The Weekly Screed (#716)

Beau Geste… American style
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — It’s time to mothball the U.S. Air Force.

I mean it. Really, what have we ever gotten from the USAF but Curtis LeMay, Hiroshima, Doctor Strangelove and Tom Cruise in a form-fitting flight suit?

Perhaps I exaggerate, but it’s fairly clear that the Air Force has outlived its time. The Navy has an identical air force, with the added strategic advantage that it moves around — anywhere the need arises — on big boats. And the CIA has air power, with its video-game fleet of drones, that scares the hell out of everyone.

The USAF can’t even lay claim to the greatest combat pilot in U.S. history. The immortal Richard Bong, who shot down 40 enemy planes and won the Medal of Honor, goes back to the days when the air corps was still part of the Army.

We could fold all those pilots, planes and rockets back into the Army and save billions in redundant expenses. Even better, we could use the Air Force Academy for better purposes than what it’s doing now — which seems to be mainly a) preserving the triple-option offense in football and b) supplying the nation with right-wing Christian kooks who know how to fly jets and launch missiles.

Where have you gone, Chuck Yeager? The world turns its lonely eyes to you. Except that it doesn’t. You’re over the hill.

Today, the big threat to world peace isn’t something you can readily target with an F-35 fighter-jet that flies at the speed of sound carrying air-to-air missiles and quarter-ton bombs. Right now, what everybody worries about is a whole lot of pseudo-religious hoodlums (often referred to, sloppily and tendentiously as “terrorists”), who hide among civilians and carry deadly weapons largely supplied by American military contractors (recalling, of course, the words of Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”).

The Navy Seal team that executed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan aptly demonstrated the most reliable method for defeating the gangs of violent psychos who roam the deserts and jungles of the Third World and occasionally disrupt the middle-class complacency of the West by blowing up a deli or murdering the odd cartoonist (I know — this is a tautology). Nowadays, we call this sort of activity “special ops.” Small squads of finely tuned commandos who use precise intelligence from inside sources to sneak behind enemy lines and — in deadly lightning strikes — decapitate the enemy’s leadership.

Every U.S. military branch has some of these guys, whether they’re called Seals, Rangers, Delta Force, Jason Bourne, whatever. But most of our commando groups have a glaring weakness. They’re mostly white guys and monolingual.

Few of our special forces are indigenous to — or intimate with — the places where they have to infiltrate and maneuver. Our native “spies” in countries like Syria, Yemen or Libya are few and often bereft of military training. We have no one in Nigeria, for example, who knows the languages, turf and customs of that complicated country as well as does Boko Haram, the gang of barbarians whose idea of a good time is burning down a schoolhouse with all the kids inside.

With a few Nigerians on our team, we’d be better able to deal with these guys.

This is where the French Foreign Legion comes in. Since 1831, the Foreign Legion has been running various kinds of special ops, mostly in Third World outposts like Timbuktu. More important — as indicated by the movie Beau Geste (which has been made five times) — the French Foreign Legion is not particularly French. They take guys from everywhere and turn them into Gary Cooper.

The typical recruit of Foreign Legion lore is an ex-con or deserter with a phony name. His last resort in life is the thankless prospect of anonymous drilling in the bleak Sahara. His sole reward is the prospect of being killed by bloodthirsty insurgents who wield scimitars and ride glistening black stallions. But, if the recruit survives, he becomes a crack soldier and a romantic legend in his own right.

This is where the U.S. Air Force Academy comes in. Once we’ve cleared out all those Top Gun wannabes, we can fill the Academy with cream-of-the-crop students and athletes selected from every nation — including America but especially from those troubled locales where poverty, despair and religious zealotry turn promising young people into jihadist nuts. Out there in the Rocky Mountain obscurity of Colorado Springs, ensconced in Western luxury and American propaganda, the cadets of the American Foreign Legion would get a) a rigorous, liberal and broadbased college education, and b) daily drills and exhaustive instruction in how to fight the sort of clandestine, asymmetric war that seems to represent the future of conflict throughout the world.

The result would be a flow of multicultural commandos of unparalleled skill, able to fight in anywhere violence erupts. But, uniquely, the American Foreign Legion would include agents able to infiltrate and operate unsuspected in any nation, because they would come from that nation, speak its languages, know the territory, understand every custom, tradition and gesture.

OK, this sounds a little creepy. One pictures the Uncle Sam setting up sleeper cells and black sites everywhere, waiting for trouble with his finger on the trigger. But hey, the status quo is already creepy, as long as the predominantly Caucasian CIA and NSA and God-knows-who-else operate secret missions out of every U.S. embassy, consulate, FOB, investment bank, news kiosk and press club on earth.

The American Foreign Legion would probably be more transparent — and definitely more benevolent — than the sneaky crap we’re doing today. Best of all, it would guarantee, in a few years, the next remake of Beau Geste. starring — just a suggestion — Chris, Luke and Liam Hemsworth as the smokin’-hot Geste boys!

Eat your heart out, Tom Cruise!