifty years ago, the possibility of a competent national economic policy depends upon recognizing the interdependency of two sets of principles. Everything I have written and published on that subject since 1952-1953, has been premised upon what has been subsequently proven, by performance shown even in published work alone, to be the best long-range forecasting method known, since then, up to the present date.

I now summarize the most relevant points of that so-called LaRouche-Riemann Method.[11] The summary has an unavoidably technical form and specialist flavor, but such matters must be put on record as an indispensable part of any policy-shaping argument on this subject. I summarize the technicalities, and then add explanations which should make the subject-matter more accessible to the layman. It is notable that there exist a considerable number of currently extant presentations on these technical points.

Those two, multiply-connected sets of principles are, summarily, the following: 1) The nature of the human being and species, as distinct from that of all lower forms of life, lies in the practical implications of what globally extended modern European civilization knows as experimentally validated universal physical principles, the principles from which technologies are derived. 2) Similarly validated forms of universal principles underlying principles of Classical artistic composition, as distinct from all other forms of art. Both qualities of principles are generated within the individual human mind in the same way, either discovered through sovereign powers of individual cognition, or rediscovered as by a student's replication of the act of original discovery, and sharing that experience of rediscovery with others. The two kinds of universal principles are multiply-connected, in the included sense that the latter are indispensable to efficient cooperation in the generation, circulation, and application of the former.

The validation of the combined application, is supplied by methods peculiar to the domain of a science of physical-economy: The demonstration that the combined application of such principles generates a physically measurable increase in the human species' power to exist in and over nature, in and over the universe at large. This increase is expressed in per-capita and per-square-kilometer terms, and also in terms of demographic characteristics of populations and their family households. The resulting, combined measurement is expressed as the notion of potential relative population-density.

The type of transformation so defined, is most conveniently described as Riemannian in form, so named in reference to Bernhard Riemann's founding of the modern form of a science of physical relativity, in his celebrated 1854 habilitation dissertation. The desired effect, the increase of potential relative population-density, is chosen as the definition of the elementary form of action characteristic of physical economies. It is expressed, thus, as an increase in the relevant effect of per-capita action, an increase which corresponds to an increase of the Riemannian form of characteristic curvature of the kind of physical-economic process (phase-space) in which the individual economic action is situated.

Now, turn to a more popular form of exposition on the subject of the principles which I have just so summarized.

For example, by increasing either the raw energy or energy-flux density of that energy, society increases the effectiveness of the labor of the individual operative, but without the necessary requirement of any other change in the action of the operative. The same applies to infrastructural improvements in transportation, water management, education, health-care, and so on.

Let us suppose that the supply of such elements of basic economic infrastructure, and their improvements, were provided to the users without charge, except as at government expense. There are numerous examples, such as the case of toll-free public highways, of this. To similar effect, a study conducted years ago, showed that the cost of collecting tolls on the New York Subway system was greater than the income from those tolls! It may be counterproductive, for example, to base charges to household consumers on metered delivery of water, the latter a practice which can be justified economically only under conditions rationing of short supplies require this. Indeed, the notion that public utilities must be sustained by tolls paid to afford pleasure to shareholders, is readily demonstrated to be a great, if currently popularized delusion.

The "pay back" for improvements in and maintenance of basic economic infrastructure, such as clean air and water, or protected natural resources, usually occurs in the form of a beneficial improvement in the economic environment, within which particular events of production and consumption are located, rather than as a consumable product billable to some person who chooses to consume it. Where a factory, for example, consumes directly the labor, materials, supplies, and so forth, its output requires, the beneficial action of infrastructural improvements is transmitted to society in general, that chiefly as an improvement in the characteristic physical-economic curvature of the total economy in which all acts of production and consumption occur. Usually, this benefit does not occur simply as a localizable incurrence of the total cost or expense by a specific localized person or action.

As I have always warned, during the past half-century, in the classroom, in my writings, and in my consulting practice, the common cause for idiocies of policy-making and today's generally accepted classroom economics dogma, lies in the obsession with reducing matters of economics to the form of what are currently generally accepted financial accounting practices. The crucial point of scientific method here, is the following.

