That was a good article about the abuse of the US military. I was reading a book recently about the development of US military spycraft for the past five decades, and according to the book, these planes were initially developed to limit what Eisenhower saw as a dangerous growth of the military.

Eisenhower’s concern at the time was fairly similar to Andrew Bacevich’s. He knew that the US needed a strong deterrent against the Russian nuclear strikes everyone was worried about, but he had to deal with a very hawkish general, Curtis LeMay, who was heading the Strategic Air Command (the always-airborne fleet of bombers that comprised the American second-strike capability). No one knew what the Russians had at the time, and LeMay used the lack of intelligence as a reason to demand more and more planes. Eisenhower knew that an excess of weapons would come with a heightened temptation to use them, so he focused on developing technology that would tell us specifically what the Russians had, rather than bulking up the Air Force. It’s from this research that we got the U2, the first spy satellite, and ultimately the Stealth aircraft.

In other words, the very technology that’s key to the military we’re misusing today was developed to prevent misuse of the military.

I think if history were sentient, I bet it would have a pretty dark sense of humor.