As the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be the next Supreme Court justice moves toward its conclusion, the public are being treated to a vivid display of how far President Trump’s opponents will go to stop his agenda. While moves to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination may be the most high-profile examples of this effort, they aren’t unique. Similar campaigns are being waged against other Trump administration priorities less publicly but with the potential to be just as worrisome.
[Trump: Allegations against Brett Kavanaugh a ‘con game’ played by Democrats]
The White House has identified U.S. military modernization as one of Trump’s top priorities, and leading conservatives have praised the progress that the administration has made in less than two years in office. From working to increase defense spending to elevating U.S. Cyber Command into a major warfighting command, Trump is leading the rebuilding of the U.S military after years of drift and neglect under the Obama administration.
But former President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning decades ago about the military-industrial complex remains true: Real change in defense not only disrupts the policy status quo, it disrupts established businesses who will fight to protect their bottom lines. Those who value the profitability of their business over the enhanced strength of our nation’s military are now going to extraordinary lengths to thwart Trump’s military modernization initiatives.
One of the top Trump administration defense priorities under Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ leadership is known as JEDI – the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud. Defense Department Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy has said that DoD’s current use of multiple computing clouds means “our clouds’ capabilities are disparate and disjointed.” JEDI will revolutionize that environment and, as Deasy has said, “lay the foundation for so many future warfighter capabilities.”
JEDI comes with a $10 billion price tag and technical requirements that few companies can meet, which has driven some contractors to pursue a scorched earth strategy to try to delay or derail JEDI in order to protect their place at the DoD trough.
Starting late last month, news reports began to emerge that an unnamed entity, presumably one such contractor, had enlisted the help of a private investigative firm to create a dossier of allegations to try to smear the reputation of Mattis and other senior DoD officials all as a means of creating public pressure to disrupt the JEDI contracting process.
One of their tools, according to Defense One, is that “a private investigative firm has been shopping around to Washington reporters a 100-plus-page dossier” which claims that Mattis and his senior aides acted unethically in moving the JEDI contracting process forward. Defense One further reports that the firm which created and distributed the dossier, RossettiStarr, refuses to say who paid for its creation. Notably, Defense One reports “at least some of the dossier’s conclusions do not stand up to close scrutiny.”
Defense One called the dossier and efforts to use it to drive media coverage to pressure DoD to hold off on JEDI “an unusually hardball form of backroom maneuvering.” But supporters of Trump see this tactic as anything but unusual. The use of anonymously-funded dossiers filled with false allegations and distributed to reporters to try to generate negative media coverage has become almost common in efforts to thwart Trump.
While such lowball tactics sadly may have become common in politics, it is unprecedented to use private investigators to go after serving senior national security officials. Mattis is a decorated Marine and an American hero whose record of service to the country is impeccable. Efforts like this to anonymously smear him and other senior Defense officials in order to advance private business interests is a new low – even for opponents of Trump.
We can expect deception, surveillance, and disinformation to be the sort of methods used by hostile foreign intelligence services. We shouldn’t accept them being used by private companies against our leading national security officials in order to frustrate Trump’s military modernization and just to secure lucrative contracts for themselves.
Horace Cooper is a writer and legal commentator.