Geometry of Position

As I have stressed, once again, in my recent paper on lunacy of bench-marking, the crucial issue of method is the fact, that the appropriate mathematical method in physical science is not deductive forms of generally accepted undergraduate classroom mathematics, but, rather, the mathematics of a so-called geometry of position, which was also named Analysis Situs by Leibniz, Riemann, and others.[12] The role of Analysis Situs in physical science, and economy, is perhaps better understood by pointing to the form in which "geometry of position" appears within Classical artistic compositions, as Classical metaphor.

The geometrical form of Classical metaphor, is recognizable in the point of distinction between Classical Greek sculpture, such as the model cases of Scopas and Praxiteles, and the Greek and Egyptian Archaic. The application of Leonardo da Vinci's discovery of a higher principle of non-linear perspective, and the continued application of this by Raphael Sanzio and Rembrandt, provide the attentive student a very clear and forceful demonstration of the general meaning of "geometry of position." Cusa and da Vinci student Johannes Kepler's unique discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, in his The New Astronomy, for example, demonstrates precisely, in contrast to the scientifically fatal blunders of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and Newton, how Analysis Situs ("geometry of position") must be understood in the field of astrophysics. So, Gauss demonstrated Kepler's discovery of principle as Kepler would have desired this, nearly two centuries later.[13] All Classical metaphor, as it appears in Classical poetry and tragedy, has the exact same characteristics as in other media of scientific and artistic composition.

One of the best examples, is to be recognized in the way in which Johann Sebastian Bach discovered and developed the principle of well-tempered polyphony, as in opposition to the misleading, mechanistic notion of equal-tempered tuning and other hoaxes by Helmholtz in this matter. I restrict our discussion to the most relevant highlights of this case used as illustration.

The points the reader must bear in mind are the following. First, that the precise values of the F# and A in the well-tempered system are not determined according to some action-at-a-distance trick, such as that proposed by Galileo and used by Isaac Newton for his fraudulent notion of planetary orbits, as determined by "action at a distance." The difference between Kepler and Copernicus, on the determination of Solar orbits, and the difference between Bach and his opponents on tuning, are precisely parallel, as a study of Kepler's writing would enrich one's appreciation of exactly what Bach accomplished so uniquely, scientifically.

In human, as opposed to merely instrumental music, musical values are determined according to the natural characteristics of the human singing voice. Putting the important issue of sophistications in coloration to one side, the primary fact bearing upon tuning of the human singing voice, is the existence of precisely defined differences in register shift among those types of singing voices which have been developed to their natural beauty by those Florentine methods of bel canto training which are associated with Leonardo da Vinci's pioneering investigation of this matter.

Once we introduce the notion of a geometry of position into polyphonic singing among types of voices so distinguished, we have, as Bach shows most dramatically in his The Art of the Fugue, and also, earlier, in his celebrated A Musical Offering, some wonderful paradoxes, pivotted around the notion of successions of Lydian intervals, paradoxes which arise from the role of thematic inversions among the chest of voices defined according to registral distinctions.

In such instances, the actual location of the pitch at which a tone is to be sung, is not in the nature of a precise tuning defined by linear mathematics, but, rather, an orbital position, as Kepler's argument in his The New Astronomy (and also other locations) indicates, and as Bach's tuning requires. This pitch may be deceptively close, sometimes, to the mathematical value suggested by some mechanistic scheme, but it is never determined in exactly that way. The counterpoint in the polyphonic composition will require the performers to follow a pathway which conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler sometimes described as "between the notes." The trajectory so defined differs from the mechanistic, that in exactly the same sense that Kepler's astrophysics differed from the bungling choice of method used by predecessors such as Copernicus and Brahe.

If we put to one side the fraudulent, widely circulated reports on the subject of tuning by Helmholtz and Ellis, and simply look at the challenge of singing the scores of properly trained, bel canto voices and instrumental accompaniments as written by Bach, the truth about Bach's tuning appears beyond doubt. The same point is illustrated by the work of the greatest composers who based their contributions directly on study of Bach, such as Mozart and Beethoven. It is shown in the notion of the implicit musicality of Classical poetry, in the argument, against the school of Reichhardt et al., by Schiller, Beethoven, and Schubert. The performance of songs of Schubert, a subject of some historically determined special importance for music and poetry as a whole, as by the most conscience-stricken performing artists, illustrates this principle. All of this is a suitable example of the notion of a geometry of position, as it occurs with physical science, or any and all Classical forms of artistic composition.

