Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

by Stan Goff

Book Overview

Goff's career as an NCO in the Special Forces (Delta Force, US Rangers, Special Ops) took him from the invasions of Panama, Grenada and Haiti, to the training grounds of the Colombian Army (ostensibly in drug interdiction), to a semester as a West Point lecturer, to Mogadishu at the time of the operation immortalized in Black Hawk Down. Unlike the typical soldier's memoir, Goff does not in machismo or heart-searching. He draws lessons from his past,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932360123
• ISBN13: 9781932360127
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Soft Skull
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Valuable for specific reasons

In fairness, Goff's writings should be criticized in the appropriate context: they are anecdote laden, rantish, autobographical, yet analytical and provisionally authoritative. Goff is not uncomfortable deploying simile, metaphor, or limited allegory to connect his personal experiences to the conceptual and/or assumptive framework he offers. A basic premise of his writing is his commitment to engage a world of competing (or impoverished) perspective on global realities, offering clarifications or counter-points to what he regards as conventional and/or largely inadequate wisdom. That being said, he offers no "smoking gun" critiques of world affairs. I'm not sure that he means to; it's enough that he has been there and seen what needs to be seen; he's not trying to reify or vindicate his point of view, just to provide a meaningful contrast to those views that over-saturate the public imagination. His objective seems to be the "sobering" of the naive and jingoist assumptions that Americans cling to, but too often take for granted. In other words, he's not trying to convert anyone; he's "playing Cassandra" as Camus said, holding up the mirror to the nation he served and risked his life for, aparently banking on the hope that we'll demonstrate the existence of a national conscience. If in reading his work, you feel disturbed and spurred to a greater degree of deliberation about the narratives you recieve from day-to-day, then his work has had the intended effect. In this respect, he's just doing his duty. Little more, little less. It strikes me as a bit absurd that other reviewers would place such liberal import on his political sympathies, as if to imply that these might somehow eclipse the over-all body of points, impressions, and conjectures Goff puts on the table. Goff himself is a bit circumspect (at times, outright cagey) about his personal politics. At others he's in your face about them. I'm not clear on what standard of political objectivity is in vogue with the readers out there, but we swim in a sea of ideology-laden "facts". Let's grow up and move on. If you're worried about the integrity of Goff's ideological proclivities, go befriend a current or former member of special forces. See what his anecdotes and opinions do to your impeccable clinicism and analytical detatchment. Maybe your "objectivity" is more of an obstacle to your own understanding than you've presumed.

Stunning view of the US military

This is a hard-hitting critique of recent US foreign policy. Goff, who used to be a soldier in Army Special Operations, analyses the US state's wars in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, Somalia, Haiti and Iraq. In Korea, General MacArthur ordered his forces to "destroy every means of communication, every installation, factory, city and village from the front line to the Yalu River." General Curtis LeMay boasted, "We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both, and ... we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes." The USAF dropped more bombs on Korea than on all Europe in all of World War Two and dropped 7.8 million gallons of napalm. US forces killed about four million Koreans, as against `only' three million Vietnamese people. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) faced huge problems. The US state maintained its punitive sanctions. Russia cut its oil supplies by 90%. In 1995, the country suffered the worst floods for a century, which swept away more than 400,000 hectares of prime farmland just before harvest time and made five million people homeless. In 1996, there were more floods and in 1997 a severe drought destroyed 70% of the country's corn. In 2000-01, the country suffered the worst drought in its history. Despite all these hardships, the DPRK honoured its commitment under the 1994 Agreement with the USA to suspend its plutonium production facilities. The US state, on the other hand, broke its promises by failing to supply the promised alternative energy sources, failing to normalise relations and targeting the DPRK with nuclear weapons. The DPRK had warned that if the USA reneged, it would restart its nuclear power programme. In 2002, Bush named the DPRK as a target in its Nuclear Posture Review. The DPRK then stated that it had the right to develop nuclear weapons in self-defence. (The USA has had nuclear weapons in South Korea since 1958). Goff also has some brilliant insights into how the American working class can defeat this imperial and anti-American US state. "The most important quality in a leader is the aggressive tenacity that never loses sight of the mission, combined with the creativity to achieve it." He attacks the `left' for "their utter lack of aggression and their constant moral hand-wringing ... they only know how to mobilize fear that demoralizes people, instead of mobilizing rage that drives through fear and seizes the initiative."

An intellectual approach that cuts professional crap

Inflation has been so low for a few years that I didn't notice it at all in the topics covered in FULL SPECTRUM DISORDER by Stan Goff. The book does not have an index, but the notes at the end of the book contain some economic information which was useful for the author's Marxist theories. The recent election of George W. Bush to a second term with a majority of the votes cast makes an outbreak of revolutionary civil war within the United States seem highly unlikely anytime soon, but a belated consideration of A TRACT ON MONETARY REFORM by J. M. Keynes (1923) suggests that a working class view of the state of the global economy with an eye to the future is in order. Goff's first book, HIDEOUS DREAM, was about his participation in the American occupation of Haiti. One of the most brilliant things in FULL SPECTRUM DISORDER is his use of that perspective. "The Haitians say, the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more you see nothing but his ass." (p. 85). Eventually his "the more all you can see is his ass" view comes to dominate the analysis which Antonio Gramsci called "the basis of the new type of intellectual." (p. 184). Goff became familiar with Samuel P. Huntington's ideas, `a creepy theory of "military professionalism" and the "civil-military relationship" ' (p. 187) while teaching West Point freshman after he was relieved of his Delta Force duties and his security clearance was suspended on Thanksgiving Day, 1986. (p. 186). Goff only mentions it in passing in emphasizing `the actual experience of the people behind the wretched Special Ops mystique. In our case, these are the experiences of enlisted people who in many ways transgressed the invisible boundary between enlisted people and the credentialed "managers of violence." ' (p. 189). More as a former private, drafted when I first started to attend Harvard Law School in 1968, than as the sergeant I briefly became in Nam, this is the point in this book at which I felt closest to the author. Capitalist political economy has grown fat on the idea that economic growth provides the wherewithal to imagine a brighter future. Currently, our prosperity depends on a global economy which sucks up American dollars, as Goff earlier demonstrated: "But this meant that the U.S. could pay for oil in money that it could print, which it did--a practice that would normally devalue the currency in an open market, were it not for the fact that that same devaluation would now wipe out creditors like Europe. . . . They know the U.S. will never pay back its debt, . . ." (p. 156). Individual workers seem to start out working for nickels and dimes, compared to the dollars which signify real wealth, but by the time they reach retirement, dollars are hardly worth the nickels and dimes they initially made. Investment for retirement might make sense for professionals whose salaries reflect the levels enjoyed in peak times by top earners, but a great number of people living in poverty with numero

A must read for active service members.

As a veteran of the '91 Gulf War and Drug Wars in the Caribbean, I am deeply grateful for such an honest and courageous account from an NCO who functioned in the most covert levels of military operations.A simply amazing piece of literature which cuts to the bone. Full Spectrum Disorder is an adventurous journey with philosophical hues that only an experinced combat veteran could provide. With incredible observation and biting wit, Goff takes the reader through one compelling political, strategic and tactical level at a time, ultimately depositing them atop a dizzying peak amidst a sobering view of the immediate obligation of humanity.