As I have emphasized, over more than half a century to date, it is impossible to present an adequate definition of those principles of individual cognitive function which we may describe as "human reason," except by recognizing the commonly underlying basis for validated discovery of both universal physical principle, and the validatable methods of Classical forms of artistic composition. Indeed, some of the worst, popularized, systemic absurdities in current academic dogma, stem from the arbitrary and false rule of thumb stated by the neo-Kantian Romantic Professor Karl Savigny, as the need for an absolute separation of Naturwissenschaft (natural science as misunderstood by Savigny) from Geisteswissenschaft (e.g., social philosophy and art). This is, in other words, the popularized delusion that the study of physical science and social processes, as both are distinct from aprioristic mathematical formalism, have no common axiomatic basis. The entirety of Kant's so-called Critiques was premised upon the assertion of the same delusory assumption, of that assumed self-evidence of the hermetic separation of Two Cultures, which is central to the intrinsic irrationalism of Savigny's argument.[14]

In the case of neo-Kantians such as Savigny, or empiricists and positivists generally, or in modern neo-liberal and existentialist dogmas, the so-called proof of such types of hermetic separation, lies in an elementary and delusional quality of fallacy of composition, the reliance upon nothing but reductionist's passion for merely deductive forms of argument, excluding the principle of geometry of position (i.e., Analysis Situs) from its common basis in both physical science and in Classical forms of artistic composition.

Those relevant illustrations of the general point given, now focus upon the specific form in which this notion of geometry of position arises in the science of physical economy.

In every instance of a qualitative shift in the prevailing level of productivity in a national economy, we have two "dots" in a graphical representation. Take the case in which the relationship of these two dots corresponds to a descent in the level of productivity. The question, expressed in terms of geometry of position, is: What is the action--the physical action--which connects the reality which those two dots appear to represent? Consider the opposite case, in which an upturn has occurred. What is the form of physical action which is reflected in the apparent latter change of position of the two successive dots?

As Kepler warned against the foolishness of Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe, in the matter of Solar orbits, the cause of the displacement separating the location of the two successive dots on a graph, does not lie within the simple Euclidean geometry attributed to that paper, video screen, or other medium used to represent the apparent relative position of the pair. Back to the allegory of Plato's Cave: the apparent position of the pair in a merely Euclidean or quasi-Euclidean space-time, is merely the shadows on the wall of a firelit cave. As Kepler warned against repeating the simplistic "connect-the-dots" failures of Copernicus and Brahe, the task of science is to discover the lawful physical action from which those shadow-forms are projected, not to attempt to explain the action as a product of the merely apparent relationship among the shadows. Hence, the argument against the folly of aprioristic mathematical formalism, which Riemann presents in the concluding portion of his habilitation dissertation.

Herein lies a simple, but crucial proof of the scientific absurdity of most attempts to explain economic processes from the standpoint of today's generally accepted methods of financial accounting.

In the case of the simplest variety of example, we would answer Kepler's challenge: We must discover and apply some validatable new universal physical principle, or of a technology derived from such a principle.

Very well: would it be meaningful to attempt to represent that connection between those two dots by a straight line, or any sort of simply continuous curve defined within the bounds of today's more generally accepted form of classroom mathematics? The right answer to that question, is, "No!" That right answer is an expression congruent with the domain of Analysis Situs, the domain of geometry of position, or what, in the alternative, may be classed under the heading of Classical topology.

In the language of Classical artistic composition, the gap to be filled would be termed a metaphor of the strictly Classical form otherwise encountered in poetry, tragedy, music, the compositions of Leonardo, Raphael, and Rembrandt, and so on.

In the language of Riemannian manifolds, that metaphor corresponds to a place to be occupied by an axiom of a multiply-connected (physical-space-time) manifold, the kind of axiom which replaces, and eradicates those "ivory tower" notions of physical space-time associated with the so-called Euclidean manifold of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and their followers. In the domain of the Greek Classic, this axiom corresponds to a platonic idea, as the latter is generated as the solution to a paradox of an ontological quality. In physical science, Plato's notion of idea is used only to identify an experimentally validatable form of discovered universal physical principle, a discovery generated by what is known as Plato's Socratic method of hypothesis. Experimentally validated universal physical principles, are typical of ideas within the domain of physical science. Validated universal principles of Classical forms of artistic composition are also such ideas.[15]

The crucial point here could not be stated clearly until the appearance of Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation. Indeed, I was forced to turn to Riemann, in order to find a clearer way of expressing a set of discoveries which I had developed earlier. Notably, Riemann, basing himself chiefly on the preceding work on principles of curvature by his patron Gauss, stated plainly, that all of the so-called axioms of aprioristic geometry must be excluded from physical science, and that the only axioms used must be those we have gained through experimental validation of universal physical principles. This declarative statement by Riemann at that point, is among the most important, most crucial utterances in the entire history of modern science.

Thus, the notions of matter, space, and time associated with the legacy of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton are to be excluded from serious scientific work, and the role of axioms assumed solely by experimentally validated universal principles. This means, in my lexicon, both universal physical principles, and also validated universal principles of Classical artistic forms of composition.

Thus, when we come to a gap between the dots cast as shadows on the surface of the classroom blackboard, we must not assume that the determination of the pathway those dots imply, is to be found within the blackboard itself. In other words, the cause of the depicted representation of that interval is not to be found in the kind of aprioristic geometry which is prescribed as an article of pagan religious faith by the empiricists, Cartesians, and Newtonians. Whenever the evidence has the metaphorical quality which Kepler recognized as implied in the elliptical characteristic of the orbit of Mars, we must be forewarned that a deep ontological paradox may be the suspected cause of the irregularity in the ordering of the physical evidence so detected.

In the case, that we are able to discover a validatable universal principle through which the ambiguity of the evidence is resolved, we must treat that principle as a universal axiom of the relevant physical-geometric phase-space upon which our attention is focussed. Such axioms replace entirely the kind of aprioristic axioms still generally, and wrongly accepted in today's classrooms. Thereafter, whenever that same "gap" arises in the terms of a geometry of position, we must, as Riemann warned us, depart the linear application of deductive mathematics, and attack the problem posed from the standpoint of a geometrical mathematics of discontinuities and gaps.

In real-life physical-economic processes, all actions which cause the increase of the potential relative population-density, have the physical form of Riemannian axioms. Such interventions, by expressions of such axioms, account entirely for what some popularized language today misrepresents as "negative entropy" in physical-economic relations.

My specific, so far unique contribution to the science of physical economy, has been to demonstrate that the relevant types of axioms to be considered, are not only what would be more readily accepted as physical axioms, but also those axioms which are associated with validatable universal principles of Classical artistic composition. It is these axioms, and the technologies subsumed by their interrelationships, which must be recognized as "filling the gaps" between the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave. Conversely, this view of such anti-entropic process-relations, defines the only meaning of axioms which is not, like today's generally accepted practice of financial accounting, the fruit of mere superstition.

It Follows From That

From those admittedly deep, but indispensable considerations just summarized, it follows, that the form of human action, by means of which man's power in and over the universe is increased to economic effect, is expressed in two respectively distinct, but multiply-connected forms. 1) Validated universal physical principles, and the technologies derived from them, and 2) Validatable universal principles of the form associated with Classical artistic composition and coherently related applications of statecraft. It is the latter principles which foster the discovery and effective cooperation within society for the application of the former.

It is the physical effect of those classes of mental actions, by and among cooperating individual members of society, upon which willful increase of the productive powers of labor depends. It is only action of this specific quality which generates resulting increases in the potential relative population-density of the human species, and, thus, the true growth of the economy of nations.

Three leading classes of economic action are derived from the principled features of the relationship just described. There is, most obviously, the cooperation of persons in taking the apparent risk of relying upon the discovery and use of validated universal principles and technologies: the domain of entrepreneurship. There is, secondly, the creation of the indispensable preconditions for promoting the first class of actions: the domain of basic economic infrastructure. There is, thirdly, the indispensable role of government, in organizing forms of cooperation within society: the domain of statecraft.

For this purpose, under the presently existing and imminent circumstances, a certain principle is to be stated in the following form. Statecraft is the application of the universal principles of Classical forms of artistic composition to the fostering and management of the economically efficient application of those increases in productive powers of labor which, in turn, generate increase in the potential relative population-density of nations, and, thus, implicitly, of humanity as a whole.

The principal means by which statecraft promotes those end-results, is through the state's assumption of wittingly efficient responsibility for the development of the potential represented by the entireties of the land-area and population. This compels the state to focus upon chiefly two aspects of the economic process: the development of the basic economic infrastructure, chiefly through governmental functions, and the fostering, as through the creation of public credit, of the function of entrepreneurs in employing scientific and technological progress to bring about increases in the average productive powers of labor, as measurable in physical terms, per capita and per square kilometer of the total territory.

In other words, the notion that a national economy should be either entirely of a "free market" type, or a "state economy," is nonsense. As the founders of this republic understood clearly, and stated repeatedly, the success of the modern sovereign form of nation-state republic is the only systemically successful design for a durable and successful form of modern economy. This is a form of state and economy in which the national government assumes the lead both in indicating the direction of national economic development, and is facilitating the possibility of the cooperative implementation of that directive between chiefly the public and private sectors of the economy as a whole. The model of President Franklin Roosevelt's leadership of the U.S. recovery from the Wilson-Coolidge-Mellon-Hoover depression, is not a perfect model of either the modern state or modern economy, but it is the right choice relative to the criticisms of Franklin Roosevelt commonly presented today.

To this end, the essential economic directive of the state must be chiefly twofold. It must commit the nation as a whole to certain scientific and technological goals in physical-economic progress, and must dedicate its powerful influence to promote Classical forms of culture over both illiteracy and the corrosive influences of contrary impulses.

The pace is properly set for this work by the role of the national government in promoting medium- to long-range goals in scientific and technological progress, and steering the flows of public expenditures and credit into those combinations of channels through which those goals of progress are likely to be realized. The principal means for implementing those indispensable functions of a sane form of government, is the government's sovereign responsibility for both the physical and social infrastructure of the society as a whole. Under our Constitution, this is expressed in terms of the historically evolved division of labor among Federal, state, and local government.

Among those essential responsibilities of government, are the Federal government's unique and exclusive constitutional authority and responsibility for the issuance and regulation of the national currency and public credit, including regulation of the financial institutions and practices of the nation as a whole.

To related and similar effect, since the first modern nation-states, those of France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII, all sane and sovereign nation-states have been economically protectionist. Sane governments have always acted to protect the viability of an array of branches of production and trade on which a sovereign form of national economic and related security have depended. The regulation of finance, trade, and credit, for these protectionist purposes, has been the essential responsibility of government, a responsibility which no moral government can relinquish or delegate.

We see around the world today, and in the loss of the national economic security of the U.S.A. itself, the lunatic results of capitulating, once again, to the repeatedly proven folly of a deregulated, "free trade," and so-called "globalized" model of economic and related practice. The neo-liberal delusion, that reliance upon the wisdom of little green men hidden within the interstices of the infinitesimal smallness of free-trade transitions, the so-called "Invisible Hand," will bring us a rich harvest of ill-deserved bounty, is one of the most irresponsible, and wild-eyed delusions ever put into widespread circulation for practice.

Thus, under the presently onrushing conditions of global financial collapse, the U.S. government must take certain immediate actions to the combined effect of preventing a social disaster and beginning a durable economic recovery. The indicated, reformed role of the U.S. military institutions, will have to contribute a significant part in that process.

3. The Pivotal Reform of the Military

Respecting the challenges posed by the present global financial crisis, the necessary changes, from present trends in military policy, are essentially three.

1. A general reform in U.S. military doctrine respecting privatization, and respecting training, composition, recruitment, and economic conditions of training and life for the regular U.S. military arms and their associated reserves.

Essentially, the military command, as accountable from the top to the President of the U.S.A., must exert an undelegatable responsibility for knowing and defending the strategic interest of the nation in every area of activity to which the military arms are deployed. No contractual agreement can be permitted to serve as a substitute for the direct accountability of the military institutions for both knowledge and practice in each and all areas in which they are responsible. Nothing of this can be delegated to a private contractor, or will be willfully so delegated by any patriotic official of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Nor shall any responsible officer be denied access to verifiable knowledge of matters affecting the area of his or her responsibility. Nor can the military rely upon other branches of government to act, instead of the military's fulfilling its responsibility for knowledge and control in the area of its explicitly assigned and implied responsibility. Other agencies may aid the military by informing it, but the military does not escape its responsibility by relying upon the information supplied by other agencies as a substitute for its responsibilities, even if those other agencies are official ones. Name that, if you wish, The Cole Memorial Standard of Accountability.

This might be seen as a war-time standard. In fact, such a standard is implicit in the very notion of day-to-day rules of engagement.

2. A change in the strategic doctrine of the U.S.A., including the specific mission assigned to scientific crash-programs conducted as part of, or complementary to long-range strategic missions, such as space exploration, assigned in part to the military arms.

3. The combined role of the U.S. Corps of Engineers and cooperating non-military agencies in conducting a large-scale development of the basic economic infrastructure of our nation, and in cooperation with other nations.

As a practical matter, at a time when the amount of combined unemployment and waste in the economy as a whole, is as large as it will be shown to have been at the instant the finality of the present world financial crash is apparent, the portion of the total labor-force which must be absorbed into infrastructure programs, will be larger than at any point during the recent half-century. Not only will the ration of such persons be very large, the remedies must be mobilized quickly, at least in their initial phases. Most of this employment will, by necessity, rely upon the use of newly created, large masses of public credit applied to topical areas such as urgently needed public works.

The alternative to such a policy would be chaos, perhaps even the kind of combined economic and social crises which could soon destroy our nation from within. Only childish or similarly deranged political figures would resist such policies under the conditions facing our nation on what is now the proverbial day after tomorrow. In such a circumstance, neo-liberal ideology is a rope by which any politician could readily hang himself.

The great challenge in all this, is to manage the indicated emergency effort with a certain orderliness and net effectiveness. The difficulties will arise chiefly from the shocking suddenness of the needed changes in both policies and recently popularized habits, and the need to avoid those grave risks which a mismanaged undertaking would represent under the extremely difficult circumstances, such as the relatively scarce financial and other resources which the present situation has predetermined.

The lessons of the Twentieth-Century mobilizations of the U.S.A. for each of two World Wars, and for the emergency measures of the 1933-1940 interval, must be reviewed and taken into account. The relevant kinds of archive reports, books, and personal experience of those who are familiar with that experience, must be brought together now. There will be much improvisation required, since immediate opportunities for large-scale increases in employment must emphasize existing public works and related projects which may be either accelerated, or which are sufficiently well-planned and pre-organized that they may be readily brought to life.

Those preparations should be currently in progress within relevant institutions of the U.S. government and other relevant types of locations. I shall not begin to catalog some of these here, but, having stated this point, shall turn immediately to the matter of certain general principles of the needed program at large.

First, there should be rebuilding of the regular military arms and reserves along the lines indicated thus far. A mobilization plan for this purpose should be in progress at this time.

The principal mission-orientation of this mobilization should be emphasis upon the training of the logistical capabilities of the military arms along the lines of a corps of engineers.

End the New Violence

To have a truly competent military arm, once again, it will be indispensable to eradicate a certain growing obsession, over recent decades, with the goal of increasing the kill-ratio in warfare. I cite that here, because it is an important point in itself, but also because discrediting such follies forces us to rediscover the principles of what used to be the traditional military strategic thinking of civilized modern Europeans.

It is time to recognize, as the best historians and strategists of the past knew, that the net strategic benefit of an increased combat kill-ratio score, has been greatly exaggerated, and increasingly so, during the recent fifty years. In significant part, this over-emphasis on kill-ratio, has been simply the type of folly consequent upon a spreading mediocrity or worse among military cadres; perhaps, the more important source of this folly has been the kind of loss of any controlling and credible mission-assignment, as that downward trend in morality was visibly inherent in the post-MacArthur conduct of the war in Korea, and, still worse, the bloodily prolonged strategic sham in Indo-China.

As I shall emphasize, those kill-ratio studies overlooked the fact that the U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt actually won World War II, and that we have never done nearly as well in net performance since. Our military practice after Korea became increasingly poor strategically, notably as the emphasis on kill-ratio, rather than logistics of strategy tended to emerge as predominant. The key to victory lies not in the verb "kill," but in the verb "control." Logistics, read in the proper sense, either expresses, or implies the means by which "control" i